Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (86 page)

Things proved still more unpleasant in Hong Kong. According to Robert Clouse, Mitchum was openly verbally abusive to the Golden Harvest personnel and Chinese crew. The sentiments were returned in kind. The atmosphere became so charged that Mitchum began harboring fears that the film company was planning to kill him. He had somehow convinced himself that Golden Harvest was secretly holding extra insurance policies that would pay a fortune in the event of his death during production. Clouse himself believed there was
an element of dangerous vengefulness in the way members of the Chinese contingent at dinner one night plied Mitchum with what some feared was a lethal portion of a devastatingly powerful local spirit. He was carried out of the restaurant and back to his hotel but ultimately took a fall on a bathroom floor and busted two ribs.

Once again a behind-the-scenes “making of” a documentary might have proved more entertaining than the actual confused, simple-minded feature itself.

Mitchum returned to the role of Philip Marlowe for the second and last time in a screen adaptation of Chandler’s first novel,
The Big Sleep,
already filmed marvelously twenty-some years before as a studio-bound violent comedy of manners, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart. Producer Elliott Kastner, financed by Britain’s Sir Lew Grade, offered the project to writer-director Michael Winner. Winner, a colorful, smart, and waspishly funny moviemaker, had begun his career as a social satirist chronicling the rise of “Swinging London” in several clever to brilliant films starring Oliver Reed. He then switched gears in the ‘70s to become a specialist in brisk and often lurid genre entertainments, many of them vehicles for Charles Bronson.

Though he had written a screenplay that was in fact more faithful to the original novel than Hawks’s version, Michael Winner made the radical decision to transplant
The Big Sleep
to modern London. “It came about because it seemed to me the original film was so immensely well known,” said Winner, “that to ape it in any way would be ridiculous. Furthermore, Raymond Chandler was a great Anglophile, and when I read the book I thought it was quite a bit like reading Oscar Wilde. I know this man’s meant to be a famous American writer, but it’s an immensely British style of writing. So much so that when Jimmy Stewart was sent the script, he said, ‘I can’t play General Sternwood because he’s written as an Englishman.’ I said, ‘Jimmy, every word is Raymond Chandler’s and he’s a famous American writer.’ But Jimmy was actually being quite bright. . . . So, I thought we’d try something completely different. And I saw it very much as a gavotte, that is, a lot of people dancing around each other in a very classical way.”

By working at his usual brisk pace and carefully arranging the schedule, Winner was able to afford Mitchum a notably starry supporting cast, including Stewart,
Ryan’s Daughter
mates Sarah Miles and John Mills, Oliver Reed, Joan Collins, Candy Clark, Edward Fox, and Richard Boone. “Mitchum was held in very high regard by the other actors. And I think he was an inducement for them to work in the picture. Just as when you do a picture with Marlon
you know that more people will turn up. And also, I think they were all very good parts. Very sharp.” Although the film was spruced up for the ‘70s with a few flashes of nudity and an array of agressively sexy dames, the modern Marlowe remained a surprisingly chaste fellow, leading Mitchum to voice some sardonic suspicions: “Marlowe throws Candy Clark out of his bed, resists the advances of Sarah Miles, and has pictures of himself all over his apartment. I kept expecting him to open a closet and find exotic black panty hose and rhinestone shoes and jazz.”

Installed in a flat at Arlington House on a very posh street overlooking St. James Park and coutured for the film in the finest Savile Row suitings—nothing farted up by Vic Mature this go-round—Mitchum went to work, enjoying London as he always did, though there were the usual grousings and wisecracks to reporters or any audience he could muster. They were shooting in London, he said, “because it’s the only place they can practice industrial slavery. Around eight or nine at night I’d say, ‘Isn’t it getting a little late?’ ‘Oh, weren’t you informed,’ they’d say, ‘today is an extended day?’ Turned out to be a day you worked until midnight.” Twelve hours, fourteen hours a day he claimed to be on the job. “By the time I make the report out to the Screen Actors Guild, I will
own
Sir Lew Grade.”

