by Lee Server
Burns later recalled the meeting for Janet Leigh. “Lillian said that she had seen this animal, sensual magnetism,” said Leigh, “and this great natural talent. She told me Bob was ready to do whatever was asked of him, but she said, Do exactly what you’ve been doing ‘She saw it immediately.”
In the course of production, Mervyn LeRoy had come to the conclusion that Bob Mitchum was not after all the worst actor he had ever seen. Directing him in a strong bit played with Van Johnson on the deck of an aircraft carrier, LeRoy “sensed that he had something special.” After Mitchum became a star, Leroy liked to say that he had discovered him, ignoring the actor’s nineteen previous credits. But certainly LeRoy would have a crucial role to play in the next stage of Mitchum’s fast-developing career. Frank Ross, Jean Arthur’s producer husband, was just then planning a film version of Lloyd Douglas’s thick, religioso adventure novel, The Robe. Mervyn LeRoy expected to direct it and was preparing to join Ross over at the RKO studio as soon as he finished with the endless Thirty Seconds. Mulling over the major roles in The Robe, LeRoy had a casting inspiration: Bob Mitchum would be perfect for the important part of Demetrius, the epic’s muscular slave turned feisty Christian. LeRoy and Ross conferred, then talked to Ben Piazza, head of talent at RKO, recommending they sign their boy up for the planned production.
Mitchum went to a meeting at RKO headquarters in Hollywood. Piazza, primed by LeRoy, liked what he saw. He sent the actor on to see some of the staff producers. Most were impressed by the young man with the sleepy eyes and the deep voice. But not everybody. There were concerns about his jagged nose, his size, his deep voice. Mitchum recalled waiting outside one supervisor’s office after an interview while the men inside discussed him. “But he looks like a monster!” he heard one of them say.
When the vote was tallied, Piazza sent for Paul Wilkins and told him that RKO was considering signing his client to a long-term contract, and what did he think about that?
It was then, in May of 1944, that Mitchum received his notice to report for military induction. Two and a half years since Pearl Harbor, and the war raged on. This was the real war, not the one in Culver City or the Valley. After two and a half years of casualties, the need for fresh blood was greater than ever, and many men who had avoided going into uniform for one reason or another—fatherhood, physical impairments, mental problems—were finding that the U.S. Army could use them after all. Mitchum had never shown much interest in the war. It had always gotten along just fine without him. Brother John was a more “gung ho” personality, a sentimentalist and patriot. And the Major . . . well, Bob’s stepfather would have parachuted into Berlin and kicked Hitler’s ass personally if someone had sported him the airfare. But Robert was a professional againster and sceptic, and the regimentation and authoritarianism of military life could not have seemed like his cup of tea. Lockheed had been bad enough. Bios by studio flacks would state that Mitchum had tried to enlist many times and was rejected, but Bob himself never endorsed such claims. Of his entry into the service he said, “When they took me away, I still had the porch rail under my fingernails.”
As it happened, the army didn’t want him—for now. He was processed and then excused until the next quota call. Later in the year, a regulation exemption of fathers further postponed his induction. RKO now had a firm offer on the table for his services, a seven-year contract. Feeling that the time had come to grab onto a little security, Mitchum told Wilkins to negotiate a deal. With someone of Wilkins’s low stature in the business, this typically meant bending over and taking whatever the studio chose to offer. It was a typical long-term studio contract filled with corporate-friendly loopholes, including one-way renewal options that gave RKO the right to get rid of him after every twenty-six weeks and a “morals clause” that allowed for his instant dismissal in the event of any embarrassing or scandalous behavior. All creative decisions were to be ceded to the studio, and any lack of cooperation by the employee could result in suspension without pay. Standard Hollywood-style indentured servitude. The contract called for an initial salary of $350 per week with incremental pay raises after each renewal, topping out at $2,000 per in the seventh and final year. It was good pay by 1940s standards, though there were many weeks during his time as an itinerant screen actor when he had made more money.
An unexpected vote of confidence in Mitchum’s prospects was cast by David O. Selznick, distinguished independent producer and high roller. Selznick agreed to buy a piece of the contract for his Vanguard Films, giving him periodic exclusive rights to the actor’s services. The contract was signed on May 25, 1944, and went into effect seven days later.
