Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (82 page)

“Listen, you guys, I gotta tell this story on Bob here. He was ballin’ this babe one time, see. He was in the saddle, see, and his nuts was swingin’ back and forth in the air, see. And this babe’s dog jumps up on the bed and takes his nuts in its mouth, see.
Big
sonofa-bitch . . . So I walk into the room by accident, see, and this dog has hold of Bob’s nuts like a retriever would hold a bird. I couldn’t help it—I started laughin’—”

Mitchum grins. “I told him,
don’t laugh.”
I very slowly got, uh . . . disengaged. And I smacked that motherin’ dog—
whap!
—clear across the room. I woulda shot it if I’d had a gun.”

Also on hand, observing it all—the boozing, Girls A-B-C-D—with philosophical tolerance and good cheer was Mitchum’s obviously adoring daughter, Trina, now a beautiful twenty year old and described as an aspiring writer (it had become, after acting, the family profession, this aspiring writing). “When I was growing up, he wasn’t around too much,” she told Lewis. She recalled a childhood without regimentation, with much freedom, her mother, though, a great lady, a steadying influence. “She’s stood by him through everything, and I guess she’s put up with a lot and suffered a lot, but she keeps on going.” Trina remembered years gone by, adventures with her “oddball” father—so others
thought him—Sunday morning drives, buying hand puppets at Schwab’s drugstore, being stopped by police for driving on the sidewalk, Dad not even aware he’d gone off the road. “Pretty embarrassing,” said Trina, affectionately.

Though he was in only roughly one-quarter of the movie, Mitchum’s peformance in
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
easily stole the show and earned the actor an assortment of rave notices. More than one of the reviewers digressed to express their notions of Mitchum as one of the most overlooked and undervalued film stars—but considering the often dismissive reviews he had received through the years, who was it they thought had done all the overlooking? Following in Pauline Kael’s wake, Andrew Sarris, the other great film critic of the era, now weighed in with his own words of praise for an actor he said had muscled his way through the movies “with the professional dedication of a fighter who knows there is nothing outside the ring except an endless gutter.” Recalling a distant memory of seeing the man for the first time in the “very charming”
West of the Pecos
in some Wild East grindhouse in New York City, Sarris mused that Mitchum’s work had always been oddly subversive, slipping past the conventional critical radar. Sarris confessed that he had not viewed many of the actor’s films, including some of his most interesting work, until long after they were dismissed and forgotten by the respectable tastemakers of the day. “I was always turning to someone or someone was turning to me, and saying
wasn’t he
good? instead of
isn’t
he good?” Sarris believed Mitchum’s scandalous past—the pot bust, the jail term—and generally raffish image had had an insidious effect on his critical standing. “No one in places of high cultural authority took Mitchum very seriously.” Nowadays, in the egalitarian environment of television, of endless Million Dollar Movie and Late Show broadcasts (as well as in the more esoteric realms of auteurist and cultist repertory screenings), people were belatedly coming to realize how many unusual and fascinating films—
The Night of the Hunter,
the still little-known
Out of the Past, Angel Face, The Wonderful Country,
and so on—Mitchum had made in his long and “subversive” career.

Mitchum followed
Eddie Coyle
with another unusual gangster film, this one as glamorous, exotic, and romantic as Coyle had been drab and realistic.
The Yakuza
referred to the organized crime gangs of Japan, their exploits popularly mythologized in hundreds of bloody, highly ritualized motion pictures. Leonard Schrader, an American teacher in Japan, had written stories of the
Nipponese mobsters, and his film critic—aspiring screenwriter brother Paul had managed to see a number of Yakuza films in Little Tokyo moviehouses in California. Together they constructed an East-meets-West elegiac and violent story of a tough American detective, Harry Kilmer, once a soldier stationed in postwar Japan, returned to that country to rescue a friend’s daughter from the local mafia. Between battles with the enemy gangs, Kilmer is reunited with his former mistress, Eiko, but this relationship is haunted by a humiliating secret—due to the dire circumstances after the war, Eiko’s husband, Ken, was compelled to pose as her brother during her love affair with the American soldier. In the end, before his return to America, obligated to Ken in many ways, Kilmer unexpectedly fulfills a ritual self-sacrifice—the cutting off and presentation of a fingertip.

