Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (26 page)

Anyway, Mitchum would soon have more than enough trouble on his hands just trying to be a good capitalist.

After the success of
Pursued
and
Crossfire
and with a growing positive reaction to his performance in
Out of the Past
—seen by industry and press people in private screenings, the film still held from release until late autumn—Mitchum was shaping up to be perhaps the major new screen personality of the era. RKO still seemed not to know what to do about it. In recent years the big names had come to RKO for specific projects and short-term deals. The studio hadn’t had to take charge of a truly homegrown star since Ginger Rogers’s peak of popularity in the early ‘40s. David Selznick, still part owner of the actor’s contract, was little help. He had yet to use Mitchum in one of his personal productions (which were becoming scarcer as the decade continued), preferring to rent him out to the highest bidder. When the studio began negotiating with the Berg-Allenberg agency for the services of Loretta Young, Bert Allenberg made a play for Mitchum. Allenberg argued that Mitchum’s current representative could not properly exploit a major star, keeping him in the public eye via live appearances, radio programs, and recordings, and thus ever increasing his value to the studio. Getting Mitchum for Berg-Allenberg somehow became tied in to Loretta Young’s availability for the RKO project. The studio and the agency conspired to wrestle Mitchum’s contract away from Paul Wilkins—the man who had taken the actor from Long Beach theatrics and Lockheed assembly lines to movie stardom. The final deal would give Wilkins an ongoing but reduced piece of Mitchum’s income for the remaining years of his stay with RKO. That done, Phil Berg, in the serpentine manner known to Hollywood agents worthy of their percentages, immediately strong-armed a new contract for their new client. RKO and minority shareholder David Selznick would now be paying the actor three grand every week, less twelve weeks of unpaid layoff per year.

At $120,000 per annum, Mitchum’s base pay was considerably less than the $468,000 Humphrey Bogart earned that year as the highest-paid actor in the world, but for a man who continued to see himself as essentially a drifter “between trains,” the numbers seemed unreal, beyond his grasp. He still lived in a shitty little house, often bummed a ride home at night, and dressed like a ranch hand. He still could not manage to hold on to much cash, and in those postwar years the income taxes on big earners were all but confiscatory. Anyone without the savvy to have capital gains or other tax shelters could find himself taking home ten cents on the dollar. “I always spend all I have—much or little,” he told a friend. “It really doesn’t matter to me.” He was known as an
easy mark for a quick loan. People would promise to pay it back the next day, but the next day he often couldn’t remember who they were or what he had given them. Someone introduced him to a business manager by the name of Paul Behrmann. He was a slick character with an Errol Flynn moustache who favored flashy custom-made blazers and carried himself at all times in a manner that suggested he had the world by the testicles. Behrmann met Mitchum for lunch at Mike Romanoff’s.

“Let’s talk turkey, Bob,” he said. Behrmann told him he was going to have to decide, when it all ended, did he want to go out like Greta Garbo, with a fortune tucked away, or did he want to get out like Buster Keaton, a bum over at Metro—he’s
gag writer
now—scrounging for peanuts from the people who used to work for
him.
Behrmann said the time had come for Bob to start investing his dough, and wisely. Mitchum spoke of his distaste for the RKO brass telling him what to do and confessed to his ambivalent feelings about acting, how he sometimes dreamed of chucking the whole thing. “Sure!” Behrmann said. “But for that you need ‘Fuck you’ money.
Like Garbo.”

A few liquid lunches later, Mitchum signed on with the dapper financial guru. His paychecks and bills would now be sent directly to Behrmann’s office, while he and Dorothy would be given a small weekly stipend to cover household and incidental expenses. Behrmann told him that if he stuck with the program, in four, five years he could be a millionaire.

That summer another Mitchum entered the picture business. As he had followed in his brother’s footsteps so many times in the past, now John Mitchum found himself working as a movie actor. An agent ran into him on Santa Monica Boulevard and told him he looked perfect for a role in a picture they were currently shooting over on Cahuenga. It was something called
The Prairie,
starring someone called Alan Baxter. The director, a German emigre named Frank Wisbar, looked him up and down and said, “Jah.” A couple of scenes later, a stunt coordinator rehearsed him for a brawl with the star. He was to throw a left, then take a right from Baxter, then go into a clinch. John recalled in his memoir, “I hadn’t been told that I was supposed to ‘pull’ my punches in accepted film-fighting style.” His left pounded into Baxter’s face just above the left eye, blood squirted across the set, and it took six stitches to close up the wound.

