Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (95 page)

Managing at last to get in a few sentences about
Dead Man,
Jarmusch left the script and departed. Days later he got a call. “Mr. Mitchum would be happy to accept this role.” Like so many who had come before him, Jarmusch found Mitchum to be a fascinating and funny guy to work with. He didn’t want background or motivation, no long thing, Jarmusch remembered. “He just wants to know that he’s hitting the character the way that I want it to be and what he feels it is, and then you just take it from there.”

One day while they were working, Jarmusch found the old actor staring into the distance. “Years ago,” Mitchum said, keeping his
eyes
on the Western horizon, “I saved up a million dollars from acting . . . and I spent it on a horse farm in Tucson. Now when I go down there, I look at the place and realize my whole acting career adds up to a million dollars’ worth of horseshit.”

He did some more work. There was a cameo as movie director George Stevens in a film about James Dean’s last days on earth. Robert’s granddaughter Carrie played Dean’s girlfriend Pier Angeli.

Better to think of
Dead Man
and ferocious old shotgun-wielding Dickinson as the end of the line. A scene-stealing bad guy in the Old West, just the way it had all begun, fifty-three years ago.

.   .   .

It was getting bad. He needed the respirator within reach more often. His weight was dropping. There were days when a walk across the living room exhausted him. Doctors came around. They tried again to make him give up the cigarettes and the liquor.

In April 1996, he agreed to a request from the Turner Classic Movies cable channel—they wanted to sit him alongside his longtime dear friend and Montecito neighbor Jane Russell and make them chat about the good old days at RKO. Robert Osborne would be interviewing them. Osborne had gotten in Mitchum’s good graces years before when the Los Angeles critics were handing him one of those lifetime achievement awards. Osborne had been properly ironic about the thing and read some of Mitchum’s worst reviews through the years. Mitchum got a kick out of it. He and Jane flew to Atlanta—Turner headquarters—for the interview. For Osborne and the others there was a great deal of shock and despair at the sight of Robert Mitchum in very bad shape, wasted away, hooked up to his oxygen. In an Atlanta bar that night all those feelings vanished as Mitchum held court, telling uproarious stories between sips of vodka and oxygen. To Osborne’s dismay, all that ebullience was gone the next day in front of the TV cameras, as a wan and slack-jawed Mitchum sat on a couch beside a vibrant, gray-haired Jane Russell. “Either because of illness or cantankerousness, he was about as pleasant to interview that day as Attila the Hun. Ask him anything and he’d retort with one- and two-word answers. ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Don’t remember.’ Only when I’d ask about people such as Marilyn Monroe and Howard Hughes . . . would he open up. Or when the names of certain directors or actors he didn’t like would be mentioned. Then he’d talk.” Russell, smart and charming, sat like a loving sister who’d seen all of brother Bob’s mood swings a million times and paid them no mind. They broke for lunch and once again Mitchum became the delightful raconteur. Then back to the set and again he clammed up. For two hours the cameras turned—”It seemed like two years in Beirut,” said Osborne—from which forty minutes of television were extracted.

In the spring of 1997, the doctors said lung cancer. They wanted to put him in the hospital, but Mitchum refused. The sickness attacked with brutal speed. Dorothy begged him to go for the radiation treatments that were prescribed. Reluctantly, he agreed. “I’m doing it for your mom,” he told Trina.

.   .   .

His strength drained away; his body shriveled. The boy who had dreamed of becoming invisible now saw it happening in painful, daily increments. Was it really so, he had wondered aloud in better times, that the supreme value in a man is his continued existence? He had never been afraid of oblivion, a place—with any luck—where a man could get a good night’s sleep at last. “What I need is a black void,” he liked to say back then. “Black voids aren’t too easy to come by these days. But someday I’ll find one.”

Word of Bob’s worsening condition spread through the Hollywood community. People called, friends, associates, paying their respects, hoping the rumors were exaggerated. Jane Greer, whose fame remained inextricably tied to her work with Mitchum, and who had always been one of his most affectionate and loyal supporters, called the house at Montecito. “I talked to Dorothy. She said he was in really bad shape. I wanted to come up, she said don’t. I called their neighbor, Jane Russell. Jane was always straightforward. She said, ‘Don’t come up here. He doesn’t want you to see him. He looks awful. He’s lost a lot of weight. He just doesn’t want you to see him this way.’ So I never went up. I never went back. I never saw him again.”

