Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  The agent pleaded his case to the studio. Bob had already gotten featured billing with his given name. He was already getting recognized, receiving fan mail. Bob was no ordinary actor, the agent said, and thus should have a name “as different as his personality.” Wilkins wrote to Ben Piazza, “I have observed that the main reason for changing a name is to try to build someone up who hasn’t made good under their previous name. This is certainly not Mitchum’s case. He desires to cooperate in every way possible, but . . . we request that he be known on the screen as Robert Mitchum.”

  It was an arbitrary move on the studio’s part. After all, it wasn’t as if they were contending with Spangler Arlington Brugh or Marion Morrison, the birth names of Robert Taylor and John Wayne respectively. But the studio did not like to back down too easily and told Wilkins to let his boy think about it for a few days.

  One afternoon Bob and Dorothy had lunch together in the studio commissary. They met the English actress Jill Esmond, former wife of Laurence Olivier. Mitchum voiced his current complaint, and Esmond told them that years ago the studio had tried the same thing with her ex-husband, wanted to call him “Larry Olson” or some such.

  Just then the producer pushing for the name change passed by their table. “Hello, Bob. Hello, Mrs. Marshall.”

  “Mrs. Mitchum,” Dorothy said firmly.

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” he said with a chuckle and went on his way.

  “Who was that?” Jill asked.

  Bob savored each syllable of a name the producer did deem screenworthy: “Herman . . . Schlom.”

  Tim Holt had gone into the service, and RKO decided that Robert Mitchum—yes, he could keep his own damn name (Bob would claim that the frustrated producer bestowed the rejected name on his first son, Marshall Schlom, instead)—was going to step into Holt’s boots as their new B Western star. In July he went to work on a remake, the second remake, of an old Zane Grey title, Nevada. Just over twenty-four months after his first job in front of a movie camera, as a grizzled heavy trading bullets with old Hoppy, Mitchum was to play a starring role, the white-hatted hero, in his own low-budget oater.

  The new version of Nevada, like the two previous, had little in common with the popular novelist’s original story, Norman Houston taking credit for the plot-heavy script centered around the discovery of the Comstock Lode. Assigned to direct was Edward Killy. This “feisty little Irishman” (per Robert Wise) was an RKO veteran who had worked his way up from assistant jobs to B unit director and was now in the process of working his way back down again. As a director of actors, Killy made Les Selander look like George Cukor.

  Mitchum’s part, stoic hero Jim Lacy, like Hopalong Cassidy, rode with two saddle pals, to be played by a likable young actor named Richard Martin as the guitar-strumming Chico Rafferty and by perpetual ornery sidekick Guinn “Big Boy” Williams. There were also two leading ladies for Mitchum to smile at (though this demure horse opera allowed no hint of romance with either of them): Nancy Gates as the innocent daughter of a miner and glamorous blonde Anne Jeffreys as a worldly saloon operator.

  “I was assigned to it, and I went, ‘No, not another Western!’” Anne Jeffreys recalled. “But they told me this was from a Zane Grey book. And that was what they thought was most important: Zane Grey. But they did say that Bob Mitchum was doing it, and he was good, and they wanted to build him up with this one. There was a mystique about Mitchum, even then, you know. You heard these stories that he had been a hobo and been to jail and all that. But then I saw him giving an interview to a reporter one time, and he said that he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, from a very wealthy family. You didn’t know what to believe.”

  Nevada took Mitchum back to Lone Pine for ten days of location shooting. Back to the Dow Hotel and the Bucket of Blood Saloon. Long days filming in the scorching temperatures of midsummer on the alkali desert beyond Lone Pine proved to be sheer hell for cast and crew. “I remember that the cowboys—when it really got overbearing out there on that desert,” Mitchum said, “they’d gallop by the camera and sprinkle a handful of sand into it. Well, that’s about a two hour delay while they’d clean that camera up. We’d go and fall in the shade of a cactus.”

  Nevada castmates remembered Bob as a quiet man and something of a loner during this stay at the rugged location. “At the end of every day’s shooting,” actress Margie Stewart told Western Clippings magazine, “Anne Jeffreys and the rest would meet in the bar where our star was always found slumped down on a bar stool with his hat pulled way over his face. We would say, ‘There’s our handsome leading man.’ No comment from Bob.”

