by Lee Server
They lived now in a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough slum on the West Side, midtown, crowded with poor Irish, Italians, and other immigrant groups but only blocks away from the thriving, star-laden center of American show business—Broadway. There were five, sometimes six—when Annette’s Ernie was around—in the small place on Fifty-sixth Street. And then one more—the Major had lost his increasingly tentative position at the Bridgeport Post. He gathered up his few belongings—his medals, his snapshots from Mesopotamia, his yellowed letter from Winston Churchill—and took the train to New York, squeezing into the apartment with his wife, daughter and step-children.*
It was a tough, violent neighborhood and the local teens, many of them belonging to ethnic gangs, made the farm boys in Delaware look like daisies. There were threats on every block, fights to be fought or to be only very carefully avoided—if you were ever pegged as a chicken, you were a dead man. Robert showed what he was made of early on when he stepped in to save his brother from a beating, and then the entire gang descended. They “butchered” him, said his sister, but the gang members left so much of their own blood, so many of their own teeth on the Manhattan asphalt that few ever looked for a second opportunity to teach the Mitchum boys a lesson. Early on, Robert dropped the Felton twang he had picked up that characterized him as a bumpkin in New York. One of his talents was mimickry, imitating the voices and accents of the people he met. Within a month or so he was talking like a Ninth Avenue mick.
Robert had to go back to school, state law. He enrolled in Haaren High on Fifty-ninth Street. Haaren was no Felton High School. There were all kinds of ornery characters in attendance; some of them looked old enough to have graduated—or been expelled—years ago, blue-jawed characters with their dirty boots up on the desk. Mitchum managed to hold up his end in a tough crowd. Here, as in Felton, he showed little but contempt for figures of authority, and he was sent home more than once for bad behavior. One time he tossed a firecracker into a tuba during a school concert, right in the middle of the “Poet and Peasant” Overture. And to think the bandleader had earlier encouraged him to join the band and let him take home a saxophone to practice on. His mother learned how to play it herself and then coached him at night. He picked it up fast, as he did so many things, but got bored and dropped it. Years later, in Hollywood, he would sometimes happen upon a sax on a set or at a party and wow people with his unexpected proficiency.
Robert preferred to do his learning in private, on his own terms. He discovered the palacelike library at Fifth and Forty-second and would stay until closing in the cavernous reading rooms with a stack of books before him—novels, histories, anthropological studies, poetry, biographies. He and his brother loved to explore the city’s museums, returning again and again to the Museum of Natural History especially, imaginations set afire by the exhibits depicting ancient Indian camps, knights in armor, Egyptian mummies, bejeweled swords and daggers. The vivid glimpses of exotic peoples and locales primed a growing wanderlust.
New York offered young Bob another sort of education, heretofore neglected. He and John slept in the kitchen. The original, much larger apartment had been turned into two residences, crudely partitioned with a slab of plywood running next to the kitchen door. At night, with the lights out, the cracks and wormholes in the wood gave them glimpses of the neighboring apartment, rented out to a couple of gin-swilling NYU students. One night there were strange sounds coming through the wall that brought the Mitchum brothers crawling from their cots to investigate. The college boys had company, pickups from a local speak, bootleg hooch was flowing, and soon the quartet were out of their clothes and rolling around in orgiastic celebration while Bob and Jack watched the show from the other side, bumping heads against the cracks. It was like a Tijuana Bible come to life, the boys thought, most informative.