The highly unusual screenplay commanded a whopping three-hundred-thousand-dollar payment from Warner Bros., and Lee Marvin was offered the lead. The studio wanted to reteam Marvin with his
Dirty Dozen
director, Robert Aldrich. But Marvin dropped out after Warner refused to make his suggested script changes. Mitchum signed on, with director approval. He and Aldrich met in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. For six hours they talked and drank, remembered the old days, Wild Bill Wellman,
G.I. Joe,
Greece, Greek girls. They told stories, insulted their peers, the works. “I really considered him my friend, and I admired him,” said Aldrich. “I think he’s a brilliant actor—a strange, convoluted guy.” The day after their marathon bull session, Mitchum sent word that he didn’t want Aldrich to direct
The Yakuza.
Sydney Pollack, a man not known for his work with tough guy actors or violent subject matter, came on board. Robert Towne, the hired gun who had helped to make
Villa Rides
all that it became, was put to work on a rewrite of the Schrader script. The company arrived in Japan in January 1974. A small press conference was held. Mitchum looked out at a gathering of Japanese journalists and said to them, “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

The film’s real coup was its casting of Takakura Ken (most likely the Schraders’ hope from the get-go) as Mitchum’s comrade and the secret husband of Eiko. Ken was a legendary film actor in Japan, the Bogart or perhaps the Mitchum of his country’s gangster cinema. His tragic heroic aura, a distinctively dour charisma, was a perfect complement to Mitchum’s own wonderfully sad, soulful performance. “Mitchum and Ken got along just great. I think they really respected each other,” said Michael Moore, the film’s assistant director. “Ken was a prince to work with, and he was a big help throughout the filming, whenever there were difficulties with locations or with local conflicts. A true gentleman, Ken Takakura. A wonderful man.”

They filmed on locations in Tokyo and Kyoto, interiors in a Tokyo studio. The key American crew had to adjust to the surprisingly simple, almost primitive conditions of the Japanese soundstage. “It was a little strange at first,” said Michael Moore. “No overhead structures for the lights or for the electricians to work off of. Everything was hung up with ropes and bamboo poles. But we had a local crew with us and they showed us how it all worked.” They traveled to Kyoto on the bullet train. Pollack wanted to shoot on the actual moving train instead of faking it, so they took over a whole car and filmed Mitchum as the scenery streamed behind him.

In public, any time he wandered from the sets or took a walk, Mitchum would recall, he was surrounded by chirping, giggling schoolgirls, bowing and huddling. Everywhere he’d hear them chanting,
“Please, Kirk Douglas-san, your autograph!”
We also met some of the less demure Japanese. As with
The Friends of Eddie Coyle’s
Boston hard cases,
The Yakuza
put Mitchum in contact with real-life local gangsters. They were acquaintances of someone or other with the production, sleekly groomed, sharkskin-suited fellows in wraparound shades. One man showed Mitchum his automatic pistol—it was ten years in prison if you were caught holding it. “If anyone gets in your way while you’re in Japan,” a thug calmly told him, “just let us know. We’ll cut him down.”

He had his fun on the locations. “He became very fond of Japanese sake,” said Moore. He had his bad days. The studio publicist slipped a reporter into a dinner party in Kyoto one night and the actor erupted at the intrusion, the attempt to work him in his private time. The publicist said to relax; it was all part of being a star. Mitchum told him he didn’t want to be a star anymore. “I want out. I really want out. Perhaps the only way they will believe me is if I pack my bags and get out of here tomorrow. . . . Greta Garbo did it. . . .” Mitchum began shouting and pounding his fists in the direction of the now disinvited reporter, who fled the restaurant. Mitchum said people didn’t believe he didn’t give a damn anymore. He said, “Cross my heart and hope to die, no, I don’t give a damn!”

“He didn’t raise hell many times on that show,” said Michael Moore, “but when he did it was a good one. The furniture came out the windows of the hotel. The management had to be well paid off. Then when we were coming home, we were all at the airport together and Mitchum showed up with a framed picture he had bought, some Japanese scene. I swear you needed a van to move the thing, but he dragged it to the plane. He was loaded, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, dragged the thing onto the plane, Japan Airlines. I guess they were afraid to take it away from him. So they found someplace on board for it and we flew home.”

