Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (53 page)

Long story short, it turned out the deputy knew some people willing to pay real big bucks if John was able to get them some evidence proving his brother wasn’t such an upstanding citizen. John told him he would think about it. Next morning he went to Jerry Giesler’s office and repeated all he had heard. “Those
Confidential
bastards!” Giesler cried. He came up with an
idea: John should pretend to accept the offer and try to find out what they were plotting. And so did Brother John become an undercover agent in Jerry Giesler’s counterintel plot to beat the
Confidential
boys at their own game. John began meeting with the deputy, stringing him along with fake glimpses of Robert’s dirty laundry and promises of something big to come. It went on like that for a while, with nobody getting much in the way of evidence against anybody.

One day the sheriff’s deputy waylaid John on the street and told him his people were through waiting. He made John get into the gold Cadillac, drove him across town, and took him into a ground-floor apartment in a luxury apartment building in Beverly Hills, the offices, it would turn out, of Hollywood Research Inc., command central for
Confidential
’s fact-gathering and surveillance agents. The place was filled with big, tough-looking guys, and some of them looked like they were packing heat. There were desks around the apartment topped with phones and recording and listening devices and files and photographs. John was taken over to the head tough guy and recognized him—it was Fred Otash, a notorious ex-LA cop turned private eye, Hollywood fixer, problem solver, leg breaker, a big mean Lebanese, looked like Joe McCarthy with muscles.

“Where the fuck’s that story you’re supposed to deliver?” Otash screamed.

John wrote of the moment, “I looked over at Otash’s silent, glowering gunmen with the bulgy jackets. It was confession time. ‘I tried. God knows I tried.’ My voice was trembling and I started to cry. ‘But he’s my brother and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.’”

Otash screwed his face into a meaty mass of disgust. “Get out . . . you sniveling bastard!”

Mitchum got out.

Apprised of the situation, Giesler told John his life was probably in danger and thanked him for his time.

John took his family and got out of town for a while.

Confidential
’s lawyers fought the Mitchum suit for over a year. In the end they successfully argued that the publication had technically never done business in the State of California and the case was dismissed. By then, however, other celebrities had followed Robert’s lead, and many of these subsequent lawsuits were successful in court, greasing the way for
Confidential
’s emasculation in 1957 and the end of a brief but colorful era in the history of journalism.

Of the five men Mitchum had tried to sue, one died of cirrhosis of the liver a few months later, one was shot in the Dominican Republic and went into
hiding and an early retirement, and one—editor Howard Rushmore—was in the backseat of a taxi on Manhattan’s East Side when he pulled out a revolver and murdered his wife and then stuck the barrel in his own mouth and put his thumb around the trigger.

But that, as they say, is another story.

^*
Kramer’s difficulty in landing a star for
The Defiant Ones
was the basis for a joke that made the rounds of the Hollywood party circuit, supposedly revealing of certain actors’ proclivities, their respective egotism, bigotry, or pretentiousness: Kirk Douglas agreed to make the film but only if they cut out the role of the other prisoner; Mitchum agreed but only if the other prisoner was white; and Marlon Brando would make the film but only if he could play the part of the black man.

I
N
J
UNE 1955, THE
Norwegian tramp
Fern River
carried the Mitchums across the southern Atlantic from New York. For a week they moved slowly over an empty ocean, doing nothing. There was nothing to do. Sit in the sun, read—half his luggage was books—eat in the tiny dining room. It had taken a day out of New York for the six other passengers—retirees and college professors—to get used to the movie star on board. Now he was just Bob, stretched out on the deck, telling stories at the captain’s table at dinner. One morning he woke up, looked through the porthole, and saw Africa on the horizon. They moved up along the coast of Morocco that morning and entered the port of Casablanca. The Norwegians advised them to stay on the boat as there had been much unrest in the country of late and many foreigners attacked on the streets. Bob said, “Hell, they were probably just having a little fun with ‘em.” He and Dorothy and two other passengers hired a taxi to take them around. They left the car at the entrance to the walled medina and walked through the old gated entrance, settling down for a drink at a cafe on the square. Gawkers began to whisper to each other, gathering for a look at the famous visitor. In no time, Mitchum recalled, the square had filled with “ragheads,” maybe three hundred people pushing, edging forward, surrounding them on the narrow street. People whistling, shouting in Arabic. Somebody, said Mitchum, “remembered that it was to crowds like this that revolutionaries come to start a riot.” He got his party up and moving as the crowd followed, many of them chanting his name, eyes full of fire. The others hurried to the car, unsettled, with hundreds of Moroccans in cotton frocks closing in behind them. “Get in the car, Bob!”
someone shouted. But Mitchum paused, basking like a Roman emperor, until someone grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him into the car and the driver hit the gas.