In the meantime, Mitchum was making a one-week wonder at Monogram Pictures. Earlier in the year he had done a small part in a low-budget movie called Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a cheapie retread of the Jean Arthur comedy The More the Merrier, about romance blooming amid the wartime housing shortage. It was the work of a new team of penny-ante producers calling themselves the King Brothers. Mitchum had made an impression, and when the Kings were ready to film a suspense story called Love from a Stranger they offered him a lead role.
According to associates, the brothers King (nee Kosinski) had been slot-machine distributors among other things before they exited Chicago for Hollywood and the movies. Maurice and Frank King proved to be perspicacious filmmakers, with a real eye for exciting new talent, the kind that could be had for a price (they later gave regular under-the-table employment to the best of the blacklisted screenwriters when those writers were perforce more affordable). Early on they established a close relationship with writer Philip Yordan, one of the movies’ great hustler creators in the Ben Hecht tradition, then at the outset of a long career. Yordan recalled to Pat McGilligan, “Frank was like a 300-pound Chinaman. Always a big cigar in his mouth and his drawer full of Hershey bars, a couple hundred Hershey bars. . . . Maurie had been a prize fighter and would always have black coffee, but he was heavy, too.” Over at Columbia the Kings had viewed an unreleased feature called The Whistler, an atmospheric B mystery full of clever directorial touches imitative of Alfred Hitchcock, the work of a hundred-dollar-a-week contract director named William Castle. They arranged to borrow him from Harry Cohn for a 500 percent markup. Castle went over to Monograms tiny, red brick studio, met Maurice, Frank, and apprenticing little brother, Hymie, and Phil Yordan, who was asleep on a couch at the time. Yordan was roused, and he and Castle spit-balled a story line.
“Let’s do a murder mystery—something frightening,” Castle said.
“That’s a good idea. . . . How about a guy that wakes up and finds his wife murdered in bed?”
“I saw that picture last night.”
“I must have, too.”
They talked out something else: a small-town girl, she marries a guy she barely knows, a glove salesman, there’s a mad strangler on the loose, wears gloves, the bride fears it’s her husband. The cops close in. Her life’s in danger. The husband is about to be arrested. And then for the climax comes the big switch.
“What switch?” asked Yordan.
“How the hell do I know?” said Castle.
The screenwriter had a habit of subcontracting his assignments, finding “surrogates” to write a first-draft script, and then touching it up or rewriting the whole thing from scratch as needed. He gave the murder plot to a guy named Dennis Cooper, an aspiring novelist who worked as a clerk at a Pickwick bookshop. Cooper wrote a draft, and Yordan revised it, keeping in mind that the film had to be shot in seven days at a cost of fifty thousand dollars or under.
The Kings cast the story’s three main parts with care. To play Millie, the naive newlywed, they borrowed—from David Selznick—twenty-two-year-old Kim Hunter, who had made her screen debut the previous year in a similar role in Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim (the Kings and Castle no doubt had Lewton’s acclaimed series of subtle microbudget shockers much on their minds for this project). The part of the husband suspected of murder was given to Dean J
agger, a homely, middle-aged second lead in mostly A movies, good at conveying both square-headed sincerity and weakness of character. And tapped for the role of Fred, the plot’s switcheroo, the traveling salesman and old boyfriend who helps Millie in her crisis until he is revealed to be the actual killer, the Kings went to the young actor they had used in Johnny Doesn’t Live Here, Robert Mitchum. It was, by the standards of his usual acting jobs, a complex part that called for shifting displays of charm, devotion, and stolidity before climaxing with a showstopping crazy act.
Not the typical churn-’em-out B movie hack, William Castle was ambitious and self-conscious, a devotee of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, and he clearly intended to make more of Love from a Stranger (soon retitled When Strangers Marry) than fifty grand and seven days should have allowed. Kim Hunter recalled, “Bill Castle rounded us up and said, ‘Would you mind terribly rehearsing for a week before we go to the studio?’ For free, of course, because this was all such a low budget. ‘And you can’t tell the King Brothers.’ And we all said, ‘Oh, God, yes, we’d love to rehearse.’ So we went over to Bill’s small apartment in Hollywood and we got to work out the scenes and talk about the characters and everything we needed to prepare. Bob Mitchum was good. He gave Bill whatever he asked for. I didn’t have enough experience myself to know if someone was terribly talented or had what it took to become a star, though he was very handsome. But Bob was an actor, a true actor. And he was a joy to work with.
