Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (77 page)

Whatever. Maybe he was thinking of some other guy.

.   .   .

They found a house in Bel Air, a modest—by Bel Air standards—ivy-covered four-bedroom place with a pool at 268 Saint Pierre Road. Mitchum was awarded the large den as his personal space. Here he put his stereo and a portion of his vast record collection, some books, a couple of photographs that amused him (an out-of-focus candid of him and Sinatra in a dressing room, Mitchum’s white thigh near the lens, distorted, looking like it was springing from his crotch; “I’ve seen some big cocks, but this is ridiculous . . . Love, Francis Albert”). Unlike many stars—he claimed good old Kirk Douglas’s den was the unofficial Kirk Douglas Museum—he neither displayed nor kept any memorabilia to advertise his career. “What am I going to do,” he would say, “hang up a poster from
Hoppy Serves a Writ? Anzio?
The cleaning lady would laugh at me.” His den was to be the pot-smoking headquarters—exclusively, by edict. The curtains and cushions in every room in the house weren’t going to smell of that stuff in this place. He hid a marijuana plant in the garden and cultivated it with the love and devotion of a mother toward an infant, and it grew to be strong—six feet tall!—and bear much fruit. When it was in full bloom he took Polaroids of it and kept them around and in his wallet, like baby pictures.

It was now being said that Mitchum, having carried his antiestablishment, outsider persona into the Age of Aquarius, had become “in,” a favorite with the teenage crowd. A survey of the nation’s campuses reported that Mitchum was becoming a cult icon, the screen’s new godfather of cool. He couldn’t understand it, Mitchum said. They must have missed his last ten pictures before they took the vote. Anyway, it had to be a short-lived ascendency. It seemed to Mitchum there were pretenders to that throne all over the place now. The underplaying, the deadpan macho schtick, the cynical hipster outsider stance were all the rage in 1968. Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, Bronson. Were they trying to crowd his act? Forget it, fellas. Just my luck I’ll be here till they set fire to my coffin. Anyway, if that was the competition . . . Steve McQueen? A McQueen performance, he believed, just naturally lent itself to monotony. Didn’t bring much brains to the party, that boy. Marvin was the fourth med student from the right, back in
Not as a Stranger
days, and now he was a star, thanks to
Cat Ballou,
a part Bob had turned down. Fun guy, Lee, he thought—and they call
me
a mean drunk. Eastwood Mitchum remembered from the ‘50s, the shy, good-looking young man used to work construction jobs with George Fargo; Gray Cloud used to bring Clint along to the tavern so he could meet a real live movie star. And Bronson? Oh . . . forget about it.
None of ‘em was as popular as old Duke Wayne, and he weighed more than his horse these days and was working on one lung.

Speaking of young actors, Jim Mitchum was still trying to become a star. He was somewhere in Hollywood, but his father claimed not to hear from him for months at a time. The boy never came to him for his professional advice, he said, so he shared it with reporters instead: “I guess James is one of the ‘now’ generation. They’re sure they can do it,
now.
I said, ‘James . . . You’ve got to learn the trade first. Apply yourself.’”

And now there was another performer in the family. Chris Mitchum was at loose ends after graduating from the University of Arizona. His dream of becoming a professional writer remained just a dream. He and wife, Cindy, had two kids by this time, a daughter, Carrie, and a newborn son, Christopher Robert Mitchum. It had not been easy taking care of his family, but Chris did not like to go to his father for money. A point of pride, he said. Once, near Christmas, he had had to ask him for a hundred dollars and paid it back as soon as he could, to his father’s evident surprise. He looked for work in various professions, with varying results. Employers discriminated, he said. They heard you were the son of the big movie star, and they couldn’t believe you needed a paycheck. “My kids were starving and I was two months back on the house payments, and they wouldn’t give me a job because they thought I was loaded. . . . It almost forces you to become an actor because you can’t get a job doing anything else.”

Which sounded, after all, just like Papa Bob’s own rationale for remaining an actor.

Christopher made his screen debut with his father in
Young Billy Young,
his old man’s latest Western. He played the sheriff’s son in a flashback sequence. He fit in perfectly with a supporting cast that also included Dean Martin’s daughter Deana, John Carradine’s son David, and Robert Walker, Jr.

From a novel called
Who Rides with Wyatt,
about a purported friendship between Sheriff Earp of the title and boy outlaw Billy Clanton, the script by Burt Kennedy had originally been done for John Wayne. When the Duke decided against it, Kennedy wound up making it with producer Max Youngstein and Mitchum, who received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar salary plus 27 percent of the gross. Released in the time of
The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
and
Once Upon a Time in the West, Young Billy Young was
a decidedly more traditional, modest enterprise (comely leading lady Angie Dickinson’s nude scene excepted). It was Mitchum’s least ambitious horse
opera since the Zane Grey programmers at RKO. They shot it under the blue skies of Tucson, exteriors and all interiors, too, on a soundstage that subsequently burned down. Mitchum would sing the film’s theme song over the opening credits (the strange, nearly all-percussion score for the movie supplied by jazz musician Shelly Manne).

