Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  They set off for Florida in January 1940. The long ride went without incident until they reached Louisiana and a sudden storm washed over them. The car slid out of control, leaped off the edge of the bridge they were approaching, and plowed into swampy water. Mitchum sprang through the window and scrambled to safety, but Righter had been hit in the neck by the portable typewriter stowed on the back shelf and he lay on the floor, stunned. The car looked as if it could slide underwater at any moment, but Mitchum stomped back into the muck, forced the door open, and dragged Righter clear.

  “You saved me,” the astrologist sputtered. “You risked your life to save mine.”

  “What did you want me to do, read a magazine?” Mitchum said.

  A truck driver stopped and came down to help pull Righter to solid ground and then took them to the nearest town. The fire department towed the Cadillac out of the bayou, and the boys at the gas station got it running and cleaned it up, but the fabric-covered seats had gotten so wet that they oozed like a dirty sponge for the rest of the drive. They had to sit on old newspapers and torn cardboard boxes to keep their pants dry. “It’s like I’m back ridin’ on a fucking freight train,” Mitchum complained.

  They got to Florida, setting up shop in beachside hotels among the vacationing elite in Saint Petersburg, Naples, and Palm Beach. Robert was expected to drum up business for the lectures among the lounging dowagers and divorcees. “We charged a dollar admission for people wanting to find out what was giving with the stars. After the old guy gave his spiel, I’d pitch the women into having a horoscope reading.”

  The tour had not quite concluded when Mitchum went to Righter and told him he was quitting to go north to find his fiancee and get married. Righter asked him if he knew Dorothy’s birthday. Robert told it to him.

  Carroll Righter stared back silently, then slowly, ruefully turned his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head.

  “A Taurus . . . dear boy . . . no . . . no . . . no. . . .”

  Dorothy Spence’s parents, her friends, almost anyone who could catch her ear, had told her to forget him. He was a bum, and even if he wasn’t a bum he was gone now, had a new life in California. It was like waiting for a ghost. She wouldn’t listen, didn’t care what anyone said about him. She knew Bob’s faults and she didn’t care. They loved each other and that was that, and to heck with what they all thought. She was working at the insurance company in Philadelphia when he arrived—it was the middle of March—freezing cold in his Palm Beach finery, ice cream suit and panama hat. He told her he had won some money in a crap game and they were going to get hitched. Right away. Didn’t want them waiting for her family to get involved and try and talk her out of it. Dottie, looking shaken, went to her office and told them she was going to need some time off. Her coworkers passed the hat and gave her a hundred dollars as a wedding present. A friend named Charlie Thompson agreed to be best man, and the three of them drove to Dover, Delaware, for a marriage license and then combed the town for a ring and a nice dress for Dorothy to get married in.

  “Robert found a plain gold band,” Dorothy would remember, “but then came the problem of measuring my finger. He and Charlie solved the problem by borrowing the jeweler’s sample scale and going out to look for me. They’d forgotten the name of the store I’d gone into, so they simply wandered up and down the main street. At last I saw them through the window, so I pulled on the gown and ran into the street. We measured my finger on the sidewalk, and I tore back into the shop before they could get the idea that I’d run off with their dress.”

  On the evening of March 16, 1940, they got into Thompson’s car and drove out to the home of a Methodist minister. “He led us into the living room,” said Dorothy, “and I remember the temperature seemed somewhere below zero. So we adjourned to the kitchen where there was warmth, plus a rather strong smell of cabbage.”

  The old minister buttoned up his frock coat while his wife abandoned the stove and removed her apron. “Do you want the old service or the new one?” the minister asked.

  Dorothy said, “The old one.”

  It sounded more romantic.

  The next day the newlyweds bought two tickets for California and boarded the Greyhound bus.

  With Annette making a living in LA, the Morrises decided they, too, had had enough of Long Beach. They found a small house for rent at 954 Palm Avenue in West Hollywood and they all moved in, the Major and Ann, Carol, Jack, Annette, and Tony. When Bob telegraphed to say he was bringing home a brand-new wife, they wondered where they were going to put the couple. Out in the backyard was a chicken shack that had been built by the previous tenants—there were still a few feathers lying around—and it looked big enough to fit a bed and things, so the family decided it could be Bob and Dorothy’s honeymoon cottage. “We got the Lysol and the scrub brushes and cleaned out the chicken coop,” said Annette. “We got out all the smells and dressed it up so it was beautiful. Made a nice little bungalow out of it. And that was where Bob and Dot first lived until he made some loot and they could get their own place.”

  For a time they thrived on the narcotic aftereffects of their long anticipated union. That couldn’t last. Robert, like one who has only belatedly read the fine print on a contract, bristled to learn that society imposed certain constrictions on the married man: for instance, you were supposed to spend all your time around this one broad. And Dorothy, who’d thought Bob’s writing for nightclub performers sounded rather glamorous when he told her about it on the Greyhound bus, soon came to realize that it did not provide anything like a steady salary and often kept him out on the town till dawn with a lot of odd characters, including women. She was happy, no doubt; they had waited so long, and no one had thought it would ever happen, and now she had his ring on her finger. But it had to be a strain . . . nights lying in bed alone in the chicken-coop bungalow.

