Life Itself: A Memoir

by Roger Ebert

  Are all the rumors about you true?

  “Oh, sure, every one. Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Make up some more if you want to. They’re all true. Booze, broads, all true.”

  What about pot?

  “I don’t have any,” he said. “I sit and weep and wait for the weather to change, waiting for my crop to grow.” He leaned over and picked up a flowerpot that was leaning against the side of his cottage. A sickly spindle of twig grew in it. “My crop,” he said. “I’m waiting for my crop to grow. In my hands I hold the hopes of the Dingle Botanical Society.”

  The following year, Mitchum and the movie’s publicist, Bailey Selig, came through Chicago to promote the Lean picture. I told him his co-star Trevor Howard had been through town not long before on the same assignment.

  “What was he saying?” Mitchum said.

  “Something about his wife falling off a mountain,” I said.

  Mitchum and Bailey laughed together. “That was Trevor for you,” Mitchum said. “I’ll tell you what really happened. It wasn’t a mountain, it was a ledge. Helen was walking up to my cottage one night. The road turned, and she went straight. We were having a bit of a party at my place. A few drinks, a few laughs. Trevor was in the kitchen making love to a bottle of Chivas Regal. Harold, my stand-in, walked out front of the cottage and came in white as a sheet. He said there was a woman outside with a bloody head and only one shoe. We went out and it was Helen Howard. We got her on the couch and fanned her back to witness, and she said she’d fallen off the ledge. Dead sober she was. Harold had been a medic with the Coldstream Guards. He ascertained Helen had broken her coccyx.”

  Mitchum sipped his Pernod. “I went into the kitchen to tell Trevor. ‘Nonsense!’ Trevor said. ‘Pay no attention! I’m the only one who has a coccyx in this family! She pulls these stunts all the time. It’s her way of attracting attention.’ Then Trevor poured himself another Chivas.”

  Mitchum shrugged. “Well, as it turned out, for poor Helen it meant a twenty-five-mile ride over the mountains in a Land Rover to the nearest hospital, at Tralee. So I went back into the kitchen and broke the news to Trevor.”

  “Right you are, sport,” Trevor said. “Bloody unpleasant trip over the mountain on a rocky road to Tralee in a Land Rover.”

  “It’s going to be awfully painful,” Mitchum told Howard. “Poor Helen sitting up in a Land Rover with her injured tailbone.”

  “Yes indeed,” Trevor said. “Bloody difficult trip. Sure to be goddamned uncomfortable. No sense in my going!”

  The next year, in the autumn of 1971, Mitchum was in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, to film Going Home. I was to meet him outside the Sheraton Motor Inn. The sky hung low and wet, and Mitchum hunched his shoulders against it and scooted around to the passenger side of the car. He’d dismissed his union driver and would be driven by his friend Tim Lawless, who claimed he knew where the location was. Tim started the car and guided it down a ramp and onto a highway, turning left, which was, as it turned out, a fateful decision.

  “Jesus, what a lousy, crummy day,” Tim said.

  “And here it is only two in the afternoon,” Mitchum said. “Reflect on the hours still before us. What time is the call for?”

  “They’re looking for you around two thirty, quarter to three,” Tim said. “You got it made.”

  “You know the way?” Mitchum said.

  “Hell, yes, I know the way,” Tim said. “I was out here yesterday. Sons of bitches, picking locations way the hell the other side of hell and gone.”

  “What do we gotta shoot this afternoon? We gotta jam our asses into those little cells again?”

  “Those are the smallest cells I’ve ever seen,” Tim said. “Can you imagine pulling solitary in one of those?”

  “I did five days of solitary once, when I was a kid,” Mitchum said. “In Texas. Of course, in Texas you might as well be in as out.”

  “You did solitary?” Tim said.

  “I liked it,” Mitchum said. “You read about Alvin Karpis, up in Canada? They finally let him out after forty years. Son of a bitch walks free, and the guy who put him inside is still sitting there. J. Edgar. Son of a bitch does forty years, the least we could do for him is not have J. Edgar still sitting there when he gets out a lifetime later.”

  “Karpis?” Tim said.

  “I guess he was a real mean mother at one time,” Mitchum said.

