Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (48 page)

“Good to see you, Howard,” Mitchum said.

The Phantom smiled grimly. He said, “Bob, forgive me. I have to go make a phone call, if you don’t mind waiting.”

Howard Hughes turned and went back into the other room, closing the door behind him.

Mitchum waited. A couple of minutes maybe. He moved closer to the door behind which Hughes had disappeared. He couldn’t hear anything. After another few minutes he gave the door a knock, then opened it a crack. It was silent as a tomb in there. He opened the door and looked inside. It was an empty, undisturbed bedroom. There was another connecting door. It was locked. He went back into the living room and waited, found the toilet and took a leak, then went back downstairs to the party. He never saw his old boss again.

^*
Angel Face
was a particular favorite of Parisian cinephiles in the 1950s. Jean Luc Godard came to rank it one of his ten all-time favorite American films.

D
EPARTING
RKO
FOR GOOD
in August 1954, Robert Mitchum was among the very last of the important postwar stars of his generation to escape the shackles of the long-term stock contract. Such relationships had become a remnant of the past. The Hollywood studio system as it had existed for decades was unraveling. The rapid rise of television, the government enforcement of antimonopoly statutes that wrested away the studios’ control of exhibition, the decline of the original tyrant-moguls, and other factors had combined to undermine the studios’ near-feudal control of the American film industry. Increasingly their power would have to be shared among independent producers, talent agencies, and ambitious stars demanding control of their creative and financial destinies. Actors such as James Stewart, Cary Grant, and William Holden now made deals guaranteeing them a sizable share of a film’s profits, while others—Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas—were establishing their own production companies, developing their own projects, coming to the studios only for financing and distribution.

As a sign of his intention to join this elite group, Mitchum rented an office suite at 9200 Sunset Boulevard. When opened for business, it had a staff of two (Reva Frederick and former RKO publicist Gloria Pogue), a well-stocked bar, and a big desk where the boss could sit and make like David Selznick. He had already lined up his first two jobs months in advance of his actual emancipation from RKO, both in projects distinctly un-Hughes-like on the face of it, one to be based on a blockbuster novel, best-seller of the year, while the other offered a daringly unconventional part and a distinguished creative collaborator.
The two might make critics and audiences sit up and rethink their notions of a Robert Mitchum movie.

While still at RKO he had gotten a call from Charles Laughton.

“Bob,” said Laughton, “we have a story here we are hoping to turn into a little film, and I would very much like to talk to you about the leading role. The character is a bit different. He’s a terrible, evil . . .
shit
of a man.

“Present,” said Mitchum.

Charles Laughton, the man Laurence Olivier described as the acting profession’s only genius, was in the midst of a professional revitalization as the director of a series of theatrical triumphs—the powerful all-star readings of
Don Juan in Hell
and
John Brown’s Body
and the imaginatively conceived Broadway production of
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
Just four years earlier, Laughton had been drifting, appearing in increasingly undemanding roles and ignoble fare (suffice it to say,
Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd).
Then a young William Morris agent named Paul Gregory saw Laughton on a live television show reading from the Bible, found it a stunning experience, and came to the actor with an idea for a series of similar dramatic readings in a theatrical setting. The national tour of this one-man show was a considerable critical and commercial success, and Gregory and Laughton continued their alliance—now a formal partnership—with more elaborate and equally successful productions. Late in life, Laughton was revealed to be a great, original directorial talent, compared with the young Orson Welles for his dazzling creativity.

After their success on Broadway, the team of producer Gregory and director Laughton were eager to return to Hollywood and make a motion picture that would be as unique and memorable as their acclaimed works for the theater. An agent friend in New York sent Gregory the prepublication galleys of a novel called
The Night of the Hunter
by West Virginia native Davis Grubb. Gregory felt at once that the material could be turned into just the sort of startling and unexpected film he and Laughton were hoping to make. He rushed the galleys over to his partner, and Charles instantly agreed with his assessment. “You’ve got your finger right on my pulse,” Laughton said. “I would love to direct this.”

