Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (63 page)

There were barns, stables. Most of the farmland was tilled by contract, by tenant farmers who planted and harvested barley, corn, oats, wheat, and rye (“all the fixin’s for making whisky,” said Bob) and kept chickens, horses, hogs, and white-faced Herefords. It was a working farm, not a weekend resort. Not that Mitchum himself planned on doing much in the way of work when he was there. He was an actor, not a gentleman farmer. When he looked around the sprawling place, he saw privacy, seclusion, his own waterfront, room to breathe and fresh air to go with it. He wanted to loaf, go fishing, maybe get back to writing. “If anyone were to come there to visit with me, fine—just going there would be the sign of true friendship,” he said. It was as far away from Hollywood as you could get and still be in the same country.

They put the Mandeville place on the market and packed their bags. After more than two decades as a resident, he was kissing California good-bye. Came on a freight train, leaving a millionaire of global renown. Was he going to miss the Hollywood life? the columnists asked. “What Hollywood life?” Mitchum said. “I never traveled with the mob. I’ve only been to one movie star’s home, Kirk Douglas’s, and that was for all of ten minutes. All actors are freaks and I guess I’m a freak’s freak. If I walked into a restaurant here people held their breath—they just waited for me to walk up and sock someone.” In Maryland, he said, he was going to be just another citizen, trying to get through the day.

^*
David Atlee Phillips was later connected with the Bay of Pigs invasion and numerous other attention-getting CIA operations in North and Central America. Conspiracy buffs have claimed for him a part in the assassination of President Kennedy. In the early ‘60s, his brother James began writing a series of paperback spy novels under an alias: Philip Atlee. The books were notable for their imaginative detail regarding clandestine operations. Mitchum remained good friends with Jim for many years and spoke with David from time to time, and they may have been the source for some of Mitchum’s later “inside stories” of “spooks” and government plots and international conspiracies. James Atlee Phillips’s son, Shawn, a folk rock singer, performed on Donovan’s recording of “Sunshine Superman.” What else do you want to know?

W
ITHIN DAYS OF THE
Mitchum family’s arrival at their new tidewater residence in the spring of 1959, Robert had gone to his next job.
Home from the Hill,
based on the novel by William Humphrey and a script by Irving and Harriet Ravetch, was MGM’s latest foray into the then popular and surprisingly fertile Sleazy Southern Gentry genre. Ingredients common to this category were big old plantation houses, randy and/or cranky patriarchs and their neurotic sons and nymphomaniac daughters, nasty skeletons in the family closets (anything from drunken driving arrests to hereditary insanity), and lots of overripe, bourbon-and-magnolia-scented acting (examples of the genre include
The Long Hot Summer, The Sound and the Fury, Written on the Wind,
and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).

For two hundred thousand dollars plus a percentage of the gross, Mitchum agreed to play “Captain” Wade Hunnicutt, the ferociously masculine and debauched head of a wealthy East Texas family, husband to an embittered, sexually withdrawn wife (Eleanor Parker in the film), father to a sensitive “mamma’s boy” (George Hamilton) and—officially unacknowledged—to a manly bastard (George Peppard). The role had originally been earmarked for Clark Gable who became unavailable, but it is unlikely that Gable, two decades older and gentler with his screen image, would have been capable of anything like the violent, intimidating physical presence of Mitchum or the cruel arrogance of the actor’s uncompromising characterization. At the same time, it was revealing of a new stage of Mitchum’s career that the studio now considered him for this kind of mature role. The film’s director was Vincente Minnelli—at a
career peak, the Oscar for
Gigi
still warm in his hand as filming began—who had first worked with Mitchum in
Undercurrent
when the actor had played Robert Taylor’s fresh-faced younger brother. Now Mitch was forty-one and portraying a paterfamilias with a pair of grown sons. Were his days as a screen adventurer and love object fading into the past? reporters asked. All right with him if they were, Mitchum answered. Gray up my hair and let me play granpas, maybe they’ll stop plaguing me with work. He confessed he had only taken the part because of a promise of lots of time off and a location jaunt to an area of Mississippi where he’d heard there was excellent bream fishing.

For a month they filmed in Oxford, William Faulkner’s hometown. Mitchum found himself, so he said, once again hoodwinked, working long days without a break, the fishing tackle lying idle on the floor of his hotel room. The shooting went smoothly, Mitchum and the director working together with inspired synchronicity and a surprising enthusiasm for one another’s seemingly very different styles—Mitchum the king of just-do-it, outwardly antifussy moviemaking, Minnelli a delicate, aesthetic personality and a rapturous stylist who could spend all day getting a leaf in a gutter to lie just so before committing it to film. Mitchum told Vincente he had many acquaintances like Hunnicutt and was basing his interpretation of the character on some of these men. Perhaps in the philandering and violently macho captain he may have seen aspects of an even closer acquaintance from which to draw his inspiration.

