Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (56 page)

It could have been the start of a very unpleasant three months—Mitchum wasn’t the sort to let a goddamn director get the better of him for long. But as in one of those old Eddie Lowe, Victor McLaglen battling buddy movies, Mitchum and Huston sized each other up nose to nose, decided they were evenly matched, and agreed to be friends.

Huston was the artist as buccaneer, sailing through life in search of adventure and booty, stopping now and then along the way to make some of the world’s greatest motion pictures. “Sure,” said one friend and admirer. “He couldn’t help it! John was a guy who had an appetite for the best of everything. Of course he would make the best movies, too!” Huston, like Mitchum, suffered from wanderlust and a restless nature. Huston, like Mitchum, could drink mere mortals under the table, or certainly tried to at every opportunity. And as an inveterate tale teller, Huston’s accounts of his swashbuckling early
years—including a stint in the Mexican cavalry—were, Bob had to admit, even more colorful and preposterous than his own. The director’s range of experience and understanding of life’s darkest secrets impressed Mitchum and gave him confidence in the work they were to do. Whatever the situation, Mitchum said, “you knew John had been there.”

Mitchum found that as a director Huston had a distinct sense of rhythm he could impose on a scene and a painter’s eye for detail, but he allowed for the randomness of real life to enter the frame as well, keeping the scenes fresh, unstudied. When dealing with actors, Huston believed that once the proper person had assumed a given role, that performer brought with him the nuance and personality the role was meant to have. He therefore said very little to the actors before shooting a scene, although, unlike the other tough guy directors Mitchum had worked with, Huston had the intellectual capacity and education to verbalize whatever subtleties and values he sought should the need arise. Mitchum claimed that the most direction Huston ever gave him was to say, at the end of one take, “I think, kid . . .
even more.”
As he did so often, Mitchum used his observational skills and talent for mimickry and accents to bring the simple U.S. Marine character to idiosyncratic life. “Robert based his Mr. Allison character entirely on Tim Wallace,” said Reva Frederick. “He decided that was the perfect model for that part, with the Brooklyn accent and everything, and the whole performance was a perfect imitation of Tim.”

Huston would sing his star’s praises forever after: “A delight to work with, and he gave a beautiful performance. He is one of the finest actors I’ve ever had anything to do with. His air of casualness, or rather, his lack of pomposity is put down as a lack of seriousness, but when I say he’s a fine actor, I mean an actor of the caliber of Olivier, Burton, and Brando. In other words, the very best in the field.” If Mitchum walked through many pictures with his eyes half open, said Huston, it was because “that’s all that’s called for, but he is in fact capable of playing King Lear.”

After making a poor show of his first scene, Mitchum quickly set about regaining Huston’s and the crew’s confidence by giving his all to the next day’s action, which called for him to crawl across the razorlike coral reef and through the underbrush beyond the shoreline. By the time he’d finished crawling and the director called, “Cut,” he had scraped his flesh open in a dozen places. Huston and assistants ran down to look at the streams of blood.

“Jesus Christ, Bob!” said Huston.

Mitchum shrugged. “You work, you suffer.”

He didn’t know the half of it. There were still palm trees to be scaled, gullies and swamps to fall into, giant tortoises to ride. The three-hundred-pound
turtle towed him for what seemed like miles. He was supposed to be catching the creature for food but, said Mitchum, “it was a wonder the damn thing didn’t eat me. As it was, he almost dashed me against the coral reef.” He caught his foot on a tree root and nearly twisted it in a full circle. “The bastard Huston’s going to kill me,” he moaned en route to a doctor. And then there were the mosquitoes that infected Mitchum and several others in the company with dengue, a painful, infectious tropical disease producing high temperature, body rash, and swelling of the joints.

The comelier half of the virtually two-person cast had no easier a time of it. It was like they said about Ginger Rogers—she did everything Fred Astaire did, and backward. For the scene in which the nun runs away and passes out in a mangrove swamp, Kerr had to spend days half submerged in horrible slime and wads of sticky alligator shit. “Deborah had to lie down in this mess,” said Huston, “and she did it without a word of complaint. It was only years later that I discovered . . . she had dreams of this swamp for weeks afterward.”

