by Lee Server
“To what?”
“Beauty and the Beast.”
Rackin went to visit him at the house on Palm Avenue. “It was right below the Sunset Strip, a little rundown bungalow with a big backyard in what was a seedy neighborhood at that time, and they didn’t have a dime to their names. Dorothy, his wife, was walking around in an old cotton dress. He said they couldn’t afford underwear. So whatever money he was making, it was gone. I said, ‘Hi, where’s Bob?’ and she told me he was in the backyard. And I went around back, and there he was with some tin cans with dirt in them, and he was dropping water out of an eyedropper. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m growing my seeds.’ Marijuana.” Contrary to the RKO publicity bio, Mitchum did enjoy a little gardening.
He went out drinking and barhopping most nights, and for a time Rackin accompanied him as the designated driver. “I would meet him at a bar. He had a whole list of favorite places. There was one he liked on Sunset and Gardner where he would usually start. And I would meet him there, and then we’d get in my car and go to various other spots. I was really a chauffeur for him. And I was the only one of his friends his wife could tolerate for a while. I was never a big drinker, and she thought there was a good chance I could get him back home. She would say, ‘I don’t care how late he’s out, just so he comes back.’”
With a handful of drinking buddies gathered around at one watering hole or another, Mitchum would hold court, telling rowdy stories and keeping his pals in stitches. “He had a wicked sense of humor,” said Rackin. “He would tell story after story, and he did many of them in character. He did a great impersonation of a gay guy, a real swish, and people would sit around roaring with laughter. And he was a great connoisseur of ‘Rastas’ stories, and he would tell them like he was imitating Stepin Fetchit. I know that’s not the greatest picture in the world of black people, but I never heard him say anything derogatory about black people. You heard all these Polish stories, too, and I’m Polish and used to laugh like hell.”
Some of Bob’s buddies, particularly the stuntmen, were tough to an absurd degree and loved to prove it. One time they formed a circle on the barroom floor—all of them pie-eyed—trying to win a bet or something, and one guy standing there would punch the guy next to him, and that guy would hit the guy next to him, and around in a circle, and the last one standing won the bet. Jaws were broken, fingers were broken, blood everywhere. Good times.
By law the bars in LA had to close at twelve midnight in those days. Dedicated drinkers were just getting started by that hour, and to accommodate them a network of illegal after-hours joints sprang up at scattered addresses in Hollywood and downtown LA. Some were in basements and back rooms in the commecial districts, some were in private residences, like the mansion on Normandy above Wilshire where you had to say a password into a slit in the door, like at an old speakeasy. Some offered only setups, you brought your own bottle, but others peddled drinks, drugs, and whatever else your after-midnight heart desired. Mitchum knew them all. “One night,” said Henry Rackin, “Bob says, ‘I want to go to Brothers.’ It was a place he had talked about. It was downtown, in a very bad neighborhood. He said, ‘Let’s go.’ I said, ‘Fine. Show me how to get there.’ And we drove down there. It was a bad area, and you had to walk down a dark alley between two buildings. I was scared to death. And we came to a door and Bob talked to the guy at the door and they let us in. It was a terrible place, a toilet, hardly any light and it was dense with smoke, and the smell of marijuana made you woozy. There was a bar, people drinking, but a lot of them were smoking. People were sitting on the floor, along the walls. And Bob says, ‘I have to go to the John, order us a couple of drinks.’ And he was gone awhile, and when he came back he was screaming, ‘I don’t believe it, somebody stole my wallet!’ So I was stuck with the bill.”
On February 2, 1946, Charles Koerner, who had given RKO its most profitable years, died of leukemia, leaving the studio once more in search of a production chief and setting the stage for the bizarre final chapter in the company’s history. Corporate president N. Peter Rathvon filled the post in the interim.
For his performance in The Story of G.I. Joe, Robert Mitchum was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Oscar went to James Dunn, heartbreaking as the doomed, happy-go-lucky father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
“Hell, even I voted for Jimmy Dunn,” said Mitchum. “The Academy,” he liked to point out in the decades ahead, “never messed with me again.”