  “He was a great guy,” said Richard Martin. “I got along with him—every one of us did—but he was controversial. If you didn’t like Bob Mitchum, you just didn’t like him. He wasn’t going to change himself in any way to fit what anybody else might expect of him.”

  Anne Jeffreys discovered that the brawny cowboy actor had a brain. “He was very intelligent, carried on these very deep conversations. His looks didn’t call for that! He used to quote poetry. Very deep. I thought it was deep. . . . It was lovely. He was charming, and a lot of laughs, and very charismatic. One night after shooting we had dinner and Mitch said, ‘Let’s walk some of this off I said, ‘OK,’ and we took a stroll along the little road that ran through the town, unpaved, just talking and walking. We reached the end of the town, and the road ran along and out of sight. There was a glorious full moon in the sky that night. I said, ‘I wonder where this road goes?’ And Mitch said, ‘I have no idea, but it must be someplace beautiful.’ And so we walked on, and the road took us right into the city dump.”

  • • •

  The Nevada company returned to the studio for another two weeks of filming interiors. If Bob was supposed to be a star now, it was almost entirely theoretical. An unproven lead in a B Western, even a Zane Grey Western, apparently didn’t rate many perquisites in the RKO hierarchy. For the first couple of months they had him putting his belongings and change of clothes in one of the lockers near the public toilets. It was not much bigger than the one he’d had at Lockheed. Space was at a premium on the Gower Street lot, and you were expected to do your washing up at home. Dismissed at the end of shooting one late afternoon, coated in grime and various effluents, Mitchum went out on the lawn in the open courtyard below the executive offices, stripped down, and started showering with a garden hose. Somebody alerted Ed Killy to this spectacle and he came rushing over.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’ve got no place to take a shower,” Mitchum said. “I can’t put my clothes on over all this crap!”

  Killy clutched his scalp. “For Jesus sake put your pants on!”

  Then he dragged Mitchum to the producer’s office and threw a fit. “This is the fucking star of the picture, mister, and he hasn’t got a place to change his goddamn underwear!”

  The studio arranged to provide Bob with a small dressing room.

  Pleased with what they were seeing in the Nevada dailies, Herman Schlom and Sid Rogell scheduled another Zane Grey remake for Mitchum, to begin production as soon as a shooting script could be readied. West of the Pecos reassembled much of the Nevada personnel, including Ed Killy, Norman Houston, and cinematographer Harry Wilde, with actor Richard Martin reprising his role as Chico, the Irish-Mexican sidekick (the option on his seventy-five-dollar-a-week contract having been picked up). And once again location shooting would be done in and around Lone Pine. So much for the similarities. The style of the film was quite different from its straitlaced predecessor. Essentially comic in tone, Pecos devoted a great deal of its running time to a Sylvia Scarlett-ish subplot involving costar Barbara Hale disguised as a young cowboy and the merry fallout therefrom as she travels across the frontier with Bob, an oblivious gunslinger. In one scene, Mitchum pulls “cowboy” Barbara onto his lap while rolling a cigarette from tobacco pouch and papers and teaching “him” how to lick it closed. The cross-dressing frol
ic gets even more curious when straight man Mitchum throws open his bedroll and invites his transvestite trailmate to join him under the covers, spoon fashion.

  “Nothin like company on a cold night,” says Mitchum. “Come on, kid, get in.”

  “I want to sleep alone,” says the “boy.”

  “Oh no you don’t. Come on, get in and cuddle. . . .”

  Mitchum was increasingly confident in front of the camera, the good-humored performance in West of the Pecos a sizable improvement over his work in Nevada. As the earlier film’s earnest hero he seemed interchangeable with any number of deadpan B picture cowboy stars. In Pecos he began to reveal the lurking possibilities. He was charming, slyly funny, coolly laid back—a rather hip horse opera star. His improved riding skills were also evident, notably in a full gallop one-hand-on-the-reins running insert.

  The studio execs were pleased with what they saw in both Nevada and West of the Pecos. Mitchum’s rugged good looks were really coming across—there were fewer cracks about him resembling a beached shark. RKO foresaw a long line of Zane Grey horse operas in the new boy’s future.