Robert had never had much truck with girls, and they didn’t seem to like him, all skin and bones, indented chin, face like a damn ferret. In any case, rural Delaware was a prim, God-fearing place and had been unlikely to offer much in the way of sensual inducements. New York was another story altogether. In addition to the eye-opening antics seen through the plywood wall, Robert came in close contact with many beautiful and relatively godless women from Annette’s growing circle of Broadway acquaintances, some of them stopping by the apartment for a late night coffee after long hours on the stage. One of these lovelies, friendly and high-spirited, was a stripper currently employed at Minsky’s Burlesque. Feeling sympathy for Annie’s skinny brother when he expressed his dream of someday getting to see such an interesting-sounding show, the young woman arranged to sneak him in one night as her underaged guest. He stood by the backstage door at a prearranged time until out slipped his lovely liaison wearing a long, fur coat, in which she enveloped him and stealthily escorted him into the theater. Fresh from her own appearance on the stage, the lady had nothing on beneath the fur. Robert struggled to keep his balance while bathed in the heat of her luscious femininity. It was a fever-inducing experience, as was the show itself, glimpsed from a discreet nook in the wings. His subsequent inclination toward a showbiz career Robert would blame on this epochal viewing. “Any boyhood visions of growing up to be a policeman or fireman collapsed right there,” he later confessed. He would return to the burlesque house on a number of occasions during his Manhattan sojourn, becoming friendly with several of the show’s star performers, and it was there—he claimed when anyone had the temerity to inquire—it was there, backstage at Minsky’s, between the lissome thighs of a sympathetic stripteaser, that he would surrender whatever technically remained of his innocence.
It was only with the family’s arrival in New York that Robert began to comprehend the terrible circumstances into which the country had been plunged. In the time since the stock market crash of 1929, the enormous economic downturn had rapidly dismantled great chunks of the social infrastructure across America, upsetting the lives of mllions. Everywhere now was mounting unemployment, dislocation, despair. A city as powerful as New York continued to function much as before, the streets and subways still crowded with gainfully employed citizenry; but the nightmarish effects of the Great Depression had become a citywide specter visible on every block. Mitchum would never forget the haunted-looking beggars skulking around Tmes Square, the cardboard shanties under the bridges and in empty lots, the shivering men lined up in the snow outside a church soup kitchen, waiting hours sometimes for a cup of hot broth and a small hunk of bread. And there were worse things to see: the ones who didn’t survive the hardship, dead from starvation or disease or fear, the bodies lying where they fell until the city could collect them like the day’s trash. “You’d find ’em under the subway steps,” Mitchum remembered, “huddled up and gone.”
His family hung on, barely. They moved to another apartment uptown in the West Nineties, but the rent still came due each month. Ann had to stay home to take care of baby Carol, while the rest did whatever they could to bring in some money. On arrival from Bridgeport, the Major had made the rounds of the Manhattan newspapers and magazines looking for a position, without success. His roster of claimed talents included a clever way with cards, and now and then he would hear of a game going on somewhere and scrounge up fifty cents or so and try and make it grow. Once he actually came back with ten dollars for the kitty. For a time Jack worked as a delivery boy at a market, taking big boxes of groceries to the elegant apartment houses on Central Park South. The temptation to remove some mouthwatering item or two from the deliveries was always mitigated by the fear of losing the job and the dimes that it earned him. They scratched by, hand to mouth. One night the family dinner consisted of a bag of roasted walnuts one of the boys had stolen from a vendor. Robert found a job jerking sodas at the drugstore of the Astor Hotel on Broadway. He worked for twelve hours on Christmas Day 1931, so the boss treated him to a dinner on the house, a feast it seemed at the time, with his stomach always empty—a hamburger and a chocolate soda.
At fourteen he le
ft home.
“You read these stories that Bob ran away,” said his sister, recalling the events of sixty-seven years earlier. “He didn’t run away. Mother packed his things for him! Like many great minds, artists and visionaries, and Bob was a little bit of all of that, he was curious, wanted to see everything. He had to get out and explore the world. He read everything, and when he learned about interesting things and places, he became so eager to go see them. He’d read a story about the Okefenokee Swamp, or this or that, and he’d say, ‘I’ve just got to go see what that looks like.’ Mother used to read us a little poem, I don’t know who wrote it, and it mentions the ‘great wide wonderful world, so beautifully dressed,’ and Bob just couldn’t wait to go out and see it.”
Mitchum would remember it in less idealistic terms. “I was a poor kid and a lot of trouble. I never got along too well anywhere. Fifth wheel kind of thing . . .
“I got tired of gnawing on chicken necks and hit the road.
“I guess my ambition was . . . to be a bum.”
