Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (93 page)

Nineteen-ninety. He would be seventy-three in August. It was getting lonely out there. There were damn few men or women left alive who had been movie stars in 1944, let alone still busting their hump at it the way he was. And now, almost a half century in the business, he was all signed up to try something new. A TV series. A situation comedy. NBC had . . . what was the word . . . “greenlighted” the . . . what the fuck did they call that thing they had shot? Now he was—the
pilot,
that was the fucking—now he was gonna be the star of a situation comedy on network television. On NBC, Saturdays at 8
P.M.
Seventy-two years old and he was going to be making like Bill Cosby, with the jokes and the double takes. The offer had come, a guy named Arnold Margolin had created the thing. It was a role tailor-made for him, they said: a cranky, homeless bum with a heart of gold. A family of orphans adopts him out of a packing crate in the city park, asks him to pose as their grandpa so they can all go on living together. Takes the job serious: pours their milk, looks at their report cards, even—this was a good one—uncovers the kid’s stash and yells at him for smoking marijuana. It was all very sweet, good for the whole
family, and timely too—bums were in the news all over the place these days, just like in 1933. If it was a hit, they said, and ran four, five years, he’d make more money than God.

In mid-1989, a pilot had been produced for NBC in a two-hour, TV-movie format. Screened for test audiences, that TV-movie turned out to have one of the highest test scores in NBC’s history. As one associate of the show put it, “They could not
not
OK a series.” In late November, NBC gave the go-ahead for
A Family for Joe
as a standard, taped-before-a-studio-audience, thirty-minute program, with its prime-time run scheduled to begin on March 24.

Mitchum’s first day of work had been delayed. Ann Harriet Gunderson Mitchum Clancy Morris had died on February 2 at the age of ninety-six. She had been a strong presence in his life until the end, through all the years a valued sounding board and confidante, with her sharp mind and no-nonsense discernment. He would never get used to her being gone.

Arnold Margolin and associates recast most of the kid roles and hired a staff, including top-ranked sitcom director Alan Rafkin and a flock of writers. Among the latter were two young men, writing partners Phil Rosenthal and Oliver Goldstick, who had lately come from the New York theater to look for work in Hollywood. “It was our first real paying job in show business, and we grabbed it,” said Rosenthal. “But to be honest, we had the same reaction everyone else did:
Robert Mitchum in a sitcom? We
thought the whole idea was dubious. Mitchum wasn’t particularly known for his comedic skills.”

“We were thinking of this guy from
Out of the Past,
and it just didn’t add up,” said Goldstick. “But we saw the pilot and now we thought, OK, they’re going for a W. C. Fields kind of thing, where he’s gruff and he hates kids, hates animals. The idea of this marginal Charles Bukowski alcoholic figure becoming stuck in a suburban household surrounded by kids and busybody school-teachers . . . yeah, it started to sound like it might be funny after all.”

During the days when the writing and production staff were coming together, Phil Rosenthal caught a broadcast of
The Night of the Hunter
and taped it, brought it in to show to the other staff writers and anyone else he thought might want to marvel at the guy they were going to be working with. Some of them, including one of the writers, laughed derisively at the film, at Mitchum’s performance as Preacher Powell. “God, this is corny,” somebody said.

Welcome to prime time.

“Mitchum came in for the first meeting,” said Rosenthal, “and he was always very deadpan, completely straight-faced. You never knew when he was putting you on. That first day he brought a big book with him. He said, ‘This is a book I treasure. It’s about my favorite entertainer of all time. A man I truly admire.’ It was the life story of Petomane. The—whatever it was, seventeenth, eighteenth-century French entertainer who farted on stage. The world-famous farter. He said, ‘This man was a great artist.

“Knew everything there was to know about Petomane,” Oliver Goldstick confirmed. “Some people thought it was tongue-in-cheek. I swear to God I think it was legitimate. He loved that guy. He said, ‘Farting . . . now that’s the way to make a buck.’”

The show went into production, but from day one there was a sense of frustration, even hopelessness. “If they had used him as a natural curmudgeon as it was originally intended,” said Phil Rosenthal, “that would have worked. But right away they—somebody, the network, some of the producers—began demanding a softened-up image, make him more likable, to the point where in the first shot on the first show he was wearing an apron and putting flowers on the table! So right away, they took his balls from him, and what was left?”

