Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (39 page)

The slender plot line begins with a down-at-heels gambler, Dan Milner, fresh off the prison farm, hired for a mysterious high-paying job that sends him to a luxurious resort in Baja, Mexico. With no idea of his mission, waiting for his contact to show, Milner interacts with a number of colorful and some suspicious characters staying at the lodge, including playgirl Lenore Brent, narcissistic movie star Mark Cardigan, a mysterious German “writer,” and a drunken pilot. Eventually Milner learns that he’s been lured down there to become the patsy in an exiled mobster’s scheme to sneak back into the United States by switching identities with him, a rootless loner no one will miss. Taken captive aboard the gangster’s yacht, Milner turns the tables and the bad guys are captured or killed. Back in his hotel room, Dan and Lenore, broke but happy, decide to keep company. The End.

Supporting Mitchum and Russell in the cast were Vincent Price as the egotistical Hollywood actor, Tim Holt (the B Western star whose boots Mitchum was once assigned to fill) as an immigration agent, Jim Backus as a Wall Streeter on vacation, Tony Caruso and Charles McGraw as mob henchmen, and Howard Petrie in the role of the deported mobster Nick Ferraro. Cinematography was by studio regular—and Jane Russell’s particular favorite—Harry J. Wild. Planning to shoot nearly everything indoors at the studio, Farrow had a massive main set built, the Morro’s Lodge, where most of the action took place, a functioning, tropical rustic moderne resort complete with manmade beach sprawling across three soundstages (”You really thought you were there,” Jane Russell recalled). Farrow and Wild would unveil the set in a showy single take with a smoothly gliding camera moving across the sand and through the lobby, slipping up behind the derriere of a silk-pajamaed cocktail waitress twitching briskly down the length of the bar (“
That
was John Farrow,” said Mitchum of those moments of twitching.
“A signature shot!”),
moving among the tangoing couples on the dance floor, swerving away just in time to catch Mitchum in suit and tie striding in from the swimming pool, camera backtracking now as he seats himself at the bar and orders a drink (”Ginger ale, please”). Cut.

Filming went smoothly, although John Farrow’s tough, even cruel behavior toward the crew and supporting and extra players continued to rub Mitchum—and now his costar, too—the wrong way. “He was nice to us, but he would be
nasty to some of the other kids,” said Russell. “Needling all the time. If you needled him back, that was okay, but if you didn’t think you could do that . . . other people were kind of terrified.” Farrow had a bottle of rare scotch in his trailer adjoining the set and sampled it daily. A raiding party from the crew went into the trailer one evening, emptied out half the bottle, and then, ritualistically, three or four took turns pissing into it. After that, evil grins met Farrow whenever he poured himself a belt of the prized whiskey.

Bob and Jane got along like old buddies. From her stand-in and friend Carmen Cabeen, the sometime wife of Boyd Cabeen, Russell was already well acquainted with some of Bob’s more depraved antics and she had prepared herself for his “shocking” side, but that he was also so “intellectual, gentle, caring” came as a most pleasant surprise. She would rave about his astounding command of the English language—even as he would tell her she was the most inarticulate girl he knew. He would tease her about her God-fearing ways, but he understood she was no Loretta Young, wallowing in piety. He loved to tell the one about the pestering reporter who couldn’t believe a girl with her “image” read the Bible and went to church each Sunday. “”Hey buddy,” she told him, “Christians have big breasts, too.” She was good-natured, generous, strong-minded when she had to be, a stand-up guy. Mitchum nicknamed her “Hard John.” They became fast friends.

The
His Kind of Woman
mutual admiration society also included the erudite and amusing Vincent Price, thoroughly enjoying himself in a self-mocking performance as the film’s vain, Shakespeare-spouting thespian. “Jane was a lovely, funny girl, with a great attitude,” said Price, “and Bob was just hilarious.” Many a time Price, a gourmet cook, hosted the other two for lunch, serving fabulous meals he had whipped together from scratch. Some days they would all remain on the perfectly pleasant Morro’s Lodge set during the noon break, spread a blanket on the faux sand beach, and have a family picnic, Reva delivering baskets of chicken and potato salad, bottles of wine and beer. “We had a lot of fun on that picture,” Vincent Price recalled. “At least in the beginning, before it got so . . . crazy.”

In mid-May Farrow shot the last pages of the script and went home, the picture completed. Or so he thought.