  Mitchum, who had originally come to the studio after Mervyn LeRoy’s big talk about megabudget productions like The Robe, let it be known that he was eager to do something that didn’t require the use of a saddle. The King Brothers tried to borrow him for the title role in their next film, Dillinger, but the studio’s Ben Piazza told them that the part and the project were too unsavory for their rising star. The role went to Lawrence Tierney, and the picture made a fortune. Mitchum lobbied for the part of Sonja Henie’s hockey player love interest in a romance called It’s a Pleasure. Producer David Lewis tested him and decided that Mitchum dwarfed the dainty skater. Lewis went with the shorter Michael O’Shea. Mitchum sulked. Wilkins told him to relax, something good would come. There was plenty of time. For now, why didn’t he try and enjoy being the new Tim Holt?

  Throughout the summer and fall of 1944, independent producer Lester Cowan and director William Wellman were preparing to make a film, The Story of G.I. Joe, based on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle. For Wellman—”Wild Bill” of legend, a tough-talking, whip-cracking Hollywood character and director of classics like Wings, The Public Enemy, Nothing Sacred, and The Ox-Box Incident—G.I. Joe had become one of those rare projects that grabbed him by the balls, a personal obsession. Well-man’s filmography included classics and clunkers, but he was determined to get this one right, putting the truth and poetry of Pyle’s writing on celluloid. Wanting to avoid movie star glamour at all costs, Wellman had been looking for new faces to populate his cinematic Company C, Eighteenth Infantry. He would claim that he didn’t even know Mitchum was in the business when he saw the man for the first time and, in signature Wild Bill style, accosted him in front of the Brown Derby restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard.

  “What’s your name, bub? Mine’s Wellman.”

  “Bob Mitchum. And the purpose of your inquiry?”

  “I make pictures. What do you do for a living?”

  “That, Dad, is a matter of opinion.”

  One day some months before, Lester Cowan had arrived at William Wellman’s Beverly Hills house. Unknown producers didn’t usually show up unannounced on the Wellman doorstep, the director told him, and even if he knew him he would certainly never let a producer come inside. Cowan said to listen, that he was going to make a great movie about the American foot soldier, the best thing of its kind, from the Ernie Pyle stories, and Wellman was the only man who could direct it.

  Wild Bill had been a pilot in the French Foreign Legion’s Lafayette Flying Corps during World War I, a colorful experience he never got tired of invoking. Wellman told Cowan, “You’re talking to an old broken-down old flier. . . . I hate the goddamn infantry and I don’t want to have anything to do with them and please thank Mr. Pyle, but not for me.”

  A few days later, Lester Cowan had Pyle himself call the director and try and make him change his mind. Pyle told him of the great need for such a picture and what it would mean to all the kids fighting for his and Wellman’s country. The director reluctantly agreed to visit with Pyle at his home in Albuquerque. The writer who had been traipsing around the European war fronts turned out to be a frail, gray-haired, middle-aged man. Pyle’s home life was modest and lonesome. His wife stayed in her room and drank. Ernie slept in the garage. Wellman settled into the guest room, uncertain what he was doing there. He had yet to read a word of Pyle’s writings, and with nothing to do that night but listen to the clink of Mrs. Pyle’s ice cubes, he cracked open Ernie’s latest, called Brave Men. He read the dedication:

  In solemn salute to those thousands of our comrades—great, brave men that they were—for whom there will be no homecoming, ever.

  In a Dead Man’s Hat 85

  Oh, Jeez, Wild Bill thought. He sat in bed turning pages till dawn, reading Ernie’s tenderly etched sketches of ordinary soldiers as they lived and died in the great conflict overseas. By morning Wellman was making plans to shoot the picture.

  Pyle’s deal with Lester Cowan included certain informal guarantees. He wanted no phony love interest added to the story, and the actor playing Pyle himself had to look “anemic” and “weigh in the neighborhood of 112 pounds.” Without actually putting them on a scale, the producer first considered Fred Astaire for the part and then settled on Burgess Meredith. A screenplay was manufactured by the triumvirate of Leopold Atlas, Philip Stevenson, and Guy Endore (the latter best known as the author of the fiendish novel The Werewolf of Paris, not a Pulitzer Prize winner). Then Wellman brought Pyle to Hollywood for a polishing job. “We worked together day after day and it gradually became a great shooting script. Cruel, factual, unaffected, genuine, and with a heart as big as Ernie’s.”

