Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (64 page)

Jack Warner had attempted to get Zinnemann to shoot the picture in Arizona; there ought to be a couple of kangaroos in the Phoenix Zoo, he told him. Zinnemann was adamant, saying that without the uncountable atmospheric details of the genuine locations
The Sundowners
would look like nothing more than “a half-assed Western.” Glancing again at the returns on Zinnemann’s
The Nun’s Story,
Warner agreed.

Mitchum arrived at Kingsford Smith Airport at three in the morning on September 28, straggled wearily from the plane he had been on for what seemed like weeks, only to see a mob of Aussie reporters charging him, he claimed, screaming, “How do you like our beer?”

Housed at the Hotel Australia in Sydney for a few days to rest and soak up the local speech patterns, Mitchum sparred with some of the nation’s impudent newspapermen, who trotted out a long list of the actor’s transgressions for amiable discussion. Sucking at a vodka and tomato juice, chain-smoking Mexican cigarettes, Mitchum claimed it was all a case of mistaken identity. “I’m no tough guy. . . . All the public knows is some silver, chromium-plated jerk. How could they really know what I’m like?” And as for that marijuana beef, Mitchum explained once again that his conviction had been removed from the record. “Well, all this was news to me,” wrote one Down Under Winchell next day. “No mention of this
expunging
the conviction never [sic] got to Australia. But try as I might, I couldn’t budge Bob Mitchum from his story. So that was the sum total: he isn’t a jailbird, he isn’t a drunk, he isn’t a brawler. And he was too big for me to argue with. So I left.”

With a cast made up largely of English and American actors, Zinnemann prayed they would all be able to approximate an Oz accent that would at least not sound ridiculous. Mitchum astounded him. “His Australian accent was perfect; he had the uncanny knack of making any accent sound as though he had been born with it.” Zinnemann found Bob amusing and delightful company, was much taken with his “colorful” way of expressing himself. “If, for instance, he had to go to the toilet, he would say, ‘I’ve got to drain my lizard,’” Zinnemann said. “He is one of the wittiest and most respectful men I have ever met.”

Deborah Kerr, arriving with boyfriend Peter Viertel, the movie writer and novelist, renewed her respectful love affair with Mitchum. “It was an honor to feed her lines,” Mitchum said, “even in this godforsaken country.”

They began filming in the area around the small town of Cooma. Mitchum moved into a hired house. He had a cook, a chauffeur, and an English secretary/manservant. He fished in the local “alpine” stream and caught a single trout. The weather was bitterly cold, and fires burned in every room of the house. It poured rain and production shut down. From the start, Mitchum seemed to react badly to the aggressively starstruck Australian public. “He didn’t get along with the Aussies very well,” said Fred Zinnemann. “He felt victimized and outraged by the blunt possessiveness of the local fans and autograph-hunters.”

In Cooma he was followed everywhere he went. An audience gathered to watch him eat a steak in a local restaurant, standing stock-still for each course as if they were watching a play. The gawkers, a foul mood, and the rotten weather sent Mitchum into hiding in his villa at the edge of town. He was reportedly “bored stiff,” but seldom ventured outside. “He’s like a caged tiger waiting for production to start,” said his shuddering personal assistant, Brian Own-Smith of London. “He’s a regular Lonely Garbo,” wrote one newshawk. Cooma’s citizenry kept their eyes open, but spottings of the American movie star were rare and were much talked about when they occurred. There were tales told that he had insulted a woman in a hotel and that he had “jobbed” a man in a barber’s shop. “He’s a real sleepy lizard when he’s sitting in the sun,” a postman was quoted. “Then I watched him cross the street. He’s the breathing image of Paddy Carmody, I tell you!” An eleven year old had a run-in on the road and reporters rushed to gather her story. “He gave me his autograph,” said Bobundra’s Jill Singleton. “Gee, he’s a beaut bloke.”

One Sydney reporter on the scene managed to wrangle his way inside the Mitchum manse and found the actor fixing an onion-laced beef stew. “Robert’s a real homebody,” said Own-Smith. “He’s a marvelous cook, the dishes he makes are delicious! He went into Cooma twice, but many people followed him. Of course Robert likes meeting people and signing autographs but he doesn’t like it when they crush all around him. Some people try to be too smart. They push an old piece of torn paper under his nose and say, ‘Sign this, you!’ and not even ‘please.’ That’s when Robert jumps up and grabs them around the neck and says, ‘Where are your manners, buster?’” In the kitchen Mitchum stood over a bubbling concoction while a maid scrubbed vegetables, the chauffeur searched for black pepper, and the valet drank vodka beside the broom cupboard.

