Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (27 page)

Mitchum and Robin Ford in police custody, wardrobe by LAPD.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

“Officers Must Put Prisoners Inside Cage”: released on bail, September 1, 1948.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Mitchum behind bars for marijuana possession. Note fine-grained cordovans.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Courtroom hearing: Lila Leeds, attorney Grant Cooper, Vicki Evans, attorney Jerry Giesler, Robert Mitchum.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Domesticity: Robert Mitchum with wife, Dorothy, and son, Christopher, circa 1949.
Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Mitchum learned to play the saxophone during a brief term in high school.
Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Robert Mitchum and tiki girl, circa 1950.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Advertisement for
Where Danger Lives
(1950) starring Robert Mitchum and Howard Hughes protegee Faith Domergue.
Courtesy Cinedoc

Mitchum visiting costar and buddy Jane Russell on the set of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

Advertisement for
His Kind of Woman
(1951), directed by John Farrow (and Richard Fleischer). The quirky film noir was a pet project of RKO boss Howard Hughes and remained in and out of production for more than a year.

Only four years older than Mitchum, Loretta Young had been a movie star for two decades. She had a steely capacity for self-preservation and, like Marlene Dietrich and a few other savvy veterans, cultivated a technician’s knowledge of lights, lenses, and camera angles so as to better maintain her celluloid allure. Mitchum would watch with amusement as she calibrated her head movements just before the camera rolled, making the infinitesimal adjustments that would let the light fall on her face with enchanting perfection.

“I’m afraid I threw you a little into the shadow then,” she said guilefully after a take.

“Honey, I don’t give a damn,” he told her, or said he did.

In August the
Rachel
company left Hollywood for a six-week stay in Oregon, filming exteriors in the woods of Fox Hollow and along the Mackenzie River near Eugene. The principal actors and Foster were assigned houses rented from the locals. Mitchum’s had a scenic view of the chilled Mackenzie. Provoked by locals and sportsmen gushing over the river’s bounty, he took up fishing in his off-hours. Grabbing a rod, a book, and a bagful of beers, he would amble off by himself for the entire day or until somebody came to retrieve him, a habit he would continue at future locations on many another film when an unspoiled waterway was at hand.

Though they would call themselves friends in the years ahead, and Mitchum would speak approvingly of Holden as a man and as an actor, the two stars seemed in the beginning to be far from compatible. Holden was prone to melancholy and bouts of debilitating self-doubt. He was a heavy drinker but a lonely one, more likely to hide away with a bottle than to hoist a few with some comrades. In Oregon, Mitchum’s self-assurance and flamboyance only increased Holden’s funk. Loretta Young, among others, observed his plunge into insecurity on the days when Bob was on the set.

“Why are you so nervous?” she said to him. “You have the lead role. He doesn’t get the girl, you do.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Holden.

“You know what I’m talking about. Bob Mitchum has gotten under your skin.”

“You’re crazy,” said Holden, but his discomfort continued to show.

Loretta Young could be a pious and preachy character, Mitchum found. One morning following a dinner party she had thrown at her rented home, she cornered her costars and confronted them about their previous night’s imbibing. After berating them for drinking nearly two bottles of whiskey, she declared that they were both going to be big stars for years to come and if they turned into drunks they would never get to enjoy it.

An obsequious Holden mumbled that she was probably right.

Mitchum momentarily raised an eyelid. “Are you finished, Mother Supenor?

A devout Catholic, Young frowned on unseemly behavior of all kinds and particularly disapproved the use of bad language in the workplace. It was generally understood that there was to be no swearing by anyone within miles of Loretta’s delicate ears, a tall order considering that in the movie business even the child actors cursed like sailors. To enforce this edict, Loretta instituted her infamous “curse box,” requiring an immediate donation (to be forwarded to one of her Catholic charities) by anyone on the set uttering a forbidden epithet. This provoked one of the most durable of Mitchum anecdotes. In the pithiest version of the story, an assistant explained to Bob how the curse box worked, with its sliding scale of penalties.

“It’s fifty cents for ‘hell,’ a dollar for a ‘damn,’ a dollar-fifty for ‘shit’—”

“What I want to know is,” said Mitchum, in a voice that could be heard throughout Oregon, “what does Miss Young charge for a ‘fuck’?”

