Therefore, we become totally vulnerable as we witness our partner do the same. Nothing is more attractive, it is a raw, unadorned divesting of self. It is an indomitable act of trust. It is a perfect environmental breeding ground for Love.
The memories of love affairs sparked by screen romances are still with me, reignited into feeling by a song or the weather or a familiar smell. How volatile the terrain of romance was when I was young. How reckless and explorative was I, new in the movie kingdom. I thought I knew just what I wanted and who I was. I had my “feet on the ground,” yet my head was “in the stars”—a metaphor of my mother’s that, for some reason, she felt was an axiom to live by.
Only now do I realize how much loneliness contributed to my colorful life. Only now do I understand the power of romantic attraction born out of a feeling of isolation from myself.
Why was the loneliness so profound? I don’t know. I had a reasonably loving and attentive childhood, which, on the face of it, should have prepared me for the “big time.” But no one can be prepared, regardless of background, for the illusions that seduce and alter the logical well-grounded mind.
I have seen it over and over as the years pass, and only because I went through it do I understand the price such exquisite distortion can exact.
I watch young actors and actresses today—and even some middle-aged ones—struggling with what is real and what is not. It has been ever thus, I suppose, when one works and lives in the land of altered reality … Hollywood.
On a soundstage you create a life and environment of such real intensity that the outside world seems a hoax. On a soundstage you are attended and appreciated and, because of that security, are challenged to experience aspects of yourself that heretofore have gone unrealized. Because of the catering and coddling and cuddling, you never feel threatened or jeopardized to venture into areas where angels fear to tread. You feel invincible, free to recklessly abandon yourself to the fantasy of the moment and the relationship that has been prescribed for you in the script. You find yourself interrelating with the most attractive people in the world, people who have survived their own wars of unreality and stand opposite you emotionally triumphant—nothing can faze them anymore. This is a chemistry hard to resist.
And so you begin a work relationship that depends entirely upon the sharing of feeling. And when feelings are shared, there is a bonding. And with bonding there is involvement, and with involvement there is love. Thus the waters of reality become murky.
I have had these feelings more than once. It is difficult for marriages and other long-term relationships to survive the narcotic fantasies of movie relationships. The emotional illusion coupled with the separation demands of a location put a strain on a primary relationship that is difficult to withstand.
There you are, cradled together, sometimes on a foreign location, playing lovers because the script demands it, finding values that are peculiarly personal to enliven the onscreen chemistry, continuing to be together long after working hours are over because it’s comforting…. All of these elements inevitably lead to a shared trust that is just right for what is required creatively. Then you begin to live your creative illusion and you see how fine is the line between your life and what you are creating on the screen. Your illusion carries you along until your feelings are beyond your control. The illusion has a life that is determined to be its own, and you are, in effect, its servant.
All of this was at work when I met Robert Mitchum and we did Two for the Seesaw.
Mitchum had been a childhood movie hero of mine, a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, macho, gentle giant of a man who resorted to violence only when profoundly provoked. I loved those qualities in him. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much of an underachiever he was. I was fascinated by a man who seemed to have no ambition, no dreams to fulfill, no drive to prove anything to anybody. It was a case of opposites attracting when he walked into the small office on the Goldwyn lot. I stood up and looked into his face. He shook my hand.
“Don’t let me take up too much space,” he said. “I’m basically a Bulgarian wrestler. I’m not right for this part.”
“You’re wonderful,” I said. “I’ve admired you for so long—I think you’ll be great.”
He lit one of his Gitane filtered cigarettes and inhaled deeply. As yet he hadn’t looked me full in the eyes. I wondered why. He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth as he exhaled the smoke, leaving a thin trace of white cigarette paper stuck to his lips. I watched, fascinated. Was he aware of it? He wasn’t. He let it fade away naturally. I noticed his fingers and hands were well used. A small bone poked out of the top of one of his thumbs.
He walked across the room with a rolling swagger and sat down. Then he looked up at me.
“Hey,” he said, “I’ve got a broken nose, and I can change a tire without help. I’m nothing but a goddamn mechanic. If I can be a movie star, anyone else can be a king…. But why you want me for this part is your problem.”
The die was cast. I willingly fell into the role of rescuer, saving him from himself. It gave me something to do … unlock the great Mitchum so the world could witness what gold there was underneath.
Over the three years that our relationship flourished, I found him to be a complex mystery, multifaceted, ironically witty, shy to the point of detachment, and incapable of expressing what he personally desired…. Perfect … He became a project.
His intelligence was a trait he orchestrated cannily, doling out clues to it just at the moment he felt he was being taken advantage of unfairly.
But usually his modus operandi was to act as if life just kept happening to him. He felt no responsibility for anything, really. He said he was a lucky bum, basically a hobo who rode the rails as a kid, got himself arrested for vagrancy, and when he needed to work, did so by washing dishes or pounding sheet metal at the Lockheed plant. He said he’d been in jail three times, usually for some disturbance, nothing really serious, so he was technically an ex-con who had trouble traveling without permission.
