Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (92 page)

Mitchum met with Herman Wouk for a kind of refresher course in their shared creation. The key to it all, Wouk told the actor, was the man’s sense of loyalty, of patriotism, keeping sight of the greater good (never mind about the adulterous affair with Pamela Tudsbury; even Eisenhower had a bit on the side). For Mitchum, the filming, especially by comparison with the awful memories of Yugoslavia on the other one, was relatively stress free. They shot in Hawaii; in Bremerton, Washington; in D.C.; Mobile, Alabama; and Pensacola, Florida. In consideration of Mitchum’s age and health, his scenes were carefully scheduled, giving him a hiatus before each major location change. Kind of fun, Mitchum thought. Plenty of variety, new faces every day. You stand around in front of the camera, and one day they march in FDR and the next day you’re working with Harry Truman or Eisenhower.

Dan Curtis’s labors were considerably more taxing. Mitchum came to have enormous respect and great affection for the unwavering, fanatical filmmaker. He drove everyone crazy, but he did his homework, slaving like a determined schoolboy, and he knew what he wanted and he got it, whatever it took. The man really could have won World War II, Mitchum thought. Complete tunnel vision. They were in Hawaii, Curtis in a motorboat shouting orders; the boat sprang a leak, started to sink under him, and the director was still waving and screaming for his damned long shot. They were on the destroyer up in Bremerton harbor, tearing out of the harbor at eighteen knots, and Curtis shouts, “Hold it! Hold it. Do it again. . . . Back it up.” Mitchum was standing near the ship’s captain. The look on the man’s face was worth his one-million-dollar salary. “It takes three miles to stop a destroyer, and Dan thinks it’s like driving a Porsche. The captain said, ‘I am going to be in my quarters, padlocked within. . . .’”

Mitchum returned to Santa Barbara in July with a month off before finishing up, three more weeks in D.C., Florida, and Alabama. While at home he got a call from John Huston. Mitchum’s old pal, eighty-one years old now, suffered from emphysema, carried a tank of oxygen with him everywhere these days. Wheezing away into the phone, Johnny said he was about to start an acting job in Newport, Rhode Island, a picture his kid Danny was directing,
Mr. North.

“I’m not in the best of shape, kid,” Huston said. “Might need a favor. Don’t want to let the boy down. Small part. Think you could take over for me, kid, if it comes to that?”

Mitchum knew he had to be in Washington on August 13, but he didn’t hesitate. “Pencil me in, John. But we both know you’ll do the damn thing yourself.”

On July 28, hours before he was to start his acting job (he’d also cowritten the script), Huston had a severe attack of the lung disease and was rushed to Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts. The doctors diagnosed pneumonia. Mitchum got word that he would have to do the favor after all. He arrived in Newport days later and went to the hospital to see Huston.

The old buccaneer looked like hell. He was tied up to a dozen tubes, his flesh purple where it had any color at all. Huston’s eyes widened, and he greeted Mitchum with a weakened version of that signature crooked, rascally grin.

“Well, you suckered me,” said Mitchum. “I can see by the look of you ya never had any intention of doing this picture.”

“I hoaxed you, kid, you’re right.”

Huston had always told people that Mitchum was one of the few Hollywood stars he was really fond of, while Robert’s enchantment with Huston—not to mention his imitations of him—had been a constant since the days and nights on Tobago. It figured they got along. They were much alike, with their lifelong disdain for the presumptuous and the pretentious, their contempt for Hollywood bullshit (as long as it wasn’t their own), their shared fondness for losers and faraway places and women and liquor and for a good story about any of the same.

They could only make small talk now. Mitchum said the nurse was worried that Huston wasn’t eating enough. There was some rude back-and-forth about the nurse and what she could try eating. Then the medical people returned, taking tests, reattaching Huston to his respirator. Out in the halls there were people hovering. One of John’s girlfriends was crying. Mitchum said he didn’t look so bad. “I’m telling you, they’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”

He shot the small role of a crusty old millionaire under the direction of Danny Huston. It was supposed to be a sunny comedy, but it was shot on a death watch.

Huston died on August 28. By then Mitchum had left Rhode Island and returned to finish
War and Remembrance.