Goldstick: “We went to one of the producers, Bill D’Angelo, and complained. ‘You’re robbing him of his grit. This is a guy’s been living on the street. He’s arranging tulips in a vase. This guy would be eating the tulips!’ But this was the time of these new family sitcoms, appealing to much younger audiences, and I think they decided that was going to be their audience. And whatever idiosyncracies were present in the pilot were already being jettisoned for this sort of avuncular, Mr. Belvedere kind of character. And Robert Mitchum was certainly the anti-Belvedere if there ever was one.”

“The show was terrible,” said director Alan Rafkin. “It got sappier and sappier, and Mitchum pretty much knew it; but he came to work like it was for an Academy Award winner, never complained or disparaged, and he took direction better than anyone I ever worked with and I’ve worked with about four million actors by now. He knew every line, and between takes he was a raconteur second to none.”

Rosenthal: “He was always just ‘Point me where you want me to go. I do my job; I go home.’ There was only one time—and I thought this was interesting—where he questioned something that we wrote. There was some dialogue and it included a play on the speech from
Casablanca.
He runs into a woman he had an affair with long ago. And she’s the kids’ kindergarten teacher. And he has this speech after the one in
Casablanca,
something about
’of all the kindergartens in the world she had to walk into mine.’ Well, he questioned it. It sounded odd to him. We told him it was a spoof on
Casablanca.
He said, ‘What do you mean?’ We said, ‘of all the gin joints . . . Bogie in
Casablanca’
He’d never seen it, never heard the line before. So we explained it, and then it was fine and he went and did it.”

Goldstick: “The only person who didn’t get along with Mitchum on that show was Juliette Lewis. There were some fireworks. He didn’t like her, and I don’t think she really cared for him. Why? I don’t know. Within two weeks they both had their own wranglers, someone to watch each of them.” Lewis hadn’t wanted to do the show, according to Toni Cosentino. “And so she kind of made everybody suffer. But then she got into it. And Bob ended up liking her. And he saw her in a movie while they were working. And he saw that she could really act.”

There was some concern that Mitchum would have trouble performing in front of the large studio audience that came to the tapings—he hadn’t done a sustained piece of live theater in over four decades. Mitchum shrugged: “I’ve been working in front of a hundred crew guys for years, and they’re the toughest audience there is.” It was not a problem. Said Alan Rafkin, “He was introduced at the beginning, and they would applaud and scream and stomp their feet. He was very pleased by the reaction. Said they really seemed to like seeing him. And then he would go ahead and not even notice them.” The problem with the audience was of a different sort. The network and the producers, busily trying to position the series as a kids’ show, were distraught at the demographics of their live audiences. “The audience was practically all female,” said Oliver Goldstick, “and most of them were old, from seventy-five to death. They flipped for him. He was still the sexiest thing on earth to them, and I don’t think they paid any attention to the kids in the show!”

Nine episodes of
A Family for Joe
were produced, after which NBC canceled the series. “He had known it wasn’t going to last,” said Alan Rafkin, “but never got angry or bitter or anything. There was a wrap party. He didn’t stay very long. His manager said, ‘I don’t want him to hang around. You don’t want to see that.’ Meaning that if he had more than a couple of drinks . . . she didn’t want us to see him other than the way we knew and loved him. He had never been anything but straight and sober on the set. So he had a drink or two, he was fine, and then she hustled him out of there. I was sad to see him go. I loved him to death, you know, and I had hoped we could have done this thing for a couple of years. Grown old together . . . “

.   .   .

On March 16, 1990, Bob and Dorothy celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills. “In its own way it was a very good marriage,” said their Santa Barbara friend Beverley Jackson. “When all was said and done, he adored Dorothy. He would never have thought of leaving her, and he never did. She was his security blanket and his first love and his last love. And the same for her. And he may have had his affairs, but by heck it was his Dottie and he always came back. And she was a devoted wife and wonderful mother. But there were times when she was crushed, very hurt. And if Dorothy had had an affair he would have died. They were very puritanical people in their own way. Other women, European women, would have just accepted that their husbands had lovers. Deep down, Bob was very devoted to her. But it was part of his macho image. Listen, some people just have a bigger sex drive.”