Brother John Mitchum had gotten out of the service after nearly three years. He had not been sent into battle, but he had certainly done his share of fighting, in Florida, Hawaii, and elsewhere. A brawl with an officer had gotten him railroaded into the brig, and on a happier note, he’d won an assortment of boxing championships for his regiment. He returned to Los Angeles with a plan to study for a career in music under the GI Bill. When he had gone away, his brother was a struggling B movie bit player. Now Bob was a movie star. John had seen G.I. Joe in a crowded theater where he was stationed, and it filled him with pride. But back in Robert’s orbit in LA, the difference in their status made for a certain added tension in the relationship. Bob’s constant complaining about the way the studio took advantage of him wore on John’s nerves. He was trying to make ends meet on a ninety-dollar monthly government stipend. One night, John told Mike Tomkies, Bob was waving around a check from RKO, squawking about how much tax had been withheld or something.
“Why don’t you shut up?” John told him. “You’re whining like a child. There are people coming back from the war with one leg, no legs . . . and here you are, bitching about losing a little money. . . .”
At that Robert hauled off and slugged him.
“We had both been drinking, of course,” John said. “He hit me right in the head, and that started it. We fought so hard we did two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the den—and he’d just fixed it all up. . . . It could have got a lot worse, but Dorothy finally stepped in and stopped us.”
Robert had not won an Oscar, but as they say, “It was great just to be nominated,” and he—or his contract holders at any rate—profited from the honor as the Academy nod spurred other studios to make big-money offers for his services. MGM was one—paying twenty-five-thousand dollars per performance for two films shooting back to back that spring: a suspenser titled Undercurrent and a romantic melodrama with a wartime background variously referred to as Sacred and Profane, A Woman of His Own, A Woman of My Own, Carl and Anna, Karl and Anna, and, finally, Desire Me.
But first RKO rushed him into something of their own, The Locket (called What Nancy Wanted during production), starring Laraine Day and produced by Bert Granet.
“Men worshipped . . . Cursed . . . Hated . . . Loved Her!” moaned the ads.
Evil women were all the rage in 1946, and The Locket’s Nancy was the latest addition to a growing noir sisterhood, whose ranks included the femmes fatales of Double Indemnity, Leave Her to Heaven, Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Obsessed and psychologically twisted by the humiliations she’d suffered as a little girl, the bewitching adult Nancy is a daring kleptomaniac whose criminal behavior drives numerous men to madness and suicide. Mitchum was cast as one of the latter, a bohemian painter with a photogenic New York atelier who takes a swan dive through a skyscraper window after Nancy gets done with him. Olivia De Havilland wanted the lead, but producer Bert Granet’s friendship with Laraine Day overruled box office considerations—it would turn out to be Day’s best part and the most interesting performance of her career. In addition to Mitchum, the major male roles went to Brian Aherne as a psychiatrist and Gene Raymond as Nancy’s would-be groom. To direct, the producer borrowed John Brahm from 20th Century-Fox. “At Fox,” said Granet, “he had done a very good suspense picture about Jack the Ripper called The Lodger. He was a German—but not too German—and I thought he would be good to direct this and give it som
e of that same atmosphere he had in The Lodger. And we had Nick Musuraca, a marvelous cameraman.”
The film is best remembered today, somewhat derisively, for its extensive use of the flashback. This narrative device had become popular, particularly in the densely layered film noirs (four of Mitchum’s next five films, in various genres, would make extensive use of flashbacks). The Locket took things to extremes with, at one point, a flashback going into a flashback going into a flashback. “That complexity was really what enticed me to the material,” said Granet. “It was like an enigma within an enigma within an enigma. It was an enticing script by Sheridan Gibney . . . maybe more so than the picture.”
Mitchum did what the producer thought was a great job in the film and caused no problems. Granet remembered it as a happy time. One Sunday everyone in the cast, including Bob plus Mrs. Mitchum, went up to Brahm’s small horse ranch in Malibu, and on another weekend they were all invited to dinner at the home of Gene Raymond, where his wife, Jeanette MacDonald, entertained. But there was some tension on the set. Though Mitchum and Laraine Day had been friendly when they knew each other in Long Beach and at the Players Guild, during the shooting of The Locket he wanted nothing to do with her. Day claimed she’d been pleased to hear that her old Long Beach colleague was cast in the film and thought his performance marvelous, but when she approached him off camera he cut her dead. Years later Laraine would hear that Bob was nursing a grudge: that he believed she had snubbed him once, at Schwab’s drugstore, when she had made it in movies but he was still a nobody. How funny! Day had thought he’d acted so strange because of the dope he was taking.