With a growing logjam of unreleased studio features to preoccupy him, and busy with various business concerns and a hectic social life, Hughes would not even look at
His Kind of Woman
until several months after the production had closed down. Then the tinkering began. Hughes had Robert Stevenson direct
some mundane pickup shots and retakes in the last week of October. Then, in December, Hughes summoned scenarist Earl Felton and director Richard Fleischer to his diurnal headquarters at Bungalow 19 of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Felton was a veteran hack writer of the Pat Hobby sort, a cynical wit, and a robust character despite a handicap that required him to get around on crutches. Fleischer was the talented young son of animation maestro Dave “Popeye” Fleischer and a B movie pro looking to move up in the ranks. His crackerjack noir thriller
The Narrow Margin,
written by Felton, was being talked about as the no-budget sleeper of the year, but Hughes had yet to schedule its release (at one point he had considered permanently shelving the B version and remaking it with Mitchum and Russell). The three discussed the climax of
His Kind of Woman
and all agreed that the scene Farrow had directed—Mitchum and the bad guys in a brief scuffle on the bridge of a yacht—could be expanded and made more exciting. They sat together all afternoon improvising the additional action, Hughes wanting to work out each and every new slug, kick, and gunshot, Fleischer and Felton screaming their comments for the sake of the aviator’s failed hearing.

Hughes suggested that the whole assignment could be done in ten to fourteen days, but the story conferences alone continued for the next six weeks, many hours at a time, with Hughes ever increasing the scope of the film’s violent climax. The action would now take place not only on the deck of the yacht but inside as well, in the engine room, in the wheelhouse, there would be a torture scene, a beating, a bursting steam pipe. Nothing had been built for the original production but the small prop bridge, so an entire yacht had to be constructed over the water tank on the Pathe lot. Hughes thought up an elaborate rescue attempt by Vincent Price’s character and some of the hotel guests and some Mexican policemen, a comedy sequence with a sinking rowboat.

On January 10, 1951, shooting began again on
His Kind of Woman.
As Hughes examined the daily footage, he would send long, critical memos with maniacally detailed descriptions of the action he wanted to see on film.

The comical sinking of the skiff beneath Price and his posse did not meet Hughes’s expectations as filmed, and bulldozers were brought in to deepen the cement water tank so that the boat would submerge another thirty inches.

Of all the newly invented material, Hughes had become most excited by the scene in which an ex-Nazi plastic surgeon offers to dispose of the Mitchum character with an injection of an experimental drug. Hughes declared that he would write the dialogue for this scene himself, and to Fleischer’s amazement Hughes not only wrote it but sent along an acetate recording of himself speaking the German doctor’s lines in a high-pitched TexaBavarian accent.

Mitchum balked at the new “injection” sequence wherein he was to struggle against Ferraro’s thugs and the doctor trying to shoot him up, the syringe pressing against his exposed vein. “No way Bob wanted to do that scene,” said Tony Caruso. “He’d say, ‘What’s Hughes trying to do to me, man?’ He’d just got over that drug rap and Hughes wants him on screen with a needle going in his arm! And they wanted to have a needle actually piercing his skin, you know? They were gonna have a real doctor do it, everything sterile, but Bob absolutely refused. They told him ‘Look, this is what Hughes wants . . . let’s try to do it.’ Hughes wanted to see that thing going in the skin. And I can remember Bob telling them what he thought, refusing adamantly in no uncertain terms; he was not going to have a needle in his flesh. But Hughes was sending all these messages, ‘Do this, do that. Have Caruso hit him harder. Hit him in the gut. I want to see his fist go in
deep’
—all that kind of crap.”

Filming continued off and on for three months. One day Vincent Price threw a party on the set, an anniversary celebration—he had begun working on
His Kind of Woman
exactly one year ago. Fleischer took the miles of footage to an editor and put together the new climax. With all the material Hughes had asked for, the first cut of the climactic scenes alone ran an hour and twenty minutes.

Hughes eagerly viewed the edited reels at his private screening room in the Goldwyn Studios. Afterward he lavished praise on Fleischer and his colleagues. It was great, great stuff. But there was one problem, and it wasn’t the fact that the movie now ran an impossible three hours. Hughes said, “I don’t like the actor who plays Ferraro.”

Fleischer said, “But he’s in nearly everything I just shot.”

“Yes, well,” said Hughes, “we’ll get another actor and redo everything.”

Fleischer was then directed to begin a comprehensive search for a replacement Ferraro. After narrowing the candidates to three finalists, Hughes had Fleischer direct each of them in a test scene with Mitchum—the scene in which the star received his on-board beating. They settled on a man named Robert J. Wilke, and Fleischer went right to work reshooting the scenes. He was nearly finished when a man collared him outside his office. The man’s name was Raymond Burr. He was an actor. Howard Hughes had sent him over. He would be replacing Robert J. Wilke.

“Mr. Hughes said to tell you I will be playing Ferraro now.”

As Fleischer recalled it in his autobiography, throughout the maddening months of their work together, Mitchum’s behavior had been exemplary. But
now at last, in this sixth or seventh go-round for these same bruising scenes, the actor began to show the strain. “Mitchum took to drink. . . . He began stashing vodka in water glasses at strategic places all over the set. Whenever there was a delay of some sort, there was always a glass at hand. I didn’t catch on for quite a while. It often puzzled me how he could start a scene sober and finish it drunk.”

Late in May the last shot was at hand. As sick of the proceedings as everyone else, Fleischer dreamed of nothing but wrapping it up and getting the hell away from there. The lighting for the setup wasn’t ready until late in the afternoon, and Fleischer knew that in these hard-drinking final days it was not a good idea to ask anything of Mitchum past 5
P.M.
But the desire to conclude the whole awful assignment was so tremendous, the director decided to chance it.

It was not a wise decision. A very drunken Bob Mitchum arrived on the set. Two stuntmen playing tough thugs were supposed to drag him into the salon of Ferraro’s yacht and hold him before the German doctor. When Fleischer called, “Action!” Mitchum unexpectedly swung the two men ahead of him and sent them crashing onto the floor. Fleischer stopped the take. Thinking it was some kind of misunderstanding, he again explained what he needed, and Mitchum and the stunt guys started over. Again the pair were thrown to the floor. Even as he knew he was courting disaster, Fleischer felt compelled to go on. The third take was nothing but a brawl, the stuntmen now responding in kind to Mitchum’s experiment in improvisation. Fleischer screamed, “Cut! Cut!” as the three men rolled around the set, knocking over the furniture and nearly giving a heart attack to the elderly actor who played the German doctor.

The stuntmen scrambled or were thrown to a neutral corner and Mitchum stood alone on the set, hunched down, panting savagely. The crew stood around in stunned silence. This was Fleischer’s first opportunity to work with a major movie star. It was not going as he had hoped. In a quiet, controlled voice the director told Mitchum he had made a fool of them both.

At this mild rebuke Mitchum exploded. Screaming obscenities and violent threats, he began throwing things, overturning the lamps, collapsing a heavy poker table, tossing chairs. He smashed the windows out, kicked down plywood walls and doors, toppling the entire set, then staggered off the stage, grabbing for every stray chair and sending it flying through space.

“I’ve had it with this fucking picture! I’m sick and tired of being taken advantage of. . . . Stinking directors, and fucking fag actors riding on my back! Fuck you! And fuck Howard Hughes, too!”

He raged his way across the hall, lurched into his dressing room trailer, and slammed the door shut.

Fleischer tried to keep from being sick. He quietly told his assistant to get the set fixed and then went home. After a sleepless night, the director returned to the studio next day full of anger and outrage. He stormed into Mitchum’s trailer to demand a public apology. Mitchum saw him, moaned,
“Oh God,”
falling to the floor and crawling underneath his couch, disappearing completely. Mitchum couldn’t face him, he said, and begged him just to go away.

Fleischer felt the wind go out of his rage. “You . . . son of a bitch.”

“I must be,” said Mitchum.

In spite of—or aided by—its spasmodic production history and cluttered auteurship,
His KindofWoman
would turn out to be one of the most original and entertaining of Mitchum’s RKO releases. Unlike Hughes’s other fussed-over features, with their choppy editing and reduction to just-the-facts simplicity,
Woman,
two hours long in the final cut, was luxurious, digressive. John Farrow’s careful staging was left intact, the film full of atmospheric long takes and sweeping tracking shots until Fleischer’s takeover and the gritty climax on the boat, all percussive cutting and unusual handheld camera work. A worthy bookend to his work on
Out of the Past,
Frank Fenton’s dialogue was tart and tough throughout, full of memorable, wised-up banter. Showing no indication of the genre-busting turns to come, the opening scenes were purest noir, a shadowed, violent, after-midnight landscape of all-night diners, rented rooms, snarling guard dogs, crooks, cardsharpers, a beating around every corner. The dialogue invoked Mitchum’s personal identification with the alienated loser hero in his first moments on screen at an LA greasy spoon.