Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (73 page)

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”We’re all excited, thinking this must be some
incredible
restaurant the way Hawks has been talking it up. And we get to this
gas station
outside Nogales—a cafe run by the people who run the gas station. But, dammit, the food was just as great as he said it was!”

“S
OME PEOPLE IN THE
Defense Department kept nudgin’ me—’Why don’t you go find out?’ Next thing I knew I was fallin’ off an airplane at Ton So Nhut . . . and it’s 117 degrees.”

The conflict in Vietnam was raging, no end in sight. At home, public opposition to American involvement in the war was becoming more heated, soon to explode. Morale had begun its steady downward crawl among the fighting troops. Hoping to raise the soldiers’ spirits, as well as provoke some much-needed positive press, the USO—in addition to sending out vaudeville shows of the Bob Hope sort—had been organizing more low-key “handshake tours,” asking Hollywood celebrities to go to Vietnam at government expense and spend a little time meeting and talking to some of the boys in the camps and hospitals. Those who went included Robert Stack, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Lana Turner, John Wayne, Hugh O’Brian, and Martha Raye (who became a fearless virtual fixture in the war zone). Mitchum had never shown much interest in the war till now (he had barely spoken a word in public about World War II, for that matter). But maybe, he said, it was time he had a look at what they were doing over there with all that tax money. Protect his interests. It also sounded like a hell of an adventure.

Flown out on a government aircraft, Mitchum spent his first days in Saigon, wined and dined in tropical colonial splendor, meeting and greeting the military elite (General Westmoreland awarded him an autographed glossy), hearing the company line on the war. He was taken to military hospitals and toured the wards filled with injured Americans, young guys with missing
arms and legs and faces half blown off. The visits had their intended effect—it wasn’t easy to remain neutral or indifferent about the war when you saw what the enemy—whatever their cause—was doing to these hometown boys. He was taken out to villages and shown good works projects, Americans putting in sewage systems, building schoolhouses. He was impressed, and pissed off. Why didn’t they show any of this noble shit on the news back home?

The greater part of Mitchum’s two-week visit was to be spent in the field, roaming by helicopter and light aircraft from one U.S. encampment to another, fanning across the jungles north of the capital city. Dressed in the khaki safari suit favored by TV correspondents and Hollywood bwanas, Mitchum, accompanied by an army public relations man or other assigned “minder,” would drop from the skies onto tiny landing fields the size of a parking space, where he would be welcomed by the top brass and shown around. The usual itinerary included a quick tour of the base and an hour or so of shaking hands and making small talk, encouraging words for the troops—then back to the Huey and the next camp on the list. He posed for pictures, signed autographs for anyone who wanted one, and collected phone numbers and messages from kids who knew their moms would be thrilled to hear Robert Mitchum telling them their boys were OK.

Special Forces veteran Daniel Carpenter, stationed at a Green Beret encampment “so far out in the bush that everyone seemed to have forgotten about it,” would recall that the coded announcement of a VIP visit was greeted as an oncoming headache by the camp commander until the VIP was revealed to be Robert Mitchum.

“No shit,” said the North Carolinian captain. “You ever see
Thunder Road?”

Mitchum arrived by helicopter with a diffident navy lieutenant, got the usual grand tour, shook some hands. The navy man wanted to wrap things up and get back in the helicopter, but Mitchum said, “Relax, man. Anybody got a drink around here?” They trudged over to the local clubhouse, a contraption made of ammunition boxes and
Playboy
centerfolds. Mitchum asked what they charged for a drink, then asked how much it would be to buy the whole bar. The captain didn’t know. Mitchum told him to figure it out. Then, Carpenter wrote, Mitchum “took a fat roll of bills from his pocket. It cost him a couple of hundred to buy the bar. The troopers drank free, on his tab, for months.”

Mitchum played some craps, lost most of his roll, and took off.