  The house on Palm, overcrowded already with the permanent residents, was forever filled with friends of the family, musicians and actors and aspiring playwrights and little-theater directors and astrologers and mystics, eccentrics of every stripe, characters like no one Dorothy had ever met in Delaware—her husband excepted, of course. She got along with everybody, but the new Mrs. Mitchum was down-to-earth, not head-in-the-clouds, and there were recurring if indirect suggestions that she was not living up to the family’s bohemian standard.

  Robert was lured back into acting, taking one of the leads in a nonpaying little-theater production of a play by Claire Parrish called Maid in the Ozarks. A response to the great Broadway success of Tobacco Road, it had a similar rustic setting and required the entire cast to speak in ersatz hillbilly twangs. Playing one of the concupiscent Ozarkians was a very young blonde actress named Gloria Grahame, who would work with Robert many times in the years ahead in the movies, though such success was not then even a dream for either of them. Hanging around the cast, John Mitchum was introduced to Gloria’s older sister, Joy, they began seeing each other, and the two were married by the end of the year.

  Bob would most likely have continued on with his haphazard and penurious creative pursuits if not for the fact that Dorothy learned she was pregnant. He had up to now cleverly avoided most of the trappings of responsibility, but the threat of fatherhood, and perhaps Dorothy’s pronounced reluctance to bring a child into the world without a dime to their names and while living in a converted chicken coop, would give Mitchum pause. He had to pull himself up by the lapels and face the fact that the time had come at last to stop fooling around, making castles in the air, and go find some tangible occupation with a regular paycheck at the end of every week. In his mind, some small, very distant voice he was not familiar with told him that if you were a guy who had gone and gotten himself married and there was a child and—according to the radio—a war coming on, then what you did was you got yourself a lunch box and went to work.

  Hitler was raging across Europe, and storm clouds hovered over the United States. The defense industry had rapidly expanded with the growing l
ikelihood of U.S. participation in the conflict, and the armament and aircraft factories of Southern California were now operating on round-the-clock schedules. Jobs were plentiful, and Mitchum quickly found a position as a sheet metal worker at the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank. The base pay was $29.11 a week, though you could easily average a take-home of $42 with regular overtime hours. He was assigned to the graveyard shift, from midnight to morning, six nights a week. He was given a visor and a lead skirt. He was given a rubber apron.

  It was the beginning of the worst year of his life.

  Work in the plant was noisy and dangerous and something of a grift. “We were making a lot of obsolete airplanes (old Lockheed Hudsons) that we sold to the British, and they didn’t want ‘em, but they were stuck with the contract. I didn’t like the whole idea of it.” He was a shaper operator. He fed sheets of metal into a machine. The machine went screeeeeechunkchunkscreeeeee, ear-piercing metallic sounds, with knives sticking out all over it, spinning around at 26,000 revolutions per minute, throwing out streams of red-hot metal. To Robert it looked like something dreamed up by Edgar Allan Poe. He would stand before it with a kind of hypnotized horror, waiting for his fingers to get lopped off and shaped and bloody sparks to fly out. When somebody’s machine malfunctioned, you held your breath. Blades would come loose and shoot across the floor. One time Mitchum saw a knife come loose and slice right through the wall of the building. It finally landed somewhere in Glendale, he believed. Many of the workers were Oklahoma farm boys out of Steinbeck, innocent fellows right off the horse-drawn plow. The Okies would write home with wonder, said Mitchum, “Hoowee, you ort to see this here machine!” They’d be scratching themselves and forget what they were doing and the next thing you knew they had lost an arm.

  Before the Lockheed job, Robert had made a commitment to another play. His farewell appearance, he figured. Now he had to rehearse and act and do the godawful job and wait for his kid to arrive all at the same time. It was a production of The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky, directed by a Russian named Mike Stanislavsky and performed at the tiny La Cienega Theatre. Robert played his part in imitation of blustery character actor Gregory Ratoff. It was a shoddy enterprise. They’d be on the stage acting and all the lights would go out. It would be somebody in the dressing room plugging in a hot plate to warm up his blintzes. Sometimes the actors had to raise their voices to be heard over the arguments going on backstage. Robert was at the theater on March 8, 1941, when Dorothy went into labor. He rushed to the hospital in full makeup, a Russian peasant pacing the waiting room with the other expectant fathers. That night Dorothy Mitchum gave birth to their first child, a boy. He would be named James in honor of Bob’s long-gone father.

  Robert’s partner at the Lockheed plant was a young, red-haired Irishman from the Valley named Jim Dougherty. “It started out that I would run the shaper and Bob was making the setups,” Dougherty recalled. “And then they put him on a shaper of his own. His machine you pushed by hand because the parts were smaller. There were sparks everywhere. They weren’t actually sparks, they were pieces of aluminum, and he got so he could direct them in any direction. And if the boss walked in there and Bob didn’t want him in there he would just send those sparks at him. We got along. We kidded each other. I’d throw a rag in his machine and it would crack just like a whip. He’d jump right up on the bench, yelling, ’Don’t do that; don’t do that!’