Mitchum had been around long enough now, his reputation on- and off-screen looming large before him, that the cast’s two newcomers, the two Georges, tended for a while to stare and tremble when working with such a living legend.

“They were impressed because I was very impressive,” said Mitchum. “I was like someone an old cameraman used to describe when I was over at RKO. He was an Argentine-Italian and I think illiterate. He’d probably started out as Bessie Love’s gardener or something. To him, a woman artist was anyone who made over a thousand dollars a week. If she got less, she had to be a whore. Why else would she hang out with foulmouthed guys and juicers? I was an artist to Peppard and Hamilton in the same way.”

“I don’t know why Bob puts on his act,” said Minnelli. “Few actors I’ve worked with bring so much of themselves to a picture, and none do it with such total lack of affectation as Mitchum does.”

Speaking of affectation, both the young actors in the film were giving excellent performances, but Peppard’s came with a lot of baggage. He was fresh from the New York theater and Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, full of thespian the-orums and wary if not outright contemptuous of the ways of Hollywood.

“Have you studied the Stanislavsky Method?” he asked Mitchum.

“No,” said Mitchum, “but I’ve studied the Smirnoff Method.”

Peppard and Minnelli did not see eye to eye. The actor did not like to do certain of his more difficult scenes until he could really
feel
them. Minnelli (ignoring his own directorial fussiness) told Peppard that was fine for Greenwich Village but in the movies you started to “feel” the scene when you got off the bus at the location. The hot-tempered Peppard decided that instead of compromising he was going to tell Minnelli and MGM to shove it, and shared his decision with someone he imagined would understand, that rebellious spirit Bob Mitchum. To his surprise, the older man advised caution. Mitchum said, “It’ll be a very expensive hike. I’m sure the studio can sue you. I’m certain it will be your last job. Even though you think Minnelli is wrong, do it his way.”

After three weeks in Mississippi, they moved back to the Metro lot in Culver City for a month, then off on a second location trip to the town of Paris, Texas (”Minnelli shoots all his pictures in Paris,” Mitchum cracked), the actual setting of William Humphrey’s novel. Most of the two-week visit was spent filming a wild boar hunt,
Home from the Hill’s
great visual showpiece, which Minnelli put together with all the cinematic flourish of his greatest musical sequences. They filmed in an area near Paris that Gigi would not have found
sympathetique,
a wooded, sulfurous swamp filled with copperhead snakes and quicksand.

The final stage of the hunt, with the battle between the wild boar and the hunting dogs, was shot back on the MGM lot. A big boar was imported from Louisiana but was found dead on arrival. Instead a big pig was used, and tusks were glued to its face. To make it stagger and fall over, they shot it up with tranquilizers.

After the last six weeks at the studio, the lengthy film (with a final running time of two hours and thirty-two minutes) was completed early in August, by which time Mitchum was already in Ireland on another job. With
Some Came Running, Home from the Hill
was the finest of Minnelli’s operatic/neurotic wide-screen melodramas, a lurid, flamboyantly emotional and yet deeply incisive exploration of family life at its most destructive. Mitchum’s powerful performance as the fierce, ultimately poignant Captain Hunnicutt gave more credence to those, like Laughton and Huston, who envisioned the actor triumphing as one or another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Critics applauded Mitchum’s work, but they were more excited by the strong, youthful, and promising newcomer George Peppard. What could you expect, Mitchum would say. He had been around a long time since the press had first fussed over him in
G.I. foe.
Yesterday’s news and then some. It was like that old joke you
heard actors telling around the lunch table, the rise and fall trajectory of a Hollywood star:

“Who is Robert Mitchum?”

“Get me Robert Mitchum.”

“Get me a Robert Mitchum type.”

“Who is Robert Mitchum?”

He began a new three-picture commitment to United Artists with a film produced jointly by Raymond Stross and DRM,
The Night Fighters
(aka
A Terrible Beauty),
an action drama of Irish Republican Army terrorists attacking British interests during World War II. As Dermot O’Neill, Mitchum would play yet another revolutionary and his most reluctant hero to date, a dim and drunken boy-o who joins the IRA on a whim, finds it not much to his liking, and in the end turns informer. Though Hollywood usually took the freedom fighters’ side in films about “the troubles,” this was a British production and so a more
objective
take on the subject, with IRA members here including ruthless opportunists associating with Nazis and the protagonist a good man at heart who sees the light and betrays his revolutionary friends. At the least it was unusual and intriguing subject matter for a film, and its appeal to Mitchum—revolution, exotic setting, outsider hero, drinking scenes—was apparent.

