Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (3 page)

They never saw their new stepfather again.

This was Ann’s last attempt to create for her children anything like a traditional family environment. From now on tradition was out the window. They were all—mother and kids—just going to have to make it up as they went along.

There was in Ann Gunderson Mitchum Clancy an instinctually unconventional, almost bohemian outlook on life that had lurked beneath the surface of the proper Scandinavian lady. She was intellectually curious, spiritually adventurous. She devoured books, magazines and—it would be a trait Robert would inherit—retained everything with a near photographic memory. She carried the family’s genetic predisposition toward the arts, was a talented representational painter, self-taught musician, could read and play music, read and wrote poetry. She encouraged the same love of art and literature in her children. “When she came across poetry that captured her,” said Robert, “she would show it to me and read it in cadence. We had a lot of books, a library, and I had the run of it. She really was a great woman.”

She was a free thinker, not rebellious but a natural, quiet iconoclast. In a time when conservative narrow-mindedness was the norm and bigotry a commonplace, Ann was independent, nonjudgmental, without racial or ethnic prejudice. She paid at best lip service to the Protestant Church of her forebears.
Years later, with typical unconventionality, she—along with her daughters—would become a devoted follower of an Asian-based faith some labeled a mystic sect. An unusual woman. She would raise unusual children.

Robert’s independent streak seemed fixed from the cradle. When he was four he walked out the front door of the house and past the front gate and kept going. It took most of the day to find him. He had walked to the edge of town. A woman brought him over to a policeman who took him home. Ann was frantic. Tears in her eyes, she held him and begged him not to do it again. He had just wanted to see what was out there, Robert would recollect.

Sometimes it seemed to Ann that Robert, and then John, too, when he could crawl out of the crib, were just magnets for trouble and disaster. Other mothers’ children got scraped knees or bumps on the head. Bob and Jack were always coming home half-murdered. One day, seven-year-old Robert took his little brother with him for a stroll down busy Stratford Avenue. John ran straight before the wheels of a speeding vehicle, his body thrown sideways directly into the path of a second car. As a horrified crowd gathered and an ambulance rushed the unconscious boy to the hospital, Robert turned and ran home to report the news.

”Where is your brother?” asked Ann.

”He’s been run over by two cars . . . but I don’t think he’s dead yet.”

John’s head had been nearly twisted off. His jaw had to be reset and wired into position and a steel plate inserted above the neck at the back of his skull.

One evening, middle of a Connecticut winter, the boys sat with some neighborhood kids on the Bridgeport dock. Bob lost his balance and fell into the icy waters, nearly drowning. A Portuguese fisherman came almost too late, dragging the boy out on a wooden pike. Convulsing with cold, the water on his face and clothing turning to ice, Robert staggered home. His mother found him coated in a layer of frost like a snowman. His skin underneath was blue. He became inflamed with fever. His chest swelled up till he could barely breathe. The doctor said he had pleurisy, and the boy lay in bed for weeks.

When the youngest was old enough to go to school, Ann went out and got a job, first assisting in a photographer’s shop and then as a linotypist in the composing room of the local newspaper, the
Bridgeport Post.
With no father and his mother often not home, John stuck ever closer to his older brother. “They were like twins, inseparable,” remembered sister Annette. “A real team, and together they would march out the door, off to get into mischief, as boys will do. I can still see them coming down the street after one of their adventures, all scuffed up, one pants leg up, one down.”

Robert was a different person at home with his mother, quiet, a reader from the age of four, devouring books by the hundreds. Mother and sister never did know the other boy who grew up and got into fights and talked all the four-letter words. All their lives, when Bob became famous and they would read the articles in the newspapers, they would never quite recognize the person being written about. “This uncouth ruffian, the one in the papers,” said his sister, “that was not him! He was a brilliant person, very self-conscious and with an extremely painful shyness.”

It was clearly Ann’s secret desire that her children might become artists, as she had once dreamed of becoming. “She nurtured it in all of us,” Annette would remember. “She gave us music and books and pictures to look at. She inspired us to think great thoughts, to express ourselves, to dream wonderful dreams.” Robert as a child pored over illustrated storybooks and magazines, sometimes drawing his own words and pictures on the blank pages and spaces, continuing the adventures in the books. Doris Dickerson, a young girl whose family later came to live in that Logan Street house, would remember finding some of these books left behind, with their handmade additions, scenes of adventure and travel. In one, on the inside cover, was a bright drawing in colored pencil, a self-portrait: a boy with cowboy hat, six-guns and boots, astride a horse, and below in red block letters the words “THIS IS ME, BOB MITCHUM.”