Everybody else had the Claude Rains roles this time. James Stewart as Sternwood, the rich, wheelchair-bound old man with the errant daughters, flew in from Los Angeles for a few days to shoot his two scenes. Though just seventy years old now, the great movie star appeared much older. “The picture was all about corpses,” Mitchum told Donald Dewey, “but Jimmy looked deader than any of them.” Stewart had a hearing and possible memory impairment and kept fumbling on one of his lines. “Every time he’d flub it, he’d look at me and apologize to me like he’d just committed some kind of atrocious crime. Damned embarrassing, I’ll tell you. What the hell is Jimmy Stewart apologizing to
me
about?”

Joan Collins, playing the sexy, scheming bookshop clerk, Agnes, thought Mitchum one of the greatest actors she had ever worked with, but was initially terrified of being bruised or broken by him during their on-camera tussle. “He had to wrestle with me on the floor, fling me across the room onto a sofa, grab my hair, then throw me over his knee and spank me really hard while I wriggled around trying to dodge his slaps.” Mitchum did all the action as required, but Collins found the whole thing a remarkably gentle and bruise-free experience. “Honey, I’m an actor,” he told her afterwards, “and I know how
to play
rough. I’ve been doin’ this stuff for about a hundred years so I’m not about to hurt an actress in a scene, ‘specially not in
this
piece of crap.”

The great casting coup for the British
Big Sleep,
besides Mitchum’s return to the role, was Richard Boone playing triggerman Lash Canino. Boone’s Olympian charisma turned the small part into the most compelling villain Mitchum had gone up against since Robert Ryan—or Jane Greer. “In the evening Bob tended to drink,” said Winner, “and, bless him, Dick Boone drank a bit.” In fact, Boone, like Mitchum, was considered a world-class imbiber; and on the night they were to film their last violent encounter, both were feeling no pain. Staggering about the set and blasting away at each other, the two old pros had a high old time of it. Winner: “I did say, during the final shoot-out, ‘This is like
The Gunfight at Alcoholics Anonymous.”
I mean, that was being a little cruel, but they were a bit stoked up there. But they were fine.”

Mitchum and Sarah Miles—in the Lauren Bacall role—were happily reunited for the production. They had remained chums through the years, fostering continued speculation about their relationship; and as Miles’s marriage to Robert Bolt had come undone, she would admit to having again been tempted by the American’s sexual allure. But nothing came of it. Miles valued Mitchum’s friendship all the more when he became one of only three showbiz acquaintances to immediately defend her during a horrible, scandalous crisis she had endured a few years earlier. Miles had somehow gotten entangled in a bizarre relationship with a
TIME
magazine reporter, David Whiting, who had seduced her and then managed to make himself a permanent fixture in her life. Although he was clearly unstable and beat her violently numerous times, Miles was incapable of doing whatever it took to get away from the man. Violently jealous, he bestowed beatings on several of her costars and friends as well—
including Mitchum.
The actor had arrived in London for a visit and left a message for Miles to call him. Mitchum had just concluded the purchase of some marijuana from a local connection and was closing the door to his flat when Whiting arrived in a maniacal fury, knocking Mitchum to the floor. “I caught his eye and there was death perching right in the corner of it,” Mitchum told her. He clung to the floor in a ball while Whiting kicked him again and again, then grabbed his newly purchased pot stash and fled. It was the only time, Mitchum said, he had ever refused to fight back when attacked. “No way, man! Never fight when you see death in the eye.”

Whiting followed Miles to the American West where she was shooting a film, and one night—after he had given her another beating, and she had revealed as much to costar Burt Reynolds and others—Whiting was found dead on her bathroom floor under mysterious circumstances. Miles felt that many of those close to her, including family members, believed she was complicit in
the man’s death—his murder no less—and Mitchum was among the shockingly few to offer support and prove a stalwart friend.

Mitchum had his own small scandals to engender during the course of
The Big Sleep’s
production, consorting with a luscious young Londoner, to the delight of Fleet Street’s strenuous tabloids. “There was a whole thing in the paper about it,” Michael Winner recalled. “I had interviewed a girl that afternoon because we had to do a book cover with some nudes on it, to be seen within the movie. And we took the photos ourselves. The girl was a nude model, and she came to see me to be a nude model for this. It was a one-hour modeling assignment, probably fifteen dollars. And by absolute, amazing coincidence I met Mitchum in the lobby of a theater that evening—he was seeing John Mills in a Terrence Rattigan play—and he turned up with this girl. And he hadn’t met her through me. How he met her, I don’t know. It was strange. There she was going to the theater with him. And this girl says, ‘Hello.’ She was perfectly pleasant. And she was his girlfriend, I think, during his stay. She sold her story to the English press, so I’m not telling a tale out of school. And then they all had a fight with some other girl outside his apartment. That was also in the papers here. Some other woman who was following him around, and they had a fight outside the apartment. I said, ‘Bob, I hope it wasn’t
inside
because we’ll do you for the damage, you know!’”