The strange, brilliant novel was an American Gothic, written as if by some collaboration of William Faulkner and H. P. Lovecraft, mixing a rustic tale of terror with gallows humor and experimental prose. In the Depression-ravaged South, a psychopathic evangelist named Harry Powell, a charismatic black-clad
preacher with the words
Love
and
Hate
tattooed on his knuckles, wanders the back roads doing a peculiar version of the Lord’s work, killing stripteasers, whores, lonely widows, and other wantons. Grubb wrote: “Sometimes he wondered if God really understood. Not that the Lord minded about their killings. Why, His Book was full of killings. But there were things God did hate—perfume-smelling things—lacy things—things with curly hair—whore things. Preacher would think of these and his hands at night would go crawling down under the blankets till the fingers named Love closed around the bone hasp of the knife and his soul rose up in flaming glorious fury.”

In prison for car theft, the preacher meets Ben Harper, a condemned man who, broken by the hard times, had robbed and killed to feed his family. Harper is executed while his ten-thousand-dollar swag remains missing, and Powell goes off to acquire it. He cozies up to the widow Harper and her children, Pearl and John, marries the widow, kills her, then turns on the children, who are the keepers of the secret of the hidden loot. John and Pearl barely manage to escape, fleeing upriver where they are taken in by the eccentric old Miz Cooper, mother hen to a houseful of stray children and outcasts. Preacher Powell pursues them, and by nightfall he lays terrifying siege to Miz Cooper’s house. But goodness prevails. Miz Cooper traps Powell in her barn and turns him over to the police. In the jailhouse for murder, Powell is seized by an angry mob and lynched.

Having purchased the rights to the novel, Gregory and Laughton pondered the proper casting. “Right away I thought of Mitchum,” said Paul Gregory. “He was a man who could project great charm, and yet there was a sense of evil lurking there under the surface. Charles asked me if I saw anyone for the role of the preacher and I said, ‘There’s one American actor I think could do a good job with this, Robert Mitchum.’ And Laughton said, ‘Jesus Christ! That’s right. He’d be wonderful. I can see him, yes. . . .’ And we decided to waste no time. Charles knew him slightly and he came to my office and called him at home.”

“Present,” Mitchum said.

Laughton asked him if he might have time to take a look at the novel.

“I’m just twiddling my thumbs here. Sure, send it over, I’ll take a look.”

Mitchum read it that very afternoon, sprawled in a lounge chair beside the pool. He loved it—Davis Grubb’s corrosive take on the world, the fiendish humor, the portrait of a rural, near-medieval South that rang true to his own Depression-era wanderings there, the whole subversive attack on religious hypocrites and nut cases and psalm-singing yahoos. Said Julie Mitchum, “Bob told me he was going to do that one to show people not to follow some character
because he’s got a Bible in his hands, or because he’s got his collar on backwards, to alert people to these kinds of characters. And he was always very sympathetic to the exploitation of children, always very sympathetic to the innocence of children. He thought this would get that out there.” But were they really going to be able to make a picture about a wife-murdering, child-stalking maniac of a preacher, doing his evil deeds in God’s name? Well, if they were, Mitchum decided, he wanted to be in on it.

He went over to Laughton’s house the following Saturday afternoon to discuss the project. Laughton called Paul Gregory immediately afterward. “He was on the ceiling with excitement about Mitchum. He said that Mitchum had been wonderfully enthused, had so many ideas to offer.” Mitchum quoted from the book by memory and at one point got up before his adoring host and began crashing about the living room, acting out the love/hate sermon, the story of “right hand/left hand,” knuckles upraised. “Of course,” said Gregory, “they had had quite a few drinks.”