And on to Europe.

Sheldon Reynolds was American television’s expatriate boy wonder, only twenty-six in 1951 when he began producing, directing, and writing a weekly series called
Foreign Intrigue,
a cloak-and-dagger drama distinguished by its authentic European backgrounds. Reynolds staggered Hollywood TV producers with the amount of production value he could squeeze into a low-budget show—each episode seemed to be shot in a half-dozen countries. This he accomplished through a variety of clever improvisatory strategems, shooting exterior sequences for an entire season at each location, then returning to his bases in Paris and Stockholm to write scripts and shoot interior scenes that would match up with what he had shot on the streets of Rome and Berlin and so on. The show was a hit, running for five seasons and 156 episodes. Then Reynolds came to Hollywood, wanting to “expand his horizons” and set up his first feature film. He shared the same agent with Robert Mitchum, and so they were brought together for a meeting on the set of
Not as a Stranger.
Mitchum liked Reynolds, knew his TV show, liked his nontraditional ideas about shooting a picture, and liked the idea of hanging around in the glamorous capitals of Europe. Mitchum said, “Let’s do something.” The problem was Reynolds didn’t have a script—he didn’t have a story even. The agent said he would be committing Mitchum to a summer picture within the next two weeks. Reynolds said that if he’d wait two weeks, he would have a script. He sat down and batted out a complete screenplay in the next eleven days. Mitchum liked it, United Artists liked it, and the picture was on.

Bob decided to spend the entire summer in Europe, half work and half vacation. He arranged passage on a freighter bound from New York to Genoa—it was a boyhood fantasy, crossing the ocean on a rusty old tramp.

Foreign Intrigue
was not the title Sheldon Reynolds had intended for his feature debut. It was not a spin-off from the series, he insisted. But the script, about an American public relations man wandering the boulevards and back alleys of Europe investigating the death of his employer, had enough in common with the TV show to make UA feel they could profit from the association. Otherwise the studio left the producer-director to his own proven devices. It
was a ten-week schedule with locations in three countries and a start date in early July.

Filming began on the Riviera, in Nice and Monte Carlo. Mitchum hated the expensive wardrobe that had been prepared for him—”There was a Swedish version of a Made in Paris suit with an Edwardian cut,” he said. “I looked like Johnny off the pickle boat”—and elected to wear his own clothes in the picture. These included a trench coat (a staple garment of the
Foreign Intrigue TV hero,
making the movie look all the more a continuation) given to him as a going away present by Reva Frederick. Too-tight clothing aside, Mitchum relished the production’s European style—the tiny crew, the minimal technical gear, the ability to move from one setup and one location to the next in a matter of minutes. Reynolds had eliminated all the flab and fuss of big Hollywood filmmaking. There were no story conferences, no production design sketches to be approved, no big sets to be built. The efficient operation Reynolds had put in place for his television show meant they had access to lights, recording equipment, film stock, and personnel wherever they went, allowing them to travel from country to country carrying little more than their personal luggage. They just got up in the morning at one luxurious hotel or another, had a big breakfast, and started shooting something. Mitchum didn’t know if the finished product would look like a movie or a newsreel, but it was certainly pleasant putting the thing together.

The unit moved along the Mediterranean, then up to Paris, Versailles, on to Stockholm and the islands of the Swedish archipelago. The Mitchum boys were shipped over at the end of their school term (Trina left at home with a nurse). Dorothy schlepped them to the obligatory monuments and museums along the route, but more time was devoted to finding them Coca-Colas and properly prepared hamburgers. From Sweden they took a brief trip to Oslo, Norway, and arranged to meet some of Bob’s Norwegian relatives. They were lovely people and in no way fawning—Bob had a feeling they hadn’t gotten a chance to see any of those newfangled talking pictures yet.

