Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (57 page)

“Back in the ’fifties, I got an invitation for the inauguration of the new governor in [a state in northern] Mexico. I was to go down to lead the parade before the afternoon bullfight on Sunday with Carlos Aruzza, taking down one of my fancy Spanish horses. Then there would be the inauguration and a big dinner party. I was told I could bring a guest and so I took Bob and Dorothy, who I loved dearly. The bullfight went off well, the opening parade was great, and we went to the dinner party. Now along the way Bob was interested to
hear about the outgoing governor because he had the reputation for being the worst politician in the history of Mexico—and boy, if you know Mexico, that’s really being crooked. He was smuggling hookers and dope and gold and everything else. But he had had his six years and he was out. Well, after the bullfight we’re all at the big dinner, and Bob and Dorothy are seated right next to the ex-governor. And everybody was drinking and having a good time. But I guess Bob never knew who he was sitting next to because all of a sudden I hear Bob’s voice and he’s saying to ex-Governor ‘Well, it sounds like they got you into office just in time. I understand that that son of a bitch who was here the last six years was the biggest damn crook in the country, he had a whore racket, and he’s running a dope ring.’ And the ex-governor is looking at him as he’s saying this and he’s not happy with it; it’s in front of everybody, all these distinguished guests. And I tried to get Bob’s eye and I couldn’t and finally I just muttered to him, ‘Bob, that’s the former governor you’re talking to.’ And Bob just blinked, didn’t miss a beat, and he said, And you know, Governor . . . , my pappy always told me, when you grow up, son, whatever you do you try to be the biggest and best in the whole damn world, whatever it is. And I always thought that / was the biggest and best no good son of a bitch in the whole damn world, but . . . here I am
talking to him. And it’s a real honor.
‘And the man didn’t know how to take it, but he decided it was all in fun and he started laughing; and he says, ‘This guy’s got
balls!’
Which of course he did.”

“Bob was by nature a very lonely person,” said his sister Julie. “He had a sensitivity that was difficult for him to reveal to outsiders. He never let many people see that side of him.” Mitchum kept no childhoood pals, no bosom buddies. “I don’t think he ever really wanted or needed anyone like that,” said Reva Frederick, “someone you talked to every week or month, someone you shared your problems with. There were people he was delighted to run into, to take a call from and catch up on the news with, like Victor Buono and Sinatra and people like that, they got along great, but then he went on his way. Perhaps it would have been a problem for him, opening himself up, letting someone understand you, know your problems, your feelings, the way you would do with a real friend. Robert, I think, had a great deal of sensitivity and a lot of fears that he would not want to share with anyone. But I have no idea. I really have no idea if that’s what it was. Tim Wallace was the closest person that Robert ever had as a real friend. But Tim was older than Robert, and Robert was so superior to Tim in so many ways, intelligence, talent, money, he was over Tim, it was in no way a friendship of equals. Tim was just there, company.
If Robert wanted to drive up to Montana he could always grab Tim and Tim would say, ‘Sure!’ He was always delighted to go anywhere, do anything. He would tell jokes, do whatever you needed, including get out in the middle of a freeway and change a tire. He was an ideal companion who never asked anything of you and always did what you wanted. That was Robert’s one friend. The rest were guys he could talk to at lunch or have a few drinks with. That was all he wanted. He didn’t need anyone getting closer to him than that.”

A loner, but a gregarious one, Mitchum had people he called pals, male and female, all over the world and in all variety of high and low places. “He was extremely adaptable,” said Reva. “You could toss him down anywhere and he could find someone to talk to. And I mean anyone. He could have a conversation with people from every conceivable walk of life.” Through the years he had passing acquaintanceship or intermittent friendships with generals, makeup men, politicians, ex-convicts, surgeons, stunt guys, Nobel Prize—winning scientists, salesmen, cowboys, barflies, stewardesses, government leaders, strippers, even a few policemen (he told people that the cops always had the best dope). He liked the company and conversation of writers and had proudly bent an elbow with John Steinbeck and with A. B. “Bud” Guthrie, author of
The Big Sky.
For many years he kept in touch with novelist James Atlee Phillips, the man who wrote
Thunder Road,
and he had a long-standing acquaintance with Barnaby Conrad, the author of
Matador
and the owner of a hip watering hole by the same name. Conrad first met Mitchum at his San Francisco nightspot, the actor taking up the Matador’s weighty guest book and scribbling,
“Compadre . . . When all the broken crockery of desperate communion is swept from under our understanding heels we may find on that clear expanse of floor the true and irrevocable target of infinite thrust.”
Forty years later Conrad was still trying to figure out what it meant.