“I found him to be like a very, very powerful and lazy horse,” said Sydney Pollack of Robert Mitchum. “He wants to walk as slow as possible and wants to get away with doing as little as possible. You used to really have to push him. He won’t offer the full emotional nature of a performance, at least he didn’t for me, until you went after him a little bit.” Still, Mitchum’s performance was a grand one, a glorious tough/tender characterization, and he looked more purely movie star glamorous—the leonine presence, face of decaying beauty, broad shoulders caped in a camel’s hair overcoat—than he had for years. The film suffered from the director’s fondness for mushy, soft-focus visuals, but overall
The Yakuza
was a very entertaining and wonderfully exotic film.

If Bob had been reading his
Los Angeles Times
in late January 1974, he would have encountered news of an old friend, not heard from in ages. In a seedy stretch of Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, a nineteen-year-old transient named Roger B. Lebel had been stabbed to death. The suspected killer was an unstable drifter from Connecticut, a Bible salesman. Police investigating the murder found that Lebel’s only known acquaintance in the neighborhood was a female minister in a small church on nearby Western Avenue, The Spiritual Mission, Inc., Laymen’s Evangelist (SMILE). Her name was Lila Leeds. Now forty-eight years old, fuller of face, hair no longer blonde, she lived in a tiny court apartment on Melrose. Back in 1949, she had left California, banished from the state by the same judge who had sentenced her to sixty days behind bars. She had roamed around in the Midwest, working in nightclubs, getting married more than once, getting into trouble, going to jail. She’d gotten hooked on heroin. Once she’d been caught with the stuff on her while visiting her current husband in prison. Fifteen years an addict. In 1966, she had drifted back to Los Angeles, sick, penniless. One day she heard church bells ringing. It seemed like all the church bells in LA were ringing at once. She began to study religion, volunteered to help in the local missions. She did healings. For a time she sang and gave testimony of her deliverance at the Johnny Barton Miracle Crusade (”Come for your Miracle. . . . Come early, doors open at 1:00”), hosted by a man with the hair and sideburns of an Elvis Presley imitator. After so long a time as a bad girl, she believed she had finally been blessed, chosen to do good works for the Lord. At the SMILE center in Hollywood she tried to offer help to drug addicts and others with problems. So many young kids came out there, said Lila Leeds, wanting to get into the movies and finding nothing but trouble.

.   .   .

In the spring, returned from Japan, Mitchum gets a call, a voice out of the past. It’s Otto Preminger, in France, preparing an “international thriller” called
Rosebud
about a group of yachting debutantes kidnapped by Arab terrorists. Preminger needs a name actor for the sort-of lead, the role of the two-fisted government agent in pursuit of the terrorists. The part means two months’ work on the Cote d’Azur and Corsica in summer. A tempting offer. They call each other friend now. Otto is like Henry Hathaway, a charming gentleman when he’s not directing. Mitchum tries not to remember what Preminger is like when he is directing. He accepts the part.

In June Mitchum arrives in Juan les Pins. He is coaxed into attending a press conference. He is in fine form. Here, a sampling of his responses to reporters (questions immaterial):

“You want to suck what?”

“As long as it has tits. . . . “

“Fuck you! I’m not here to sell your papers.”

The company moves to Corsica. Bastia. Mitchum and his wife move into a deluxe hotel overlooking a palmy seashore. Up to now the filming has been a series of disappointments and minor disasters. The script doesn’t play. Production values must be reduced or sacrificed altogether. Some of the actors do not, after all, speak coherent English. It’s a mess. Some on the production believe—pray—that Mitchum’s skill and charisma will turn things around.

They don’t. After two weeks on location, Mitchum has worked only three days. Bored, he shifts between smooth professionalism and strange, erratic behavior. Preminger has his own problems, has never been a hand-holder, and is oblivious to the star’s growing restlessness. Shooting at an old mill, Mitchum wanders over to meet some local farmers, who present him with a mason jar of
eau-de-vie,
a mightily potent fruit mash. He is pleased with the gift and samples it readily. A writer, Theodore Gershuny, is chronicling the making
of Rosebud
for a book and records the actor’s antics as they try to film the scene. Mitchum and a group of raiders are lined up before the camera, studying a map. One of the actors cannot pronounce his line of dialogue. Mitchum is blithely mocking. The actor continues to screw up his line. “I should take out my dick and show him the map,” says Mitchum. “Take out what?” Preminger
says. “I should piss on his arm! Hahaha—” “Bob, we are rolling!” “I’d take out
your
dick, if I could find it. . . .” “Bob, please, there are ladies present!”