  The wipers beat back and forth against the windshield, and on the sidewalks people put their heads down and made short dashes between dry places. We were in Pittsburgh now, and the smoke and fog brought visibility down to maybe a couple of blocks.

  “I’m glad we’re shooting inside today,” Tim said.

  Mitchum whistled under his breath, and then began to sing softly to himself: “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade…”

  “With a hundred and ten cornets in the rear,” Tim sang, banging time against the steering wheel.

  “ ‘A hundred and ten’? Is that right?” Tim said after a while.

  “All I know is the seventy-six trombones,” Mitchum said. “I don’t have time to keep pace with all the latest developments.”

  “How long you been in Pittsburgh?” I asked.

  “I was born here,” Mitchum said, “and I intend to make it my home long after U.S. Steel has died and been forgotten. I intend to remain after steel itself has been forgotten. I shall remain, here on the banks of the Yakahoopee River, a greyed eminence. I used to come through here during the Depression. I don’t think the place has ever really and truly recovered.”

  He reached in his pocket for a pipe, filled it carefully, and lit up.

  “I don’t think we went through a tunnel yesterday,” Tim said.

  “Well, we’re going through a tunnel now,” Mitchum said.

  “Are you sure we’re supposed to be on Seventy-Nine and not Seventy-Six?” Tim said.

  “I think I’m sure,” Mitchum said. “We were either supposed to sing ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’ to remind us to take Seventy-Six or to remind us not to. I’m not sure which.”

  “You’re not leading me down the garden path, are you, Bob?” Tim said.

  “Route Seventy-Nine,” Mitchum said. “Maybe it was Seventy-Six. Or… Route Thirty?”

  “This is the goddamn airport road,” Tim said. “Look there.”

  “Steubenville, Ohio,” Mitchum said. “Jesus Christ, Tim, we’re going to Steubenville, Ohio. Maybe it’s just as well. Make a left turn at Steubenville and come back in on the Pennsylvania Turnpike…”

  “Ohio’s around here somewhere,” Tim said.

  “I’ve always wanted to make a picture in Ohio,” Mitchum said. “Maybe I have. I was bitten by a rowboat once in Cleveland.”

  There were three lanes of traffic in both directions, and Tim held grimly to the wheel, trying to spot a sign or an exit or a clue.

  “The Vesuvius Crucible,” Mitchum said. “Pull off here, and we’ll ask at the Vesuvius Crucible. If anybody ought to know where they are, the Vesuvius Crucible ought to.”

  Tim took the next exit and drove into the parking lot of the Vesuvius Crucible. Mitchum rolled down the window on his side and called to a man inside the office: “Hey, can you tell us how to get to the Allegheny County Workhouse?”

  “The what?” the man said.

  “The Allegheny County Workhouse,” Mitchum said.

  “Hell, they closed that down back here about six months ago,” the man said. “It’s empty now.”

  “We just want to visit,” Mitchum said. “Old times’ sake.”

  The man came out into the yard, scratching himself thoughtfully. “The Allegheny County Workhouse,” he repeated. “Well, buster, you’re real lost. You turn around here and go right back to downtown Pittsburgh. Take the underpass. When you get to downtown Pittsburgh, ask for directions there.”

  “How wide are we off the mark?” Mitchum said.

  “Buster,” the man said, “you’re thirty-eight or forty miles away from where you sh
ould be.”

  “Holy shit,” Mitchum said.

  “I’m telling you,” the man said, “they shut the workhouse down back here six, seven months ago. You won’t find anybody there.”

  “Thanks just the same,” Mitchum said.

  Tim drove back up to the expressway overpass and came down pointed toward Pittsburgh. “We should have taken Route Eight,” he said.

  “Sorry about that,” Mitchum said. “There’s the road to Monroeville. Ohio’s around here somewhere.”

  “Nice countryside,” Tim said. “You ought to buy it and build yourself a ranch.”

  “I could be the biggest rancher in Pittsburgh,” Mitchum said. “Get up in the morning and eat ham and eggs in my embroidered pajamas. Some girl broke into the motel; did you hear about that? With a pair of embroidered PJs?”

  “Embroidered?”

  “A great big red heart right over the rosette area,” Mitchum said. “I’ve got an idea. Maybe we should hire a cab and have it lead us to the Allegheny County Workhouse.”

