He said my face was “treacherously beautiful,” like “some enchanted goblin’s.”
He said the glimmer of communication between us was probably “self-appreciation” because we recognized our own thoughts in each other. He talked about his “heavy rushes of feeling” and “dogged protestations in the limited lyric of mundane love.”
Robert saw himself as a poet and I was an appreciator who worshiped his use of language, even though a lot of the time I didn’t know what he was talking about.
There were times when we planned to meet and he never came. More than once I found myself in a hotel room or an arranged apartment somewhere in the world, waiting for him. These were the times I cursed him, but I cursed myself more for believing we could have a relationship that meant something. It made me ponder the reasons I found myself so involved with him at all. He was clearly not a man of usual values, or about whom you could make easy predictions. He was insular at the same time that he was so amusingly gregarious.
Then I began to realize that Robert, more than any other man I knew, was helping me investigate my unresolved feelings about my father. Of course, Dad had spun stories too, only his were tales of what he could have done rather than what he had done, and I hadn’t realized it until I got to know Robert. Both had longed to wander the world, poking around in the way other people lived, finding adventures that would help them dismember their pasts. And both had deeply romantic natures.
My dad was from a small town in Virginia. He lived with both his parents, the stronger of whom was the mother.
Robert was from a small town in Connecticut. His family was fatherless until his mother married again.
I sensed that my father longed to venture as a “man” out beyond the perimeter of safety (he told me once he always wanted to run away and join a circus), and I saw in Robert the man who had fulfilled that dream.
And there were emotional areas so camouflaged in each man that I was compelled to salve their concern that exploring and exposing deep feelings would be too painful.
Every now and then Robert’s true sorrow and pain would break through. Once I remember lolling in a bubble bath in a village outside of Paris. When I turned around, he was sitting in a chair, just gazing at me, silent tears sliding down his cheeks. He said it was because I was beautiful. But I could feel it was because he couldn’t envision himself truly happy. Neither could my dad, so I was attracted very early to difficult, intelligent men to whom I thought I could bring happiness.
Robert taught me that that wasn’t possible. Happiness resided—or did not reside—within a person. What a painful lesson.
Robert’s manner of speaking was so obtuse and sometimes so esoteric that it constantly thwarted the clarity of feeling that Î longed to hear. He was a master with rich language, seemingly calculated to impress; yet his thoughts wandered in many directions and he never much cared whether I or anyone else kept up with him. If I questioned him, he’d ignore me and continue down his path of thinking.
It would have been a thrill to hear a precise answer to just about anything.
Robert seemed to be alone, but in many ways he was dependent … on work, on recognition, on books, on booze, cigarettes, and a willing audience. The contradiction made him more and more interesting.
During our relationship, I was trying to draw my own conclusions about Hollywood when I read what he had told a reporter, Helen Lawrensen, from Esquire—one of the few reporters he agreed to talk to. Of Hollywood he said: “It is a dull, aching euphoria…. There is all this asinine waste of money. They decide they want to use a shot of a harvesting machine. So three guys go tearing around the country, stay at expensive hotels, get stoned, spend days taking color tests of the machine. They then decide it won’t work…. [Hollywood] has no relation to real life, to real people. Oh, there are real people there, but they’re in oil refineries and factories, not in movieland. Hollywood is Atlantis.”
A man after my own heart. But if Hollywood was Atlantis, Robert Mitchum was from Venus.
Once when we were in an apartment in New York, the dialogue between us had become so indecipherable that my mind closed in on me. He had a way of being so emotionally uncommitted in these exchanges that I felt like I was hanging bubbles on a clothesline. He had no strongly held personal opinions about anything. He was fine with that, lost in the maze of his meanderings. But I couldn’t stand it anymore. I was so angry I opened the door, picked him up bodily, and threw him out into the hallway. I waited for some kind of appropriate response. He simply bowed and said, “I’ll tell him when he comes in.” What did that mean? That was what he always said when he knew he could go no further.
He slunk away and decided that I had flung him out of my life. It didn’t occur to him that taking some responsibility for his vagueness would help. No, he “knew” I was too good for him. Much later, I read a poem by Mitchum. The “anguish of my solitude,” he wrote, was sweet.
I wrote him in despair as a result of his inverted sense of commitment to himself.
The fact that you don’t need anything is in direct relation to what you already possess. But the fact that you don’t want anything is a sad neglect of the life you’ve been given. To want something enables others to give to you. You must know I want to give what is wanted. If you don’t allow yourself to want on the grounds that it is selfish … you reduce yourself to a bum. To be a bum, and a good one at that, is up to you. But must the rest of us suffer the same existence because you are unselfishly selfish?
He demanded nothing. He had no desires, not in relation to food, an evening out, or even an evening in. His attitude toward lovemaking was the same. He never took the initiative. He enjoyed it certainly, he was sweet and tender, but I never really knew what he wanted. Anything was okay. He was like that about his work too. He never asked for anything. Not even good parts. He’d take B pictures because he said “better me than some other poor fool.” And so he would intermittently ruin his career yet another time, accepting roles in inferior pictures until David Lean or Fred Zinnemann, who both claimed he was one of the finest actors in America, pleaded with him to be in their pictures. He said he was ashamed of being an actor because people accorded him more respect and fame and money than he merited. But when his fine talent was proven once again, he’d sabotage it in a barroom brawl somewhere.
