Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (91 page)

Santoni’s long friendship with Mitchum began to fade at this time. “Getting loaded together had been certainly a factor in our relationship. I stopped drinking in ‘79. And once it was clear that we didn’t get together to get loaded anymore, you know, there was an element missing. It was like the third member of a trio was missing. He never commented on it. I never felt that he was uncomfortable. When he came over he would bring his own bottle. It was ‘82—‘83 we drifted apart. Looking back I can see that my stopping drinking was a factor.”

“We’d had a lot of good times together,” said another longtime Mitchum pal, Dobe Carey, “but what sort of spoiled our relationship was years ago when I quit drinking. And if you didn’t drink you weren’t going to stay too close to old Bob. I had had a great time for many years, but I felt I was going to lose my wife, my family, and I stopped for good. But if you told Bob you had stopped, well, he could never understand it. One time we were all in a car, it was that big Chili Cookoff out in the desert, sponsored by the guy that brought the London Bridge over. And we were riding out there, a bunch of us, and somebody said, ‘How come you don’t drink anymore, Dobe? You used to
drink pretty good.’ And Bob said, ‘Because his dad was a big movie star. He had an inferiority complex.’ And he had a whole psychological explanation for what made me drink and what made me stop. And it didn’t have anything to do with that at all. In those days, it was all part of the everyday routine with most of us, a part of living. I missed it for a long time. But they used to say back in the old AA days, if your life became unmanageable because of alcohol . . . And I guess Bob never felt that his life was unmanageable. I know that Dorothy, when we would go up to my mother’s place in Santa Barbara, she would come over and she would say, ‘Oh, I wish Bob would stop drinking.’ But maybe she was trying to make me feel better, I guess. I don’t know.”

There were days, even weeks, when he didn’t touch a drop. He had stopped drinking a number of times, he would say to people. Stopped just like that and no one noticed. So fuck ‘em. They did notice the other times. “He would go drinking at a hotel near the house in Montecito,” said a friend. “Do his happy hour thing. The bartenders would cringe, the waiters would cringe. He would just get ill-tempered, nasty. ‘Where the fuck’s my drink? What took you so fucking long!’ This kind of thing.” People remember the sometimes vicious needling of family members, the need to get a rise out of somebody, relatives coming away in tears. There were embarrassing scenes in public—toppling over, passing out at dinner parties. Once, stepping before a gala audience and sliding to the floor unconscious. People gasped, thought he had dropped dead.

Reni Santoni: “Dorothy once said to me . . . she knew I had stopped drinking for some time by then, . . . she said, ‘You know, we moved to Montecito for the spectacular sunsets. And now, with his drinking, we never notice them. . . .’”

Certain exigencies in American life in the ‘80s—namely, the necessity of dealing with a growing general population of drug users and addicts—had spawned a subculture of recovery and rehabilitation. Drunks and druggers who had once been left to a circumscribed destiny of premature physical decomposition and/or imprisonment were now offered a vast new hopeful menu of medical, spiritual, and philosophical methodologies for the treatment and cure of their problems—now more often sympathetically, less judgmentally, considered “diseases,” just like German measles. This dependency-busting culture had found some of its first and most enthusiastic subscribers among wealthy and trend-conscious Californians.

Mitchum’s increasingly unpredictable and destructive behavior finally so disturbed and frightened family members that, in May 1984, drastic measures were taken. He became the subject of an “intervention,” a fashionable new method of making the addict confront his wrongdoing face-to-face with his presumed loved ones. A sort of guerilla theater production, the participants surrounded Mitchum suddenly, forcing him to listen as one person after another read prepared statements regarding their anger, unhappiness, pain, fear. They opened old wounds and new. “They really sandbagged him,” said a friend. “He said he felt just pathetic . . . devastated by the whole thing. And then they took him to Betty Ford. It was just terribly humiliating.”

The Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, in the desert near Palm Springs, had opened in October 1982 as a private clinic for the treatment of alcoholism and other drug dependencies. From the fact of its namesake and chief publicist—the wife of former president Gerald Ford, who had herself recovered from various addictions—and from the steady, much-publicized arrival of a series of celebrity patients in various states of duress, including Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford, the center had come to be known as the “rehab of the stars,” a glamorous spa for the famous and fucked up, and gossip columns wrote of its glittery clientele as they once had of the Mocambo and the Brown Derby.