“These rumors that my first housekeeper left because I was walking around undressed are wrong. I let her go because she never smiled. . . . I told her, ‘Wash your hands, little lady, we don’t need you around here any more. . . .’ When the hell does it stop raining? . . . Sure, I get about two hundred thousand bucks for this picture, but I don’t see any of it. Every cent of it goes into a Swiss company. It’s held in trust for my kids. . . . ‘Jobbed’ a man in a barber shop? Do I look like a guy who’s been near a barber shop? . . . I don’t meet any people. I’m here for work. Pubs—I don’t go into them. Not much. I like mixing my own drinks at home. I like my own cooking. . . . If you like, you can just call me Mother.”

When Paul De Coque, the young Cooma man Warners had hired to drive Mitchum around, learned that a close relative had fallen ill in Sydney, Mitchum gave him several hundred dollars and told him to take the company station wagon. “If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to let me know,” Mitchum said.

He spent a pleasant day with
The Sundowners’
author, Jon Cleary. The Sydney
Sun
reported it with the headline “B
OB’S
N
OT A
S
LOB
.” Cleary was quoted for the record: “Robert Mitchum is anything but a droopy-eyed slob once you get to know him. He is extremely well read and writes beautiful poetry.”

On November 12, Dorothy Mitchum arrived in Sydney from California for a ten-day location visit, and reporters swarmed her flight, too.

“This Mrs. Mitchum’s quite a doll,” said the man from the
Daily Telegraph.
“Tall and slim and built to all the right specifications. ‘I’m traveling reasonably light,’ she announced when she arrived and wearily deposited a mink coat and a gigantic stack of parcels on top of her luggage. ‘Usually I have to lug a whole strange assortment of things along for Robert. Records and sunglasses and what have you, because he’s always giving things away’ We know, Mrs. M., we know. When we shot down to see him in Cooma he gave us quite a hangover!”

At the end of the month Dorothy had returned home, and
The Sundowners
company headed for Port Augusta in the south. From here they would be commuting most days to the sheep station at Iron Knob, a forty-minute drive from the port. Arriving at tiny Whyalla Airport where reporters and fans clamored in the 104-degree heat, Mitchum, looking like a “shaggy caveman” to one observer and hiding his “sleepy peepers” behind outsized sunglasses, brushed aside the crowds and motored off to the luxury cruiser
Corsair III
he had chartered at a cost of a hundred pounds a week. Dina Merrill recalled, “We saw little of him after work. Everyone else—except for Deborah, who found a little house, but she had most of her meals with us—was staying at this little hotel.
We took over the whole place except for a couple of itinerant salesmen passing through from time to time. There were only four of us had their own bathroom, and I was very fortunate I was one of them! And they were the smallest rooms you ever saw in your life. Mitchum, though, spent all his time on his boat out in the harbor. He wanted to get away from all the people who were bothering him. But young ladies were known to swim out there to the boat. It was rather amusing—the women trying to climb on the boat and Mitchum trying to keep them away.”

Adhering to the code of the sea, perhaps, Mitchum eventually let a few of these aquatic intruders come on board. Some local “sheilas” happily confessed to attending a “wow of a party” on the shaggy man’s cruiser.

Each morning the company boarded vehicles to take them to the sheep station at Iron Knob, a long, bumpy ride across the hot, barren, fly-infested countryside. “You can’t imagine how hot it was, how dry and dusty,” said Mitchum. “I was clean only twice during the entire shooting.”

“The dust flew along the whole road,” said Dina Merrill. “It was terrible. I shared a driver and car with Peter Ustinov, who made it at least bearable. He liked to drive and so we used to put the driver in the backseat and the two of us would sit up front, and Peter would sing a different opera every day, not only singing the parts but doing the instruments. He had us laughing so hard we couldn’t get out of the car when we got there.”

At Iron Knob Mitchum encountered something even more intimidating than the local autograph seekers. “Those sheep in Australia stand as high as a pony, and I didn’t know where the hair left off and the meat started,” he said. He was always very tenderly disposed toward animals, and the prospect of shearing the plumply beautiful four-hundred-pound merinos—and doing it at top speed, taking the entire fleece off in one piece—filled him with dread. “He was terrified of cutting off a nipple, or a vein running close to the surface under the sheep’s left jaw,” Fred Zinnemann recalled. “This would make the sheep bleed to death. Mitchum was unable to do the job without first having several bottles of beer.”