Kerr, too, would get a dose of dengue and spent several days in the local hospital. But her most unrelieved agony was undoubtedly her wardrobe, the heavy nun’s habit that had to be worn from dawn to dusk in the scorching tropical temperatures. “Talk about mad dogs and Englishmen,” she gasped, scratching and sweating in the itchy costume. Mitchum claimed that two members of the crew were employed entirely for the purpose of holding Deborah’s skirts up between takes and “cooling her ass with a fan.”

Kerr and Mitchum were a magical team. The actress likened their work together to a perfect doubles pair at tennis. Getting to know him in those first days on Tobago, as they sat on the “soft pink sand,” Kerr recalled finding herself “listening to an extremely sensitive, a poetic, extraordinarily interesting man . . . a perceptive, amusing person with a great gift for telling a story, and possessed of a completely unexpected vast fund of knowledge . . . Bob was at all times patient, concerned, and completely professional, always in good humor, and always ready to make a joke when things became trying.” Laura Nightingale, a wardrobe girl on the film, described Mitchum’s great sensitivity toward his costar to journalist Lloyd Shearer: Sensing that her feet were hurting from the sharp rocks she’d been standing on, “He just kneeled down, unlaced her white sneakers, removed them and massaged her feet. It was lovely and compassionate the way he did it. . . . Then he put her sneakers back on and said kind of brusquely to hide his tenderness, ‘Gotta keep you alive for the next scene.’ Then he walked away. Deborah was so touched she cried.”

Deborah became Bob’s great platonic love. He would speak of her ever after as his all-time favorite actress and the “only leading lady I didn’t go to bed
with”—an exaggeration in any case, but meant somehow as a compliment. When they met he had been expecting a prim Englishwoman like the rather frosty ladies she often played on screen, but Kerr turned out to be one of the boys. She was a rare delight, warm, wise, earthy. One time she was rowing a raft in open water during the tortoise-chasing scene, Huston constantly shouting, “Faster! Row faster!” The wooden oars split in half in her hands, and Kerr, in her damp nun’s habit, screamed in fury, “Is that
fucking
fast enough?” Mitchum, floating nearby, swallowed a gallon of saltwater laughing.

Kerr and Mitchum collaborated on the most amusing moments of the whole shoot during a visit by an inspector from the Catholic Legion of Decency, the self-appointed censorship board. Invited by Fox to verify that the film’s depiction of Miss Kerr’s nun character was entirely respectable, the Legion sent a suitably severe man of the cloth down to Tobago to observe the filming. He soon began making complaints and demanding changes, perceiving something smutty in the most innocent line and gesture. One day he arrived on the set as Huston was preparing a scene between Mitchum and Kerr. Huston greeted the priest and then called for “Action.” Director and crew were deadpan as Bob and Deborah spoke their lines, then moved closer together, Mitchum sliding his hand under nun Kerr’s breasts while she cupped his buttocks and they began to kiss with open-mouthed abandon. The Legion of Decency man’s eyes widened, he grasped at his heart and screamed, “What is going on there?!”

“No talking, Father,” said Huston. “Dammit, now you’ve gone and ruined a perfectly good take.”

The only other speaking parts in the film belonged to the Japanese soldiers, heard conversing among themselves in one scene. Waiting till the last minute to find Japanese-speaking bit players, the casting scout wound up on a frantic island-hopping search, finally securing the services of eight émigrés living in a Japanese farm colony in Brazil. To play the nonspeaking Japanese forces, the film drafted fifty Chinese from the restaurants and and hand laundries of Trinidad. The film’s American invaders were a hundred actual marines.

For the filming of the bombing raid, everyone had come down to the beach to watch the fireworks. There were supposed to be a couple of dozen explosions scattered across the sand over the span of a couple of minutes. But the powder man’s setup short-circuited and the explosions went off prematurely and all at once, nearly blowing the beach off the island. There were remarkably few injuries considering the destruction, but one special-effects man was temporarily blinded.