It wasn’t so glamorous, really. Patients were given a small room and required to make their beds in the morning and be up and out for breakfast at six, before the long day of counseling and therapy. “No hardship,” Mitchum said, as they ran through the rules. “I made my bed all through the army.” At Castaic, too, come to think of it.

It wasn’t so easy, really. “He was not happy to be there,” said Jean (not her real name), a therapeutic nurse at the center. “And he made it quite clear. One time we were getting him into the swimming pool with the other patients and he didn’t want to go. So he peed into the pool in front of everyone.”

“He said it was awful,” an associate remembered. “He had a very hard time in the detox area, just cleaning it out of his system. . . . He hated it.”

To the inquiring press Mitchum would reveal only indifference. “I stayed there until they were through with me,” he said. “I don’t know if it ‘worked.’ I don’t understand that.” Perhaps it had helped to “modify” his behavior a little. “I don’t fall down so much.” Anyway, he said, it was his wife’s idea the whole thing; he’d done it for her.

A friend came to meet him on the day he was released from the center. They headed home by way of Los Angeles. Mitchum asked to stop at the Beverly
Hilton Hotel. He went to the bar, put a ten-dollar bill down, and ordered a double scotch. The bartender poured it out. Mitchum threw it back, slid the ten over, said, “Fuck ‘em all,” and went back to the car, and they drove to Montecito.

He continued working. Now, well past retirement age, there was not so much talk about retiring. It was a different tune these days. What am I gonna do, he would say to associates, “stay home and roll my socks?” He did guest shots in theatrical features and leads in made-for-TV movies. Some great work, too: he was chilling, fascinating in
Killer in the Family,
playing Gary Tyson, a real-life kind of Pa Barker (or perhaps a Papa Max Cady) leading his brood on a crime spree through the Southwest. Rare for a network production, the ABC movie was uncompromisingly brutal, the scenes of violence like hammer blows to the head. It was the last entry in the actor’s remarkable rogues’ gallery. There was a final teaming of Mitchum with Deborah Kerr for an HBO cable movie filmed in Britain,
Reunion at Fairborough,
bittersweet tale of an old American ex-bomber pilot returning to his wartime haunt in England, finding a lost love and an unexpected granddaughter. The two had remained, in that showbusiness extended family way, warm but not close friends through the years. Deborah occasionally penned a note to him, always addressing it, “Dear Mr. Allison. . . .” In the cable movie, Kerr and Mitchum still had a certain ineffable rapport, but the evidence of time’s levy since
Allison
was saddening.

A movie for CBS broadcast,
Promises to Keep,
also dealt with an old man stirring up the past. This time it was a possibly terminally ill ranch foreman who travels to California to look up the family he’d run out on three decades ago. Ex-wife and adult son are bitter but—as in the HBO movie—the old man sparks up a relationship with a young grandchild. It was the sort of touchy-feely, troubled-family drama television had come to specialize in. There was a casting gimmick: father, son, and grandson would be played by real-life equivalents in Robert, Chris, and a new addition to the performing dynasty, Chris’s eighteen-year-old son, now called Bentley, a broad-faced blond with earrings and a Farrah Fawcett hairdo. To make the movie even more personal, they were going to shoot the thing in Bob’s backyard, in and around the town of Santa Barbara.

It had been Chris’s project. For two years he had been “developing” the script, and it had gone through a purported two dozen revisions. In the end, though, it was not the rather superficial teleplay but the “Mitchum clan” gimmick that sold the project to CBS. Perhaps, the network thought, audiences
would be titillated by the intimations of a blending of fiction and real life in the story of distant, frustrated father-son relations. And perhaps they would be onto something. For a sequence showing the characters looking through a family album with snapshots of the fictional father and son in earlier, happier days, Chris claimed the only appropriate photos they could find of real-life father and son had been staged, taken by press and publicity photographers back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. “I thought, God, did we only get affection because there was a camera crew there?”