The actor was more in his element during the film’s big brawl between the two rival gangs of sheepshearers. Now at last he found common ground with the Aussies who, on a merciless 108-degree afternoon, took to the action with ecstatic enthusiasm, slugging, jumping, breaking ribs, continuing long after Zinnemann and several assistants had repeatedly screamed, “Cut!” Mitchum, said the director, “had great fun.”

.   .   .

On December 17 Mitchum, Kerr, Ustinov, and others from the production boarded a Pan Am Boeing 707 headed for the States and a Christmas break before a final few weeks of interior filming in London. Reporters and others once again dogging his trail, Mitchum remained grumpy and incommunicative, saying only that he had seen little of the country he was leaving, had done nothing else but work, and was completely “cheesed off.” Harumphing his way to the aircraft, Mitchum was intercepted by a small girl and appeared to visibly soften at her request for an autograph.

“I have a little seven-year-old daughter, too,” Mitchum said, and scribbled on the Aussie girl’s pad: “In a country which with casual aplomb regards the anachronism of the kangaroo and the platypus—the being homo sapien is a disgusting oddity—Merry Christmas, Bob Mitchum.”

He then picked up his bag and boarded the plane.

Mitchum’s performance in
The Sundowners
met with universal acclaim. Perhaps the unusual backdrop and a contrived accent helped the critics to see beyond the widely perceived notion of Mitchum as an actor who simply “played himself.” As Paddy Carmody, a living, breathing creation without a hint of artifice or theatricality, Mitchum gave perhaps the greatest demonstration of his supreme command of a naturalistic acting technique that was as rare as it was—generally—underappreciated. (Of course, this is not to deny that the charming but irresponsible and selfish vagabond Carmody had possibly more than a little in common with the man who portrayed him.)

It was a unique and wonderful movie, had a warm humanity, a jaunty sweetness, an enticing, lyrical aimlessness. The simple yet poetic imagery, the rowdy humor, the sense of the sublime in the everyday brought to mind the work of John Ford but minus Ford’s sentimental or melodramatic excesses.
The Sundowners,
even Mitchum had to admit, was no gorilla picture. The film received numerous award citations and nominations at year’s end, with Mitchum named as Best Actor by the venerable National Board of Review in New York.
The Sundowners
got five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Deborah Kerr, but Mitchum, to many people’s surprise, was not recognized by the Academy. The film was a good earner at its initial engagements in New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities, but its returns faded in the rest of the country. Zinnemann believed that a misconceived and misleading publicity campaign accentuating the sexuality of Deborah Kerr (”the impression given that she . . . could hardly wait for the sun to go down so she could lay her hands on Bob”) harmed the film’s potential success.

Although contractually entitled to top billing for
The Sundowners,
Mitchum ceded the position to Deborah Kerr at her request. “I told them by all means . . . and that they could design a twenty-four sheet of me bowing to her, I couldn’t care less.”

His curiously unpleasant relations with Australia continued long after his final departure. The country served him with a substantial income tax bill for his
Sundowners
earnings. He refused to pay, claiming he had never been working for an Australian employer, but the Oz tax collectors harassed him for several years to come.

Mitchum remained in London to make
The Grass Is Greener
for producer-director Stanley Donen. It was an ersatz Noel Coward drawing room comedy about a high-born English couple and the restless wife’s tentative fling with a rich Texas tourist. The all-star production had Mitchum working once again with Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons (his third go-round with each) and for the first time with Gary Grant, who took over when Rex Harrison withdrew after the death of his wife, Kay Kendall.

Mitchum and Grant fell into a mild, undeclared rivalry. Grant fretted that Mitchum’s casual style was making him look overrehearsed, and whispered to wardrobe that Bob’s understarched shirts were perhaps a tad sloppy even for a Texan. Mitchum complained that his role seemed to be entirely a matter of saying, “Really?” and, “Oh?” in between Grant’s monologues. He liked Cary well enough, found him expectably charming, though rather odd and a solid square. “No sense of humor,” he told Chris Peachment and Geoff Andrew. “His humor is sort of old music-hall jokes. ‘What’s that noise down there? They’re holding an Elephant’s Ball? Well, I wish they’d let go of it, I’m trying to get some sleep!’ I guess that was when he was coming off his LSD treatment.”