Sister Annette, a beautiful little girl with a head of golden curls, as the oldest child was the first to pursue her artistic impulses in a public sphere. She danced and sang on the street and in the park, whenever the urge took her. A man told her she should be on the stage. “I went to Mother and stomped my foot and said I wouldn’t eat my dinner if I couldn’t go on the stage. I didn’t know what a stage was. Mother told me. She said if that was the case she would send me to get dancing lessons. And she did, and she could hardly afford it. The teachers I went to had a vaudeville act in the season. A song-and-dance act. They liked me and eventually, when I was thirteen, fourteen, I went on the road with them and did my own dance act.”

Robert expressed his creativity primarily in words, by the time he was six and seven spending much of his spare time penciling couplets and rhymes and short stories. He wrote things on little pieces of paper, saving some and tossing others to the floor and under the bed. He created his own newspaper he called
The Gold Streak,
writing short news items interspersed with poems and limericks. Ann took notice of these writings and, pleased and excited, began collecting them, prowling the bedroom for the discarded works as well. One piece of verse she found folded into a tight square holding up a window. She went to her mother: “My son’s a writer!” One day she put a sheaf of Bob’s verse together
and brought it down to the newspaper. There was a children’s department at the
Post,
a page for the young ones appearing every Saturday. The editor of this page was known as Uncle Dudley. Uncle Dudley was an Englishman, a former soldier in the British army named Hugh Cunningham Morris, a dapper middle-aged man with a formal bearing and a thickly plummy accent. Ann told him about her wonderful son and showed him the poems. The Englishman listened and looked, charmed by the young mother, finding her sweetly feminine yet very dignified and self-effacing in the way of the shy Scandinavians. He was so taken by the lovely Norwegian widow that it is probable he would have been kindly disposed toward Bob Mitchum’s poems had they been written in drool. But the things Morris saw as he scanned the penciled sheets were dashed good for a little beggar in short pants. He read “The Holy Star” and “Waiting for Dawn” and something called “War Poem” in which the little tyke “caught the grim spirit of the horrors of the battle.” Morris told Ann he would like to publish some of her boy’s creations and would run as well a brief profile about the lad and his devoted mom. The page ran, with the selection of poems and the sympathetic story and a photo of Robert in overcoat and cap intently scribbling on a pad. Overnight Ann’s boy became Bridgeport’s most famous, certainly youngest, poet—the “male Nathalia Crane,” they called him, after a then famous nine-year-old girl who toured the nation reading her work in a little pinafore. Teachers at the McKinley Grammar School fawned over the youthful literary wonder. People would point at him in the street after the story came out; strangers would come up and want to shake his hand. Robert did not enjoy the public exposure. “He hated people to know how sensitive and vulnerable he was,” said his sister. “He didn’t express himself because he wanted attention or money. Bob wrote for the same reason that you breathe in and out.” He read a book by H. G. Wells and began to wish that, like the character in the story, he could take a drug that would make him invisible.

Ann was delighted by the newspaper story and so grateful to the man who was Uncle Dudley that she asked him to the house for dinner. “He was a beautiful, wonderful man,” said Annette Mitchum. “And we hoped that he and mother would see much more of each other.”

The newspaper man hoped so too. Ann’s admirer was
Major
Hugh Cunningham Morris, from Landsend, England, late of His Majesty’s, slipped into America across the Canadian border. A character seemingly sired by Talbot Mundy out of Rudyard Kipling, Morris had roamed the world, fought in colonial uprisings in strange-sounding countries (young Winston Churchill had been a comrade in the Boer War). His body had sustained the wear and tear of shrapnel wounds, stabbings by irate natives, imprisonment, explosion, shipwreck.
His health was far from tip-top, his glory days were behind him now, and he had been just scraping by in the world the last few years. But still a man of great pluck and charm. Sister Annette adored him at once and hoped he would stick around, but the boys were more ambivalent. They treated him as an interloper, paying little interest or respect.