It was bigger by far than
Winds
—longer, more expensive, more expansive, shot in a dozen countries, and involving a total of more than forty thousand paid
extras. Dan Curtis’s final cut ran a whopping thirty hours with commercials. ABC chose to further divide the
Winds
sequel into two sections, the first broadcast throughout November 1988 and the concluding hours the following May. For all of its repeated descents into soap opera dramatics and Saturday cliff-hanger suspense,
War and Remembrance
was in many ways an astonishing achievement. TV had for so long been accepted as a medium for the intimate, the anecdotal, the superficial. Curtis, Wouk, and company had reinvented the wheel with the epic size and seriousness of purpose of their prime-time endeavor. Curtis’s terrifying, apocalyptic staging of the Nazi death camp exterminations—the most explicit and detailed recreation of the Holocaust ever attempted—arguably placed
War and Remembrance
among the most powerful works in the history of American television. Once again, though, critics attacked Mitchum’s participation with a cruel relish—they said he was calcified, near moribund. They said, “His acting days are over.”

Mitchum filled in for another ailing actor in the fall of 1987, this time a guy he didn’t know, Edward Woodward, the star of a CBS series called
The Equalizer.
While Woodward recovered from a heart attack, a two-part episode was put together featuring Mitchum as a mysterious superspy. It was a terrific appearance, Mitchum glamorous, tough, cool as hell. In another few years he would become involved with his own weekly series and it was a mess—a smart action show like this was the sort of thing he ought to have done.

Mitchum’s daughter, Trina, had a friend in Los Angeles who worked on filmed bits for
Saturday Night Live,
the long-running comedy program that played on NBC. An invitation was procured for Dad to guest host an upcoming installment. With some reluctance he agreed. In California, Trina and her filmmaker friend put together a piece for the occasion, Robert reunited with Jane Greer in a film noir spoof shot in black-and-white. In the second week of November 1987, Mitchum flew to New York, accompanied by Toni Cosentino of Charter Management, for the required six days of bull sessions, publicity, and rehearsals with the regular cast before the live telecast on the night of November 14.

“Most of them were in awe of him,” said Cosentino. “Phil Hartman was just the sweetest, and the whole staff were very good to him. And he was pleasant and everything went great.”

The writers came up with a monologue and a series of sketches that played
off Mitchum’s public and cinematic personae—as the sardonic don’t-give-a-shit hack movie actor not afraid to “jeopardize that 104th movie role” and as the golden-age icon in the
Out of the Past
filmed short and a
Farewell, My Lovely-esque
skit playing with the cliche of first-person, voice-over narration. Mitchum objected to nothing they threw at him, knew exactly where the laughs were supposed to be, and had his lines down in a way none of the cue-card-reading regulars could match. He rehearsed another sketch that was cut before airtime, the setting an old folks home for stuntmen and Mitchum a doddering Hollywood roughneck who’d fallen off one chuck wagon too many. “They had him on a walker, all kooky in the head,” Cosentino recalled. “It was one of those
Saturday Night Live
sketches that was going to just lay there without a laugh. And I said, ‘You know, we’re doing this for you to look cool, why do this shit? Who the hell wants to see you in a walker?’ And they cut it out, which was the only thing I insisted on.”

Toward the end of the rehearsal period, Mitchum asked Phil Hartman, “So when do we start getting these things on tape?”

“You’re kidding, right?” said Hartman. “It’s done live. You know . . . Saturday Night. . .
Live?”

Mitchum said, “Oh . . .”

On Saturday, a concerted effort was made to keep the host sober. “It was sort of like that movie
My Favorite Year,”
said Cosentino. “We just had to keep liquor away from him and it went fine. It went great. Of course, when Dorothy got there at the end of the week we had to put a stop to having fun. And then they had the wrap party afterwards. And there were people came to be in the audience just to see Bob—Victoria Tennant from
Winds of War
was there and others. And everyone wanted him to be at the wrap party, but Mrs. Mitchum took him back to the hotel. She didn’t want him to drink. She would be embarrassed when he would get so bombed. God forbid he would pop back a few with the
Saturday Night
crew.”