There were others who had not been in touch in many years but treasured memories of the time they had spent together. Karen Sharpe, the pretty young ingenue in
Man with a Gun,
now married to Stanley Kramer for many years, had never forgotten Bob’s kindness to a newcomer in the business. “I was a long time retired, but I was talking to a man who ran a film festival in Tennessee and he mentioned that Bob was very ill. It had been so long since I’d seen him. And I just picked up the phone and called. And he got on immediately. ‘Bob, this is Karen Sharpe, do you remember me?’ ‘Yes,
yes,
of course,’ he said, and he was very sweet. And you would not have known from the sound of him that he was ill. And it was only days before the end. We chatted for about ten minutes. I asked about Dorothy and I told him I had seen his brother not too long ago. Finally, I just got very sentimental and I said, ‘You have to know, working with you was one of the great experiences of my life. It’s so many years ago now, and time goes by and you never end up telling anybody how you feel or what they meant to you. You were just the dearest person to me, Bob.’ And he just said softly, in that drawling way, ‘Thank you, Karen.’ I told him Stanley and I both sent our love and then we said goodbye.”

Anthony Caruso, a friend for sixty years, had come up to Santa Barbara for a get-together just before things had gotten bad. They’d had dinner, gotten bombed, told the old stories, some of them so old you couldn’t remember who
they had happened to. “Remember that, Tone?” Bob would say encouragingly, wanting backup for some crazy tale, and Tony would say, “I remember, Bob,” just like in the days back on Highland Avenue at El Rancho Broke-O. “I would call him after he got sick. He’d come on, ‘Hey, Tone. . . .’ I’d say, ‘How you doing now?’ And he’d say, ‘Fair to middlin’.’ I’d say, ‘Come on, Bob, tell me how you’re doing.’ ‘Fair to middlin’. I’m OK.’ He wasn’t somebody who could tell you if he wasn’t feeling good. And knowing him, I didn’t expect he would do that. And then I would tell him I was coming up to see him. And he said, ‘Well, Tony, don’t come up right now. Wait till I’m in a little better shape.’ And then I heard he was doing worse and I told him I was coming. He said, ‘Let me get back on my feet, Tone. Let’s make it in a few days.’ And then, you know . . . there weren’t any more days.”

A month before the end, Jane Russell saw him for the last time. Dorothy brought Robert over to Jane’s and her husband John’s house for a barbecue. “We all knew the end was near,” said Russell. “Bob was so frail . . . But he was as witty and nonchalant about death as ever. He was a lovable smartmouth right to the end. We laughed, talked about the old times . . . He could always bring tears of laughter to your eyes.”

Toni Cosentino, his business associate and friend for ten years, found herself unwilling to see Mitchum in his deteriorated condition. It hurt too much. She didn’t want to think of him like that. It was bad enough even a year before. People would see him and call and say, “Oh, my God, he looks so awful.” She couldn’t stand the idea of someone who had been so strong and unflappable, now so helpless. “We talked on the phone. And he would leave messages on my machine. Sometimes he sounded down and sometimes he would leave really funny messages, or he would end it saying, ‘Gotta go, my Ex-Lax is working.’ Or, ‘Gotta go, I hear the vultures circling.’ And then, toward the end, they would be more abrupt. Just, ‘OK, give me a call.’ You could hear he was down.

“Father’s Day, in June, I wrote him—which I never did—I wrote a little card and note for Father’s Day, just telling him how much I missed him. He called, left a message thanking me for the card. I called him the day he died. Dorothy answered. I said, ‘Mrs. Mitchum, could I talk to Bob?’ She said he was sleeping. I said I would call back. She said to call back, but that he was very, very bad. I said, ‘I guess I just wanted to let him know that somebody’s sending something for him. They’d really like him to do it, a narration job.’ They were always sending things like that for him. And Dorothy said, ‘Good. He’ll like to know that they still want him. . . .’ And that was the last word I ever spoke to her.”

.   .   .

“I was at brother Jack’s house that night,” said Julie Mitchum. “Jack and Bonnie had gone to bed about ten o’clock. I had a night-light on. I felt Bob leaving us. Felt him slipping away. We had always had ESP, the two of us. And I started to go with him. There is a line in the Faith, ‘Thus far and no farther. . . .’ Well, I heard those words come to me. ‘Thus far and no farther.’ And I had to come back. But I knew Bob was going away then. . . . “

That night, on the last day of June 1997, Robert Mitchum awoke, took a cigarette from the pack on the bedroom table, and lit it up. He drew the smoke of an unfiltered Pall Mall into what remained of his lungs. One for the road.

