Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (80 page)

Mitchum attended the film’s gala opening night festivities, the Ziegfeld screening and the postpremiere party at the Museum of Modern Art, where the actor clownishly got up with the hired band and sang “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home.” Cornered by one inquiring reporter as he came out of the theater, Mitchum announced that the film was too long and that it had given him cramps in his ass. Later in the evening, after studio publicists had restrained themselves from attacking him bodily, Mitchum was encouraged to explain that what he had meant by that was that the film was excellent and that David Lean was a great artist.

Though the picture got off to a good start, it was soon clear that
Ryan’s
Daughter would
not have the stature—or the “legs”—of
Lawrence of Arabia
or
Zhivago.
A portion of the critical fraternity seemed to take Lean’s imperfect—overblown, wretchedly humorless—production as a personal affront, savaging him in print—and in person, in New York, during a little get-to-know-us session in which he was asked to his face how he could have made this “piece of bullshit.” An irate female critic is said to have inquired, “Are you trying to tell us Robert Mitchum is a lousy lay?”

Lean was mortified. He did not make another film for fourteen years.

The film could not be considered a dud by any means—the determined MGM publicity machine and David Lean’s vast reputation would simply not allow it. But the sense of a letdown was undeniable. It was as if the director had tried to make
Brief Encounter
on the budget of
Doctor Zhivago,
the result a case of cinematic elephantiasis. As for Mitchum, he had performed his wispy role with delicacy, his usually cynical and debauched gaze become a thing of sad helplessness in the person of the weak schoolmaster, Charles. Even as he physically towered over the rest of the cast, Mitchum’s skill as an actor and presumably a great deal of willpower very nearly transmogrified his chesty brawn to a frailer form more appropriate to the timid soul on screen. As in
Two for the Seesaw,
he proved that he could play a dull, moping character effectively enough, but the question remained: Why would anyone want him to do that? Critical reaction was mixed, though on the average Mitchum was treated more sympathetically than Lean. If many found his part miscast, they were still impressed by his nobly self-effacing effort.

Though Mitchum received no mention among the honors and awards heaped on the film throughout the next year, his participation in it had certainly done much for his prestige. The association with Lean and the massive publicity push for
Ryan’s Daughter
brought his name to the forefront after years of half-of-a-double-bill flops (much as Marlon Brando would soon be resurrected in
The Godfather
following a similar long string of bombs). Mitchum was once again “hot.” For a time he seemed to be at the top of the wish list for every big action picture and masculine drama to be made. He was offered the leads in
Dirty Harry
and
The French Connection.
He turned them down. Aside from the usual lament about the need to retire and schedules without enough days off, his stated reasons for what he chose or rejected were often more or less esoteric. The drug-busting cop hero of
The French Connection
—an Oscar winner for Gene Hackman—apparently offended his sensibilities, as did
Dirty Harry
—Clint Eastwood’s boost into superstardom. Mitchum thought that the latter script, like its director, Don
(The Big Steal)
Siegel, reeked of “drug store” tastes.

More difficult to understand was the rejection of another offer, to play Gen. George Patton in the film that would ultimately star George C. Scott. The producer, Frank McCarthy, thought Mitchum perfect casting for the lead. He sent him the script and got a thumbs-down. Some weeks after that McCarthy asked Mitchum to come to the studio for a meeting. Mitchum claimed to be busy, so McCarthy asked Reva Frederick to come by. “I went into his office at Twentieth, and he told me he wanted to show me something. He had a huge thing on the floor covered with a sheet. He said, ‘I want you to see this!’ and he uncovered it, and there was a very large painting, a portrait of Mitchum made up as General Patton, with these pearl-handled pistols. It was really quite something. And McCarthy said, ‘This is how I visualized Patton. We want Bob for this role.’ And he went on and on about what they were going to do. I said, ‘Let me tell him about this. That’s all I can do. I never answer for him.’ He told me to take the new version of the script and ask him please to read it. ‘I’il await your call.’