He listened to stories of his mother and grandparents. A cousin and some others would stay in touch, writing him letters through the years.

“Mitchum was marvelous to work with,” said Sheldon Reynolds, “extremely knowledgeable, understood the kind of filmmaking we were doing, could adjust and improvise to any situation. An incredibly fast study and with an amazing ear for language. We had a scene where he is supposed to be making a phone call and speaking four or five lines of French. Not one word made sense
to him—he learned it phonetically—but he did it instantly, and his accent was excellent. And as an actor, if there was a hole in a scene, in the story line, he could find a way to fill it, to play through it and make it logical, because he understood story and everything that was going on. And he was extremely generous with the other actors. If he was not on camera and a bit player was saying some lines—normally, you had a script girl or the director reading the off-camera lines while the star went somewhere to rest, but Mitchum was always there to feed the cues to everyone. They all enjoyed working with him.

“He was a marvelous man, and we became very good friends. I found that his Hollywood image was a facade. He was very smart and learned, and if you wanted to discuss literature and poetry with him you had to hold your own because he knew what he was talking about. He was always eager for new experiences, not parochial at all. We went to dinner together every night, in Paris and elsewhere, and he was eager to try new things, taste new foods, frogs’ legs, anything.

“He loved wine and he particularly loved cheese, cheese of all kinds he was eager to try. And while we were shooting, his thirty-eighth birthday came up. I told everybody on the set not to say a word, not to say ‘Happy Birthday’ So we went through the whole day shooting and nobody said a thing to acknowledge it. And he was in his dressing room, taking off his makeup and cleaning up, and then I came in and told him I wanted to show him tomorrow’s set. And we went out and everyone was there to yell ‘Happy Birthday,’ and we had the whole place covered with barrels of wine and giant wheels of cheese, about thirty-six different kinds of cheese. And that was the only time I ever saw him get emotional.”

For the rest of his stay in Europe Mitchum would provoke the wrath of hotel keepers and gagging chambermaids, not to mention family members, as he gorged on great slabs of Roquefort and Gorgonzola and Brie and left unwrapped, unrefrigerated portions behind under the beds and in dresser drawers. “I remember, he talked a lot about cheese,” said Harry Schein, the Swedish theater director and husband of Ingrid Thulin. “He was crazy for cheese, that man.”

Ingrid Thulin (billed phonetically as Tulean in the credits), a successful young actress on the Stockholm stage (and with legendary performances for Ingmar Bergman and Luchino Visconti still in the future), was making her film debut as
Foreign Intrigues
leading lady. “I was so nervous to meet this famous Hollywood star, and he looked so big—he seemed like a giant, such shoulders! And I met him and I saw that he was reading Simone de Beauvoir! And I thought, Well, I have never seen a
man
reading Simone de Beauvoir, this
feminist writer, not even in Paris. And he talked to me about the book and had me read it—and I am really thankful to him for that! So I was so surprised, this ‘tough guy’ was a real intellectual.

“He was very funny. In Paris, the French journalists would come around and someone asked, ‘Can you say something in French?’ And he said,
‘Cognac!’
And one time he was urinating in the street, an alley, and someone yelled to read the sign over his head—it said, in French, Do Not Piss in the Doorway—and he was very angry. ‘What kind of town is this!’ he said. ‘Take that sign down!’ And then another day, we were up at the place where they had the Eternal Flame. And he heard that some Dane had been able to put it out by urinating on it. And he said, ‘Oh, I can do that,’ and he made a bet with someone and pissed and he managed to do it!”

Just once, on the Swedish archipelago, were the tables turned, Mitchum getting a chance to be shocked, when the director called a lunch break and—it being a hot day for Sweden, about 45 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Bob—the cast and crew, wardrobe lady, everybody stripped off their clothes and ran naked into the nearby sea. “Well, summer lasts about two days up there,” he said. “Doesn’t pay to invest in a bathing suit.”