Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (87 page)

Ironically, it was during this period—on December, 8, 1980—as his career seemed to have returned to the B picture murk whence it began, that Mitchum was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Los Angeles Film Critics association. He was the fifth recipient of the honor, following Allan Dwan, King Vidor, Orson Welles, and John Huston. “I would like to thank you all,” said Mitchum, “for picking my name out of a hat.”

Later that same month, his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Trina, wed a California musician and composer named Scott Richardson. Trina had gone through a period as an aspiring writer, then as a burgeoning photographer. Now she was said to be interested in movie production work. Brothers Chris and James were still plugging away at their father’s business. After more than twenty years as an actor, Jim had never broken through to the big time and was reduced to working in mostly out-of-the-mainstream movies. Sometimes he tried to make his own breaks and got involved on the production side. One underfunded project called
King of the Mountain
fell apart after shooting began in New Mexico, and, according to John Mitchum, Robert had had to pay off bill collectors to the tune of eleven thousand dollars. Jim’s most recent credits were unknown quantities called
Blackout
and
Toxic Monster.
“I wish I could tell you that Jim is a famous surgeon or even a box boy in the supermarket,” his father uncharitably said to a reporter. “But I can’t. He curses the stars and wonders why he wasn’t singled out for eternal glory.”

Chris, who drifted into acting when nothing else worked out, had gotten a number of jobs through sympathetic associates of his father’s, Howard Hawks and John Wayne. An agent then found him a role in a film made in Spain, a thriller called
The Summertime Killer.
It would not get much play in the States, but the picture was a sizable hit throughout Europe, and its success led to other jobs there and in Asia, mostly in action and horror movies. Usually, he would
say jokingly, he played a smiling, renegade CIA agent who kills hundreds of people. He went where the work was and moved the family to Spain for three years. In Hollywood they couldn’t even spell it, but the name Chris Mitchum on a marquee meant good box office in Algeciras or Manila. In 1980, he returned to the United States hoping to try his luck again in Hollywood. “From 1980 to 1982, I didn’t work at all,” he told the
Los Angeles Times.
“That was one of the many times I bottomed out.” It was rough, he said. He’d had an established price for his services in Europe, and in California no one wanted to pay it.

John Mitchum had continued to work in the business. He was a busy journeyman character actor with dozens of credits by now, his most prominent job to date the role of Det. Frank Di Georgio, supporting Clint Eastwood in
Dirty Harry
and two sequels. He seemed content with the career he had found for himself and was well liked by people in the business. His personal life, though, had for many years been beset by tragedy. Years before, his wife, Nancy, had been diagnosed with malignant exophthalmos, or Graves’ disease. Bone surgery on her face had left her in a condition that made it difficult to keep her eyes from falling out of their sockets. She suffered for a decade with complications from the disease and then, in 1976, died from terminal, undiagnosed cancer. John was married for a third time, brieftly and unhappily, and then once more, happily, to a stage actress named Bonnie Duff, brother Bob serving as best man at the outdoor ceremony.

The 1977 ABC broadcast of a multipart adaptation of Alex Haley’s best-selling book
Roots
had met with enormous acclaim and an unprecedented viewership. It would prove to be the model for a new television format, the blockbuster miniseries—lengthy, sprawling, melodramatic pop literature transformed into lengthy, sprawling, et cetera, TV programming.

In 1980, the ABC network announced its intention of producing a thirty-five-million-dollar, sixteen-hour-long adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel
The Winds of War,
a thick, fictional account of world events between the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian islands in 1941, the epic canvas centered around the globe-trotting family of U.S. Navy captain Victor “Pug” Henry. With his long-established skill as a storyteller, Wouk had written a compelling page-turner in which his primary characters—Pug, son Byron, daughter-in-law Natalie—managed to interact with every world leader from FDR to Stalin and/or experience every earth-shattering event—from Pearl Harbor to the Holocaust—of those tumultuous
years. The tale had action, spectacle, suspense, adultery, heartbreak, history, and a moral lesson or two.