I went back and told Robert what had happened. He laughed. He said, ‘What the hell is that all about? He got a painting made? Why would anybody do that?’ I said, ‘Because he sees you as Patton, and he wanted to show everyone what he saw. He sees no one else but you!’ And Robert said, “Oh . . . OK.’ Well, he was amused by that and he agreed to look at the script again. And he reread the script and he said, ‘No. I just don’t want to do it.’ That was it. He said that he didn’t see himself as that character in those situations. He said, ‘It isn’t me; I don’t want to do it.” In later years Mitchum would admit that the character of the controversial general fascinated him, and he had read everything that had been published about the man. So what was the problem? He said he knew what would happen: They’d all get to Almeria, they’d want to fuck it up, water the man down, and he’d let them do it because . . . that was what he did. Someone like George C. Scott would be willing to fight for the character, make the picture into something worthwhile, he said—a strange confession of professional defeatism.

Sarah Miles was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar and MGM brought her to Los Angeles for the ceremony. Her schedule was tight, but after the award show dress rehearsal she went to visit the Mitchums in Bel Air. She had a swim. Dorothy served tea. He looked buttoned up in his wealthy neighborhood, Miles thought, not the roaring, wild man they had known in Ireland. Dorothy said she would drive Sarah back to her hotel. Miles discerned an odd vibe from the woman but couldn’t put her finger on it. Perhaps Mrs. Mitchum, too, had
heard those unfounded rumors that Sarah and Robert had been shagging away back in Dingle. At the hotel entrance Dorothy gave her a kiss and told her to come visit again.

“I do believe you mean it,” Miles said.

Dorothy smiled at her. “Robert will never leave me,” she said.

Going Home
was the story of a man who kills his wife. Harry Graham kills her in a drunken rage, witnessed by his young son, Jimmy. Years later he tries to rebuild a relationship with the boy, now nineteen, but Jimmy burns inside and secretly dreams of some act of vengeance. He rapes his father’s kindhearted girlfriend, and Graham nearly kills him for it. In the final face-off, the son demands from Graham an explanation, a rationale for the brutal act he committed all those years ago, but there is none: It was a gratuitous, pointless tragedy that cannot be undone. They can only go on from there or give up trying. The boy asks, “What happens now?” The pensive father tells him, “You get to be twenty.”

Retirement had proved bothersome after all. And costly. He told Reva he might possibly entertain an offer, if it did not involve any heavy lifting. “Two sets of guys come into the office,” said Mitchum, “and the first set has this nice script about jazz musicians and they’re going to shoot in San Francisco. I like that. A few days later I tell one set of guys, ‘See you in San Francisco.’ They look puzzled and say, ‘No. Wildwood, New Jersey.’ My secretary looks at me and says, ‘Yep. You got them mixed.’ I had signed for
Going Home.”

The director remembered it differently. “Mitchum liked this script,” said Herbert Leonard, making his first feature after years of producing such television shows as
Route 66.
“I had worked very hard on it with the writer, Lawrence Marcus. I believed in it and I believed in the fucking picture that we made. Mitchum read it and he said, ‘I want to do this picture.’ He never copped to me what it was in the script that attracted him. So how can I know? The relationship between a father and a son, I suppose. Or maybe he always wanted to kill his wife! Who knows? But he was not being cynical this time or uninvolved. He was there. He wanted this one.”

Leonard told Mitchum he was offering the role of the son to an acclaimed young actor. “Mitchum said, ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’ He said he looked like a fag. Not masculine enough to play his son. I said, ‘Are you kidding? This guy’s not only a good actor, but he’s a tough little guy’ He says,
’Oh, bullshit! I’m not having him play my son, get somebody else.’ I said, ‘We’ll go down to the YMCA and you two can put on the boxing gloves and you’ll see if he can handle himself.’ He refused. And that’s how Jan-Michael Vincent got a break. I didn’t want him.”

Shooting began in Wildwood—with the star complaining about gawking, unruly rubberneckers trailing their every move (at one point a woman passed out from the excitement)—and then moved on to McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Leonard came to Mitchum’s motel room every morning at seven-thirty and talked out the scenes to be shot. “He was stoned every day. Eight o’clock in the morning, forget it, he’s already finished a half a bottle of vodka, and eight-fifteen he’s got the vodka and a big pipe of marijuana. But he came to work knowing his stuff. Never came in without knowing what he was supposed to do. Don’t ask me how he prepared or when he prepared! I don’t fucking know! He was stoned the whole fucking time. It was an amazing capacity. I was bewildered by his ability to do it day after day and not suffer. He was doing everything he could do. He was sleeping with one of the actresses. I had someone in the cast stoned all the time, sleeping around with everybody, sleeping with Mitchum. And one time we had to do a porno movie thing to use in a scene. We shot that at this motel in an empty room and we got some local girls and he decided he had to be in on that, to be codirector.