The press coverage told a story more poignant than the one being filmed. In putting the movie together, Chris admitted to the
New York Times,
he had hoped to make his father proud of him. “Whether he is or not, God knows; he’ll never tell me. Until we did this picture together I never had any evidence he knew what I did for a living. We never discussed the fact that I was an actor. My father has never expressed an opinion one way or another about my doing anything. . . . My father didn’t say to me nine times a day, like I do to my kids, ‘I love you.’ “

Reporters pressed for the warm and fuzzy angle, generations bouncing on each other’s knee, sharing tales of the good times together, but it wasn’t easy. The senior Mitchum did not do warm and fuzzy. He preferred hanging out with the crew, flirting with passing females (to a well-endowed production assistant in a souvenir Grand Canyon T-shirt he cracked, “Shouldn’t that say Grand
Teton?”).
When pressed to comment on the enterprise they were presently shooting, Mitchum said, “I figured it provided my son with employment and his son with employment. It’s cheaper than paying their room and board. . . . I don’t have to watch it; that doesn’t come with the contract.”

If they wanted enthusiasm, they were going to have to hire somebody else’s dad.

“He just won’t open up,” Chris said. “But I know my father loves me.” Two weeks after an article on “Three Generations of Mitchums” appeared in
People
magazine, Christopher fired off a letter to the editor decrying the “inaccurate and out-of-context quotes,” creating “the image of a family of isolated individuals living in awe and fear of a patriarch. . . . [0]ur family remains as close as a family can be. My father’s 46-year marriage should tell you something of the truth.” Was it counterpropaganda or self-delusion? The fact was that separate stories and quotes quite similar in nature to the
People
piece appeared within days of each other in the
New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and elsewhere.

Promises to Keep
received withering reviews. Critics called it “mawkish,” “predictable,” “trite,” and “dull.”

.   .   .

The performing Mitchums kept coming. Chris’s beautiful twenty-year-old daughter, Carrie, was now acting. Robert went to see her perform in a play at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In the course of the drama Carrie removed her top. “Nice to see you with your clothes on,” Mitchum told her backstage. She would hear that he had complimented her performance to other people. “But he told me nothing,” she said. Soon she would find a degree of success acting on a daytime TV soap opera called
The Bold and the Beautiful.

In April 1986, Mitchum was the honored guest at the Cognac Film Fest du Policier—a recently established festival devoted to the thriller, the gangster picture, le film noir. Mitchum had long been popular among cinephiles in France, a favorite of the intellectuals—Mitchum,
un vrai existentialiste.
The crowds were ecstatic. As the applause simmered down Mitchum told them, “You’d think I found a cure for cancer.” The translator missed something, and the papers said: “Robert Mitchum has found a cure for cancer.”

Five years after their triumphant broadcast of
The Winds of War,
ABC announced the start of production on a sequel.
War and Remembrance,
from Herman Wouk’s own finale to the saga of Pug Henry and company, would be an even costlier, longer, and more ambitious miniseries—the narrative covering all of World War II from just after Pearl Harbor to the Axis defeat. Dan Curtis returned to the helm and began gathering his cast. Victoria Tennant, Polly Bergen, David Dukes, and many others reprised their roles from the earlier miniseries. Ali MacGraw, who had been in her early forties and playing twenty-nine at the time of
Winds,
was replaced as Natalie Jastrow Henry by Jane Seymour. John Gielgud took the role of Aaron Jastrow from a dying John Houseman. Hart Bochner replaced Jan-Michael Vincent as Byron Henry. As for Victor “Pug” Henry . . . critics had attacked the sixty-five-year-old Robert Mitchum with an ageist glee back in 1983. And now the actor was a septuagenarian. What would those critics have to say about a seventy-year-old—who, Curtis couldn’t deny, was starting to look every day of it—a seventy-year-old winning World War II and in his spare time romancing the lovely young Ms. Tennant? Other names were considered: James Coburn, George C. Scott. In the end, Curtis just couldn’t see the point—whatever they would gain in fewer
wrinkles, in greater physical energy, they would be losing in stature, in audience identification, in mighty presence. It was like they used to say in those corny old movie trailers: Robert Mitchum
is
Pug Henry.