To make this, the costliest of all television programs, ABC and coproducer Paramount Television handed the creative reins to Dan Curtis, whose fame rested on the 1960s vampire soap opera
Dark Shadows
and several glossy prime-time TV movies, such as his 1973 version of
Dracula
with Jack Palance. Curtis was a rare figure among important television producers in that he directed his own projects. With the completion of the massive screenplay by Wouk himself, the plans for a vast production took shape, with filming to be done in six countries and hundreds of locations, from Hawaii to the wilds of Yugoslavia. There were nearly three hundred speaking roles to be cast, first and foremost that of the story’s central character, the link to all the various threads in the sprawling epic. According to Wouk’s description of Captain Henry, the role might have properly belonged to someone in the age range and bulldog shape of an Ed Asner, but Curtis and ABC saw the story’s steadfast military hero and patriarch in more classical terms. The producer-director considered a long list of prominent names for the role, but after a luncheon with Robert Mitchum—granite face, tall, broad-shouldered, American as Mount Rush-more, a tough SOB with awesome presence—he knew he had found his man. Gary Nardino, the president of Paramount TV, gave him no argument. Said Nardino of Mitchum, “He’s the only Gary Cooper still alive.”

Through the years Mitchum had had nothing much good to say about the medium of television. It had always looked like too much work, too little pay, and the end result was a load of crap. But that was . . . then. He was sixty-three years old, and maybe he had worn out his welcome in features. The big pictures these days all seemed to be aimed at half-witted teenagers anyway, and he could not easily imagine himself dressed up in gold tights like a chorus boy for one of those Star-whatever outer space adventures or sitting around chewing the fat with a retarded-looking extraterrestrial. Advisers pleaded: This is going to be the biggest thing ABC has ever done. It will be the television event of the year. And they want you to star in it!

Dan Curtis called him for his answer.

Mitchum said, “How long?”

“About forty weeks.”

“How much?”

“A million.”

“Why not?”

.   .   .

Other principal roles went to Polly Bergen as Mrs. Pug, John Houseman as the Jewish scholar Aaron Jastrow, Briton Victoria Tennant as Pamela Tudsbury (Mitchum’s love interest), Ralph Bellamy reprising his
Sunrise at Campobello
turn as Franklin Roosevelt, Ali MacGraw as the impetuous Natalie, and Jan-Michael Vincent (playing Mitchum’s son for the second time) as Byron Henry, the latter two casting choices not made until long after the production had been under way. Shooting began in December, pleasantly enough, on the decks of the
Queen Mary
in Long Beach, filling in for the German liner
Bremen,
and then on the tennis court of a Hancock Park estate (where it was discovered that Mitchum, unlike Pug Henry, had never touched a racket in his life; a tennis-playing double for the star had to be found). After Christmas break they moved on to more rigorous locations in Yugoslavia, filling in for the Russian front; arrangements had been made to rent most of the Yugoslav army. Mitchum’s departure for Europe coincided with his catching a strain of Thai flu, and he arrived in Zagreb with a 104-degree temperature. For over a week, he worked while shaking and shivering with fever. The weather was indeed Russian-front cold, nearly as frigid on some of the interior sets as it was in the forest. “Every toilet within four miles was frozen,” said Mitchum. “Slivovitz kept me alive.” Once Curtis interrupted a take to ask why Mitchum’s suit appeared to be moistly shiny. The actor had sweated right through his shirt and jacket, and the sweat had beaded and frozen solid.

“Everyone could see how sick he was,” said Victoria Tennant, who had come to be a great admirer and good pal of the actor. “But he kept working. He was the only actor the Yugoslavs recognized, and when he looked like he was going to drop, they were still after him for autographs.”

The food Mitchum would recall as nothing but nightmarish variants of porridge. The thirty-five-million-dollar production was spending fifty bucks on catering, he said. Standard fare was a soup of barley and rainwater thick enough to plant a telephone pole in. On special occasions, he said, it would also contain a greasy hunk of congealed red mystery meat. After several weeks, the company’s Zagreb hotel became infested with a group of three dozen roistering Russian conventioneers who had apparently not bathed since the revolution. The group were omnipresent in the lobby, dining room, and elevators and gave off such a collective reek that some of the
Winds
people took to carrying face towels from their rooms to cover their mouths and nostrils against the nauseating smell. Mitchum and Jan-Michael Vincent had gone up in the elevator with a half-dozen of the reeking Russkies. “After we got out,” Vincent
recalled, “Mitchum held the door, whipped out a tube of Crazy Glue, and began squirting great quantities of it up one side of the elevator door and down the other. Then he waved good-bye to them and they nodded appreciatively, thinking he had fixed something. We learned later that it had taken the hotel servicemen six hours to get those Russians out of that elevator.”

