Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (90 page)

In March 1983, Reva’s lawyers announced the filing of a $1.85 million lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against her former employer, Robert Mitchum, and his wholly owned corporation, Talbot Productions. The suit charged that in addition to being wrongfully fired while recovering from “a severe and disabling stroke,” Reva had been denied a promised $150,000 retirement benefit. No matter which way the facts fell, it was an unfortunate matter. Industry people, various strata of producers, publicists, and showbiz press, recalled how helpful and devoted Reva had been to Mitchum through the years,
and how well she had covered for him or kept his feet out of the fire on numerous occasions. One Mitchum acquaintance remembered him once saying of her after she had left the room, and without further explanation, “That woman has kept me from going back to prison.” (Another person remembered him saying almost exactly the same line about his wife; it may have been a job for more than one woman.) The Mitchums’ friends, meanwhile, would hear the other side’s version of events. “We saw Bob and Dorothy in Santa Barbara right after, and they felt they had been screwed,” said Kathie Parrish. “I mean, bills for shoes, and Bob would say, ‘I haven’t bought a pair of shoes in twenty years. I take them from the pictures.’ And first-night theater tickets. He said, ‘I don’t go to the theater. It makes my ass sore.’”

“I mean, what happened to Reva and Bob at the end . . . there was a mishmash and they got rid of her,” said Anthony Caruso. “They were totally surprised at her actions. There was a big split-up, and she sued him. But she sure shouldn’t have because they treated her like a daughter. Dorothy was very good to her.”

The accusations increased in size with the passage of time. “Well, his version, though he would never talk in public,” said an associate who knew Mitchum in his last years, “was that somehow they had gotten him to sign over the rights to his movies. He didn’t own
Thunder Road
anymore. And all this money was gone. I said, ‘If that happened, why didn’t you call the cops? How come you didn’t sue?’ Perhaps there were people who knew where all the bones were buried, and he just couldn’t afford to make a fight.”

“It was all dismissed by different lawyers,” said Reva. “It all remained, I guess you’d call it, a void. Everybody just forgot everything, and everything was dismissed. And we never went further with anything. It was never a settlement or . . . anything. You go your way and I’ll go my way is sort of how things came to a final decision. And that was the end of our association.”

Mitchum appeared at the fifty-fifth annual Academy Awards presentation, paired off with Sigourney Weaver. There was the usual badinage, which Mitchum delivered with typical insouciance. The normally witty Weaver was reduced to the Margaret Dumont square’s role on this occasion.

Sigourney: I’m so honored tonight to be here with Mr. Mitchum and present the award for Best Supporting Actress.

Mitchum: Is that what we’re doing? (audience laughs) All right, we’ll keep it shorter than
Winds of War.

Winner Jessica Lange loped onstage for her prize, Mitchum offering a quite formal handshake.

Mitchum agreed to fill in for Burt Lancaster, after the actor underwent an emergency heart bypass operation, in a second Cannon Films production,
Maria’s Lovers,
starring Nastassja Kinski, John Savage, and Keith Carradine. The film was set among a mostly Slavic community in rural Pennsylvania just after World War II, the story of a returning GI whose psychological problems render him impotent only with his new bride, Maria, who reluctantly finds romance elsewhere. Mitchum’s role was that of the ex-soldier’s lusty but dying immigrant father.
Marias Lovers
was to be the first American-based work by the brilliant Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky. The son of well-known Russian poets (his father the composer of the Soviet national anthem), Konchalovsky had for many years written scripts for Andrei Tarkovsky before directing the acclaimed
Siberiade,
a prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival. “I left Russia in 1979 and I was for three years unemployed, couldn’t put anything together,” Konchalovsky recalled. “When I came to Hollywood no one knew me, basically, except for Kinski. She was just coming up as star and she asked me if I would do something with her. I had this script, which I had planned to make in Europe with Adjani. Kinski was hot, so I got some clout, and finally Menahem Golan said, ‘Set the story in America and we will do it.’ But I thought it would not be right in truly American society, these characters, too emotional, so I put it in a Yugoslav enclave. We shot in Pennsylvania, Brownsville and other small town, near where Cimino shot
Deer Hunter.