To further publicize
Rachel and the Stranger,
and by way of fulfilling his agency’s promise to spread his stardom to other fields, Mitchum was signed to a recording contract with Decca Records. At the company’s Hollywood studio, he sang full-length and more carefully produced versions of the six songs written for the film. With “folk” still a decidedly obscure wing of the popular music scene in America, these were more easily seen as novelty recordings, partly sung, partly spoken, with only the spare backing of jazzman Dave Barbour picking at a guitar and Walter Gross playing an authentically Early American-sounding harpsichord. As he had in the movie, actor Gary Gray joined Mitchum on the comical “Just Like Me,” lyrics revised here to refer to his “Uncle Bob.” They are interesting, odd recordings. Mitchum’s singing voice is musical but frail, barely able to hold up to the modest range of the tunes. The spoken parts came in plenty handy. No trace of Mitchum’s iconic personality shows through; instead he sings “in character,” and a retrospective listening finds certain moments like the weirdly cross-talking monologue section of “Foolish Pride” rather creepy, as if one were listening to crazy Preacher Powell from
Night of the Hunter
making
his
first record. Decca released “Rachel” and “O-he, Oh-hi, O-ho” as a double A-sided 78, to not much success, and the company made no further requests for the actor’s time.

Mitchum himself would continue to believe in his possibilities as a singer. Music was important to him, as it was to his mother and brother and sister. He
was a great appreciator of music, from Beethoven to Dizzy Gillespie, with an adventurous ear, an aficionado of swing and bop and later of country and calypso, an amateur musicographer with an ever-growing record collection to which he enjoyed listening, alone, for long hours without a break. Mitchum, in fact, identified far more with the life and style of the gypsy jazz musicians, drifting across the country from sleazy nightclub to nightclub, than he did with any of his Hollywood peers in their baronial splendor. Mitchum’s whole private persona, the sleepy nihilism, the jive talk, the taste for weed, were all much more in the style of some hipster musician than of any previous species of Hollywood movie star.

He still blew a saxophone when the urge struck, noodling in his dressing room or at home, and he sang in public with little urging, at parties and public appearances, occasionally in tune and frequently with a swaggering enthusiasm that could turn an audience on. A female publicist who heard him at a party where much drinking had been going on thought he sounded like a young Bing Crosby and tried to arrange a deal for him with Columbia Records. Label president Paul Weston agreed to let him record a couple of duets with Jo Stafford. But Mitchum’s then boss Howard Hughes got into the middle of the negotiations and the offer dissolved. Mitchum would not have his voice on another record release for ten years following his Decca debut.

There was anyway no lack of movie work. He happily agreed to a loan-out to producer Charles K. Feldman and Republic Pictures for a film version of John Steinbeck’s
The Red Pony.
Steinbeck had been a literary hero of Mitchum’s since he first read him as a teenager on the road, huddled behind the shelves in the library of some small town not his own. It wasn’t just any Steinbeck adaptation either. The script was by the author himself, and he was personally involved in preparing the film with director Lewis Milestone, who had previously transferred Steinbeck to the screen in 1940’s
Of Mice and Men.
The production was conceived as prestigious all the way, with the participation of the famed novelist, the still reputable director, music by Aaron Copland, and film processing by Technicolor (it would be Mitchum’s first color movie). With Orson Welles’s
Macbeth
and Frank Borzage’s
Moonrise,
the release of
The Red Pony
was part of oater-and-cliffhanger-prone Republic’s brief, aberrant bid for “respectability.”

Mitchum was to play Billy Buck, lone ranch hand on a small California spread owned by city-bred Fred Tiffin and his wife, the daughter of an aged pioneer. The story centered around Tom, the couple’s young boy, his attachment
to Billy and to the pony given him by his father. Costarring was Myrna Loy as the mother, with Shepperd Strudwick playing her husband, Peter Miles as Tom, and Louis Calhern in Buffalo Billstyle white hair and beard as Grandfather. The film begins as a sprightly, lyrical tale of childhood, with young Tommy fantasizing a ring of performing circus horses and his hero Billy as an Arthurian knight, and Milestones flat, homespun staging looking like the simple color illustrations in a storybook. But the tale soon turns more neurotic and unpleasant, the Tiffins revealed to be on the verge of separation, Grandfather with his endless stories of taming the West a great bore, and when the red pony gets caught in a rainstorm, the maudlin account of his illness and death takes up a good quarter of the running time. Mitchum as the laconic hired hand gives a simple, self-contained, and convincing performance, though the story makes the character tiresome as he heedlessly steals the boy’s affections from his caring father.