Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (40 page)

“Where you been?” asks Sam the counterman. “I ain’t seen you since the last rain.”

“Palm Springs.”

“Hustling the millionaires?”

“I went down there to cure a cold. I wound up doing thirty days.”

“For what?”

“For
nuthin!
”

The expressions of Dan Milner’s amiable, weary nihilism might have come direct from a Mitchum press interview of any vintage. “No, I’m not busy,” says Milner, about to be hired for a mission to oblivion. “I was just getting ready to take my tie off, wondering if I should hang myself with it.”

With Mitchum’s third-reel arrival at the Baja resort, the film would shift gears and keep on shifting them, alternating unpredictably between tropical moonlight romance, comedy, murder mystery, and extreme violence (only Anthony
Mann’s brutal noirs contained anything to match the sadistic fury of Fleischer’s and Hughes’s belt buckle and hypodermic melee). The unhurried narrative easily made room for random, beatific vignettes: Jane Russell’s squalidly glamorous introduction in a flyblown Nogales cantina, warbling an insouciant Sam Coslow ditty (”Five Little Miles from San Berdoo”); Vincent Price’s farcical assault on the villain’s yacht, with offhand tribute to Buster Keaton; and Mitchum standing over an ironing board ironing the wrinkles out of his cash (”When I’m broke I press my pants,” he explains), a moment worthy of Bunuel.

As Hughes and everyone else had suspected, Russell and Mitchum made a wonderful team, a young man and woman who looked, in critic Manny Farber’s phrase, as if they would do in real life what they did here for RKO. Magnificent physical specimens ideally paired, together on the screen they appeared at all times as if just back from or en route to the nearest boudoir. Hughes loved the film and excitedly made plans to exploit what his friend Louella Parsons was calling “the hottest combination that ever hit the screen!” On Wilshire Boulevard he hired a massive billboard and had the film’s poster art—the stars in a languid horizontal embrace—loaded into a bright golden frame studded with gas jets ejaculating fire. The first night it was up and running, Hughes arrived at 3
A.M.
, stood on the street corner, and stared for some time at the blazing creation, Jane and Bob cuddling in the flaming sky. Then he got back into his car and ordered the whole thing torn down.

His Kind of Woman
opened to mixed reviews—the
New York Times
called it one of the worst Hollywood pictures in years—and moderate earnings. The film would have registered a nice profit but for the nearly one million dollars Hughes had spent on five months of retakes, added scenes, and cast changes.

Just three months after shooting on
His Kind of Woman
concluded for the first time, Hughes reteamed his brawny stars for another exotic thriller:
Macao.
“There is no other place like it on earth,” claimed the screen treatment. “Macao, in the China Seas across the bay from British Hong Kong. Where gambling is the heavy industry and smuggling and dope peddling come as naturally as eating. To this island of commercial sin comes NICK, a young grifter wanted back in the states—and NORA, a girl who never got the breaks. Both hard as nails, cynical, strangers. And on the same boat, posing as a salesman, comes a hardboiled New York cop, sent out to capture a fugitive-racketeer who is now the Frankie Costello of Macao. . . .”

On this premise, fashioning a shooting script, slaved writers Norman
Katkov, Stanley Rubin, Edward Chodorov, Walter Newman, Bernard Schoen-feld, George Brickner, Frank Moss, and most likely anybody else at RKO with a working typewriter.

Early in the summer, second-unit man Dick Davol was dispatched to Hong Kong and Macao to shoot background footage. Davol found Asia in an annoying tizzy when he got there. Cameramen were not welcome and everyone had their hand out. He cabled Hollywood to be prepared for his whopping big expense account:

It was necessary to pay for every setup under cover. Here are a few of the people who were appeased:

 

Macau Chief of Police

Propaganda Minister

Immigration Officers

Custom Officers

Macao Harbor Police

Hong Kong Immigration Officers

Hong Kong Policemen

Communist Custom Patrol Boats

Sampan Owners

Chinese Junk Owners and Crews

Communist Business Owners

Screenwriter-producer Jules Furthman, Howard Hughes’s most valued creative collaborator, had urged his boss to bring Josef von Sternberg back from an involuntary retirement to direct John Wayne and Janet Leigh in
Jet Pilot,
an anti-Communist aviation romance. Sternberg was one of the handful of true artists of the cinema’s first half century, but a surfeit of arrogance, artistic intransigence, and bad box office had sent him wandering in the wildnerness, without a feature film credit in nearly ten years. Always a connoisseur and exponent of movie eroticism, Hughes remembered fondly the humid results of Sternberg’s work with such screen beauties as Evelyn Brent, Esther Ralston, and Marlene Dietrich. It was an arousing idea, to unleash the director’s caressing camera on some of Hughes’s own objects of desire—Janet Leigh and a collection of shiny jet-propelled aircraft.