Producer-writer Andrew Fenady put together a project to be shown on the USA cable network,
fake Spanner, Private Eye,
based on a novel called
The Old Dick
by L. A. Morse, a breezy, hard-boiled mystery about “the world’s oldest detective.” George Burns lobbied for the part. “He was ninety-something years old, for chrissake,” said Fenady. Fenady knew there was one perfect “old dick” and it was Robert Mitchum. Through John Mitchum, Fenady got the script to Robert. Fenady: “We talked on the phone. He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK.’ I said, ‘Should I see what your agent has to say?’ He said, ‘Agents? Hell, those
guys are just mail drops.’ I said, ‘I got to make the deal with somebody.’ So he gave me the name of a guy named Mike Greenfield. Old Greeny. I knew him. So we talked. He said he thought it would be fine. He told me I ought to go over and meet him first. And he said, ‘Look, the most important thing with Mitchum is he needs to have the right cameraman if you want him to do it.’ I said, ‘Who the hell is he, Greta Garbo?’ And the agent explained this and that Mitchum needed. So I said, ‘Well, if that’s what it takes to get Mitchum, I’ll do it.’ I knew a damn good cameraman named Hector Figueroa and I asked him a favor, get me a compilation tape of his very best stuff he’d done. I got the damn thing, I found out where Mitchum was, and we met. And I said, ‘I brought a tape. I understand you have certain requirements.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d like to be paid.’ I said, ‘I understand you like to have approval of the cameraman. Have you got a tape machine I can play this—’ He said, A tape machine? What the hell are you talking about? I’m not looking at any damn tapes!’ I said, ‘But Greenfield said—’ “Greenfield must be full of shit. . . . If you like the cameraman, that’s fine with me. Tell me when to show up and I’ll do what I can. Oh, and can you find a good part for brother John in there somewhere?’ Anyway, it worked out great.”

While many of the people Mitchum worked with these days knew as much about his long career in the movies as he did about basketball—there were producers and directors on the scene startlingly ignorant of cinema history or anything else older than six months ago—Fenady was a film buff as well as a veteran and could recite Mitchum’s hundred-plus credits backward. The first time he’d seen the actor in the flesh was nearly forty years ago, on the old forty-acres lot, Mitchum walking with Susan Hayward, shooting
The Lusty Men.
“The son of a bitch was all chest, his chest was two minutes ahead of him, and he was a good-looking bastard, loaded with sex appeal. Oh Christ, he looked like a movie star.” Fenady made
Jake Spanner
a nostalgic wallow for Mitchum fans, securing footage from
Out of the Past
for a daydream sequence, filling the film with cameos by RKO vintage actresses and faded starlets like Terry Moore, Sheree North, and Stella Stevens, renting an old RKO soundstage, and generally referencing Mitchum’s and the movies’ days gone by. During casting, Robert suggested they consider giving another part to one of the family. Like he said, it beat paying their room and board. Fenady took the hint and picked a role that seemed good for Chris, but he was unavailable and Jim Mitchum was offered the part.

The director, Lee Katzin, recalled, “Everyone enjoyed working with Bob. He was terrifically professional and very funny. And very dirty, in the nicest sense of the word. He kept the crew in hysterics. There were many scenes
where there would be voice-overs as in the old detective movies, Bob describing his thoughts or narrating the action on screen. And when we would do these, Bob would just improvise dialogue to cover, whatever came into his head. And he would do these monologues about his ‘tallywhacker’ and the size of his tallywhacker, where he was supposed to be doing this serious action under the voice-over—just for the amusement of the crew, and they were falling over. He was very funny.”

“Bob was just fantastic,” said Fenady. “Such a pro. And at the end we had a chase scene and he broke his goddamn ankle. And I said, ‘That’s it. Shit, we’re in trouble. We’ll have to shut down for a week before we can finish.’ I went up to him, and he was turning blue from agony. I said, ‘Bob, shall I close down the company?’ He said, ‘I’il let you know.’ He started for home. He was quivering with pain. He stopped and said, ‘I’il see you tomorrow.’ I didn’t see how. But he showed up. Still in great pain. He literally could not stand. But he was there. And we rewrote the scene so he could sit for most of it, but if he’d had to stand he would have stood. That was the kind of a man Robert Mitchum was. It was the last day of shooting, and we got it done.

“He was a marvelous man. And such an underestimated actor. They always talk about all the bad pictures he did. But I’ll tell you something. Add ‘em up. Nobody made as many
good
pictures as Mitchum did. He should have gotten all the awards many times over. Christ. . . “