Lie saw himself as a common stiff, born to be lonely, who should expect nothing from life except that the roof doesn’t leak. He told me once, “When I awake in the morning and pee and it doesn’t burn, I figure it’s going to be a good day.”
He called actors who primped in front of the mirror “girls” and feigned disinterest in what might be a good script for him. He was more likely to go fishing with a stranger than to talk deals with a big producer.
He responded with humor and sarcasm when actresses spent other people’s time primping in a mirror before a take. He had an appreciation for what the camera demanded, but was privately appalled at the makeup and powder applied to his face before a take. He would mutter under his breath that he felt like a primping asshole.
When we began to work together, I realized immediately it would be an experience like no other.
He made me feel that it was incumbent upon me to draw out his sensitivities and prove to him that it was safe to express them. He had a way of teasing me with just enough poetic artistry that I felt I’d be missing the adventure of a lifetime if I just did my job and walked away from what I intuitively knew was a deep and stormy fragility. All in all he was an exquisite challenge. And I went for it, in a big way. I think many other women before me had done the same, although he vehemently denied it. When I questioned him about his past relationships with women, he appeared vaguely stunned, as though the thought had never crossed his mind. He refused to relate to such a concept, almost as though such behavior occurred only among lesser mortals. He was an elitist and a commoner simultaneously. “Hell,” he said, “I’ve never even known if a woman dug me. I’m just trying to get through the day. If they say I have an interesting walk or something, I just say, ‘Shit, I’m only trying to hold my gut in.’” This was one of his favorite self-deprecating lines.
But he seemed to like and respect women, sometimes saying, “They are better men than me, Gunga Din.” Robert was so obtuse and vague
that I found myself addicted to the quest for clarity in our relationship. I would sometimes ask him what time it was just to have the thrill of a specific answer!
His favorite drinking story to promote romance (I suspect) was his escape from the chain gang. He has told it many times, in print, on television, and to me. It basically goes like this.
He described himself as a hobo, riding the rails and sleeping in trains whenever he got the chance. I could never quite get clear why he was living a life of such vagrancy. But at any rate, he got arrested for vagrancy and was sentenced to a chain gang in Georgia. He was shackled next to “some poor nigger” with whom he became friendly. He spoke with casual yet searing drama about the pain, the pus and infection the shackles caused him.
I would sit entranced by his explicit description of the humiliation of being chained to his bed at night. I didn’t know whether to believe Robert or not. But when he went on to describe his bleeding and blistered ankles, how he tried to stuff cloth and old newspapers between his skin and the shackles, and how the guards caught him and said that the pain was part of the punishment, he had me—but good. I wanted to reassure him that this would never happen again. When he got to the part about his escape from the chain gang, I had the impression that I was hearing a well-rehearsed prose reading engineered to solicit sympathy and a kind of romantic horror in both men and women. The men would think he was a man’s man and the women would desire to mother him. It really worked, and to this day I feel the story is true, if overdramatized.
Apparently the guards had taken pity on him, allowing him to do his chores without the chains. The image of Mitchum chained was surely enough to evoke pity in the most sadistic of prison guards, and he had an exquisite hangdog expression that worked in many situations.
Mitchum can lumber and stumble (his preferred body movement, I think) until you believe he’s profoundly helpless. It’s at such a moment that he makes the shrewd, unpredictable move. Right out from under you he can bolt, which is what he did—right into the dense Georgia woods. He described “feeling like a nigger being chased right before they lynched him.” He ran zigzag so the bullets missed him. (I couldn’t see Mitchum running fast, much less zigzagging.) But anyway, I sat mesmerized, as though I were in the woods with him. As though it were my place to be there with him. There I was crawling on my belly with him, my own legs leaking pus as I oozed my way through mud and gunk. Darkness descended. I heard crickets and owls. The full moon hung in the purple sky. I wondered if there were wolves in Georgia. We covered ourselves with dried leaves and twigs and branches and tried to sleep, wondering if the guards would accost us at sunup. “Nobody will come after us,” said Robert, trying to whisper in his stentorian voice. “They’ll just go after some other poor nigger to fill their quota on the chain gang.”
When the sun came up, we found ourselves mired in a foul-smelling swamp with dozens of predatory water moccasins slithering around us. I could feel them on my skin. It made me shiver to the bone with fear. “Don’t worry,” said Robert, “they are as afraid of us as we are of them.” We pulled ourselves up and began to walk knee-deep in the swamp. He said he wanted to get to a city to find a drugstore for medicine, but he didn’t have any money, so he couldn’t afford it anyway. My heart turned over again. The torture of infected wounds racked his body as he pressed on to avoid the authorities.
The memory of the shackles and the loneliness of incarceration kept him going. I was with him every step of the pain-riddled journey, fearing to be seen and recognized as we crossed the border into South Carolina. We slept in ditches and barns, stealing corn from the fields and fruit from the trees. The loneliness of the wilderness slowed us down and contributed to a dwindling faith in ourselves.
The mental isolation was hard on Robert because he was a young man who missed his family. He had only run away from home because it was the midst of the Depression (he was fourteen) and he wanted to make his own way in the world. “Instead I’m becoming acquainted with death,” he mourned.