  There was no plot and no hero in any conventional Hollywood sense, and no villain—only an inexorable but virtually unseen enemy. Next to Pyle, the white-haired observer of the young Americans’ struggle, the most prominent character was that of Charlie Company’s empathetic commanding officer, Lt. Bill Walker, based like many of the characters on a real person. Wellman was still looking for somebody to play Walker only a matter of weeks before filming, when he and his assistant director, Robert Aldrich, ran into Mitchum on Hollywood Boulevard. He took Mitchum over to Lester Cowan’s office and conducted a bantering interrogation.

  “What kind of parts have you done?”

  “For two years I’ve been supporting horses—or vice versa.”

  “You mean to tell me you haven’t been knocking ‘em dead on Broadway? How tall are you?”

  “Six foot or so, I guess.”

  “You guess? Don’t you know? Every goddamn midget that comes in here says he’s six feet tall. Alan Ladd is six feet three. What’s the matter with your nose?”

  “Nothing. It serves the purpose—I breathe through it.”

  Coincidence can sometimes look like destiny: in 1928, Wellman had directed the film version of Jim Tully’s Beggars of Life, one of Robert’s favorite books; in 1933, he had directed Wild Boys of the Road, about the Depression “road kids,” and that one could have been Robert’s own story. Cowan got RKO’s permission to test Mitchum for G.I. Joe. Wellman told him they would do the long scene between Pyle and Walker, near the end of the script. In the scene, the correspondent comes to see the lieutenant in his tent while he is writing yet another letter to the mother of a soldier killed in battle. Walker, in conversation, reflects on the dreadful job at hand and the waste and absurdity of war. It was the most concentrated and emotional scene Mitchum had ever attempted in the movies.

  Clearly aware that this was a big break, the only opportunity at hand to climb out of the B picture ghetto, Mitchum spent all the time he had preparing for the audition, speaking the lines, pondering his approach. He didn’t know much about the war really. He didn’t know anybody to talk to who had been involved. But Julie did. She had met hundreds of GIs while doing her nightclub act around California. Sometimes the
places would be packed with nothing but men in uniform. Robert talked to her about the veterans she had met, and Julie told him how she would never see gung ho happy warriors the way you saw them in the movies. The ones who had been in the thick of it, she said, came back withdrawn, exhausted. They had faced down death or seen it get their buddies, and they were sad-faced and depressed, many of them.

  They shot the test with no frills, a couple of fill lights aimed on a tiny stage with a Western wagonwheel for a prop. Wellman gave few suggestions. He wanted to see what the wise guy might come up with on his own. So Mitchum played the scene as he thought it would work, speaking the sad lines with a low key, weary anguish. There was a long silence when it was over. Wellman couldn’t speak, forgot to say, “Cut.” He was even more knocked out later when he screened the footage. “I saw something so wonderful, so completely compelling,” he said, “that I was mad at myself for not having built the set so that I could have the test be the actual scene that came out in the picture. He was fantastic.”

  Mitchum would say, “I think he was surprised I remembered most of the words, that’s all.”

  Cowan went to RKO and made a deal. The loan-out called for a payment of $800 a week for six weeks and second-place billing. Mitchum would receive only his regular $350 weekly salary, and the studio pocketed the profit.

  Production got under way in November. Cowan had arranged with the army to obtain the services of more than a hundred active-duty soldiers, most of them veterans of the North African and Italian campaigns depicted in the film. The director planned to use only these actual combat troops as extras and for all uniformed bit parts. “I made actors out of them,” Wellman said, “and then all the actors had to live with them, drill with them, and learn to be like them.” Actors carried eighty-pound packs all day long and dined on the dreaded K rations. Wellman was pursuing a physical and psychological realism for G.I. Joe that would have made von Stroheim proud. Filming began in the Mojave, filling in for coastal Algeria, then moved to rented space at the Selznick studio in Culver City. Old standing sets were ruthlessly reduced to smoking ruins, the cathedral town built for DeMille’s 1928 silent The Godless Girl turned into ravaged San Vittorio, where Charlie Company cleans out a nest of invisible snipers. For the long, central sequence of the men trapped interminably in the valley below a fortified monastery, shot on cramped interiors, Wellman had his designers create an ultrarealistic wasteland of rain and muck and cold. The director’s son, William Wellman, Jr., visited his father during the filming and recalled the uncomfortable conditions. “Even for a kid it was no fun to be there, and the actors were all stuck in it all day long. Muddy, wet, a terrible mess to have to work in. My father wanted it to be ‘war is hell’ and it was.”