Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (78 page)

Locations were found at the far reaches of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry on the western end of Ireland. It was a landscape of rocky cliffs and long, sandy beaches and a pounding, merciless Atlantic. There a complete interior and exterior village set was built, forty-three different structures, most of solid stone. The new village was given the name Kirrary. Life in Dingle and environs was happily disrupted as the locals took lucrative advantage of the arriving film company’s need for lodging, food, and alcohol (the latter available from some thirty pubs in the immediate vicinity; you could even buy a drink in the shoe store, according to actor Leo McKern).

Bags packed for Ireland, Mitchum took a few questions from the press, the usual surreal little playlet. . .

Reporter: What’s the Lean film about?

Mitchum: (taking a sip of his double Ramos Fizz) I don’t know what it’s about.

Reporter: What part do you play?

Mitchum: A husband. A yoke carrier. If it had been made long ago—who was the actor who played the perfect husband, the one who was always married to Joan Fontaine?—well, that’s who would have played it.

Reporter: What’s the character?

Mitchum: (eyes widening) I just told you! A Jewish woman during the troubles. A husband who shows up whenever the call sheet calls him.

.   .   .

In February 1969, Mitchum flew to Germany, taking possession of a new white Targa at the Porsche factory in Stuttgart, then drove and ferried his way to Ireland. Arriving in Dingle, presenting a red rose to Sarah Miles (and reminding her that they had originally been meant to work together on
Mister Moses),
Mitchum was assigned to the tiny, whitewashed Hotel Milltown (the name, oddly, of a prescription narcotic in the states). The entire Hotel Mill-town, all eleven rooms, was his. At one end of the hall was a bathtub and at the other, the toilet. The telephone at the front desk remained in service during his residency, and there would be the occasional call from people hoping to reserve a room. In the dark days of boredom to come, Mitchum was known to answer the phone himself and chat, take reservations, sometimes concluding by telling the caller, “By the way, you do know we’re under new management? Yes, it’s a nudist joint now.”

Filming began with a sequence involving Trevor Howard and John Mills in a tiny fishing boat. The seas were wild that day, and the locals warned Lean not to send the actors out there. He ignored them, the boat was overturned, and Mills was knocked unconscious and nearly drowned. “He was very game,” Lean said appreciatively. On another occasion it was Leo McKern’s turn to be almost lost at sea. McKern had a signal to make if he was in danger. He made the signal. Lean refused to let the wet-suited divers run into the shot until he had what he needed. McKern was finally dragged out, but his glass eye was lost to Davy Jones.

At his first sight of Mitchum, bulging in his costume and standing beside one of the more diminutive English actors, Lean reacted like he was looking at King Kong. Surely no one had told him Bob was so bloody large! And the period suit and derby hat that had been prepared for him to wear made him look like Charlie Chaplin, or a giant ape version of Chaplin anyway. Lean felt unsure of his approach to Mitchum and not quite happy with the performance he was getting. Mitchum’s casual attitude and sarcastic jokes left him unsettled. Mitchum would do his usual playing around up to the last moment before a take and then effortlessly go into character. Mitchum acted like the whole enterprise was no more important than one of his silly Westerns. At the end of one dramatic, emotional scene, Lean called, “Cut,” and Mitchum said blandly, “How was that? Too Jewish?”

When, finally, Lean hit upon a scene that met with his satisfaction, and feeling he had at last found the key to getting what he wanted from Robert, he began shooting the previous scenes over again. Mitchum joked that they were
going to spend the ten-million-dollar budget on rehearsals. He was also offended. He told Sarah Miles that if Lean hadn’t liked his fucking performance the first time he should have been a fucking man and said so.

After ten days of shooting, they were seven days behind schedule.

The relationship between the star and the hawk-faced, neurotically obsessive English director would ebb and flow, mostly ebb. The imperious Lean was used to having his actors bow and scrape before him, but Mitchum mostly just laughed or gave him the middle finger. For weeks at a time they would barely speak to each other, communicating tart messages via Mrs. Bolt, who did her best to encourage a truce. At other times, Mitchum took a merely bemused or mocking stance toward Lean, who struck him as rather humorless and comically starchy, uptight.

The wedding night lovemaking scene between Rosie and Charles—her underwhelming, disillusioning, first experience of sex with a man—turned into an unending goof for Mitchum and an embarrassing nightmare for David Lean. The director awkwardly coached the action with the most careful terminology while Mitchum sprawled informally in the bed in his nightshirt, groping Sarah Miles in her nightshirt and behaving like a jaded porn star.