  “I don’t even think we’re in Allegheny County,” Tim said.

  Mitchum hummed “Seventy-Six Trombones” under his breath and filled his pipe again.

  “There’s a funny thing about this picture,” Mitchum said. “At the same time I was reading this script, I was also reading a script about a jazz musician in San Francisco. So I ask myself, do I want to play a jazz musician in San Francisco, or do I want to go on location in some god-forsaken corner of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and live in a motel for two months? No way. Noooo way. So these two guys come in, and we have a drink or two, and I sign the contract. On their way out, I say I’ll see them in San Francisco. They looked at me a little funny. Do you know what I did? I signed up for the wrong fucking movie.”

  “Here’s Route Eight right now,” Tim said.

  “That’s Exit Eight, not Route Eight,” Mitchum said.

  “We’re going to be real late,” Tim said.

  “They can rehearse,” Mitchum said. “They can practice falling off stairs, tripping over lights, and shouting at each other in the middle of a take.”

  The car was back in the tunnel again now. Tim came down through a series of cloverleafs and found himself back on Route 79, headed for the airport.

  “I’m lost,” he said. “Baby, I am lost.”

  In desperation, he made a U-turn across six lanes of traffic and found himself on an up ramp going in the wrong direction with a cop walking slowly across the street toward him.

  Mitchum rolled down his window. “Roll down your window,” he told Tim. “Let’s get a breeze in here.” He shouted to the cop: “Hey, chief! We’re lost! We been forty miles out in the country, and here we are headed right back the same way again.”

  “What are you doing making a U-turn against all that traffic?” the cop said. “You could go to jail for that.”

  “Hell, chief,” Mitchum said, “that’s where we’re trying to go. We been looking for the Allegheny County Workhouse for the last two hours.”

  “They closed that down back here six months ago,” the policeman said.

  “We’re shooting a movie out there,” Mitchum said.

  “Hey, you’re Robert Mitchum, aren’t you?” the cop said.

  Mitchum pulled his dark glasses down on his nose so the cop could see more of his face and said, “We are so lost.”

  “I tell you what you do, Bob,” the cop said. “You take this underpass and follow the road that curves off on your left before you get to the bridge.”

  “Thanks, chief,” Mitchum said.

  Tim drove onto the underpass, followed the road that curved off on the left before he got to the bridge, and groaned.

  “We’re back on Route Seventy-Nine heading for the airport,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mitchum said. “Screw that cop. Screw that cop and the boat that brought him.”

  “Now we gotta go back through the tunnel,” Tim said. “I’m upset. I am really upset.”

  On the other side of the tunnel, Tim pulled over next to a state highway department parking lot and backed into it down the exit ramp. A state employee came slowly out of a shed, wiping his hands on a rag and watching Tim’s unorthodox entry.

  “Ask that guy,” Mitchum said. “Offer him a certain amount to lead us there with a snowplow.”

  Tim got out and received some instructions from the state employee. The instructions required a great deal of arm waving, and their essence seemed to be: Go back that way.

  Tim tried it again, back through the tunnel, across the bridge, down the overpass to a red light where a police squad car was stopped in front of their Mercury. Mitchum jumped out of the car and hurried up to the squad car for instructions. He got back just as the light turned green.

  “You’ll see a sign up here that says Blawnox,” he said. “That’s what we need. Blawnox.”

  “I’m out of gas,” Tim said.

  “I got a letter from John Brison today,” Mitchum said. “John’s in Dingle, in Ireland. Where we shot Ryan’s Daughter.”

  “I am really upset,” Tim said.

  “According to John,” Mitchum said, “they’ve formed a Robert Mitchum Fan Club in Dingle. The membership is largely composed of unwed mothers and their brothers.”

  “Where the hell are we?” said Tim.

  “That’s what happens when you shoot on location,” Mitchum said. “It’s nothing but a pain in the ass.”

  In 1975, I went to talk with Mitchum in his office on Sunset Strip. He had just finished playing Philip Marlowe, a role he was born for, in Farewell, My Lovely.