Mitchum hired his
One Minute to Zero
director, Tay Garnett, whose career had fallen on hard times. He had not gotten a feature assignment in five years and was reduced to directing half-hour television programs. Thinking that perhaps his low fortunes were due to bad habits, he had given up drinking and become a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Garnett thought
The Night Fighters
script lousy and believed it would invite invidious comparisons with Ford’s classic
The Informer,
but he was in no position to promote negative thinking and hoped it could all be made right once they got to Dublin.

It wasn’t. The film is best remembered, if at all, for Mitchum’s impeccable Irish accent. “There is still an elemental force in the story,” he said. “But it’s like looking for a diamond that’s been covered in sewage. You know it’s there, but man, does it smell.”

An incident in a Dublin bar after a day of filming at the Ardmore Studio got more attention than the movie ever would. A short, flyweight Irishman came up to Mitchum and poked him in the ribs with a pencil.

“Hey, movie star,” he said, “give me your autograph. It’s for me wife.”

Mitchum said, “Look at the leprechaun,” and told him to wait until he had finished his drink. “But, he didn’t want to wait and told me so.”

Mitchum took the man’s paper and pencil and wrote, “FUCK YOU,” signed it “KIRK DOUGLAS,” and handed it back.

The man returned, having read the inscription, pulled Mitchum around, and threw a fist at his right eye. Mitchum looked down and said, “If that’s the best you can do, little lady, you better come back with your girlfriends.”

Richard Harris, Bob’s drinking buddy and fellow actor in
The Night Fighters,
said, “He hit Mitchum full in the face when he wasn’t looking. Mitch could have killed him, but he just shrugged it off like he does in film fights. He was wonderful.”

The man returned with a few more autograph hunters. Mitchum head-butted one of them and sent him reeling. Then two of the others attacked, inspiring Richard Harris and a couple of Abbey Theatre Players to come to Bob’s aid. A huge “donnybrook” ensued, and the police were summoned to break it up. A colorful consensus account of the brawl animated the world’s newspapers the next day, most of them delighted by the possibility that bruiser Mitchum had finally met his match—“M
ITCHUM
R
EFUSES
F
IGHT WITH
M
UCH
S
MALLER
M
AN
,” “M
ITCHUM
F
LIPS FOR
I
RISHMAN
,” and “B
LACK-EYED
M
ITCHUM
I
S
M
EEK
,” said the headlines, one account describing how the movie star was “tossed for a loop by a short, limping Irishman,” while another claimed the brawny Yank had been given a “ju-jitsu flip” and knocked out cold by a midget.

Warner Bros, and Fred Zinnemann were producing a film of Australian Jon Cleary’s highly regarded novel
The Sundowners.
It was the picaresque story of the footloose Carmody family, Paddy, Ida and son Sean, and their wandering adventures in the rural Outback, the title derived from the family’s nomadic existence—home was wherever they happened to be at sundown. In 1959, after a series of distinguished box office and critical successes
(High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma, The Nun’s Story),
Zinnemann was at his zenith, the standard-bearer for mature, adult, big-budget filmmaking. His movies were the sort the tastemakers considered good entertainment and good for you, too, and his projects and associates were invariable award nominees and frequent winners. For
The Sundowners,
Zinnemann cast Deborah Kerr as the loving, long-suffering wife (he had directed her to an Oscar nomination in
From Here to Eternity)
and Robert Mitchum as the beer-swilling, sheep-shearing, irresponsible Paddy. (Zinnemann had long hoped to work with him and had originally cast him opposite Kerr in
Eternity,
but Howard Hughes had refused a loan-out). Kerr’s involvement convinced Mitchum to sign on, though it would mean flying to Australia with barely a day off after his Irish sojourn. Others hired for the film
were Peter Ustinov as a comical remittance man, Glynis Johns as a saucy hotel keeper, Michael Anderson, Jr., as Sean, Dina Merrill as a station owner’s wife, and a few native sons like Chips Rafferty taking supporting roles. The Carmody’s racehorse was to be played by a well-known retired turf champion, Silver Shadow, and pulling the family cart would be a thirty-year-old named Sam, once awarded the title Most Handsome Milk Horse in a Sydney beauty contest.