“I’ve always known,” he went on, “that I would die at a very early age. I have pellagra—” a vitamin-deficiency disease, I learned “—and am wandering the American continent alone. My tongue is black from starvation and I know it is all my own doing. I must have been the dumbest of the dumb to precipitate this course of action.”
He walked and grabbed rides on trains for close to a year. When he finally decided he’d had enough, he returned to his home to find that his family had moved. Persevering, he located them, and I was right next to him as he walked gently into the middle-class home, his leg swollen as big around as a tree stump where the wounds from the shackles had become poisoned with infection. His mother was glad to see him, but the family wanted to cut his leg off.
“I tried to tell myself that I had really lived life, but I cried myself to sleep out of loneliness. I still do.
“So, I drink as a preparation for death. When the great day comes it will just be one more hangover.”
The first time I heard this story, my fate with him was sealed. I was from the South, where storytelling is an art. My father was my original educator in storytelling. Robert took the torch from him.
My mouth would hang open with compassion. Oh yes, how I wanted to be the person who would make Robert feel safe in the world. To me, his sleepy-eyed expression, his laconic drawl, and his undulating fullback way of walking belied the truth that he was a literate and painfully shy man whom I would draw out of himself for all the world to see.
So, from the beginning he was a man who triggered my interest because there was so much there to uncover, untangle, and understand.
I loved working with him too. He was considerate and kind, never late, and he always knew his lines as well as the lines of the other actors. He smoked his Gitane cigarettes, drank anything he could pour, and judged scripts by how many days he’d have off. Yet I believe he really cared and was too embarrassed to let anyone know.
Our director, Robert Wise, who was a lovely man and a fine director, witnessed our chemistry early on. Mitchum and I kidded around a lot, so much so that Wise took us aside and pleaded with us to take a little time and be serious before each take.
Robert and I had a way of telling jokes or laughing right up until the time Wise yelled “action,” and we very much enjoyed making a sudden transition into the emotion required by the scene. But Wise couldn’t adjust that fast. As a result, he felt isolated from the party.
Robert and I couldn’t help ourselves. We were on a roll, attuned to one another’s sense of the absurd and frankly insensitive to others in our environment. “Too swift for the pack,” Robert would say.
We never spent any time together away from the set. Then, during a period when I had a few days off, I went to Hawaii to think and be alone. I was unreachable. When I returned, Robert said, “When I didn’t see you, I felt deprived. You are too much with me.” From then on things changed.
The next day we shot a scene where he, in character, said, “You are a beautiful, beautiful girl.” Even in black-and-white, I blushed so much they had to put an extra layer of makeup on me.
Soon he was driving me home from work, reciting poetry that he’d memorized. He put on a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics, which revealed to me an extensive knowledge of poetry and a state of consciousness deeper and more aware than his Neanderthal pose would indicate. We spent most of our work time together on the set or in each other’s dressing rooms, and after hours there were long story-spinning sessions with other adoring listeners.
Sometimes he would drink too much as he recited by heart sonnets of Shakespeare.
Sometimes he’d gaze at the stars and barely acknowledge that I sat next to him in the car.
“I’m a caged lion with the soul of a poet,” he said. “A poet with an ax.”
Sometimes he’d buy a bag of pomegranates and bring them to me as though they were the crown jewels. He’d open them with his huge hands, turn them inside out, and separate the seeds
from the fruit while he spun another story about his life.
The filming progressed, and day by day we and the crew became a family. In those days, stars could take the time for long comrades-in-arms coffee breaks, sitting around the camera, reminiscing about years gone by. It cemented the unity of the film family. Each person felt important and integral to the work. Robert, of course, identified more with the “working stiffs” than he did with the “above the line” personnel.
Crews are sensitive and sophisticated about creative behavior. They’ve seen it all and are blind to it all. Crew members can become like wallpaper, if necessary, melding into the woodwork yet surrounding the room with attention. They may gossip, but it’s subtle.
They were aware of the relationship developing between Robert and me. They respected it. They allowed it without comment. They were included. There was nothing secretive or clandestine about it, and that was because our friendship was still growing.
It wasn’t until after the picture that our deeper relationship really began. I called Steve to explain what was developing between Robert and me. I was a little afraid of it, and beginning to wonder how much longer I could wander around the romantic landscape without destroying the relationship I had with my husband. I didn’t want to ruin Robert’s marriage either. I wasn’t sure where it was going between us, and I think I was looking for help from Steve. If he would come home, perhaps we could clarify our own relationship. But Steve said he was too busy. He chastised me for being adolescent and not understanding his need to establish an identity of his own. So Robert and I traveled together, meeting in places like New Orleans, Paris, New York, London, and even Africa. We loved bumming around. We got lost in the moment of wherever we were. Robert had no sense of time or purpose. The present was all there was. Then we’d part and there would be long stretches when we didn’t see each other but kept in touch by phone, and the phone calls were like our travels, rambling, without a destination. His words haunt me still.
My Lucky Stars Page 27