“I traveled with them a lot,” a close associate reflected, “and it seemed like it was now more fond affection, brother-sister kind of thing. But then she would get horribly jealous, so there must have still been some sparks there. Dorothy thought everybody was screwing Bob. But most of Bob’s screwing was mental, not physical. He was more into mental games with women than physical. Let’s just say the last fifteen years of Bob’s life he was impotent. He wanted that game, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Dorothy thought this guy probably had a hard-on that reached from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, and there was no way that was possible, as far as fucking women. That was long gone. He liked the chase—can I get a young girl to like me? But not follow through. Bob was the king of male chauvinist pigs and putting hands on people. And he was not above putting his hand on a tit or something. But for him, that was nothing.”

They had remade
Out of the Past
a few years ago.
Against All Odds
they called it, with Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward substituting for Mitchum and Greer. It was very pretty, nice Mexican scenery—sort of
Gidget Goes to Cozumel.
Jacques, Robert, and Jane had nothing to worry about. Now they were remaking
Cape Fear.
Robert DeNiro was playing Max Cady. Martin Scorsese was directing. They wanted Mitchum and Gregory Peck to do cameos. An
hommage.
Mitchum said no. Greg called him up, said, “C’mon, Bob, let’s go do it for the guys.” Part of the joke was, they switched personas. Mitchum was an upright deputy sheriff this time, Peck was Cady’s sleazy lawyer. DeNiro was covered
in tattoos, like somebody in a circus sideshow. It was a pleasant time with Scorsese. “Very humorous, quick, and efficient,” Mitchum said. Scorsese, a cinephile, had seen all 103 of his pictures. “That beat me,” said Mitchum. “I’ve seen about seven of’em.”

On January 18, 1991, Mitchum received the Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contribution to the entertainment field” by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association at their annual Golden Globe ceremony. The following month he was set to receive the D. W. Griffith Career Achievement Award from the National Board of Review in New York. When he learned that he was supposed to provide his own transport and accommodations, Mitchum told them to keep it. The board gave the award to Lauren Bacall instead. She lived in Manhattan and presumably only cost them cab fare.

Toni Cosentino of Charter Management was a diehard Republican and determinedly tried to bring Mitchum into the fold. “I’m the worst conservative, and I was a very big George Bush supporter, so I made him do all this stuff for the Bush campaign. I got him to go on the stump for a while. He wasn’t very political, but he said he liked George Bush because, of course, he knew him when he was head of the CIA in Vietnam. And then he got an invitation to go to Bob Hope’s house for a fund-raiser. And Bob says, ‘Do you want to go?’ And I say, ‘Yes, yes!’ So I got to go and it was fabulous. And I got to meet George Bush and everything. They were talking about Vietnam stuff and it was really neat, things that happened in Vietnam. It was so cool, stuff I didn’t even know. It sounded like Bob sort of went into Cambodia, but he couldn’t tell me. And I was just dying because it was so cool. . . . “

Mitchum’s voice would ultimately ring out of the Republican Convention hall as narrator of the biographical/promotional film that played to the delegates and to television viewers before the candidate’s arrival on the convention stage. Mitchum’s anarchic, lawless (in Pauline Kael’s phrase) profile, his criminal record and marijuana use were unremembered or wished away in the eagerness to foster this powerful association.
^*
Bush had an image problem that dogged him—the wimp factor they called it—and his campaign people slavered at the prospect of Mitchum’s testicular intonations ringing across the auditorium. He was the only John Wayne left.

Mitchum had always liked to call himself a plumber, and now finally he was doing jobs that were about as glamorous as fixing a stopped-up toilet. When Glenn Ford became ill with heart and circulatory problems, Mitchum signed for a recurring role on a Family Channel cable television series called
African Skies,
starring Catherine Bach, the cutoff jeans girl from
The Dukes of Hazard.
It was a kind of weekly cameo appearance as a blustery tycoon, fitted in among shots of zebras and elephants. The show could have used a good boxing kangaroo. He appeared briefly in a wretched knockabout farce about lady fire-fighters called
Backfire.
It seemed intended for those who had found the
Police Academy
movies too subtle. Mitchum played a senile fire chief. He looked weirdly out of place among a swarm of smooth-fleshed, empty-headed youths, like Buster Keaton in those
Beach Party
movies in the ‘60s (in fact, he looked here very much like the aged Keaton, with the same collapsed face and eloquently vacant deadpan). But the damndest thing was, in the midst of even this awful movie, he was good, maintained his dignity, and for a couple of moments here and there he was hilarious.