“You lift up the . . . the nighties,” said Lean. “And then you . . . you have intercourse . . . and then you . . . you . . . “

“Shoot my wad?” said Mitchum.

“Uh . . . yes . . . you climax . . . abruptly . . . and then withdraw.”

“What style of this intercourse should we have, David?” Mitchum asked.

“What . . . style?”

“How about she climbs up on top and straddles me?”

“Good God, the girl’s supposed to be a virgin!”

They went for a take. Mitchum wrestled with the long, heavy nightie. “What a task it turned out to be,” Sarah Miles wrote in her autobiography. “On and on, he hauls away at great lengths of material. ‘Cheat both nighties up a little,’ said David impatiently. Mitchum pulled mine up. ‘All the way up to your cunt?’ he whispered in my ear. . . .” Mitchum mimed the act then fell away with an erection.

He said, “Careful, honey, or you’ll crease my nightie.”

Fastidious Lean called for another take. Mitchum’s hands encircled Sarah’s “lower cheeks” as she wrestled with an unavoidable sense of excitement. “He was a mixer all right.” Miles found herself very drawn to Mitchum and spent much time in his “caravan,” causing considerable gossip. There was a widespread belief that the two stars were “doing it,” Miles herself admitted, though she heartily denied the act had ever occurred and found such speculation terribly tacky.

Miles and Bolt threw a big party at the manor house they were renting at the other side of Dingle Bay. Word had spread and security was nil, so there were a number of gate-crashers. Two of these, a man and a woman, surly and drunken visitors from Dublin, encircled Mitchum as he sat downing a beaker of whiskey and demanded he get up to settle a bet—was the woman’s strapping husband taller than the big film star? Mitchum reluctantly obliged. The man, pleased to be an inch taller, began feigning blows at the actor’s face. Sarah Miles came over to break it up and was shoved aside by the man’s horrid wife. The man swung; Mitchum swung back. The man lunged forward and raked his thumbnail across Mitchum’s eye as if to slice it in half.

Mitchum screamed and reeled back, covering the bleeding orb. The Dublin couple hightailed it. One hand covering his injured eye, Mitchum lurched outside and stumbled to his Porsche, coming out with a gleaming hunting knife upraised. Roaring, “I’ll get you motherfuckers!” he rushed back into the house. Mitchum crashed from one splendid Georgian room to the next, one hand clutching the dagger, the other covering his bloodied eye, as startled, shrieking party guests jumped out of his way. It looked like a scene out of a Hammer horror movie with Christopher Lee.

The shooting schedule had to be changed, and Mitchum could not do close-up work for weeks. Lean seemed not even to notice. What were a few weeks to him? He worked at the pace of a pyramid builder. It didn’t hurry things any that the weather was atrocious for filming, pouring rain one hour, sunny the next, and back again, so overcast for days at a time that the cameraman got no reading at all on the light meter. When summer arrived, they had been shooting for nearly six months and there was no end in sight. Mitchum continued to feud with Lean. Once the director left him standing in wet sand for over an hour and then went off to do another shot without telling him. The next time Lean wanted a shot of him, Mitchum waited till the camera was turning, then exposed himself and began pissing.

Bored, cut off from all but those minimal comforts offered by Dingle, Mitchum felt obliged to be self-sufficient. He cooked many of his own meals and gradually became chef to a good portion of the company. He obtained a rare bundle of huge lobsters one weekend—lobster thermidor was one of his specialties—but before he could have his way with them, Sarah Miles—having seen their cute little crustacean faces—took them and threw them back in the sea. Mitchum vowed revenge, and later, she said, had it by announcing to reporters—accurately—that Sarah was a secret urine therapy adept—drank her own pee. He planted marijuana “trees” in the back garden at the hotel, which yielded a huge crop (”In my hands I hold the hopes of the Dingle Botanical
Society”). Generously encouraging all and sundry to try a toke, he gave much of the inhibited British crew and cast their first experience with the devil weed. On one occasion Sarah Miles was startled to see Mitchum and her own mother sitting together sharing a joint. On another a Dingle policeman showed up at the Milltown to inquire about the unusual vegetation in the garden. Mitchum whipped out a sizable spliff, lit it, and goaded the cop into trying it. Soon other members of the constabulary were said to have stopped by as well for a sampling of the contraband.