He had daydreamed about tramps and hoboes the way other boys did about cowboys and airplane daredevils. They were the last great American adventurers, knights of the open road and all that jazz. It was a life Robert had read about, hungrily devoured, in alluring stories and books by Jack London and Jim Tully and others who wrote of train-hopping vagabonds in a world of thrills, danger, and absolute freedom. Tully, in particular, was a kind of private god to Mitchum. The “hobo author,” as he was called, a two-fisted intellectual, proud nihilist, hard-boiled stylist, Tully wrote of social outcasts and bottomrungers, tramps, prizefighters, carnies, orphans. Mitchum read his Beggars of Lifey a memoir of Tully’s days as a “road kid”—a young drifter—read it again and again till the type was stained and smeared with dirty fingerprints and pages fell loose from the binding.
• • •
In the early ’30s, history conspired to create a hobo subculture the likes of which Jim Tully could never have imagined in his footloose days. With the Depression spreading across the land, plaguelike, an economic Black Death, hundreds of thousands of jobless and destitute Americans began to leave their homes and families and wander the country in search of work, food, survival. They left in cars, like Steinbeck’s Joads, in trembling jalopies stuffed with their every possession; they tramped and hitchhiked; and in ever-increasing numbers they rode the trains, illegally hopping the freights that crisscrossed every part of the country. Most of the hoboes on the road were adult males, but as the Depression continued into a second and third year, conditions growing worse, families unable to cope and schools being shut down, hordes of children became a part of this desperate, aimless migration as well. There were an estimated 250,000 youths—the so-called wild boys of the road—riding the rails at the height of the Depression.
Crowds of a hundred and more would gather to catch a single freight train, a ragtag army swarming onto the cars as they rolled down the track. Outside rail yards they built encampments, “hobo jungles” they were called, and a few had grown to the size of small towns. Some communities were taking drastic, even violent measures to drive off the scourge of the wandering unemployed. Some among the nation’s wealthy and reactionary feared their anarchic ranks would become an organized revolutionary force, hoboes rising up to attack the banks and factories en masse and topple Herbert Hoover’s government.
On a morning in 1932, fourteen-year-old Robert Mitchum hopped aboard a freight train heading south.
* Mitchum would on occasion absurdly claim to have been voted Felton’s class valedictorian (and his equally trouble-making pal Manuel Barque honored as salutatorian!)—and say that he had set fire to the school instead and left town the day before graduation, a case of wishful daydreaming, though some journalists have printed the claim as fact. In 1976 the Felton school board, hoping to have the now-famous film star appear at their bicentennial celebration, wrote to him in Los Angeles and offered as enticement the high school diploma he had never earned. Mitchum did not return to Felton, but the diploma was forwarded to him nonetheless.
* The house on Logan Street where Robert spent his early childhood had been sold for three thousand dollars, all of it going to unpaid levies and the mortgage company. The family that purchased the place found it in very poor condition and without a furnace or water heater. The rooms contained items abandoned by the Mitchums—pieces of furniture, a oiuja board, and numerous sketches and paintings by Ann and others that a surviving member of the new owner’s family described as “very lovely.”
chapter two
Boxcar to the
Promised Land
THERE WERE TIMES, HE would remember, lying on his back on an open flat-car on a warm summer night and staring at the stars overhead, when he would feel blissfully happy and free. And then there were the other times. Evenings with the cold wind whipping through his bones. Staring out from an open boxcar through the windows of passing houses, imagining he saw the families inside gathered together at the dinner table or huddled around a Christmas tree, times when he would be filled with loneliness and trying not to cry. One time he was riding a reefer, a refrigerator car, into Idaho Falls in the dead of winter. What he was doing in that part of the world he couldn’t say, had probably hopped the wrong freight or something. It was ten below zero outside. Shivering, teeth chattering. Nothing to eat for twenty-four hours except a can of unthawed peaches found trackside. He had an old newspaper and stuffed the pages inside his pants for warmth. A hobo crouching nearby had started a little campfire in the car. A spark touched the newspaper sticking out of the leg of Robert’s pants and it went up in flames. He awoke with his legs on fire. The hobo helped him tear his burning pants off. It was the only pair he had, too. When you were standing with no pants on under a streetlamp in Idaho in the middle of winter, trying to find some frozen clothes to steal off a clothesline and then trying to thaw them out in a depot campfire without burning those up, too—well, Mitchum liked to say, after that things could only get better.