“Thank God we had rehearsals because when we did go over to Monogram to start shooting there was no time to think. You moved from scene to scene. You just did it. But Bill Castle was marvelous, and because of those days in Bill’s apartment we knew what we were doing. It was a very tight schedule. The studio was so small and I think everything we did was on just one stage.”
There was one element of discord as the filming went on. According to Kim Hunter, the Kings were eager to sign Mitchum to a multifilm contract. When Bob told them he wasn’t interested, “they tried to convince him. He’d be sitting down, waiting for his next scene or something, and suddenly he would be surrounded, one side and the other, by chaps he swore had guns, and they were trying to talk him into signing. I know Bob was very glad when the film was over with because he was still alive! And believe me, we were all eager to get out of there, but Bob in particular was relieved.”
When Strangers Marry would turn out to be a little miracle of efficient creativity, transcending the restrictions and expectations of a Poverty Row cheapie by means of an intense, surprise-laden script, expressive direction, fluid camera work, and a superb portrayal of vulnerability and aching disappointment by young Kim Hunter. Mitchum, less skilled than she at this time, is occasionally wooden but overall an effectively ambiguous presence as the spurned but still loyal boyfriend. Underacting all the way, even his climactic descent into madness is kept low on the over-the-top meter. William Castle’s Hitchcock infatuation is evident in emulations like the shock cut between a screaming woman discovering a body and a whistling locomotive (a direct steal from The 39 Steps) and an impudent Hitchcockian cameo (Castle seen in a framed photograph given to the police). The film’s more significant association is with a genre still developing and unnamed in 1944. Critics in postwar Paris created the term film noir to describe what they saw as a new wave of similarly gloomy and pessimistic Hollywood mysteries and crime dramas. These black films were dark in tone, cynical and violent, and dark in their visual style, awash in shadow and half-light. They evoked a world of danger, paranoia, and corruption, of moral and psychological dislocation. The settings were largely urban and nocturnal, an artificial warren of tenements, alleyways, saloons, cheap hotels, police stations, and greasy spoon diners. In film noir, heroes and heroines were not the pure and noble creatures of Hollywood tradition but ran the gamut of maladjustment, from alienation to criminal insanity.
Released in the first full year of the noir cycle, 1944—the year of Double Indemnity, Phantom Lady, and Murder, My Sweet—When Strangers Marry, in its brief six reels, managed to include a full complement of noir themes and motifs: sexual obsession, the wrong man, betrayal, hallucination, a manhunt, a shadow-haunted soundstage Manhattan (and one classic scene for the anthologies: Kim Hunter alone in a hotel room lit only by a garish neon sign, gripped by a mounting sense of dread). It was Mitchum’s debut in a genre with which he would be more strongly identified than any other actor. Here was the first embryonic version of Mitchum’s noir outsider and, too, the first of his gallery of lethal psychopaths.
On release, the Kings’ economical thriller was acclaimed by those critics who were actually willing to look at a lowly Monogram Pictures release. James Agee, in The Nation, wrote: “I have seldom for years now seen one hour so energetically and sensibly used.” Its reputation would continue to grow through the years, culminating in historian Don Miller’s unequivocal assessment of When Strangers Marry as “the finest B film ever made.”
Shooting on the King Brothers production had ended on June 3, overlapping by two days the start of Bob’s RKO contract. On June 5 he crossed the thresh-hold of his new home at 780 Gower Street.