Mitchum was in Zagreb for two months, most of it, he would say, spent falling on his ass in the snow while trying to reach an outhouse. After one particularly debilitating day’s shoot, he received a phone call from Bo Derek, who had wanted him to play her father in
Tarzan, the Ape Man,
shooting in sunny Sri Lanka and the Seychelles. Nearly in tears, he whimpered to Victoria Tennant that he could at that moment be headed for a warm beach somewhere to play with busty Bo. “Yes, and here you are with a freezing flat-chested English girl,” said a possibly unsympathetic Tennant, “in the middle of fucking Yugoslavia.”

At last Mitchum was given a break to go home and recuperate while the others labored on. A doctor told him he had been working all this time with a solid case of pneumonia. When he returned to Yugoslavia he brought with him crates of fresh California fruit to bestow on the grateful company. More weeks in Zagreb; then at last they moved on to more congenial locations in Italy, Austria, and England. Mitchum would be given periodic vacations throughout the year, but they never seemed long enough to recover. Despite the vast-sounding budget and a twelve-month shoot, they were, after all, trying to make the equivalent of nine feature films in that time. For all its opulence,
The Winds of War
still ended up being shot like any other television production, with corners cut wherever possible and speed always of the essence. They worked six days a week, late into the evening almost every night. The shooting schedule was so efficiently planned that they were forever filming sequences that were wildly out of continuity with the previous one and the next, requiring Mitchum to change constantly in and out of nearly one hundred different costumes and two dozen pairs of shoes, none worn long enough to be broken in (”My toes are still braided”). Just trying to find where they were in the script, shifting the pages, say, from Scene 19 to Scene 643 in the massive screenplay, could give you a double hernia. Mitchum had not had to work so fast on a picture since those seven-day wonders at Monogram. Throughout, he complained like a foulmouthed Job, but ABC publicist James Butler thought it was in large part an act and that he was having “a good time with his hard times.” Butler observed in the journal he kept that when no one was around to be entertained, the “other” Mitchum came out. “He is singing softly to himself much of the endless time between scenes. Country songs, usually. His voice is warm, low, spirited . . . it makes him enormously human and enormously likable.”

Month after month, ferocious Dan Curtis never let up, keeping things on schedule, never intimidated by logistics that might have vanquished General Eisenhower. “He had shortened the lives of his players an aggregate total of two hundred and fifty years,” said Mitchum. One day, while filming a marching batallion, Curtis reeled back, clutching his chest. Someone shouted, “Dan Curtis is having a heart attack!” Said Mitchum, “I have never seen so many smiles at one time in my life.”

“Bob,” said the director, “likes to kid.”

Mitchum was a good soldier, the ultimate pro, Curtis called him, though when the director’s attention turned away, and Bob considered himself abandoned “to the wolves,” he would slip away to a pub and get drunk. “Then,” said Mitchum, “he’d have to spend a day finding me.”

Shooting was completed a year and one week after it began, with the filming of the attack on Pearl Harbor, staged at Port Heuneme, California, on December 7 to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the actual event. Curtis shot it with typical efficiency, in one afternoon, using eight cameras, two takes. One of the ABC people gloated, “It took
Tora, Tora, Tora
three months to do the same action!” Mitchum shrugged: “It took the Japanese fifteen minutes.”

It had been a long, long job. Mitchum calculated that in the end, with the amount of time he had put in, his $1.25 million salary had worked out to about $2.40 an hour. “I could have done better picking potatoes.”

With his virginity now taken, and no feature film offer imminent, Mitchum accepted another job in television. His Santa Barbara neighbor Mel Ferrer was producing and had tossed the script on his driveway next to the morning paper. It was a straight, old-fashioned private detective mystery with an awful title,
So Little Cause for Caroline.
They soon changed it to something just as bad:
One Shoe Makes It Murder.
They shot it in the spring. The schedules were crazy, dawn to bedtime, everyone running around under pressure. OK, that’s it for television, he said. It was a sloppy and sleepy B picture, but Mitchum and costar Angie Dickinson made it something more than watchable—the senior citizen and the old broad were sexier together than most of the “hot” young couples Hollywood was offering.