In Los Angeles, his actor and performer pals tended to be from the fringes of the showbiz hierarchy, colorful or eccentric characters or good storytellers or good listeners. There was Richard “Lord” Buckley, the avant-hip nightclub comic and monologist—as in “The Nazz,” his swinging history of Jesus Christ—with whom Mitchum shared a love of esoteric language and black dialects (it was because they both had part American Indian ancestry, they decided, and thus were both “honorary niggers”). There was actor Billy Murphy, who’d been in
G.I. foe
and
The Sands of Iwo Jima,
a strange cat who dressed all in black like a Western bad guy and had a favorite saying (”You bet your life, mister—and you may
have to”)
and a personality that struck fear in the hearts of directors and casting agents. There was Morty Guterman, an agent with the Feldman Company and Robert’s favorite companion for deep-sea fishing trips
to Baja, and Peter Simon, a paraplegic who had worked with Marlon Brando on
The Men
and whom Robert became friendly with through Dorothy’s work with Los Angeles charities. There was actor Robert “the Wing Commander” Rothwell and movie extra/construction worker George Fargo, aka “Gray Cloud” because of the cloud of smoke that seemed always to be swirling around him. (Mitchum’s world was at times like one of those Howard Hawks movies where everybody had a nickname. There was “the Hog” and “Seed Sacker,” and the man himself was known to the gang as “the Goose,” as in the one that laid golden eggs and from his peculiar chest-out-thrust walk.) “The way Sinatra had his Rat Pack, Bob had a lot of guys he could pull together when he wanted to go off somewhere,” said actor Roy Jenson. “He’d say, ‘We’re going to New Orleans,’ or down to Mexico. And he’d go off for days or weeks, someplace like Mazatlan, he loved it there, taking four buddies with him, to drink with him. And there had to be four guys because it was like duty, nobody could keep up with him the whole time.”

Sheldon Reynolds remembered a Mitchum gathering in the late ’50s. It began, for him, one night in Paris: “It was about three o’clock in the morning, I was not entirely awake, and the phone rang. It was Mitchum. I said, ‘Hi.’ He said, ‘Let’s get together.’ I said, ‘Wonderful. Why don’t you come to Paris?’ He said, ‘Well, that’s a long way. Why don’t you come to California?’ I said, ‘Well . . . let’s compromise, we’ll meet in New York.’ And he said, ‘OK,’ and hung up the phone. I went back to sleep and in the morning I said to the woman I was going with, ‘Was I dreaming or did I get a call last night from Robert Mitchum?’ She said, ‘Yes, I think you did.’ So I called his number in California and I spoke to Dorothy. I said, ‘Could I talk to Bob? He called me last night but I’m not sure what we said.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know either, but he got in the car and said he was driving to New York.’ I said, ‘Well, do you expect that you’ll hear from him soon?’ And she said, ‘I think I will hear from him. He left without his wallet and he has no money’

“Well, that was typical is all I can say. And we did meet in New York some days later. He had driven across country by himself. He would meet people and he could sleep anywhere and just took things as they came. I remember him telling me about driving into a gasoline station somewhere in the South. The man filled up the tank, and as Mitchum was paying, the man looked at him and said, ‘Ain’t you that actor fella?’ And Mitchum said, ‘Yeah.’ And the man said, ‘Well, how about that.’ And he said, ‘Have you had dinner?’ And Mitchum said, ‘No.’ And the gas station man said, ‘You want to come home; we’ll give you something to eat.’ And off he went, taken care of for that night. I asked him how was the food and he said, ‘I think it was squirrel stew. Tasted like squirrel. Seasoned with buckshot.’

“In New York I stayed in the Hampshire House and he stayed in the Sherry Netherland, as I recall. And we picked up Trevor Howard, he joined the group. Trevor just showed up, I don’t know from where. There was a lot of drinking. And Trevor said we must go to this great little jazz bar, very tiny place he had discovered. Trevor insisted nobody went there, it was an out-of-the-way place. So we got into a taxi and the little place was just above Broadway and Forty-second Street. It was packed. The musicians were playing behind the bar, and they stepped down to come meet Mitchum. Everyone recognized him, and the place just kept getting more and more crowded. And things got out of hand, and the police came and they took us away in a police car. And Trevor, with this crowd around and getting pushed into the police car, said, ‘I don’t understand it; this place has gone all commercial!’