RKO had been created at an oyster bar luncheon in the autumn of 1928, a merger of FBO (Film Booking Offices), a minor movie studio belonging to Joseph Kennedy; David Sarnoff’s Radio Corporation of America; and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit of vaudeville theaters. Headquarters would be FBO’s lot between Gower and Melrose, directly adjacent to Paramount Pictures, on a plot of land previously owned by a Hollywood cemetary. Trade-named “Radio Pictures” for its RCA connection and recurring use of broadcast stars, with a logo of a beeping radio tower, RKO began releasing features in 1929, assuming a place beside Fox, MGM, Warner Bros., Columbia, Paramount, and Universal as one of the so-called majors of the sound era (Columbia and Universal, in the beginning, considered somewhat less major than the rest). Through the years the studio would have its share of popular successes and award winners, producing some of the greatest works of Hollywood’s golden age—King Kong, The Informer, Little Women, the Astaire-Rogers musicals, Gunga Din, Citizen Kane. But RKO had never achieved the strong profile of the industry’s front-runners, hamstrung by lack of a clear identity (something comparable to Warner’s blue-collar aesthetic or MGM’s mix of glamour and iconic stars like Garbo and Gable) and a revolving-door policy for its production heads. With no presiding mogul-for-life, no Thalberg, Zanuck, or Cohn to set the course, RKO had lurched through the years from one interim regime to another, each with its own guiding principles and often questionable inspirations. After teetering on the brink of oblivion during the tenure of the artistically ambitious George J. Schaefer (patron of Orson Welles’s Mercury Productions among other bad business decisions), RKO in 1942 had begun a policy of “entertainment, not genius” as dictated by new production chief Charles Koerner. Koerner’s dedication to lowest-common-denominator commercial projects—a slate of musicals, comedies, Westerns, and horrors—brought the studio back from the brink, and RKO was posting record profits by the time Robert Mitchum signed on the dotted line in May 1944.
Nothing the actor saw in his first days at the studio did anything to make him believe he was out of his depth. He was introduced around, met supervisors who struck him as semiliterate at best and fellow “starlets” one step above retarded, floating around on clouds of their own self-satisfaction. “They had forty stock actors under contract at the time,” he recalled. “They were all six feet tall with lifts and padding. They all came in, chucked the producer’s secretary under the chin, and said, ‘Hon, did you get the script?’ Then they drove their Cadillacs to the Mocambo. I figured—these cats were working? I should own the joint!”
Production plans on The Robe had stalled.* Instead of the biblical epic, Mitchum’s initial assignment was something considerably less prestigious: Girl Rush, a musical comedy Western starring the studio’s woebegone would-be Abbott and Costello team of Alan Carney and Wally Brown, with female leads Frances Langford and Vera Va
gue, the full-faced girl singer and the fluty-voiced comedienne fitting the movie around their performances on Bob Hope’s weekly radio show. The knockabout plot involved gold rush claim jumping and mail-order brides and included a long sequence with most of the male cast members in drag. Four songs had been composed to order: “When I’m Walking Arm in Arm with Jim,” “Annabella’s Bustle,” “Rainbow Valley,” and “If Mother Could Only See Us Now,” a score worthy of a Carney and Brown vehicle.
Mitchum’s first scene came some twenty-two minutes after his fifth-place billing in the opening credits. He’d looked good on film before, but the RKO stylists had gone to work, and his appearance here was startlingly photogenic: rising up from a crowded dinner table, a pompadoured Superman in buckskin, huge shoulders and inflated chest above an impossibly slim waist, hands poised on studded, sexily low-slung gun belt. “I’m a regular faggot’s dream,” he mumbled at the preview. The film proved to be a good showcase for RKO’s new contract player. Mitchum exuded a maximum of masculine charisma throughout, did charming love scenes with Frances Langford, displayed a breezy sense of humor, and maintained his cool aplomb even in a bonnet and gingham dress.
Studio execs decided they were not happy with the name “Robert Mitchum.” A memo was sent to the actor: he would henceforth be known as “Robert Marshall.”
Mitchum responded: “Screw that.”
Someone from the studio told Paul Wilkins to explain to his client how things worked: he was their property now, they knew their business, and he ought to have the sense to defer to their judgment in these matters.
Mitchum had agreed to have his broken nose touched up for the sake of future fame and riches, but the request to change his name struck him as a more personal affront. Mitchum said, “I’m not changing it.” His father had given him that name. What the fuck. Forget it. He told Wilkins to tear up the contract for all he cared.