Herb Speckman, another Vietnam War veteran in the field during Mitchum’s tour, recalled his first sighting of the roving movie star:

“The gentleman landed at Dong Ha air strip and they wanted to take him up to Quangtri Province, where there was no runway. We didn’t get many entertainers that far out, maybe two in all that time bothered to drop by. And Mr. Mitchum was going by jeep, about a ten-mile drive. They were worried about the man and decided to assign one of the most talented of our pilots—which of course would be myself—to escort the little convoy. Mitchum got off the airplane and got into a jeep. I was told to take care of him, flying overhead in an LI9, stay close, make sure they didn’t get attacked, that they got there all right. I watched them all load up, and then I got in my airplane, fired up, and followed them. And I stayed quite close, and then I came up from behind to get a better look. I made one pass and tore the antenna off the jeep that he was in. Scared the shit out of him. He was extremely irate. It was probably a twelve-foot whip antenna, and the wing of the airplane took it right off, which didn’t bother me. I got a little closer than I intended. I didn’t intend to kill anybody, just to give them a little fright. And I had a good three feet to spare before I would have actually hit Mitchum’s head. But, you know, if you never had a big engine suddenly come at you from behind, just missing your head by a few feet, it can give you a little scare.”

“Yeah, I remember when Mitchum came up there to Quangtri,” said Norman Peterson, a pilot and air liaison officer at Mitchum’s destination in the jungle. “He was the only one besides Martha Raye. Came in by jeep, which was a little dangerous coming through there. We called it Indian country. Friend of mine buzzed him, knocked his antenna off. He was angry. Said, ‘Wait till I get ahold of the SOB that buzzed us!’ See, if the enemy had attacked him on the road, he had no communication. But nobody attacked Mitchum. I don’t know who’d want to.

“Yeah, Mitchum came in,” said Peterson. He was wearing a bright pink shirt. It wasn’t becoming. He went over to the officers’ club, an old tin-roofed French building with ten bar stools, and he drank up my bottle of Johnny Black Label I was saving for me and another guy and the other guy got killed. Mitchum came in sober, got drunk, and they had to carry him out of there. Mostly what we had was cheap stuff, but Mitchum must have smelled my Black Label. Black Label was hard to find at that time. I had to bring it up there from Thailand. And I was sitting at the table with the rest of them, and the army said, ‘Pete, you got a bottle of Black Label.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, present it to Mitchum.’ The way they said it, I didn’t have much choice. And Mitchum uncorked the thing and he didn’t even give me a drink of it. I told him, ‘Give me a drink.’ I put my glass out. Nothing happened.”

Herb Speckman landed the tiny L19 and came to the camp to see what was
happening. “It was the standard routine; the big man stands around, we all spit, shake his hand, he says, ‘Hoo-haa.’ He didn’t sing or dance for us or anything. There was an Australian one time did a little magic act and brought in a couple of girl dancers. That was more appreciated, to tell you the truth, rather than the movie stars coming, saying, ‘Here I am, boys, touch me.’ I went over, shook his hand. He said, ‘Oh, so you’re the guy . . . That was damn close, mister.” I said, ‘Yeah, a little closer than I like, but it didn’t scare me.’ He kind of saw the humor in it by now. We shot the shit for two minutes. What else were we supposed to do, kiss the hem of his cloak? He drank a lot—but that’s OK, most of us did—and went away.”

“He just sort of slobbed into the jeep and he left,” said Peterson. “I think the only reason he came up from Quantri is somebody told him there was a bottle of Black Label scotch there. And he found it.”

These celebrity tours were not intended to be particularly dangerous—a killed or captured movie star would
not
be good publicity for the war—but Mitchum would come to claim numerous hair-raising adventures and close encounters with the enemy during his Vietnam sojourn. There was the time, he said, when his helicopter transport got lost, wandered across enemy lines for a while, finally found an American base, and touched down just as the place was bracing for a major attack.

“Robert Mitchum? What are you doing here?” asked the CO, as Mitchum recollected it for journalist Jerry Roberts.

“Anything to get out of the house,” said Mitchum. “I take off, eleven minutes later they got hit—six survivors. . . . That was the beginning of the end of the Assau Valley Massacre.”

“He got back from Vietnam with ninety million tiny scraps of paper,” said Reva Frederick. “Just about every boy he met over there gave him a message to take back. Pieces of paper with phone numbers, names. And Robert sat down for days and called every number. Just little brief conversations with wives and mothers and fathers. ‘I just saw your son and he wanted me to call and say hello. He’s doing fine, looks good. He’s doing a good job over there.’ Called every one.”

Mitchum signed up for a second tour, and in February 1967, spent two more weeks roaming among the troop encampments and military hospitals. On his way home, he spoke at a news conference in Bangkok, Thailand, offering a
spirited and at times baldly propagandistic defense of the Pentagon’s enterprise. The United States, he told reporters, was
not
engaged in a war in Vietnam. It was strictly a self-defense action. “We are trying to build schools, roads, and hospitals. But the enemy is shooting, and the Allies must shoot back to defend themselves.” The Vietcong were enemies of humanity, Mitchum explained. Referring to the antiwar efforts at home and abroad, he said enigmatically, “Because of a very emotional involvement in Vietnam, the American image leaves something to be desired. We have the largest standing army in the world. But there is no need to display our power. Power rests in the unity of the people.”