“Mitchum came aboard, Golan brought him in, and I found him wonderful person. Very intimidating at the beginning. You say, ‘How are you, Mr. Mitchum?’ He says, ‘
Worse!’
I think of him like Rachmaninoff, great Russian composer, very introverted in front of others, but when he accepts you as friend he is opening up. And I knew much about him, what was inside him, because I had had romance with Shirley MacLaine two years before and she told me about Mitchum quite a lot. She said he was very much a rebel, very left, his views were extreme left. She told me how he saw
himself.
That he was ‘poet with an ax.’ And this was beautiful metaphor of the person. I understood completely. It meant a very tender person who can be very cruel and relentless with his poetic substance. And at the second of our meetings, I decided to use this. I said, ‘You are a poet with an ax.’ And his eye had a flicker and he smiled. That was the beginning of good relationship.

“His humor was very dry, required close attention, especially for a foreigner. His humor was like a stone in the water, a few words,
boom, boom,
and
everyone’s supposed to laugh. It was a wonderful kind of American personality. He was like a wild animal. Reminded me of a lion. Always alone with himself, independent of everything. And to tame wild animal, director should be careful, and friendly. He can bite, he can claw you. And I pushed him further sometimes. I said, ‘I want you to do more.’ And once I wanted him to cry. He didn’t want to, but he said, ‘OK.’ And we did a second take. ‘But Robert, you should cry here.’ And he says, ‘What the hell do you want? There’s a tear in my eye!’ It was very Irish cry, one tear, but he’s supposed to be playing Yugoslav with a fountain of tears! But I couldn’t make him do any more. It was beautiful, anyway.

“It was very common for Kerouac’s generation, to feel the need to be an intellectual and at the same time a maverick, a tough guy. It is a pattern for a certain type of intellectual—drinking, fighting. Mitchum would start to drink during the second part of the day. And there were some times he had troubles. He went to the bar. I remember that he had a brawl there with some guys. Some confrontation. When he got drunk he could get—not mean, but sordid. Sordid. Once he fell and broke a rib. He said, ‘I cannot shoot today; I broke a rib.’ And he was in a lot of pain. I said, ‘OK, we’ll do it tomorrow. But please, no more of this!’

“He had, I think, a soft spot for Nastassja Kinski. She told me that he came once to her trailer, knocked the door and opened it, gave her little ivory elephant. Ivory elephant is an object of happiness. And she was so pleased. He gave it and walked away. I think romantically she excited him very much. But she was having a love affair with another actor, Vince Spano, and she had a baby from that. But I think that was reason why Mitchum never put the make on her.

“It was a very, very hot summer and it was very tough for him to work. He had terrible asthma or something in the lungs. But he never let it stop him. He was extremely professional and strong. The last day of shooting we had a drink after dinner. He looked at me and said, ‘Andrei, I know I’ll be seeing your name a lot. You’re going to do well.’ He said it like a blessing. It was nice to hear. I brought the movie to Santa Barbara. He watched, very proud, very happy. And he said after, ‘You know, I
like
this film.’ Said it very strange, like he was amazed. And he looked at me with a different attitude, with a new tenderness. It was our last meeting.”

Another birthday. Sixty-six goddamn years old. Some days he hurt all over—back, chest, knees. He was going to call the stuntman’s guild and ask for a pension. All those slips, dead falls, jumps, bashes in the eye from punch-drunk
fighters. He had cataracts in his eyes. The doctor saw tears in his lungs. The long, deep, unending smoker’s cough was becoming as common as breathing these days. That was his greatest acting trick of the moment, doing the lines without coughing up his insides.

In October he received another tribute. Life Achievement Award of the American Theatre Arts. Who? He’d never heard of the fucking thing. But he put on his tuxedo and dropped by to check it out. The dinner cochairmen, Frank Sinatra and John Huston, couldn’t make it. Frank sent a telegram, addressed to “Mother Mitchum”: “It is a long overdue tribute. No one is more worthy.” Huston spoke on a short piece of videotape: “The rest of us marvel at the extent of your contribution, its richness and its variety.” Mitchum was given a framed letter from President Reagan: “Your career is outstanding. . . . Nancy and I were both glued to the TV set wondering what Pug Henry’s next move would be.” The president couldn’t make it either. But Hal Linden and Paul Williams were there. Someone gave the honoree a computer portrait of himself in
Winds ofWar.
That was going to look good right next to his
Hoppy Serves a Writ
poster. The president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce got up and announced that one day in the near future Mitchum was going to have his name imprinted on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. Mitchum said, “I thought it was already there.”