You might be called on to take your lumps for Huston even when the cameras weren’t turning. The director had hired a local driver and baby-sitter for his visiting kids, a young islander named Irwin. He was a handsome, muscular giant and an amateur boxer, and the more Huston saw of him, the more he began to envision him as the next heavyweight champion, with Huston himself the lad’s manager and chief beneficiary. He goaded a reluctant Mitchum into going a few rounds with the new champ, and a little boxing ring was rigged up. Mitchum stepped in and looked up and up at his towering opponent. The bell sounded and, said Mitchum, “I just stuck my left hand out and he fell down.”

A more noteworthy battle took place at the veranda bar of the Blue Haven Hotel where Bob and Dorothy were having some refreshments one evening. Three American marines from the ersatz invading force arrived with, it seemed, the express purpose of getting into a brawl with the mighty Mitchum. Whether they had originally intended for the whole trio to attack one actor at the same time or whether this became an emergency tactic once Mitchum’s interest was engaged is not known. A first soldier reportedly tapped Mitchum on the shoulder and told him he could knock him off his feet with one punch, and what did he think of that? Mitchum told him to take a shot, which the boy did. Then, deciding to avail himself of another try without first asking permission, the marine found himself on the floor, seeing stars of a different variety. The other patrons at the bar watched in wonderment as the American movie actor began punching the daylights out of his countrymen, one tumbling down the staircase, another slugged in the head and dropping to the floor, out cold, and a third man dragged over to the railing of the veranda from which Mitchum had planned to toss him twenty feet to the wading pool below when he felt blows rain down on his head and neck from a high-heeled shoe.

“Hey . . . you’re supposed to be on my side!” he said.

“You were starting to enjoy it,” Dorothy told him.

The film was a beauty. It was a movie that was stripped to the bare essentials, but not a thing was lacking. It was funny, tender, exciting, visually enchanting, the empty blue sky and sea a soothing treat for the eye; Kerr was superb, and Mitchum, playing dumb as the good-hearted marine whose only knowledge of life is “the Corps,” gave a deceptively simple performance that was in fact a fully created characterization of inestimable grace and charm.

Huston and Mitchum: They had grown to be close friends during the filming, or as close as two larger-than-life rogues who both preferred the role of top dog in the pound could ever hope to be. There were long bull sessions together, in the evenings and late at night or in the long days when this or that
crucial member of the company was laid up in bed moaning with fever. They drank, played poker, and, of course, traded stories, usually with a retinue of idolators lounging around them for an audience. They talked about making movies and adventures in foreign lands. Mitchum was delighted to learn a salient fact about one of his small handful of favorite films,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
shot in Mexico—John told him they were all smoking grass down there, high as clouds for most of the picture. Huston spoke of films he planned to do someday. There was a sense, not quite spoken but both of them felt it, that they could go on together, a creative partnership making great movies one after the other, the way Huston had done with Bogart in years past. They spoke of Huston’s dream project, a grand-scale film of Kipling’s adventure story, “The Man Who Would Be King.” He had once thought of it for Bogart and Gable, but Bogie was old now and sick.

“We could have some real fun making that one, Bob. We’d shoot it all in Bhutan, in the Himalayas.”

“How do you figure we could do that, John? They don’t permit foreigners, and there’s no road in or out.”

Huston’s eyes went wide, like a little boy’s on Christmas morning.

“Parachute, kid . . . parachute.”

“T
HE THREE TOUGHEST GUYS
in the movie business,” said Budd Boetticher, the great American film director, bullfighter, horseman, “were Jack Palance, Bob Ryan, and Mitchum. And Mitchum was the toughest. And very soft and tender, like a lot of really tough guys. We met when I first got started directing and he was just starting out, and we were dear friends. We never got to see enough of each other, but the times we were together we had a lot of fun. Once when I was working at Universal he came and took me over to meet what he said was ‘the dumbest girl in the world.’ And it was Marilyn Monroe. And we went over when she was making a picture called
Don’t Bother to Knock
and he said, ‘This girl is really off the wall.’ And of course she wasn’t really. She could be very smart about some things. But Bob said what he thought, and he was funny as hell. We would always talk about doing a picture together. I wrote
Two Mules for Sister Sara
for Bob. It was going to be Bob and Silvia Pinal, and it would have been a helluva picture. They took it and messed it up, and with my friend Clint in it. But me and Bob were always hoping to work together, right up to the end.