“Bob was a great guy, did the job, no problems at all,” said Burt Kennedy. “He was from the old school, like Duke, Henry Fonda. No problems, no questions, just get the job done. He liked to make wisecracks, put himself down. Mentioned
El Dorado
one time, said, ‘On that one I played John Wayne’s leading lady’ He was a bright guy, liked to pretend that he wasn’t most of the time. But it was a joke. I remember one time we went to dinner, invited to the house of a friend of his. Turned out the guy was dean of architecture at Arizona University, and Bob sat all night talking about ancient architecture with the guy.”

Reporter Tim Tyler found Mitchum’s “get the job done” attitude to be undercut by frustration and barely contained loathing for the work—at times un-contained. In Tucson, observing the shooting of an uncomplicated scene among the crowd gawking at the “flat miserable” star in action, Tyler wrote, “As soon as the director yells ‘cut’ Mitchum explodes. Literally explodes. He sprays a string of four-letter words all over the astonished tourists who have come to watch their hero work. He dances and minces all over the Western street in a wild, furious and very accurate imitation of a fairy. Then, as the tourists stare dumbfounded at one another, he shuffles off in his chaps to the location cafeteria, muttering, ‘Every time the same goddamn role, the same goddamn role.’”

With barely a pause, Kennedy and Mitchum reunited for a second Western,
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys,
shot in the mountains around Chama, New Mexico, near the Colorado border. This one was mixed with satire and farce, in the vein of Kennedy’s earlier comedy Western,
Support Your Local Sheriff.
As in
El Dorado,
the film explored the idea of an aging cowboy hero, Robert Mitchum here playing a lawman put out to pasture, teaming up with another involuntary retiree, a train robber played by George Kennedy—an exuberant, picture-stealing performance, particularly in contrast to Mitchum’s glum, even dull work in the film.

Maybe, at fifty-one, he was living the part. This so-called generation gap that they were writing think pieces about was beginning to deprive Mitchum of some of his hip
edge.
Everybody was a rebel these days, an outsider. Kids were all using drugs, marijuana was practically passe. Some of the young actors
he
was working with on the latest pictures were into the more advanced mind-altering capacities of LSD. And on that other great controversial topic of the day, Vietnam, Mitchum was now firmly entrenched on the counter-counter-cultural side. At a party George Kennedy threw at a Mexican restaurant, Mitchum went into a kind of kill-’em-all rant involving mass bombings and how to destroy the North Vietnamese supply of fresh water. “We’d all had a few,” said John Davis Chandler, one of
The Good Guys’
bad guys. “And he was just getting outrageous, more and more out of line with this prowar thing. And I’d had a few and I said something like, ‘Well, I think we should get the fuck out.’ Something like that. ‘If we can’t win it, get out.’ And he just turned to me, furious. ‘What the hell do you know?
I’ve been there.’
And I thought, OK, you been there for a couple of weeks; you’re the expert. But I knew damn well he hadn’t been in a uniform or had to do any fighting. But what the hell; it was all drink talk. Like I said, we’d all had a few by then.”

Burt Kennedy was talented and good-natured, and the film was efficiently made, but Mitchum was heard grumbling and grousing throughout. “How in hell did I get into this picture anyway? I kept reading in the papers that I was going to do it, but when they sent me the script I just tossed it on the heap with the rest of them. But somehow, one Monday morning, here I was. How in hell do these things happen to a man?”

A complicated setup on a moving train caused difficulties. Everyone stood around, waiting for the engine to work. Mitchum said, “Why don’t we quit and try something else? Like another movie. . . . “

With the exception of a brief role in a decidedly untraditional film many years later,
Young Billy Young
and
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys
were to be Mitchum’s final Westerns. It was the genre in which he had done his first work in the movies and his first work as a star and the genre in which he had worked often enough to become identified as one of its A picture icons, with Cooper and Wayne. Nearly one-third of the eighty-five features he had appeared in by the close of the ‘60s had been Westerns. Most of these had been “the same goddamn role” no doubt, but a few had been much more than that; and some of those cowboy pictures were among the best, certainly the most unusual, the genre had ever produced. Ironically, even though a number of the most popular and talked-about films in the last year of the decade would be “hoss oprys,” even as the form was being reinvented and given new life in Europe, the Western’s days were numbered. In Hollywood the studios disdained the opportunity to make run-of-the-mill, old-fashioned cowboy movies like
Young Billy
Young
—not enough profit potential, not enough pizzazz. The new Western prototypes were the easy rider and the midnight cowboy, a driftin’ drug dealer and a Texas/Times Square male prostitute. In a few years the genre that had been a mainstay of American movies for most of the century would become a thing of the past.