Once in a bar a man cracked Robert over the head with a thick magazine. Robert looked around and straightened, his chest expanding to its full breadth, which was considerable.
“And what may I do for you?” asked Robert in his mock-elegant eighteenth-century manner. I could sense trouble.
The guy said, “I just wanted to see if you’re really as tough as you seem in the movies.” He edged toward Robert as though to provoke him. I remembered a friend of mine saying that Robert never knew his strength. He’d squash an alarm clock just by shutting it off.
“Sir,” said Robert, “I’m a survivor of the Stone Age. I’m no hero.”
That wasn’t enough. Robert couldn’t just shake his hand and be friendly and self-effacing. No, he had to be oblique and esoteric. So the man decided he wanted to talk about fighting. Robert bantered with him about prizefighting and the dangers of being big and strong. He was clearly talking about himself. The man asked Robert who he would least like to be in a fight with. Robert thought a moment.
“Frank Sinatra,” he said.
“Why?” asked the man.
“Because,” said Robert, “every time I’d knock him down, he’d get right back up until one of us would have to get killed.”
That did it. The man walked away and left us.
Robert turned to me and said, “My problem is I look right in these dirty clothes.”
Another time a guy hit Robert with a bar stool. Robert turned around and without a beat asked simply, “Why?”
The guy said, “I just had an impulse to hit you.”
That really made Robert mad. He wanted a brainier explanation. The man’s excuse was insul
ting to him. Robert picked the guy up and threw him into the alley behind the bar. Then he stuffed him into a garbage can—careful, by the way, not to really hurt him.
Barroom brawlers certainly weren’t my type. But repressed violence did appeal to me. I began to see that Robert refused to articulate his feelings in order to avoid the violence he sensed in himself. He used liquor to quell it, of course, but sometimes it exploded.
Once we were driving at night and someone inadvertently cut him off. He took it personally and proceeded to ram the back of the man’s car with our car for a mile or two. The man gaped in disbelief when he pulled over and saw Mitchum and me glide by. I was mortified. Robert just grinned, something like the grin he used in Night of the Hunter. It could send chills down your back. Was he so excellent as a perverted killer because he understood how close to the surface those characteristics were in himself? Was that why I found him so attractive? Jimmy Van Heusen used to say to me, “You don’t like men who are nice to you. None of you women ever do. You all like guys who’ll give you a hard time. Gives you something to be miserable about.”
I see the truth in his words now. I and so many women I knew were psychologically unprepared for peace and harmony. We’d snatch unhappiness from the arms of contentment any chance we got. We were addicted to it, accustomed to it really. We saw our mothers as essentially unhappy and our fathers totally out of touch with their feelings—so what did we expect? It would take a master’s degree in self-investigation to pull ourselves out of the morass of finding difficult men dangerously exciting. My education to that end continued.
After a particularly bad period of vague and convoluted communication between us, I fled to India. I needed to think and be in a country of ancient wisdom and patience. I sat in the palace of the Maharaja of Jaipur, writing Robert letters. I admonished him even as I tried to come to terms with myself. I hated him so. And I hated myself. I found myself conniving ways to do grave bodily harm to him and not get caught. My own violence, rawly expressed, astonished me! I would do anything, it seemed, to make him wake up, to make him real instead of a phantom hiding behind literary esoterica. I wanted to force him to scream and kick and demand. I wanted to hear about his dreams, what angered him, what truly terrified him. I wanted to hear about what he wanted from life, from his work, from me. I sat for days writing and remembering; the scenes are still fresh in my mind. Our trip to New Orleans where for three days we ate nothing but fresh oysters washed down with absinthe until I thought I would go blind. He literally became Cajun, and when we moved onto a barge on the bayou, he lay back, gazed at the stars, and became a fisherman, inviting some of them to join us. It was another world; a real one, somehow, but to me it felt like the twilight zone.
In Greenwich Village, he took me to hear Dave Brubeck and introduced me to musicians and music I had never heard of. When Sinatra beard I was hanging out with Robert, he told me Robert knew more about the history of music than any man he had ever known. He sang and wrote and recorded several songs that did very well.
I was with Mitchum the day that President Kennedy was assassinated and we spent the evening watching the replay over and over, wondering what life was all about. He spoke only of “the bastards grinding you down,” never about the preciousness of our little time on earth.
And when I met him in East Africa, we’d sit out on the plains drinking vodka and ginger beer, commiserating with the whites who had been through Uhuru and the Mau-Mau experience. He loved watching the Masai tribespeople interrelate, particularly the women. He was offered the wives of many warriors as an act of proud generosity. I told him that was fine with me because the chief of the tribe had offered three hundred cattle to buy me.