Mitchum visited Laughton frequently in the months ahead, coming for lunch or dinner. According to Laughton’s wife, Elsa Lanchester, the two were a natural team: “They were kindred spirits, both what you call rebels, with no respect for formal religion or Hollywood society.” Lanchester, always prone to a snit when her husband was fawning over another man, thought Mitchum a bit of a poseur, trying overly hard to convince the couple he was no dumb cowboy. “Charles knew enough to let a person have his head if he wanted to appear to have an intellectual approach. I don’t know, maybe Bob Mitchum is very bright, but I never heard such a lot of words—big, long words, one after the other. Perhaps he felt insecure with Charles and he was only trying to impress him. . . . Charles was patient with him because Mitchum was going to be one of his children.”

An agreement was made to begin filming in August, giving Gregory and Laughton time to finance the picture and prepare a screenplay and allowing Mitchum to conclude his term at RKO. Gregory took the project to the studios. Warner Bros, turned him down. Columbia was interested in the material and Laughton as a director, said Gregory, “but Harry Cohn just absolutely wouldn’t go with Mitchum. He wouldn’t even discuss it with Mitchum.”

A deal was finally made with United Artists, the “nonstudio” studio, offering a meagre $595,000 for the whole production.

At some point in the months before filming began, Laurence Olivier entered the picture, suddenly eager to play Preacher Powell under Laughton’s direction. The idea was not unexciting, and Laughton didn’t know what to do.
“Larry” discussed it with Laughton’s partner. Gregory felt they had the right person with Mitchum, but he ran it up the flagpole at the studio. He found that United Artists “would not be interested in putting up any money for
The Night of the Hunter
with Larry Olivier.”

To write the screenplay, there was brief consideration of setting Davis Grubb to the task. “He was an odd man, to say the least,” Gregory remembered. “Number one, he said he could only write on a train. And he refused to travel other than on a train or a bicycle. You could hardly get him into a car. And he was . . . troubled. Very troubled. He never spoke much. Only thing I remember, he asked, ‘Do you know Tennessee?’ I said, ‘Tennessee? Well, I know a few things, through a friend of mine.’ He said, ‘Oh, tell me about it!’ He said he was curious about Tennessee, liked to read about it. Hmm. Other than that, I can’t remember him ever saying a thing, only that he liked the movie. He thought it was true to the book. Of course it was.”

So Grubb went home—by rail and pedal, presumably—to Philadelphia, but Laughton stayed in touch. He had learned that Grubb was an amateur sketch artist who liked to draw scenes and caricatures of the people he created in his fiction. Seeing the value in such visualizations by the hand of the author himself, Laughton had him send them to Hollywood and phoned him up begging for new ones throughout the production, sometimes specifying that Grubb draw in the exact expression on a character’s face that he’d had in mind while writing a particular scene. The writer produced over a hundred of these pen-and-ink drawings for the film. “I declare, perhaps immodestly,” Grubb said, “that I was not only the author of the novel from which the screenplay was adapted but was the actual scene designer as well.”

Gregory and Laughton settled on another literary figure to write the screenplay: James Agee, the acclaimed critic and novelist who, pertinently, had written the classic study of Depression-ravaged Appalachia,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
and had one notable screenwriting credit for
The African Queen.
Unknown to Laughton and Gregory at the time they hired him,
The African Queen
had been largely rewritten by John Huston and Peter Viertel, and Agee was currently well into the last phase of his alcoholic self-destruction. “That was our first big flub,” said Paul Gregory. “He was drunk all the time. And he couldn’t get along with Charles. It was just terrible.” At first Agee worked at Laughton’s house, going out by the pool each day with a typewriter and a bottle of Jack Daniels. When Laughton couldn’t take any more of the puking and passing out, they moved Agee to Gregory’s place at the beach. Then to a hotel. Gregory: “He was a wonderful writer. But the poor man was tormented by something. I don’t know what. At times he would cry for hours. I went and sat
with him at his hotel one night, and he just sobbed and sobbed. I thought he might commit suicide. I had never seen such behavior.”