Mitchum’s two USO tours were ample evidence of his patriotism and bravery, but he nevertheless seemed to feel a need to embellish the visits with a greater strategic importance and an unlikely personal glory. He told reporters that he had certainly
not
gone to ‘Nam on any
handshaking tours
but on what he referred to as “undefined missions sanctioned by the government.” Through the years, and depending on the occasion and the hour of the evening, he would claim to have participated in as many as 152 missions, undefined or otherwise, many of them hush-hush dealings with CIA “spooks” and the like. Reva Frederick recalled, “I would hear him telling these stories to interviewers who were very gullible and were happy to get a good story, and nobody ever checked anything. I’d think, Holy shit, where is this stuff coming from! I’d just laugh and so would he, afterward.”

Returning from Saigon, in his safari suit, lugging a souvenir crossbow, Mitchum stopped over in Honolulu. He looked like shit, people told him. He told them he hadn’t slept in nearly three weeks. He put in a call to Dorothy.

“I expect tears of rejoicing that I’d been spared and that I’m back in one piece. And then she says, ‘You know, I’ve sold the place.’ And I say, ‘What place?’ And she, ‘Our place. Belmont Farms. . . . I sold the farm—cows, farmhand, and all.’”

Dorothy had gotten to hate their Maryland paradise. Mitchum could stroll in, feed the horses and watch television, then slip off in the night to London or Mexico. There were snowstorms in the winter, heat, humidity, and bugs in the summer. Every time a wasp bit her, he said, Dorothy would look at him accusingly. “Sell the joint, if that’s how you feel,” Mitchum had told her more than once. “We can live at the Waldorf-Astoria for what it costs here.”

Still in Honolulu, Mitchum called Reva in Hollywood. “You’re in the middle of moving,” she said, “so I’ve prepared a list of pictures you may care to do. It’ll solve your problem of finding a roof over your head.”

He picked
The Way West,
three months in the Northwest. It was from his friend “Bud” Guthrie’s novel, the Oregon Trail jazz. The book had gone through a blender and came out like
Peyton Place Takes a Wagon Train,
and the backers were sure it would be a smash. Directing the film would be Bob’s friend from
Track of the Cat
and the
Blood Alley
debacle, Andrew V. McLaglen. Trained by Wellman, Budd Boetticher, and John Ford, McLaglen had gone on to a successful career in television and features, becoming one of the very last Hollywood filmmakers to specialize in the Western.

“I went to have lunch with Mitchum and Harold Hecht, the producer,” McLaglen remembered. “Kirk Douglas was signed to the part of the senator. And we flat-out said to Bob, ‘Which part do you want? The husband or the scout? Take either part, whichever you want.’ And all during lunch he wouldn’t say, just ‘I don’t care; I don’t care.’ And he never would say. So what the hell, we gave him the part we thought he was best for, the scout. And he shrugged, and I’m awfully glad it worked out the way it did, because Widmark was perfect for the other part and Mitchum was perfect for the scout.”

Fine, Mitchum said. Love to play a trail scout. Smaller part, more time off. Good fishing in Oregon.

It was an enormous and complicated production, and for McLaglen and his crew as much a feat of engineering as of cinematic craft. Rivers had to be forded, wagons had to be raised and lowered from the tops of cliffs by antiquated means. It was no picnic for the cast either. “Physically, that was as tough as it could possibly be,” said Jack Elam, Weatherby in the film. “Working on the cliffs and in the sand and all that shit. On top of a mountain, the top of a ski run that was bone dry in the summer. Everybody had to take a ski lift to the top. All the equipment went up by ski lift. You’re up there, hundreds of feet up, nothing but rocks to fall on. Goddamn scary. And no facilities, just bare rocks. If you had to go to the bathroom, it was a matter of a half hour down and a half hour up, and we’re up there all day. And then long days in the river, cold water, a lot of risks of drowning. Lowering wagons down the cliff, and we all had to take part in it. Some people landed in the hospital. So the whole picture was one tough son of a gun. But Andy—McLaglen—he was wonderful through the whole thing. Stayed calm through thick and thin.”