Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (89 page)

The day after attending the New York premiere and party, Mitchum and his costars boarded a flight for Los Angeles, where they were scheduled to do it all over again for the West Coast. The first-class section of the TWA flight out of JFK was no-smoking, but Mitchum had lit up anyway. A businesswoman from New York, sitting one row ahead, suffered from various allergies and was not pleased with the gray clouds wafting her way. She turned around in her seat and explained that there was a smoking section in the rear of the plane. Mitchum jabbed out his cigarette. “I wonder which way’s the no-farting section,” he said. A little later, the allergic woman looked up to see Mitchum suddenly standing very close before her. Standing in the aisle he shifted around so that his back was to her, then bent way over, bracing himself on the back of a seat, and farted in her face. It was not just any fart, witnesses would recall in awe, but something long and deep and sonorous, like nothing they had ever heard before. It very nearly knocked the aircraft off course. Mitchum straightened up, turned, and made his way back to his seat.

The Winds of War was
broadcast between February 6 and February 13. It was a television sensation. While some critics derided the cliched melodrama and the middlebrow pretensions to Tolstoyan grandeur, many heaped praise on the epic series, and the huge viewing audience was enthralled—by the grand scale, the sweeping narrative, the brilliant action scenes. Mitchum received for the most part hostile reviews—they variously thought him miscast, too old, too inert, too heavy, and too disinterested. There were remarkably few sensitive to
the rare and formidable presence and sense of gravity he bestowed upon
Winds’
American hero. Noble, indomitable, he moved through the story’s eighteen hours of troubled waters like a kind of human battleship. One solid supporter of Mitchum’s work turned out to be the author and scriptwriter. “Robert Mitchum rose to the moment with brilliant professionalism and stunning authority,” wrote Herman Wouk. “Authority was the key to Victor Henry in my books, and authority, unchallengeable authority, was what Robert Mitchum brought to the screen.”

In the media blitz that surrounded the “landmark” broadcast, the reviews were almost an afterthought.
The Winds ofWar
sparked the most extensive, distinguished, and respectful publicity Mitchum had ever received. In full navy whites, he took the cover of
TIME
magazine, still a rare mark of distinction in those not yet pop-culture-saturated days. The cover of
TV Guide,
too.
People, Newsweek,
and many more printed lengthy pieces covering the epic miniseries, giving most of their copy over to the sixty-five-year-old star, one of the last of the great Hollywood giants, they all agreed, descended from the big screen pantheon to show the pygmies of television how it was done.

In the midst of this nonstop idolotry came a bombshell. Of course. Things had been too happy, too polite. The praise, the puff pieces, all that talk about Robert Mitchum, the living national monument. It just wasn’t. . . right.

In February, timed to coincide with the
Winds
broadcast, a six-page profile was printed in
Esquire
magazine: “R
OBERT
M
ITCHUM
G
IVES A
R
ARE
I
NTERVIEW
” by a New York-based
TIME
reporter named Barry Rehfeld. The interview had actually taken place the previous August, while Mitchum was shooting the Cannon picture in Los Angeles, and then on a second day up in Santa Barbara. At the Montecito house, in the morning, Mitchum is relaxed and scatting, some old jokes, some new ones: Duke’s four-inch lifts, murdering Shelley Winters (”Best thing that ever happened to her”). For lunch they go to a local Mexican restaurant. The movie star orders some margaritas and food and takes in the scenery: a woman with a large rear end wiggles by. “Make a great hoop shot,” Mitchum mutters. “Like in sodomy. . . Well, she has a rather commodious ass.” Back to the house and he hits the tequila, continues riffing on his simple virtues. Works cheap, works quick, and doesn’t have to commune with the white powder and a spoon like some of these guys today. He sounds off about the indignities of publicity. Why do it? Rehfeld asks him. The producers, the publicists force him into it, Mitchum says, suddenly getting a little . . . edgy. “Like Eichmann said, ‘Ee’s my job.’” He tells Rehfeld that he and some buddies wanted to go to Israel wearing big buttons: I like Eich. Then: “How do you say ‘trust me’ in Jewish? ‘Fuck you.’”

Mitchum is warming up. More double shots of tequila. He talks about Vietnam, shares some of his “inside” skinny on the war, how it could have been over like that, how they could have bombed the dam at Haiphong, washed all of’em out to sea. Rehfeld asks what about “moral principles”?

“You can design a moral principle for rape if you’re so inclined.”