Didn’t bother Mitchum one way or the other. He was taking himself out of it now. Fed up, bored to tears. His back was broken; his ass was sore. The joke books these producers sent him were worse than ever. Let somebody else make faces at the gawk box. He had four or five million in the bank, fellas, or maybe it was six, and the time had come to saddle up and ride off into the sunset with the other old farts.

R
ETIREMENT WAS THE THING
. He sat in meditation in his den that winter and into the new year, or made the two-hundred-mile drive to the ranch at Atascadero and let his mind look ahead as he drove, plotting what he would do—and all that he would not do—in the glorious, indolent future that lay before him. He thought about buying a ranch in New Mexico, a place he’d checked out near Santa Fe, build his quarter horse stock there, and maybe a winter place in the Bahamas. He wanted to get a boat, become a yachtsman like Duke Wayne, maybe a nice eighty-foot yacht, and cruise in warm waters, big game fishing.

The scripts and the phone calls continued to come into his production office. He was thinking of closing the place down. What did he need it for? Reva wouldn’t be happy about that. Have to cut back her duties. Concentrate on answering the fan mail or something. One of the scripts she had tried to get him to read came in from MGM by way of London. Robert Bolt original, to be directed by David Lean.

“Send it back.”

“But. . . it’s David Lean!
Doctor Zhivago. Lawrence of Arabia. Bridge on the River Kwai.
They want you for the lead.”

He looked it over.
Ryan’s Daughter.
Very pretty. Lyrical even. He remembered hearing about how long Lean took to make each one of his pictures. Nine years or somethin’. And you had to do the whole thing on a camel.

“Reva, honey, NFL” No further interest.

Then, some weeks later, Bolt got him on the phone. They talked, Bolt flattering, charmingly obsequious. Mitchum said Lean took a long time, didn’t
he? Bolt told him, ah yes, normally, but this was no
Doctor Zhivago.
This was an intimate little romantic drama and they would be in and out in two shakes. And besides, they were going to finagle the schedule so Mitchum could take off weeks at a time now and again. And so on. Kept talking it up. He couldn’t get rid of the guy.

“Well, it’s a nice offer but. . . just can’t. . . . I have made other arrangements. I’m planning to kill myself.”

“Planning what? Sorry, bad connection.”

“I’m planning suicide.”

There was a long pause on the other end. Maybe he’d hung up. Mitchum considered putting the phone down. Then Bolt said, “Yes, I quite understand. . . . But, well, if you would just do this wretched little film of ours first and then do yourself in, we’d be very happy to stand the expenses of your burial.”

It had begun as an adaptation of
Madame Bovary
for Bolt’s wife, Sarah Miles. Perhaps, he hoped, his
Lawrence
and
Zhivago
collaborator, Lean, would be interested in directing it. Lean said no, but something sparked when he read the script. What about an original, based on the Flaubert, same premise but new characters, settings? Lean had become world famous and enormously wealthy on account of his series of “thinking man’s spectaculars”; but he had a prickly sensitivity to criticism and he had been stung by the talk that these big-hit superproductions were not as good as the good old lean Lean pictures like
Brief Encounter,
those simple, tasteful, and touching dramas with a human-sized canvas. Bolt’s Bovary put things in motion for what Lean began calling a “little gem” of a story about romantic young Rosy Ryan, her marriage to a dull schoolteacher, Charles O’Shaughnessy, and her torrid love affair with a dashing, wounded, English military officer, the whole set in the Irish hinterlands at the time of the “troubles.” The role of the husband, an inspiring romantic as Rosy’s teacher but a dud as her sex partner, was offered to Paul Scofield, a superbly right casting choice, and he turned it down. Lean’s producer wanted a little-known Anthony Hopkins to take the part. MGM and Lean wanted a big movie star, a heavyweight to evenly stand up beside Marlon Brando, the actor who had been offered the part of the military man. His choice of Mitchum for the retiring schoolmaster and inept lover was considered odd in the extreme, but Lean had come up with a theory that a “dull” character had to be played by an actor with an opposite personality or the audience would go to sleep. Still, his people argued, Mitchum was
too opposite.
Producer Anthony Havelock-Allan
told the director that no audience was going to believe Mitchum would allow somebody to screw his wife and not do anything about it: “He’s not that kind of man. . . . He’s a tough guy, a reactor, and a violent one at that.” Lean stuck to his theory, and Mitchum was persuaded to come out of retirement for a payment of $870,000. Meanwhile, Brando was practicing walking around with an arm tied up so as to resemble the wounded, one-armed character in the script. He didn’t like the look of it. Bolt said they would change it to a missing leg. Brando presumably hopped around and didn’t like the look of that either. They were ready to change it to a sore foot. But Brando dropped out and was replaced by another American, young Christopher Jones, who David Lean had heard was shaping up to be the new James Dean. The rest of the cast was filled with top character players from the British cinema, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Leo McKern.