“And we had some days of this and then the two wives, Dorothy and Helen, Trevor’s wife, arrived in town. And everyone was to meet at 21. It had been a very long night, the night before. And everyone met up at 21, but Trevor didn’t show up. He hadn’t come back to his hotel and Helen became worried. ‘Where is he? Has something happened to him?’ she said. ‘Don’t either of you know where Trevor is?’ And we knew where we had last seen him, with some girl, but we didn’t tell her that. So Mitchum and I went off to try and find Trevor where we’d last seen him. But all we could remember from the night before was that it was a building on Fifth Avenue, nothing more, and Fifth ran for a hundred blocks. We didn’t know what to do. Then Bob remembered it was a building with a large doormat out front. So we drove along Fifth Avenue and at every building where there was a doormat, we stopped. And Mitchum would call to the doorman and say, ‘Was I here last night?’ And finally one doorman said yes, and Mitchum said, ‘And where did I go when I was here?’ And we went upstairs to somebody’s apartment, some girl, and Trevor was up there sleeping and we got him back to his wife.

“At the end of the week, everyone dispersed. But Mitchum wanted to stay on the road. And I wanted to see my sister, who lived in Washington, so we drove there in his car. And we stayed with my sister and her husband. I offered him the spare bed, but he said he would sleep on the floor. He really could adapt to any circumstances. I don’t recollect he had any plans after that. He had the ability to, as we say,
drift.
One day in Washington we said good-bye, and he got back into the car and drove off. I have no idea where he was headed and, I think, neither did he.”

Not long after he returned from the Caribbean, Mitchum ran into Johnny Mercer in Beverly Hills and told him about all the great music he had heard in
Trinidad and Tobago and perhaps even sang him a tune or two. Mercer sent him over to Capitol Records in Hollywood. Capitol had been talking to Robert about an album for some time, but no one had ever come up with a game plan. The calypso thing appealed to everybody. Harry Belafonte had recently made a huge splash with his recordings of authentic and quasi-authentic Caribbean songs, including the chart-topping hit “Banana Boat (Day-O),” and sexy, so-called exotica records, from high-octave Andean warbling to Balinese bachelor pad instrumentals, were all the rage. Now Robert Mitchum was going to be calypso’s great white hope. He went into the studio for a couple of weeks in March 1957 with a crew of cocktail jazz and rock ‘n’ roll pros and some backup singers and made like Lord Melody on a dozen jump-up tunes, including “Coconut Water,” “Matilda” (with an innovative calypso-rock arrangement), “I Learn a Merengue, Baby,” and “Mama, Looka Boo Boo.” The resulting album,
Calypso
—
is like so. . . ,
was an enticing romp, equal parts Belafonte, Martin Denny, and karaoke bar. It was the first time—until his series of accented film roles in the ‘60s and ‘70s—that Mitchum got to show off his talent for foreign accents, belting out the Carib ditties with scrupulously authentic intonations. As Caucasian calypso albums went, it was a masterpiece; and the cover photo—Mitch and a fistful of Jamaican rum in a Technicolor beach bar, complete with vaguely dusky maiden—was alone worth the selling price. But music lovers didn’t buy many copies, and the man went back to his day job.

In the summer, Mitchum was in Hawaii to film exteriors for
The Enemy Below,
the first of two films he made with the former boy crooner turned producer-director, Dick Powell. A drama of World War II set entirely at sea, it detailed a battle of wits between the commander of a U.S. destroyer and his enemy counterpart aboard a German submarine. Mitchum’s Captain Murrell was his first establishment hero since his last war movie,
One Minute to Zero;
and the part did not inspire much enthusiasm from the actor—it was what they called a “solid” performance.
The Enemy Below
was part of the late-’50s trend toward antiwar films, specifically the liberal humanist subset that included
The Young Lions
and
The Bridge on the River Kwai
—films that in the cool of peacetime attempted to put a human face on the old enemy. When Mitchum had started in war pictures, it was all about slaughtering “krauts” and “Japs.” Now the movies wanted you to understand them. A graduate of live television dramas, Wendell Mayes, wrote the script from a story by Comdr. D. A. Rayner. Powell and Mayes had originally intended the film to have a tragic, haunting end as Mitchum is trying to save Curt Jurgens’s U-boat captain. “The moment
Mitchum gets hold of him and starts pulling him aboard,” said Mayes, “the ship blows up, and at that point you pull back to watch this tremendous explosion, and you keep pulling back until there’s nothing left for the audience to see but the great vast empty sea. . . . There’s much more feeling if they should die, one finally trying to help the other after trying to kill him. But the studio said, ‘No, you like both of them. You can’t kill them. It’ll disappoint the audience.’ So we had the ending with them standing smoking a cigarette on the back end of the destroyer.”