I was so proud that I finally had the courage to leave him and go off and live with a Masai tribe on my own, experiencing a deep harmony uniting man, animals, and nature. I was beginning to actually feel the meaning of all living beings being one. Robert’s innate need for wandering, though a problem for me, was a trait I recognized in myself.
So I sat writing letters to him from India. I soon realized that he was a mirror image for my own lack of commitment. I was drawn to him not only because he was nearly twenty years older and a father image, but because through him I could learn how essential it was for me to inform others of what I wanted, needed, and was committed to in life.
Although Steve knew about my relationship with Robert, he never questioned my feelings. He didn’t want to know.
Over the years my relationship with Robert wound down. That was inevitable. I was learning that life does not just happen to us. Nature and the universe abhor a vacuum. If I didn’t design my destiny, scope out my future, dare to insist that my life was mine to mold and sculpt, then other forces, other people, other events would step in and do it for me.
Robert taught me by example that ambition needn’t be ruthless, nor was the lack of it all that attractive. Because of the frustration he provoked in me, I decided I never wanted to do that to others.
My desires, my values, my plans, and my projections for myself became more definite. I would know what I wanted so that others in my life could know where they stood.
My dad, bless his soul, was never committed to belief in himself. He was like Robert in that they both had dreams, but lived more like sleepwalkers. I didn’t want to be that way. Robert enabled me to wake up and take charge of my own ambition and dreams.
One night during the final days of our relationship, we were together when Robert had had a great deal to drink.
“I fear,” he said, “that I punished you for daring to know me.” He told me I had helped him to “sense, and see, and feel, freeing me to demand …”
Tears filled his eyes. He never finished the thought. What was it he wished to demand?
I knew what I would demand because of Robert. I would want more clarification of intention, meaning, and language. I would also never wait for a man in a hotel room for three days again.
13
A MAN I LOVED
… ON LOCATION
Sometimes real lovers in life have no chemistry on the screen. Sometimes chemistry between antagonists is what ignites the celluloid. There are many examples of the mysterious chemistry between screen stars. Taylor and Burton, Tracy and Hepburn, Gable and Lombard come to mind as real-life lovers whose chemistry translated to the screen. But for every one of them, there are pairings that don’t work at all. And to add to the mystery, many costars who fall in love are married and deeply in love with their spouses. Screen pairing can ruin lives.
To me, one of the most fascinating and dangerous “scandalous pairings” was that of Yves Montand and Marilyn Monroe. They played out their combustion for the entire world to witness while making Let’s Make Love together. Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, were left-wing, basically communist, intellectuals. They admired Arthur Miller (then married to Monroe) and thus the stage was set for a tabloid parody that debased the original attraction of serious politics.
The set was the old Beverly Hills bungalow complex. The cast was the aforementioned four and the script was not to be believed.
Long story short—Montand and Monroe fell in lust and both of their spouses were written out of the screenplay.
Simone went back to Europe, where she played the wronged wife with dignity and understanding. Miller wrote The Misfits, which he hoped would rouse his wife to her senses.
Montand was so impressed with both his wife and Monroe’s husband that he soon felt the “adventure,” as he termed it to the press, had outlived its usefulness, whereupon he returned to Simone, leaving a backlash of bad feeling in America. Monroe continued to pursue him with limos and champagne. Montand waved away her “schoolgirl crush” and Signoret said she had never expected her husband’s arms to remain empty when she was away.
Soon after that, Montand arrived in Tokyo to make My Geisha with me. I wondered if he would arrive alone. He did. I wondered how long he would remain that way, and whether I’d be the next
“adventure.”
Steve was producing the picture, which would be shot entirely on location all over Japan. I was extremely glad we would be working together. It would enable us to clarify our relationship at close proximity.
As Steve and I greeted Montand at the airport, he bent over and kissed my hand. Had he held on to it for a split second longer than necessary? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know the language of hand kissing. He had the physical presence of an expert stage performer who understood the power of his own charisma. He didn’t flirt or subtly flash his European charm. He didn’t need to. He seemed fundamentally commanding in his humor and dignity as he spoke of his trip. I was impressed by the fact that he had conquered the world stage (he was a huge hit on Broadway), and seemed quite confident he could do the same on the silver screen.
The rest of our cast, Robert Cummings and Edward G. Robinson, and our director, Jack Cardiff, were deep in work. As usual for costars, it was important for Yves and me to get to know one another. I was nervous about it. We had lunch the following day. Since I was living with Steve and Sachi in our house in Shibuya, I met Montand at his hotel.
As we sat over lunch, he was businesslike and very concerned about his English, particularly because our picture was a romantic comedy. “I know the rhythm of the words must be expert,” he said, “or the laughter won’t be there.” He spoke with slow formality. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less about laughs. He had ordered sushi but didn’t know how to use chopsticks. I took his chopsticks and placed them between his thumb and forefinger. His hands were warm. I wondered about his heart.
“So clever are these Japanese,” he said. “I have heard so many of them speak this difficult language fluently. So clean and polite … an amazing culture. I think I take up too much space.”
My Lucky Stars Page 28