“As Hitler did?” the interviewer asks.

“Hitler needed lebensraum.”

“And the slaughter of six million Jews?”

“So the Jews say.”

“So they say?”

“I don’t know. People dispute that.”

Mitchum changes subjects. Pres. Ronald Reagan’s name comes up. Mitchum has known him for nearly forty years, he says, Ronnie the Eagle Scout. He’s for him because he’s an old pal but has no idea what he stands for. Never votes. It doesn’t matter, he explains. He once met people in Europe, they told him how the future would go, and every word of it came true. The whole world—didn’t Rehfeld understand?—was run by an international cartel of business. He tells him to investigate
that
story. “Why don’t you try . . . if you want to
die . . .
You’ll find out how powerful the cartel is.”

He goes on: about international bankers, about the CIA, about Henry Ford and a “sneaky hebe” Hitler contributor named Ralph Beaver Strass-burger. Dorothy enters the room and tells them to break it up. Mitchum keeps ranting. Dorothy tells him to
shut up.
A simmering Mitchum asks what exactly was Rehfeld planning to write about?

Dorothy gets the reporter out of the den while Mitchum, in the background, can be heard: “I guess I’m not the best interview in the world.”

At least he hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

A few moments in the living room with the calming Dorothy and then Rehfeld eagerly gets out of the house and into his car. He is about to start the engine when Mitchum suddenly appears framed in the window. He opens the door, looks down at the startled reporter, and hands him a Diet Sunkist orange soda and some napkins for the long ride home.

Though Mitchum’s impolitic, bizarre, and contemptible comments would in fact have little effect on the generally idolatrous treatment he received for much of the rest of the year—salutes, tributes, a Robert Mitchum Day in Los Angeles hosted by the mayor—a small but persistent outcry followed him for months. The militant Jewish Defense League threw a press conference with
Mitchum’s photo—a portrait from
Esquire,
arms folded defiantly, in his finest Members’ Only jacket—laid on top of a Nazi flag and a banner: “Is Pug Henry Really a Nazi?” The JDL’s Irv Rubin, wearing a button that read “I Am a Zionist Hoodlum,” accused Mitchum of being a Hitler sympathizer. He said they had hired a detective to find the actor’s residence, and they would make a midnight demonstration. “If he doesn’t apologize, we have to do everything in our power, legally of course, to get him to . . . but I can’t be responsible for everything that happens in Mitchum’s life.”

Columnists requested a clarification of the actor’s views. Mitchum resorted to a tried-and-true formula: denial and blaming the other guy. “I’m sorry there’s such an unnecessary flap, but I guess there isn’t a great deal I can do about it,” said the actor. “I certainly did not plan to offend anyone, and I’m very sorry if I’ve upset or offended anyone.” Mitchum claimed it was all a mistake, a put-on, a misinterpretation by the interviewer. Much of what was printed reflected Mitchum going into the character of the bigoted old coach he played in
That Championship Season,
he said. Rehfeld must have thought he was speaking for himself when he was actually quoting the intolerant character! Which sounded awfully like Mitchum’s dismissal of the raucous Grover Lewis piece in
Rolling Stone
years before—
that
reporter, said the actor, had made it all up from one of George Higgins’s novels.

Mitchum: “I occasionally say something outrageous so they’ll say: he’s not well, let’s leave him alone.” There were plenty of people familiar with Bob’s penchant for harsh and shocking rhetoric when he was drinking, the references to “niggers” and “spies” and “hebe agents,” the description of Kirk Douglas as a “bowlegged kike” and of David Selznick as “one of those wet-lipped, sybaritic Jews,” and so on. It seemed a strange concept, a man voicing such coarse prejudices who did not himself believe them—or, as he would state for the record, who was constitutionally opposed to them but simply liked to talk a lot of bullshit, got a kick out of “pushing people’s buttons,” and so on. But that, old friends liked to say—and to hope, perhaps—was the case. “That guy,” said columnist James Bacon, “would say or do anything to shock you. If he was bored, if he wanted to get a rise out of you—and he’d had a few? I don’t think there was anything more to it.”