He did one more for Golan-Globus at Cannon. This one they had set up to make back in the homeland, shooting in Tel Aviv and in the Occupied West Bank. It was a real lead this time, the title role:
The Ambassador.
Somehow or other the boys had managed to squeeze a tension-in-the-Middle East story out of an Elmore Leonard novel they owned, a novel that took place in Detroit. Mitchum’s guy was an activist diplomat with a plan to bring the warring factions together even as he tries to handle a blackmail scheme involving inflagrante footage of his wife and an Arab lover. Ellen Burstyn would play his straying wife, and Rock Hudson—just out of the hospital for a heart operation—took the supporting role of the ambassador’s friend and problem solver. The film put Mitchum back together with J. Lee Thompson, director of
Cape Fear.
Thompson had done a string of forgettable shoot-’em-ups in recent years, but this was a piece of material he liked, felt strongly about. A good, timely, important subject and a strong cast. The actors performed well. Mitchum made perfectly vivid and authentic-seeming the ambassador’s peculiar combination
of empathy and bullheadedness; and Burstyn was typically excellent, with some suprisingly sexy activities for the fifty-three-year-old actress, including a brief and perfectly creditable nude scene (”She liked doing it,” Thompson recalled, “was all for it!”). There was a sense of excitement for some of the imported personnel, doing the story right where such things were actually happening. They were based in Tel Aviv, but there was much location shooting on the West Bank. At times there were whispered fears of terrorist attacks, and armed patrols were assigned to watch over them.

It was not a particularly happy production. “Rock Hudson was not in a good way,” said Thompson. “It was a bad, small part, and it hadn’t been cast before we began shooting. And then Menachem told me he was fetching Rock. It was a good move for the production; he was still quite a well-known name. But I felt terrible; it was such a nothing part. I tried to improve it a little. And he came and he obviously did it just for the money, and he couldn’t wait to get away. I don’t think that Mitchum cared for him, or he for Mitchum. And Rock was smoking away. Had just had quadruple bypass, and he just started up smoking again right in the hospital. He thought it was a good distraction. Poor Rock, he was not in a good way.

“And Bob, I’m afraid, his drinking by this time was a problem. It now started in the morning. There were amusing moments. He had a scene in bed with Ellen, supposedly at night, and they were both supposed to be sipping from drinks. And Ellen got his glass by mistake when she did the scene and found out that it had the real stuff in it. And she did not approve of drinking during the shooting, so it was quite a scene. She would get very angry at him, and he just looked like a small boy who was caught with his fingers in the jam. She was full of admiration for him as an actor, and she was a wonderful person, but she had a thing about drinking on the set. And this happened again, and she would smell it on his breath. . . . I had to cool her down on many occasions.

“He made a valiant attempt to stop during the shooting of
The Ambassador.
He would go days without even touching it. He was fighting it, and it was a fierce struggle for him. I had a sympathy. I could sympathize with what he was going through. Being an alcoholic myself, which I was, I could understand what was happening. It was quite painful to see. He made a valiant effort. I think he had come to a realization that it was finally getting the better of him.”

Journalist Bart Mills talked to Mitchum and observed him at work on a number of productions in this period. “To me, beyond the inevitable depredations
of age, he was now just sleepwalking through life. Going through the motions of living. Whether it was because he was a slave to alcohol or something deeper within him I can’t say, but there was a huge impression of nihilism, of a near constant despair. He never voiced it except in the usual quotes, putting down the movie business, saying he was just in it for the money, hated working, all the usual stuff. But it ran deeper, I think. I just couldn’t imagine living the way he did the last decade I saw him.”

“Later on there, I think the work began to bore him,” said Reni Santoni. “He knew he could do it and better than nearly anybody, and there was no challenge, no satisfaction perhaps. He made people intimidated, a lot of them who worked with him then. No one wanted to come up to the legend. He got it right on one take, and unless something had physically gone wrong, no one wanted to bother him to reshoot something. The directors didn’t want to provoke him, I guess. And he liked it that way, but at the same time he felt like he was left out of something. He felt bad that no one wanted to try and direct him, and he’d see the interaction with other actors, and he’d say to me, ‘I’d like to have some of that shit working for me, too.’ And yet he was ambivalent. He knew he was cutting himself off and he did it anyway. He was doing this movie and the star, the actress, came up to him and asked him for some advice, a problem she was having about acting, about the process. And he said to me, ‘You know, I knew how to help her. I had the answer, but I didn’t give it to her. I didn’t feel like it.’ And he felt bad about it. Strange story.”