In the beginning he wandered the country with no timetable, many times with no destination clearly in mind, just enjoying the ride and the view provided by a “sidecar Pullman,” the thrill of finding himself in places he had previously known only in pictures, in books. Chicago. The Big Santee. The Mississippi. The Blue Ridge Mountains. Down in the Carolinas to see the land his father had come from. The real hoboes—a term meant to describe only those migrants who traveled in search of work—called people like Robert “scenery bums,” young punks who rode the trains just looking for adventure. Some of those job-seeking hoboes knew the schedules and destinations of the freights in a given territory better than a damn conductor, but scenery bums like Bob often didn’t care where a train was going. There was a special excitement in hopping a freight to an unknown destination, leaving it up to fate. Would tomorrow drop you in New Orleans or West Virginia? Every month or so he would make his way to an appointed place where his mother would be able to write to him, care of the general post office. Often as not his mother had sent him something, a clean shirt, money, a tin of candies. Sometimes, out of nowhere, he would be sitting on the steps outside the post office and he would read her note and start tearing up. He was far from home and only fourteen years old, no matter how much he tried to deny it.
The denizens of the road, of the rails, were a kind of society unto themselves, with their own customs, their own laws and lingo. Mitchum relished becoming part of this world of outsiders. These were his people, he liked to say, the ones who didn’t fit in. In the hobo jungles, the improvised transient centers that grew up around the jumping-off points on the tracks, he would sit around the campfires and the garbage can grills and listen like a disciple to the huddled veterans telling their tales of brushes with death on the trains, violent run-ins with some notorious railroad bull, and other adventures, some bloodcurdling and some hilarious, Robert listening to the tales while he ate from his tin cup of beans or mulligan stew procured for a few pennies’ donation or b
y chipping in a couple of scavenged vegetables. Some of those guys were amazing storytellers and could hold a crowd in their palm as they wove a wild tale that was half memory and half nonsense; they could make the crowd roar with laughter at a funny windup or leave them blubbering if it was a sad story and had anything to do with a mother or a devoted dog.
It was an education. Every day he had to learn something new to survive. He learned how to catch and cook a squirrel, how to tell directions from the stars at night, how to repair socks, how to fight a man coming at you with a length of chain. He had long been a rather emancipated boy, and the road made him even more grown-up before his time. He had already, at fourteen, developed a taste for alcohol and its effects, sneaking off with many a bottle of his grandmother’s fruit wines back at the farm, but liquor was scarce on the road. Sometimes, in a jungle or in a boxcar with some other bums, a bottle of moonshine made the rounds, but it usually cost you. There was, however, another substance available to down-and-outers on the road looking for a buzz, and it was free for the taking. Marijuana grew wild in many parts of the country and was often found in great thriving clumps along the railroad tracks. “Back then it was the poor man’s whiskey,” Mitchum said. Those who knew what they were looking for could weed it out and stuff their pockets full before hopping a freight. You rolled it in a page of newspaper and lit it up. It was a pleasant way to get through a long ride, sometimes having to sit all night in pitch-black darkness and in cold. Robert liked it maybe even more than booze. He liked the way it seemed to slow things down, allowed the mind to wrestle with a thought at greater leisure, to ponder more deeply. He liked the way it made a joke heard sound funnier and a girl look prettier. It relaxed you, it felt good, it was sexually stimulating. He couldn’t believe the Lucky Strike people hadn’t already cornered the market on the stuff. As he traveled the country he became a connoisseur of the weed, came to know its botanical history, its strengths and strains. After much practice, he claimed to be able to taste the regional characteristics in any sampling—Georgia hemp from Louisiana shitweed from California Red, and so on—at a single toke, blindfolded. In later years, he would collect seeds of the best stuff he found, and he would find a place in the yard or driveway where he lived and raise his own crop.