At five o’clock in the morning, Dorothy could no longer hear him breathing. She sat at the edge of the bed and took his hands in hers. Held his hands. Then she leaned closer and kissed him good-bye.

^*
Back in the ‘50s, President Eisenhower had refused to allow any Mitchum movie to be screened in the White House because of his association with drugs.

“I don’t want to die.”

Out of the Past.

“Neither do I, baby, but if I do . . . I want to die last.”

HE HAD VERY NEARLY
pulled it off. Fifty-four years in the saddle. Worked to the day he couldn’t breathe without help and kept working. The world media eulogized. He was a legend, screen immortal, the last of the great Hollywood tough guys. They quoted Scorsese: “Mitchum
was
film noir.” Jarmusch: “There was and is no other screen presence like his: dangerous, strong but guarded . . . so damn cool.” Photographer Bruce Weber said, “I would still like to believe that he is out there to help me fight battles with life, love, and friendship.” Kirk Douglas, generously overlooking a half century of Mitchum’s ribbing, was the first of his surviving peers to say a kind word. “Bob was a very talented actor with a unique style,” he told the press. “I will miss him a lot.” Writer Pete Hamill, then editor of the tabloid
New York Daily News,
the noirest of American newspapers, gave to the movie actor the entire front page for July 2, a rare and eloquent salute. The press raked over the colorful old scandals, eased away from the more troubling allegations. Printed the truths and fictions equitably, some things long ago disproven. Listed the filmography, fifty-four years’ worth, the seemingly haphazard hundred-plus titles, many of them unknown entities to even the heartiest film buff. American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies, the U.S. cable television channels devoted to the older Hollywood product, put on marathon tributes within days of his passing.
AMC’s ran for twenty-four hours. Turner rebroadcast the 1996 interview session with the dying, ravaged, but still pugnacious star, host Robert Osborne thanklessly playing straight man, asking, “You don’t have a favorite Robert Mitchum film?” Mitchum, one last time deadpanning,
“They don’t pay you to see ’em.”

Then Jane Russell, giving the question some thought: “I just like . . .
Robert Mitchum movies.
”

One day after Mitchum, Jimmy Stewart died. Pundits with a longer lead time got to ponder a supposed irony in this random apposition. Gone within twenty-four hours of each other, they were offered up as two ends of the spectrum of Hollywood icons, the cinema’s finest representatives of daylight and darkness, the small-town guy and the man from the mean streets, the ail-American optimist and the cynic, the pessimist, the outsider. But Stewart had his dark side, in film and in life, just as so many of Mitchum’s antiheroes and lowlifes were possessed of nobility and self-sacrifice, and there were the many behind-the-scenes kindnesses and his professionalism and stuff that had never made good copy. What the hell. The thing was, the real point, what people were feeling, they were gone now and no one would replace them and no one would ever again make the kinds of films they had made. “The words ‘legend,’ ‘hero’ and ‘myth’ have echoed this week,” wrote Maureen Dowd in the
New York Times.
“It is the end of something,” wrote Chris Chase in the
Los Angeles Times.
“William Shakespeare said, ‘The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’—and these were princes.”

Reading and thinking about the loss of Mitchum and Stewart in the first weeks of July, an extraordinary concluded chapter in America’s cultural history seemed even more golden and more remote.

The body had been cremated and the remains returned to the family on Thursday, July 3. On the following Sunday morning, family members and one invited friend—Jane Russell—boarded a schooner belonging to a Santa Barbara neighbor, Fess Parker, a vintner and long-ago television’s Davy Crockett. They sailed a half mile off the coast, in view of the Montecito house, and, as per Robert’s request, his ashes were scattered into the wind and the water.

“Two or three days later,” said Julie Mitchum, “I was having trouble with the tear ducts. The
eyes
were getting wet. And I don’t believe in carrying on like
that. So I tried to suppress it. And Bob came to me then. He nudged me and said, ‘Annie . . . ,’ which is what he always called me. I heard his voice. I heard him speak to me. We could hear each other like that all our lives. And we still do. And he said, ‘Annie . . . come on, don’t cry. I’m fine. I’m here with all the gang that made it before me.’”