“But he worked on this movie. And I kept at him. Sometimes it took fifty-two takes. He wouldn’t get inside himself. This is not a knock on his ability. He was great. An incredibly great actor. But he wanted to just do a throwaway, and I wouldn’t let him. We didn’t print shit. Do it again! Fifty-two takes on that scene with the girl after she gets raped. I wanted the best fucking performance from him, and I didn’t let anything just go by. We understood each other; we were both street kids, spoke the same language. And he supported me all the fucking way until just before the end. Other people complained; they’d complain to him about me being too rough. He’d say, ‘Fuck you. Do what the man says.’ He was wonderful. Until we got to the biggest scene in the picture. Then it came apart. That’s when he did it. He waited until the climax of the fucking movie, and then he went crazy.”

It was the final, brutal confrontation between the father and the son, Vincent’s demand for a meaning to his mother’s death and the Mitchum character’s helpless and mournful statement of fact: “I was drunk and I killed her.”

They were shooting at night outside the building, a kind of roadhouse/whorehouse in the movie. “It was the key moment in the film,” said Herbert
Leonard. “He’s almost killed his son, and now he’s got to almost cry as he faces the truth. And the kid has to face the truth. And now Mitchum comes around and we’re going to shoot it and he says he wants to change the script. He had loved the script, talked about the ending, how much he liked it. Now we’re coming to shoot it, and he doesn’t want to do it. He has some all new ideas, a different climax to the movie. What his ideas were, it doesn’t matter; they’re not worth remembering they were so terrible. They were out of a different movie. They would have destroyed this movie. And after we had agreed twenty-nine thousand times that we liked the script. If there was an idea there, a suggestion that would have taken it to another level, something deeper, believe me, I would have bought it from him in a minute. But this was nonsense. And it wasn’t about the script, I knew that. It had to do with his
self-destructive drunkenness.
He had tremendous self-destructive impulses in his life. He almost didn’t want to see it be good.

“I said, ‘Bob, we’re not doing it like that. We’re doing it the way it is in the script, the way we discussed it.’ He said, ‘I’m telling you how we’re doing it.’ And he told me his ideas again. I was holding the script, trying to listen to him, and I felt the script melting in my hands, a hallucination. I could feel it dripping. He said, ‘No way. I won’t do this other shit.’ I said, ‘No fucking way are we doing a scene like that. Now if you want to sit down and relax and talk about it, if you want to do it another day, whatever the fuck you want. But don’t talk about some scene out of another movie.’ He said, ‘We’re not doing it like that.’ I said, ‘I’m not changing nothing.’ So then he says, ‘I guess maybe we need to have a little fight, you and me.’ He was a considerably bigger person. But I was in good shape; I was very athletic. And he’s kind of stoned. He puts his hands up, and I say, ‘OK, let’s go!’ And he starts swinging at me. He boxed me around. And I just ducked and moved around. I couldn’t believe it. I was almost laughing. And after about three minutes, he wore himself out and sits down on the street. I said, ‘OK? Now let’s get on with it.’ He said, ‘No fucking way I’m doing it!’ I said, ‘Do me a favor, get your ass out of here, go home!’ I told him we’d replace him. Replace him! We were one week from finishing the picture! So Mitchum gets up and goes away. We’re in Pennsylvania. I call the studio. I told Jim Aubrey what happened. He said, ‘You’ve got to stick to your guns. He can’t fucking decide he’s gonna do another script.’

“The next night we’re back again. Does the same shit. Starts swinging his fists at me. I said, ‘I thought you were flying home?’ I taunted the shit out of him. He turns and disappears. I’m going crazy myself with this thing. It’s a battle of wits; he’s taking punches at me. And I’ve got no film, no ending!

“I’m having breakfast the next morning. He’s having breakfast way over in
the corner, with his manager, Reva. And I hear him screaming. I can’t hear it all, just enough. What a fucking bastard I am. He’ll kick the shit out of me. This kind of thing.