With an ally at the paper putting in a good word, Ann was able to get a better job there, moving over to the editorial department as a proofreader. As Annette had hoped, Mother and Major Morris became quite devoted to one another. They strolled about Bridgeport side by side and he spent much time at the house, though no more than was decent. He understood the boys’ initial resentment and applied his great store of charm toward winning them over. He would sit among them after dinner and tell some well-worn stories—they made Annie roll her eyes with embarrassment, some of them, but he did it to tickle the lads. There was the time in Egypt, for instance, leading the Camel Corps back to headquarters after a long, dangerous mission, with the commanding officer and the troops lined up to greet him. He’d stopped his weary mount directly before his nibs the CO and the bloody beast had picked that moment to unload his ballast of water, and the Major had to sit there aloft in the saddle while below him the camel sprayed the commander and forced up a cloud of dust all over the officers and men.

Once Morris arranged to take Robert up in an airplane—his first flight, in goggles and leather helmet, sitting in the tiny open portal behind the Major as they buzzed the farmhouses and skimmed along the riverbank. It was a thrilling adventure but Robert kept his enthusiasm under control. “I’m afraid we kids didn’t give this one much of a break for a long time,” he would recall.

The brothers remained undisciplined, prone to finding trouble whenever they left the house. It was a boyhood, said Robert, “of broken windows and bloody noses.” One of their pals ended up getting an eye shot out with a BB-gun blast. Another time they were playing behind the local ice cream factory when John started a bonfire that swept to the building and burned it to the ground. People stopped chucking Bob under the chin and calling him the new Nathalia Crane. In their East End neighborhood, said John, they came to be known as “them ornery Mitchum boys.” They were tough little urchins roaming the streets of Bridgeport. Both of them—just like their father—enjoyed using their fists. Robert was rail thin, with bony arms, but he wasn’t afraid of anyone. There was a miserable satisfaction in giving a beating to some of those kids who had things that Robert didn’t have. He could understand what that was about years later, looking back. He was jealous of boys whose dads were coming home after
work, whose dads carried them on their shoulders or threw a baseball to them or took them fishing.

Papa Gunderson had put a down payment on a farm property in rural Delaware, and it was decided that Petrine (as John would remember it, his grandmother had been dissatisfied with her life in Connecticut and often talked of returning to Norway) along with daughter Gertrude, her husband, and their three children would move out there and try to make a go of it. Bob and Jack learned that they would be going, too. The boys’ frequent delinquency and their behavior toward Major Morris doubtless influenced Ann’s decision to pack them off with the relatives while she stayed behind in Bridgeport. Ann promised to write and visit them as soon as she could, but it was hard for Robert not to see what she was doing as a second parental abandonment. It only increased his inherent feelings of aloneness and a growing desire to become self-reliant.

In the 1920s, the region of the Gunderson farm in the small mid-Atlantic state was still largely unchanged since the nineteenth-century. There were expanses of virgin forest, horses remained a primary means of transportation and mechanical power, and telephones, radios, and various modern conveniences were not yet commonplace items as they were in Bridgeport. The farm was twenty acres or so of wooded and cultivated land, with an old clapboard main house, a tiny barn, peach and apple trees, forest. They kept a cow for milk and butter, a few chickens provided eggs on a good day, a swayback horse pulled a harrow. Oil lamps gave them light. Water came from a hand pump adjacent to the kitchen door. A sometimes muddy path led across the yard to the outhouse. In the winter the outhouse door would freeze shut and you had to go get a hammer and spike or else go squat in the frozen woods.

Life began at dawn. Uncle Bill, eagerly and for the first time in his life assuming an executive role, banged through the halls yelling, “Rise and shine!” and rousting them all out to begin the day’s chores. The kids—the Mitchums and Louise, Patty, and Gil Tetreault—milked the cow, fed chickens, gathered and chopped firewood. Bill was a taskmaster and at times a brutal disciplinarian. Once, Annette recalled, eight-year-old Louise did not jump to when her father barked an order and he knocked her clear across the room. But Bill never touched the Mitchum boys, John would remember. It was part of a sentimental vow he had made to the memory of their father. Their cousins would look on with envy as Jack and his brother often got away with murder.