With pubs galore and comrades like Trevor Howard in the vicinity, Mitchum was also known to open a bottle or two. He gave every watering hole his custom at some point. There was Paddy Bawn’s, there was Tom Long’s, there was Ashe’s, his home away from the Milltown. Turned out the place was run by Gregory Peck’s cousin, small world that it was. And—shades of
Thunder Road
—Mitchum sniffed out the local moonshine trade as well, sampling a regional, triple-distilled, untaxed liquid magic known as poteen.

Mitchum and others from the film would spend their lunch break at a bar, coming back to Kirrary blotto. Many scenes in the finished film had to be artfully put together so as not to reveal when the actors had obviously had a few. Regarding Mitchum’s nightshirted walk along the beach after finding out that Rose is unfaithful, Tony Lawson, the assistant editor, told Kevin Brownlow, “In the rushes you could tell he was absolutely paralytic. I remember when we were cutting we had to look for the bits where he looked like he wasn’t about to topple over.” Mitchum himself liked to come with visiting girls and pals to the twice-weekly showing of rushes in the local cinema—barging in uninvited, Lean made note—and give a noisy and hilarious narration about which figures on screen had been totally shit-faced at the time of shooting.

Trapped in Dingle for month after month, Mitchum required conjugal visitations. First, of course, came those of his wife, who visited the location for weeks at a time. As soon as she had been safely set aboard a flight back to Los Angeles, Mitchum would begin shuttling in the relief catchers. “Mitch’s dolly birds would fly in from all over the place,” wrote Sarah Miles. “What I couldn’t fathom was whether they came of their own volition . . . or Mitchum got them to come over and footed their bills. Were they simply dope carriers? The quality of most wasn’t particularly appetizing, some of them being no more than scrubbers.” The Hotel Milltown became jocularly known around Kirrary as The Dingle Brothel.

Mitchum had his fun, but then it would wear out again. And the filming just went on. “There’s no reason for it,” he growled. “I could have made three pictures in that time just as good as
Ryan’s Daughter
will probably be. There’s
no reason to have to sit around like this. It’s all inefficiency. . . . I sit home all day and eat potatoes. They did let me go to California for a visit. I went over the North Pole and spent a full sixteen hours in Los Angeles and they rushed me back, and then they didn’t use me for three weeks.”

It seemed that it would never end. But one day in November, finally, it did. He had been on the production for ten months, longer than his entire hitch in the U.S. Army. Mitchum wearily headed home. And they’re
still back there
, he told people in horror, Lean and his merry cameramen chasing a parasol down a beach in Ireland somewhere in the pouring rain, David shouting, “Oh,
bugger!”

Howard Hawks wanted him for another Western with John Wayne. They were calling it
Rio Lobo,
but it might as well have been
Rio Bravo, Part III
or
El Dorado Strikes Back.
Wayne said to Hawks, “Do I get to play the drunk this time?” Mitchum told the director he was done working. Wayne said, “Mitchum’s been saying he was retiring since the first day I met him.” Hawks persisted. Mitchum let it be known his price was a million dollars. Hawks decided to make do with a less expensive Mitchum, Chris. Mitchum visited his son, Duke, and the rest in Tucson while they were shooting
Lobo.
He watched Chris do a scene. Hawks told him the kid might be a star in the making. Mitchum told his son, “I figure to live, say, twenty years more. I might spend everything I’ve got. What would you think of that?”

“Go ahead,” Chris said. “It’s your money. Brother Jim and I will make our own.”

Although he was a millionaire four or five times over, Mitchum seldom thought of himself as a man of great wealth, and he hated it when others thought of him that way. He never even touched the big paychecks; everything went through managers and accountants, straight to corporate bank accounts. The only cash he generally put his hands on came from his beloved per diems, the daily stipend for expenses he received during a film’s production. He signed the checks when the relatives asked, but it was often accompanied with an air of disdain, even contempt. “Bob wasn’t known to be the most generous man in the world. Some in the family wanted money from him
forever,”
said a ten-year friend and business associate. “And Bob always resented it. When it was about money he could be the biggest prick. Bob always resented people wanting him for things.” When organized charities came soliciting his services
or an appropriately large donation, Mitchum’s frequent response, via Reva, was “Absolutely, as soon as our accountant can take a look at your books.”