Sternberg performed his task professionally if without much enthusiasm (Hughes was to keep
Jet Pilot
in postproduction for nearly a decade), and he was then sent across the lot to take the helm on
Macao,
which began principal
shooting in August. This one at least sounded like a more sympathetic assignment, the title evoking memories of the maestro’s brilliant earlier forays in the mysterious East,
Shanghai Express
and
The Shanghai Gesture.
Indeed, the opportunity to linger in another Oriental dreamscape of his own creation captured von Sternberg’s attention at the start. He oversaw the design of a vivid backlot Macao of latticework fishing nets, artfully bobbing sampans, black cats, streets filled with gaudy chinoiserie signage, and cast a populous of exotic bit parts, Sikh traffic cops, blind beggars, beautiful Chinese “high-low” gamblers in slit skirts.

The project offered all sorts of intriguing possibilities, not the least of them in the matchup of director and star. By all rights Mitchum should have been ideal raw material for von Sternberg’s molding. In
Morocco
in 1930, the director had drawn from Gary Cooper a sensational performance unlike any other in the actor’s career, impudent, languid,
cool
—it was, in fact, a kind of proto-Mitchum performance. Now the director would be working with the real thing, so to speak. As to the script, the trivial intrigue of
Macao’s
plot was no pulpier than most of von Sternberg’s earlier classics, and one could imagine, left to his own devices, his magically transforming the prosaic screenplay into something like another exotic reverie in the manner of
Morocco, Shanghai Express,
or
The Devil Is a Woman.

The circumstances, alas, did not prove conducive to flights of oneiric self-expression. RKO in 1950 was not Paramount in 1930, and the director’s despotic methods and arrogant manners were no longer looked upon as those of a world-renowned cultural icon but of a tiny, obnoxious has-been. Mitchum would recall him with little more than contempt: “He was very short and sort of arty, and he was from Weehawken, New Jersey, but he had a German accent—he was very German. I said, ‘Where did you get that accent, Joe? You’re from Weehawken, N.J.,’ and he said if I wanted to know anything about anything, to come to him, he was the omniscient artist. He had a junk shop in Weehawken.”

Jane Russell remembered, “According to Sternberg, we were not supposed to eat or drink on the set. No grip was allowed to have a Coke in the corner. Nobody.” Mitchum began bringing in bags of food and coffee, and handing them out to one and all. Sternberg was enraged, told Mitchum he was going to be fired. Mitchum said, “If anyone gets fired, it’ll be you.” Sternberg had a lecturn at which he would stand and where he would place his copy of the script. No one was to go near the lecturn, so Mitchum began having his lunch there, leaving half-eaten pickles and greasy wax paper all over the director’s pages.

“Joe was really something,” said Mitchum. “He told me, ‘We both know this is a piece of shit and we’re saddled with Jane Russell. You and I know she has as much talent as this cigarette case.’ I replied, ‘Mr. von Sternberg, Miss Russell survives, so she must have something. Lots of ladies have big tits.’”

Speaking of which:

Howard Hughes, monitoring the daily footage, took his usual great interest in Jane Russell’s appearance on screen. Regarding a gold lame dress worn in one sequence, Hughes wrote a long and vividly detailed memo. “The fit of the dress around her breasts is not good,” Hughes complained, “and gives the impression, God forbid, that her breasts are padded or artificial. They just don’t appear to be in natural contour . . . It would be extremely valuable if the dress incorporated some kind of a point at the nipple because I know this does not ever occur naturally in the case of Jane Russell. Her breasts always appear to be round, or flat, at that point so something artificial here would be extremely desirable if it could be incorporated without destroying the contour of the rest of her breasts. . . . I want the rest of her wardrobe, wherever possible, to be low-necked (and by that I mean as low as the law allows) so that the customers can get a look at the part of Russell which they pay to see. . . .”