The film for which RKO had sought Loretta Young was called
Tall Dark Stranger,
the title eventually changed to
Rachel and the Stranger
to accentuate
the presence of Ms. Young, then enjoying the biggest success of her long career as Katie in
The Farmer’s Daughter
(she would win the Best Actress Oscar for it). Based on stories by Howard Fast and scripted by Waldo Salt,
Rachel and the Stranger
was a pastoral love story with dollops of comedy and adventure, set on the Pennsylvania frontier of the 1800s. Davey, a dour, widowed farmer, takes a spunky bondwoman as his wife to do chores and care for his young son. Ill-treated by her husband, Rachel is drawn to his friend Jim Fairways, a dashing and seductive backwoods hunter. Jealousy and an Indian attack spur Davey’s romantic feelings, and he and Rachel decide to live happily ever after, while Jim returns to his life of adventure.

Obeying no discernible logic, RKO had once again chosen to cast its own hot property in a supporting part. Mitchum as Fairways would be billed third after Young and William Holden. Holden, the fair-haired boy-next-door in a number of prewar movies, had returned from several years in the armed service looking considerably more mature and ready for the tougher, more cynical parts that would define his career. But
Sunset Boulevard
was still in the future, and Holden’s postwar comeback vehicles,
Blaze of Noon
and
Dear Ruth,
would hardly seem to put him in a superior position beside RKO’s biggest male star. But what the hell, Mitchum decided. If they didn’t know what to do with their investment, it wasn’t his lookout. With three thousand coming in every week, he went along without complaint, looking at the bright side—it was a change of pace for him, a good-natured role, and a chance to sing (vocalizing “Londonderry Air” in the tension-filled atmosphere of
Pursued
hardly counted as a musical showcase). Something new, and at the same time another variation on the established Mitchum persona, the Fairways character was described in the film as “a walking man with an itch in his heels”—rootless outsider, adventurer. He would have at least the opening sequence to himself, begun with the credits still fading, an unhurried walk in the forest, strumming a guitar and crooning in a pleasant if tenuous voice one of Roy Webb and Waldo Salt’s ersatz folk tunes—”O-he, O-hi, O-ho.” It was the first of six originals written for him to sing in the film. That was more songs than Crosby did in an average musical.

Norman Foster was directing. A callow actor in the talkie era, when he was known as Mr. Claudette Colbert due to his wife’s greater success, he turned to directing in the ‘30s, mostly Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan pictures until an association with Orson Welles set him off in unexpected directions. He had only recently returned from making films in Mexico. Mitchum rolled his eyes when he heard that Foster—married now to actress Sally Blane—was Loretta Young’s brother-in-law, but the director showed no inordinate signs of favoritism or indulgence and was amiable and amenable to all concerned.

Newlyweds Robert and Dorothy Mitchum.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Robert Mitchum in
Farewell, My Lovely
(1975).
Copyright © 1975, E. K. Corporation/Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

William Boyd (as Hopalong Cassidy) and Robert Mitchum (as a badman) in
Hoppy Serves a Writ
(1943).
Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

Robert Mitchum in his first starring role, as cowboy hero of
Nevada
(RKO, 1944).
Courtesy New York Public Library

Dorothy and Robert, circa 1944.
Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Robert Mitchum with Dorothy Wellman (Mrs. William Wellman) on machine gun, during filming of
The Story of G.I. Joe
(1945).
Courtesy of William Wellman Jr.

Robert Mitchum and newly organized fan club, the Mitchum Droolettes, 1946.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Inducted into the Shoshone Tribe, Mitchum gives Chief Owanahea the secret handshake.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Robert Mitchum relaxing with costar Barbara Bel Geddes on the set of
Blood on the Moon
(1948).
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in
Out of the Past
(1947).
Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

Mitchum in the frenetic climax to
His Kind of Woman
(RKO, 1951).
Courtesy Cinedoc