Mitchum and Winner remained pals in the years ahead. “Well, Bob was two people, really. When he had a drink or two he was the mumbling raconteur or, if he had had enough, quite a rowdy fellow. But most of the time he was a very quiet person, read a great deal, read poetry, important books. He used to write poetry, rather proudly. I knew this chap very well. He was a very intellectual person. The great amount of time that I saw him he was very quiet, very sober, very dedicated. He was almost like the head of a midwestern university. And he wasn’t doing this to impress me. Why should he?
Ha ha
—I went to Cambridge, you know!”

Winner would have been the first—well, perhaps not the first—to acknowledge that his
Big Sleep
did not surpass the achievement of the Bogart classic of the ‘40s. But the new one was jolly good fun, a spirited go at the material, and here and there, particularly in several ripely acted characterizations—by Boone, Collins, the always delightful Oliver Reed as a reptilian mobster—it actually was the superior of the revered Hawks version. However, many reviewers could not get beyond Winner’s transatlantic relocation and desecrating contemporaneity. How things had changed in the few years since Dick Richards had thought to make
Farewell, My Lovely
into a period piece. Now every weatherman turned television movie critic was a Raymond Chandler purist.

.   .   .

Playwright John Guare had written an original scenario that was to be directed by his French friend Louis Malle. It was called
Atlantic City,
and it was the story of a seedy, aged hood in the New Jersey gambling resort who finds a last shot at riches and romance. Guare and Malle had thought of several actors for the part of the nostalgic old criminal, but when Robert Mitchum’s name came up a light went off. “We both said, ‘Of course!’” Guare recalled. “We thought he would be terrific. His age, his aura, the whole connection to film noir. It seemed perfect. We sent him the script, and Louis went out to California to see him. Mitchum met him at the door. Louis took one look and saw immediately that Mitchum had had a face-lift. There was not a wrinkle in sight. And he was quite open about it. He said yes, he had just had it done. He had read the script we sent him, he said he was very happy to be asked to do the part, but, he said, ‘I’m only playing forty-five now.’ Forty-five years old, in other words. And that was that. We got Burt Lancaster instead.” Lancaster’s performance in the role brought him critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination, among other honors.

Mitchum closed out the decade with two more jobs of work.
Breakthrough,
filmed in Austria, was a modest sequel to Peckinpah’s WWII epic,
Cross of Iron,
with Mitchum as an American officer. Top billing went to Richard Burton, playing the German hero Sergeant Steiner. Burton’s glamour was sadly depleted by now, and he looked like a bloated, strung-out tortoise inside his great steel army helmet.
Agency
was a Canadian thriller shot in Toronto in the winter of 1978—79, with Lee Majors as a funky adman foiling a plot to control public policy through subliminal messages, the plot hatched by evil, brilliant senior advertising executive Mitchum.

“He’s a total outcast,” the producer Robert Lantos gushed to a reporter. “Outside the Hollywood system. He has no agent, probably the only major star who doesn’t, and you deal directly with him.”

Mitchum pocketed five hundred thousand dollars for a dramatic but supporting part. Asked by the reporter if he ever got excited about any of his films, Mitchum responded with what was described as a “very long pause.”

Valerie Perrine played the film’s statuesque love interest—Lee’s. She told Mitchum, “I’ve never been in a picture with guns.” Mitchum told her, “I’ve never been in one without.”

.   .   .

He started the new decade with an even worse movie, if that were possible:
Nightkill.
It was a James M. Cainish tale of a homicidal wife, with
Charlie’s Angel
Jaclyn Smith starring as the murderess and Mitchum as a mysterious private eye on her trail. It was a gorilla picture all the way. So poor were the film’s prospects that Avco-Embassy decided to sell it directly to television, and NBC promoted its December broadcast as the world premiere of a made-for-TV movie rather than as the world premiere of a not-good-enough-for-theaters movie.