With so much of Jane Russell filling the screen, there was hardly any breathing room for the film’s second female lead, Gloria Grahame, performing the underwritten—she claimed “unwritten”—role of the villain’s croupier mistress, a part originally earmarked for Jane Greer (Hughes still in the grip of his love/hate fixation with that alluring woman). Grahame thought Hughes was deliberately sabotaging her career, too. He would not even look at her brilliant work opposite Humphrey Bogart in
In a Lonely Place
(directed by her new and soon-to-be ex-husband, Nicholas Ray) and he refused to loan her to Paramount to costar in
A Place in the Sun
(the part that would bring Shelley Winters an Oscar nomination). Instead of that she was doing
Macao
and a part requiring only that she look sexy and blow on dice.

The atmosphere on the set continued to deteriorate, von Sternberg becoming victim to variations on the “Farrow treatment,” his belongings tampered with, a reeking Limburger cheese smeared through the engine block of his car. Mitchum claimed to have taken him aside and warned him not to make “assholes” of the technicians and grips. “He’d be nice when I was there and when I was away, not so nice,” he told Dick Lochte. “What was I gonna do, bat him around? He only came up to here.”

Upon its completion, the film was put through a grueling preview process, shown to random audiences in return for their critical reaction. New production head Sam Bischoff (replacing Sid Rogell, who finally decided he had taken
his last 3
A.M
. call from Howard) gauged the audience responses and mixed in his own hard-nosed musings for a consensus opinion.
Macao
was too atmospheric, too weirdly sexy, too full of irrelevant details and artistic filigree. Apparently, instead of another
Jet Pilot,
the director had delivered something like a Josef von Sternberg picture. One preview card noted that a bare-chested Mitchum (waiting for his laundry) looked fat, and one card from a twelve-year-old girl said that he smoked too much. Bischoff decided that the picture was going to need a lot of work, though not necessarily from Josef von Sternberg. “Instead of fingers in that pie,” wrote the director of what was to be his final American feature film, “half a dozen clowns immersed various parts of their anatomy in it.”

A few days before Christmas, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club announced Mitchum the winner of their annual Least Cooperative Actor or Sour Apple Award. Olivia DeHavilland, winner of Least Cooperative Actress, did not acknowledge the honor, but Mitchum wired the club at their annual luncheon: “Your gracious award becomes a treasured addition to a collection of inverse citations. These include several prominent mentions among the Worst Dressed Americans and a society columnist’s 10 Most Desirable Males list happily published on the date I was made welcome at the county jail.”

Present at the luncheon to receive a Solid Gold Apple Award as Most Cooperative Actress was Miss Loretta Young.

The production of
The Racket
in 1928, an adaptation of a hit Broadway play by Bartlett Cormack, was one of Howard Hughes’s earliest ventures in the cinema and a groundbreaker in the nascent gangster genre. Like so many of the plays, novels, and films of the era written by wised-up big city reporters,
The Racket
—the story of a tough cop out to bring down a big crime boss—daringly and thrillingly exposed the corrupt underbelly of American society. Twenty-two years later, in the wake of the headline-making Estes Kefauver investigations into organized crime, Hughes decided the time was right for a remake of his early hit.

Hughes commissioned another ex-crime reporter and a hot screenwriter of the moment, Samuel Fuller, to write an updated version of the Prohibition-era text. The irrepressible Fuller turned in a typically provocative, anarchic script in which the good cop and the bad crime boss were two sides of the same coin—both of them uncontrollable psychos. Hughes and producer Edmund
Grainger opted for something more conventional, and a shooting script was quickly flung together by William Wister Haines and W. R. Burnett (one of the inventors of the gangster genre and a past master of incorruptible-lawman stories). Mitchum would play the cop hero, one of his rare establishment roles, though Captain McQuigg’s straight arrow is certainly an outsider in his bought and paid for metropolis. Mitchum’s glum, stone-faced performance evidenced a distaste for the part. He was reteamed with his
Crossfire
costar Robert Ryan snarling his way through the role of the old-style racket boss Nick Scanlon.

The new film, directed by John Cromwell, another man whose once distinguished reputation had become faded, would turn out old-fashioned and a bit oafish but still hard-hitting in its blunt portrait of the pervasive corruption and criminal domination of a big American city. Hughes’s update anticipated what would become the dominant thematic trend in the gangster genre in the next decade, the view of crime as another form of efficient big business with corporate rules of behavior and no room for hotheaded mob bosses determined to take things “personal.”
The Racket
would also anticipate the fascist cop fantasies of the Dirty Harry ‘70s, with its nonjudgmental display of matter-of-fact police brutality and necessary rule-bending. In the course of his investigation, McQuigg blithely sanctions the beating and jailing of an innocent bail bondsman, tears up a writ of habeus corpus, and calls for a suspect’s arrest in this sarcastic exchange: