by Lee Server
He was a little too colorful for some, including her parents, hard-working, middle-class folks who ran a general store in the town and who were not thrilled at their daughter’s friendship with a once and future hobo (they were understandably prevented from hearing of his criminal conviction and time spent on the chain gang). Not by nature a rebellious child, Dorothy hated to disappoint or distress her mother and dad. But she did not stop seeing the boy, and her feelings for him continued to improve until one Saturday night on a double date with his cousin Gilbert and another girl, riding around in Gilbert’s car, talking and laughing, an absolutely ordinary Saturday night she would remember forever only because it was the night she knew for certain that she was in love.
She was just thirteen years old, Robert would say in her defense, the age when young girls fall for derelicts.
He worked for a while as an apprentice mechanic in a local garage. Then, in the summer of 1933, not yet sixteen and lying about his age, he became one of the first volunteers for the Civilian Conservation Corps, an employment program created by newly elected Pres. Franklin Roosevelt. An innovative attempt to create jobs for some among the millions left unemployed by the Depression, FDR’s CCC put young men to work on federal land projects and emergency relief assignments, simple physical jobs mostly, paying thirty dollars a month. Robert was assigned with a few hundred other enlistees to a tideland reclamation project and spent several months toting trees and shoveling dirt for ten hours each day. It was not much different from the chain gang, really. They didn’t even let you keep your wages, sending all but five bucks per month directly home to your family. The months of steady, hard labor became a transformative experience—by the end of that first tour of duty in Roosevelt’s “tree army” Robert had lost the skinny frame of his youth, returning home a strikingly powerful physical specimen with thick-muscled arms and broad shoulders.
The Mitchum-Morris-Tetreault-Gunderson clan had a new plan for survival. Annette’s dispatches from Long Beach had painted a rosy and tempting picture of a Garden of Eden by the Pacific. It was easy, warm, abundant, everything that Rising Sun was not. With another Delaware winter ahead and no end to their hopeless, raffish condition in sight, it was decided to pull up stakes once more and move out to blessed-sounding California.
The family prepared for an autumn hegira, pooling their resources to buy an old flivver for the long ride west. Robert decided to head out before them, bumming his way to California, and Jack excitedly accepted his invitation to come along. Bob and Dottie had been going steady for months, and his restless nature was well known to her by now.
“I’ll be back for you,” Robert said. “I don’t know how long it will take. But I’ll be back.”
Ann packed the bindles for her two boys, with going-away presents of new socks and handkerchiefs. They left Delaware in July with a friend Robert had made in the CCC, Carroll Davis, an Alabama boy returning home. In the New York City produce market they hooked up with a trucker headed for Florida, and with some hiking and another hitched ride made their way to Davis’s hometown outside Birmingham, where the Mitchum boys spent a few days feeding on southern hospitality. Well rested and with their bellies full, Bob and Jack bid farewell to Carroll and his family and moved along, heading down the road with their thumbs out. Rides proved hard to come by on the southern byways that summer, and the boys found themselves on a most circuitous route to California. A sedan carrying three raucous mountaineers picked them up, then took them far off course on a bruising sidetrack that began with the purchase of three jugs of moonshine from a backwoods still. Generously the roving mountaineers shared the white lightnin’ with the two young hitchhikers, Bob and Jack availing themselves till their eyes clouded over. The events of the next few days became a blur of festive and life-threatening behavior. One night in a hillside motor court the brothers were stirred from a drunken stupor by the sound of gunfire. The mountaineers had gotten into a regular Hatfield and McCoy contretemps with some other gang of hillbillies, and soon there were pistols and shotguns roaring from either side of the court. Bob and Jack crouched under a bed as window glass shattered and wood splinters flew through the air. They would look up through their fingers and catch glimpses of their drunken driver happily shooting at the unseen assailants. Eventually there was a ceasefire or a lull in the action, everyone scrambled into the sedan, and they tore out of there and didn’t look back. The trip ended in a mountain settlement straight out of ‘L’ilAbner, old ladies smoking corncob pipes, goats in the road, young beauties bursting out of dresses made from ripped flour sacks. There was more moonshine on tap. Jack would remember them waking up this time in a muddy pen being poked at by curious razorback hogs.
They decided that hopping trains might be less dangerous after all; and with Robert teaching Jack the ropes on the fly, they caught a freight that took them as far as New Orleans. That night in a hobo jungle Bob got the word on a train heading west the next morning, and at dawn they placed themselves at the far end of the rail yard as the cars began slowly rolling out. They stood at the edge of the track and Bob looked down the line, waiting for the car he wanted to ride. There was a water tank beside them with a hose dangling free, and Jack decided to grab a last, long drink. The next thing he knew, a railroad bull appeared out of nowhere with a revolver aiming at his chest and barked at him not to move an inch.
Robert was already on board, and he leaned out from the blinds at the back end of the moving car, shouting, “Run! Come on! He won’t shoot!”
Jack started, balked, looked at the .38 staring at him, and decided that the railroad cop knew a little more about whether he would or wouldn’t shoot than did brother Bob. And so the train rolled on, picking up speed and carrying Robert out of sight, and Jack put his hands behind his back as instructed and followed the man with the gun along the siding to the station.
Bob Mitchum crossed the California border on an empty boxcar beneath a bleaching afternoon sun. Out of the desert and through the valley, the freight approached LA by nightfall. The other bums had warned him to get off before the final stop. If the bulls caught you there, they said, you were marched straight to the delousing pen at Lincoln Heights and locked up for a week. Robert decided to take his chances anyway and rode straight into the Alameda Street yards. With his worldly goods in the knotted bindle flung over his shoulder, he climbed down from the freight car and stood for the first time in the city of Los Angeles.
He skulked in the shadows looking out for police and walked along the twelve-foot wire fence that ran down the yard as far as the eye could see. He walked along until he heard the sounds of voices, muffled laughter, and a guitar. A quartet of Mexicans was sitting in near darkness on the ground beneath a signal tower. There was a guy strumming and another quietly singing along in Spanish while a big jug of red wine was sampled and passed from one to the other. They greeted him and offered up the jug and a patch of ground. One man pointed at Robert’s face.
“Tu eres Indio,” the Mexican said.
Somebody lit up a joint and passed that around, too. In fragments of English they told him about a place down the road where he could get a free hot meal, and later the man who had been singing showed him an opening in the fence where he could reach the street and pointed him toward the Midnight Mission. Robert was impressed. He had never seen anything like it—a reception committee for the bums. “This was the place, “he would remember saying to himself on that fateful first night in California. “The Promised Land.”
The mission fed him a dinner of chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes, and when he was done—it being too late to start out for his sister’s place—they gave him a voucher for a bed at the Panama Hotel, not much better than a flophouse really, in the middle of skid row, rummies and old prostitutes in the lobby. They gave him a cot in a tiny cubicle, and in the morning he found the Pacific Electrics Red Car that took him all the way to Long Beach for a dime. Arriving at Annette’s and her husband Ernie’s bungalow a few blocks from the ocean, Ro
bert stretched himself out on the living room sofa and didn’t move again for the better part of a week.
There was no sign of Jack Mitchum for another ten days. After the cops got the drop on him back in Louisiana, Jack was confined for a while and then escorted to the county line with a stern suggestion that he never come back. He continued on his way west, but all alone now, did not have an easy time of it. Catching the wrong train more than once, he went as far out of his way as the Arizona-Mexico border and then, riding a freight straight into Los Angeles like his brother but without Robert’s good luck, was rounded up with a group of hoboes and forced to spend three days in the holding tank. Worn to the marrow by his adventure, Jack could barely stand by the time he reached Annette’s Long Beach bungalow. She told him that Bob was down the hall in the tub, and Jack went back to find him luxuriating in a bubble bath, his head sticking out of the suds as he smoked a cigarette and read a detective magazine. Jack stood wavering in the doorway, expecting some show of enthusiasm for his deathless appearance.
“That laconic fart looked up at me blandly and asked, ‘What kept you?’”
After all Robert had seen of Depression-ravaged America, Long Beach seemed an earthly paradise. Bright cloudless skies, warm ocean breezes, rolling blue-and-silver-waves crashing on a golden beach. There was a boardwalk with a midway called the Pike, filled with smiling families and sailors in crisp, white uniforms and beautiful girls in brightly colored dresses. You could ride a merry-go-round and buy fresh-spun pink cotton candy. There were palm trees and happy people and no smog. Long Beach was a seaport, built on offshore oil and maritime commerce; and there was a dark underbelly to the place as in any port town, with seedy dives and clip joint dance halls, a lively corps of hookers and male hustlers to service the visiting navy boys and merchant seamen, and the Chicago mob running gambling boats two miles offshore. But all anyone who lived in Long Beach in the 1930s would ever remember, looking back, was a gentle, happy town, fun and easygoing, where anybody could walk anywhere they wanted and feel safe, day or night, hot dogs were a nickel, hamburgers were a dime, and the sun never stopped shining.
“Bob had himself a great time in Long Beach,” remembered Anthony Caruso, a teenager then, who met Robert Mitchum that summer and would remain a friend for more than sixty years to come. “He looked at that beach and the girls lying around in bathing suits, and he knew that was for him. He became a beach rat, Bob did. He was a good-looking kid, a great-looking kid. God, he had muscles and shoulders that wouldn’t stop. He walked up and down the beach and flexed his muscles. And the girls there just fell for him. I went to Long Beach Poly High and so did Bob’s brother, John, but Bob was kind of a dropout kid. He wasn’t interested in studies or sports or any of that stuff. Just a beach bum. But a great guy and a lot of fun.”
Robert became part of a coterie of amiable lowlifes who spent their time together in the penny arcades or sprawled on the boardwalk and the sand ogling girls and making mischief. His new best friend and Long Beach mentor was a character named Elmer Ellsworth Jones, a reform school graduate, emigre from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who lived in a bachelor hovel next to the post office. “Jonesy” had extraordinary reserves of self-assurance, would challenge giants to a fight though he was small of stature, and had women coming in and out of his apartment at all hours though he was quite homely to behold. Jones and crew, John Mitchum would write, “cut a swath through the town like a thresher shark in a school of herring.” It was mostly hijinks and seduction the guys indulged in, but criminal behavior was not out of the question for some of them. When the circumstances proved irresistable, Robert recalled, he and some pals would roll drunks for their wallets.
In the last days of summer, the family arrived from Delaware. Everyone moved into the small frame house at 314 Wisconsin Street. The place belonged to a man named Emmet Sullivan, a cousin of Ed Sullivan, the New York columnist and future television host. He was the perfect landlord for the East Coast emigrants, reluctant to press his case when the rent became overdue. They would greet him like a long lost uncle when he arrived to collect: Annette or little Carol would sing for him, the Major would recite some tale of the Boer War. Once he had nearly gotten out the door with a six-dollar down payment when Bob convinced him to let him bet it on a sure thing at the racetrack.
Anthony Caruso visited the Mitchum brothers at Wisconsin Street. He remembered, “It was a pretty crappy place. The blankets were dirty, the beds were never made. I don’t think anybody ever slept on sheets. It was a very happy-go-lucky family. Believe me, it was very bohemian. The two boys, Bob and John, did pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to. Their mother was a strong woman, you know, really was, but she didn’t try to control either one of the boys in any way.”
As the need arose, and if the sunshine did not prove too enticing, Robert would take whatever work became available, dishwasher, floor sweeper, truck loader. In the winter of 1935-36, he went on the road again, heading east with the ultimate goal of visiting Dorothy. After some weeks he reached Ohio and looked up an acquaintance from Long Beach, recently returned to his wealthy family in Toledo. “Bob called me one day out of the blue,” Frederick Fast told reporter Bill Davidson. “I went downtown and picked him up at a center the city ran for boys on the bum. He lived with us during that winter. My father gave him a job operating a punch press at the factory he owned. Bob hated it and he soon got fired. I remember he used to infuriate my father, a conservative gentleman, because he’d come downstairs wearing shoes but no socks. The temperature might be below zero, but Bob was on a kick then where he didn’t like socks and just wouldn’t wear them.”
He moved on in the spring, eager to see his girl. By this time Dorothy had left her parents’ home and was living in Philadelphia, had a job as a secretary in an insurance company. She was no kid anymore but an alluring young woman, wearing sophisticated frocks, hair prettily coiffed in the big city beauty parlor. Robert had to scare off a few potential suitors now. He told her she had to hold on, trust him, they would get married one day soon when he’d made his fortune or something.
“Stick with me, kid,” he said, “and you’ll be farting through silk.”
Robert returned to the West Coast, back to the life of a beach rat. He slept at the Wisconsin Street house or at Elmer Jones’s digs or wherever a night’s adventure landed him. When the wanderlust took hold again he would pick up and leave, be gone for a few weeks or months at a time. He reenlisted with the CCC and worked in the forests outside Chino, California. He won some amateur boxing matches on fight nights at the camp. With the might of his shoulders and heavy hands, victory came easily enough most times—one good shot and the other guy went flying and out for the count. For a couple of months he followed the semipro boxing circuit around central Cal and Nevada, picking up twenty-five dollars or so in prize money each time he knocked someone on his ass. He had a forty-six-inch chest and a beautiful sloping right hook, and promoters wondered if they might be looking at a new star. Robert enjoyed himself and didn’t get a scratch until one night he was matched against a fierce middleweight with arms so long that when he leaned back his elbows touched the ground. The man slapped him with an unexpected left and Mitchum’s head spun around.
“Did I hurt you, baby?” the man said.
Robert, breathing through his mouth, said, “Yes.”
The man laughed, said, “That’s what we’re here for.”
The next punch sent Mitchum down in a cloud of blood. The bridge of his nose brutally broken in two places and the lens of an eye damaged, Robert promptly retired from the ring.
At Long Beach and other ports along the California coast, he worked occasionally as a stevedore, loading and unloading the liners and freighters that steamed in from around the world. The longshoremen were among the most politicized of American labor groups, with tough left-wing union leaders in a perpetual war with the employers. Robert attended meetings and listened to fire-and-brimstone speeches by guest revolutionaries. He was
not much of a joiner, but he had seen enough injustice and capitalist opportunism in his travels to listen with sympathy to these political preachers, and for a time in this period he considered his own politics to be “conditional communist.” He would sometimes even claim to have been a card-carrying CP member and to have written a few speeches for some of the “rabble-rousers.” These experiences contributed to a stage play he would write some years later concerning the well-known (and much hated) Harry Bridges, an Australian emigre union leader and Communist whom U.S. authorities fought long and hard to expel. Fellow Traveler satirically dramatized Bridges’s deportation by steamship and his imagined fate, castaway on a South Pacific island, organizing a tribe of cannibals.
There was a local theater group in Long Beach called the Players Guild, a privately funded community endeavor dedicated to bringing the city an annual series of professional-quality dramatic productions, both originals and Broadway hits. The guild had been around for years and did not attract much attention, but that began to change in the winter of 1936-37, following the arrival of a new artistic supervisor named Elias Day, a veteran actor and director, not a famous figure exactly but a respected theatrical talent with imposing credits who had worked in some capacity with every theatrical notable since the turn of the century. Sister Annette, after a period restricted to housewifery and having a child (a boy, Tony), had been looking to return to show business, and the good things she had heard about the Players Guild and the talents of Mr. Day led her to become a member. She helped out with a couple of the productions and saw Day in action. Annette had long believed that Robert was a natural performer like the rest of them, but he was too shy to express himself in a public forum and ranked acting very low among his artistic compulsions. Only once had she gotten a chance to make him do something before a crowd. There had been some sort of talent contest sponsored by an oil company, and she had practically dragged him up there to sing a rendition of “Would You?” And hadn’t her instincts been proved correct! She had been delighted to see her brother’s suave, assured stage presence and the way the girls in the audience reacted to him, spontaneously swooning the way girls were supposed to have done when Sinatra came along years later. But when they had talked about it since then, Bob stubbornly continued to show no interest in such public display. He could recite Shakespeare by the page, but the idea of jumping around on a stage tugging on your hair and pretending to be a character somebody made up seemed to him a rather sissified and embarrassing endeavor. Annette didn’t give up. She knew Bob’s little games, the way he tried to hide his real feelings behind a layer of disinterest and ridicule. He just had to be pushed, Annette thought.