  “Bob was a good guy,” said Dougherty. “Somebody you liked to know. Very easygoing. And a fantastic storyteller. During the lunch break he would always have a new one. About boxing. And riding the rails. They sounded like tall tales but we all enjoyed them.”

  Dougherty’s girlfriend and soon-to-be wife was a fifteen-year-old beauty named Norma Jean Baker. In years to come, when Norma Jean had become a very famous actress named Marilyn Monroe, Mitchum liked to recall a warm social friendship with the child bride and future star. But these were more of Bob’s “tall tales,” according to Jim Dougherty. “Yeah, I’d hear him on television saying how back then we all went dancing and saw Frank Sinatra and all this. It didn’t hurt anybody if he wanted to say it, but Bob never did meet Norma Jean when I was married to her. The closest he came was to eat some of her sandwiches. He never had any lunch to bring to work, and I’d give him one of Norma Jean’s, tuna salad or bologna. And I’d tell her my buddy didn’t have anything to eat and she started putting in an extra sandwich or two for Bob.”

  On December 7 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America found itself at war. Many of the young men at the plant went into the service, Jim Dougherty included. “Bob didn’t get in,” said Dougherty. “He said they wouldn’t take him in the military because he had false teeth. That’s what he told me.”

  Production at Lockheed naturally increased with the war on. Now it was no longer a matter of workers hoping for some overtime. Everybody worked extra hours, like it or not. Some days when they got behind schedule or someone didn’t show, they were forced to work a full second shift: sixteen hours or more grinding metal in that hellish din. There was a foreman Robert despised, one of those hectoring types who liked to poke a pencil in your face. Robert gave him the hot sparks treatment. They got into a fight and he picked up something and threw it in the foreman’s face. They hauled him down to the office. They told him they believed he was crazy, certifiable. He waited to be fired and sent home. They gave him a three-cent raise. It was wartime. You couldn’t get fired. The aircraft factory was doing work vital to the war effort and jobs were frozen. You couldn’t even quit. He might as well be in prison, Mitchum thought.

  At home things were no less tense. Within the family there was much dissatisfaction over Robert’s abandonment of his artistic pursuits, with antagonism directed at Dorothy for supposedly turning free-spirited Bob into a conventional wage slave. Mitchum felt increasingly uncomfortable, he recalled, “in light of my mother’s and sister’s accusative conviction that my wife was somehow responsible for what they regarded as ‘enforced labor.’”

  Things came to a head early in 1942. He didn’t sleep anymore. He was disoriented all the time now, didn’t know whether it was morning or night, and was beset by hallucinations. “I’d think it was afternoon. I’d get up, take a shower, go to the kitchen and discover I’d been asleep for a hot twenty minutes. I hadn’t slept for a year.”

  One morning he came out of the plant at 8 A.M. heading for the trolley that took him home to West Hollywood. The trolley came, and he remembered not being able to read the number on the front of the car. Somebody had to tell him what it was, he just couldn’t make it out. He sat in his seat on the ride home and looked out at the strangely clouded streets. He would hold his palm up to his face and try and make it come into focus. He made his way to the house and found a chair to sit in and told Dorothy that his vision was not at all as it should be. “I suppose she was a little alarmed, yeah. I was, naturally, because I had a lot of responsibility and I didn’t know how I was going to handle it. I mean, I couldn’t do anything for anyone if I couldn’t see.”

  His sight did not return, and Dorothy took him to see a doctor. The doctor sent him to the hospital in Glendale, where Robert’s eyes were examined by an ocular specialist named Seymour Dudley.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you physically,” Dr. Dudley told him.

  “Hey man, I’m blind!” Mitchum said.

  It was, said the specialist, a psychologically induced affliction. Stress, exhaustion, hatred of his job.

  “What can I do?”

  “Get some sleep. Quit your job.”

  “They don’t let you quit. There’s a war on. I’m frozen.”

  “We can get you out,” the doctor said.

  “My family will starve,” Mitchum said.

  “It’s lose the job or lose your mind,” the doctor said.

  He had tried to be a straight citizen; no one could say he hadn’t tried. And it had gotten him a nice nervous breakdown in return. So that would have to be the last time for a
nything like that. He had fourteen dollars saved up. Dorothy went out and got a secretarial job. Robert’s eyesight returned to normal after some days away from Lockheed. His mother said, “Why don’t you try getting work in the pictures? You’d be a marvelous picture actor.”

  There was an agent he had met back when he was working in a play downtown. What the hell was the guy’s name? Bob wondered. He had been very appreciative at the time, given him a business card and everything. He remembered it: Paul Wilkins. Mitchum looked him up and they got together. Wilkins was a third-string agent with no stars in his stable but a few character players whose commissions kept him solvent. He knew Mitchum could act. The boy was big and masculine, a little raw looking, more a cowboy type than a matinee idol. With his broken nose and ditchdigger’s shoulders, nobody was going to mistake him for Fredric March. Mitchum said that all he wanted was some work that paid him enough to feed his family. Wilkins told Robert they would give it a shot. He would try and set up some interviews and keep an ear open for anything that might fit Bob’s type.