Toni Cosentino, who knew him well beginning some years after the
Esquire
flap, said, “He was a strange guy, but he got a bad rap on one thing, that he’s anti-Semitic. I have to tell you from my heart, that’s not true. But he was a curmudgeon; he didn’t like anybody at certain times. When he started drinking, he loved to be a contrarian. I don’t give a shit what you’re talking about. If tomorrow is Wednesday, when he’s drunk Bob will argue that tomorrow is
Thursday, for the fuck of it. People really didn’t understand that about him. I must tell you, he really was not anti-Semitic. I’ve heard him say stuff and—if that stuff ever got out, Jesus Christ, it would be awful. He loved to look for trouble, he really did. I don’t know what it was in him, but in his heart, no. I knew people that he really liked, and if they were Jewish, they were Jewish, it didn’t matter to him. And he would say ‘dago’ this and that one’s a ‘mick,’ but that’s how people talked and I’m used to it. But you can’t do that in this day and age of sensitivity. And I know names hurt. But what was awful was the questioning of the Holocaust. And he said to me, ‘I didn’t say it.’ And we had conversations about that. Right after
Schindler’s List
came out, and that movie devastated me. And I was talking to him about it, and he asked me my opinion about the sheer numbers of it. And I said, ‘Bob, I don’t know if the numbers are exaggerated, but it doesn’t matter if there’s an extra zero; if one person had to go through that, it’s the same as six million.’ And he said, ‘You’re absolutely right. I just don’t like it when people define it with numbers because that really cheapens the whole thing.’ And conspiracy theories? Oliver Stone asked him to do
JFK.
They came to him, will you do this part, that part. And I said, ‘What do you think of that bullshit?’ He said, ‘I think it’s bullshit.’ He wasn’t conspiratorially minded at all. I said, ‘The only conspiracy was when you got busted for drugs, right?’ And he laughed. ‘Shit happens,’ that was his philosophy.”

“In thirty-odd years that I was with him,” said Reva Frederick, “I never heard him express an interest or an opinion about politics or a politician. There were a couple of people that he knew personally, that he liked. But other than that he never said a word to indicate he was a Democrat, a Republican, a Socialist, or what have you. He told me more than once that he had never voted in his life; and on election days, when I would tell him I was going out to vote, he would just laugh and make fun of the whole thing.”

“I knew him for a lot of years,” said Reni Santoni. “And I never knew where that redneck, crackpot stuff came from. He was a cool guy, a doper, strictly live and let live. And then came this other stuff, out of nowhere. Vietnam—drown ‘em all. The Watts riots—he said we had to put the whole lot of’em in a camp, lock ‘em up in there and that’ll be it. Picking on Peter Falk, on
Anzio,
because he was a New York Jew. Dorothy asked him what they should give Trina for her birthday once and Bob says, ‘Let’s give her a Jew; she’s got everything else.’ And things like that, where you would go, ‘Whoa, where did that come from?’ Suddenly he would be in that mode. And I tried to think how he was out of a different era and how that’s the way people related to people in his formative years, I guess. But I really couldn’t tell you what motivated him. I
look back now, after all the time I spent with him, and I have to admit that I could not get up in a room and say that I understood him or could say with a certainty that anything somebody might say about him was not possibly true—maybe with the single exception that if you said he was gay, I would be very surprised.”

There was yet another bombshell to go off in what was supposed to have been Mitchum’s time of triumph. In November 1981, Reva Frederick Youngstein suffered a stroke that required her to take a temporary leave of absence from the seventy-thousand-dollar-a-year job she had filled since 1948. She had been Robert’s personal assistant, office manager, script reader, press liaison, studio liaison, confidante, dresser, baby-sitter, caterer, drink steward, and at some time or another provided any and all other services as needed, except for the one presumably supplied by his wife and a series of girlfriends. Four months later, in March 1982, her employment was terminated. Thirty-four years working for Robert, a virtual adjunct family member for much of that time, and she was out, without compensation. In Hollywood they read about the breakup in the trades and wondered what to make of it. Rumors and accusations that followed the firing pointed to an ugly rift. As the Mitchums told the story, Reva’s absence led to Dorothy looking over the office records and business expenses and not liking what she found. But many close to them understood that Dorothy had long resented Reva’s professional devotion to her boss. “I’m sure there was a tremendous amount of resentment,” said Frederick. “Being so involved in a man’s life and livelihood you’re bound to find out things that not even his wife knows, and that becomes a very difficult thing for any wife to live with. No wife is going to accept that. They are always going to be
pissed off.
And I can understand that. I would know who would go where and do what with her husband, and she would not know. You know part of her husband’s private life that is not a part of their life together. That’s where resentment really comes into play.”