  “They were gonna make Farewell, My Lovely last year,” Mitchum said. “They wanted Richard Burton. He was doing something else. The producer, Elliott Kastner, comes by with Sir Lew Grade, the British tycoon. He has a black suit, a black tie, a white shirt, and a whiter face. ‘I know nothing about motion pictures,’ Sir Lew says. ‘What I know is entertainment: Ferris wheels, pony rides.’ I suggested we buy up the rights to Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell, rerelease it, and go to the beach.

  “But, no, they hired a director, Dick Richards, so nervous he can’t hold his legs still. They have all the hide rubbed off them. He started doing TV commercials. He was accustomed to, you know, start the camera, expose a hundred and twenty feet of film, and tell somebody to move the beer bottle half an inch clockwise. He does the same thing with people.”

  Mitchum inhaled, exhaled slowly, leaned forward to see into his outer office. “Bring me a Miltown, sweetheart,” he said to his secretary. “Christ, I can’t keep up during this mad, merry social season. Comes the rites of spring, there’s nothing but elections, premieres… why they continue to send all these invitations to me is… thanks, sweetheart…

  “The girl on the picture was Charlotte Rampling. She was the chick who dug S and M in The Night Porter. She arrived with an odd entourage, two husbands or something. Or they were friends and she married one of them and he grew a mustache and butched up. She kept exercising her mouth like she was trying to swallow her ear. I played her on the right side because she had two great big blackheads on her left ear, and I was afraid they’d spring out and lodge on my lip.”

  It was a lucky chance that got Mitchum into Farewell, My Lovely in the first place. He was on Corsica to play the lead in Preminger’s Rosebud when he was fired, or quit, and came back to Hollywood just as the Marlowe role opened up.

  “I might have been able to give Otto some advice on that picture,” Mitchum mused. “I was out there at five thirty one morning, looking at the raw eggs they were describing as breakfast and doing my Otto Preminger imitation, and Otto comes up behind me and starts bellowing.”

  The exchange, as Mitchum remembered it, went like this:

  Preminger: “You have been drinking with the Corsicans!”

  Mitchum: “Who the hell else is there around here to drink with, Otto?”

  Preminger: “By the end of the day, you are hopelessly drunk!”

  Mit
chum: “It’s the end of the day, isn’t it?”

  Preminger: “You are drunk now!”

  Mitchum: “Now, Otto, how in hell can I be drunk at five thirty in the morning?”

  Preminger: “You are through!”

  Mitchum: “Taxi!”

  The last time I saw Mitchum was in Charlottesville at the 1993 Virginia Film Festival, four years before his death. They were honoring him, they said, “because he embodies the soul of film noir.” That was true, but Mitchum only smiled at it. “We called them B pictures,” he said. “We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the sets, we didn’t have the lights, we didn’t have the time. What we did have were some pretty good stories.” It was my job to be onstage with Mitchum and question him after the screening of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), one of the greatest of all film noirs, the one where Jane Greer tells Mitchum, “You’re no good and neither am I. We were meant for each other.” And where Mitchum, informed that everybody dies sooner or later, replies, “Yes, but if I have to, I’m going to die last.”

  Instead of attending the screening we had dinner at a local restaurant, where I learned his wife prudently instructed the bartenders to water his martinis. On the stage after the screening, he lit a Pall Mall to loud applause, blew out smoke, and sighed.

  “Making faces and speaking someone else’s lines is not really a cure for cancer, you know. If you can do it with some grace, that’s good luck, but it isn’t an individual triumph; it is about as individual as putting one foot before the other. One of the greatest movie stars was Rin Tin Tin. What the hell. It can’t be too much of a trick.”

  “In Out of the Past, you co-starred with Kirk Douglas,” I said. You’ve always been laid back. He was more… laid forward.”

  “Well, Kirk was very serious about it. Just before Out of the Past, Bettejane Greer and I saw a picture that came over from Paramount called The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Kirk was very interesting in it. So we said, ‘Let’s get him,’ and the studio got him and he’s quite serious about his profession, while I personally take or leave it, you know. I have a come-what-may attitude. And he spent most of his time on the set with a pencil on his chin… which kind of tickled the hell out of Bettejane. But I saw that he was very serious about it. He came to Janie and said, ‘How can I underplay Mitchum?’ She said, ‘Forget it, man. He ain’t playing it; he’s just doing it.’ ”