A stylish collection of suits, sports jackets, and tuxedo was created for Mitchum to wear in the film. They were clothes like nothing he had ever had in his own wardrobe and he decided to keep them. Someone from the studio demanded he send them back. Mitchum bristled at the humbling request. Other stars got to keep their wardrobe, why couldn’t he? With some consternation, the studio’s Jack Gross came back and told him they would do as they had done with Cary Grant and let him keep the wardrobe for the token payment of one dollar, for accounting purposes. Mitchum told him he wouldn’t pay it. “I stole the clothes. Tell that to the accountant.”
And on to MGM.
Undercurrent and Desire Me were oddly parallel projects. Both were planned as plush vehicles for Metro divas, Katharine Hepburn in the first and Greer Garson in the latter, each one playing an anxious married lady torn between two men. The male leads went to Robert Taylor in Undercurrent and newcomer Richard Hart in Desire Me, while Mitchum—though given costar billing—would play much smaller—though crucial—roles, characters more talked about than actually seen on-screen. Both projects offered Mitchum the kind of high-priced glamour and distinguished castmates his home studio could not readily provide, and they would give him exposure to the worldwide audiences in Metro’s vast theater chain. To RKO, still figuring out what to do with their boy, a loan-out was not only profitable but served as a promotional campaign for Mitchum, with a rival studio picking up the tab.
Undercurrent derived from a magazine serial in Woman’s Home Companion, the story of a plucky New England spinster who marries a charismatic millionaire gradually revealed to be a murderous paranoid with an obsessive hatred for his missing—possibly murdered—brother. The plot cobbled together elements from Rebecca, Suspicion, and Gaslight, with a few moments from Woman of the Year and Philadelphia Story thrown in for good measure. Directing the overheated but undercooked proceedings was Vincente Minnelli—it was the first of his string of neurotic melodramas—providing the film with a characteristic visual elegance and sheen but unable to provide much in the way of real suspense or interest.
In the role of the mad millionaire, Robert Taylor was resuming his career after several years in the navy. He looked middle-aged now, and his jet black, brilliantined hair and moustache seemed from another era, particularly in contrast to Mitchum’s sleek, vigorous appearance as Michael, the mysterious rival sibling, decked out in a formfitting turtleneck sweater and leather aviator jacket. Still, the role was no plum for the younger Bob, physically present for not more than ten minutes of the nearly two-hour running time, excluded from the big climax (his horse gets to save Kate’s life), and unconvincing as Hepburn’s Brahms Fourth Symphony-loving aesthete soul mate at the final fade-out.
Mitchum’s lack of on-screen chemistry with Katharine Hepburn extended beyond camera range. The actress had a pronounced superiority complex, loved to bait others, but did not take well to jokes at her expense. She seemed to turn a cold eye on the sleepy-lidded Mitchum from the start, and the chill only increased when he began entertaining the crew with an imitation of the actress at her most lockjaw affected. Such impudence. She told his stand-in he really must do something better with his life than work “for some cheap flash actor like Mr. Mitchum.” When a take went poorly, she read her costar the riot act. “You know you cahn’t act. If you hadn’t been good-looking, you would never have gotten a picture. I’m tired of playing with people who have nothing to offer . . . rahlly I am.”
Mitchum gave the big shrug. He began referring to the movie as “Under-drawers.”
If Undercurrent proved disappointing, Mitchum’s other MGM assignment was a disaster. An assortment of writers worked on the script before and throughout the production of Desire Me, trying unsuccessfully to make something coherent, if not convincing, from the story. Set in a Brittany fishing village, it concerns a woman who wrongly believing her husband has been killed in the war is drawn into a romance with a mysterious stranger, who as it turns out had secretly betrayed her husband during a prison camp escape. Mitchum was cast as the scheming stranger, with Robert Montgomery as the missing husband. Then Montgomery dropped out, and producer Arthur Hornblow decided to make Mitchum the husband and give the role of the mysterious stranger to a little-known Broadway actor named Richard Hart, leaving Mitchum not only without the better part but now playing second fiddle to an unknown (perhaps Montgomery had noticed this as well). It was a confused, inauspicious start for the project, and things never did get better.
Mitchum, coming to work with a chip on his shoulder over the casting switch, chose to find the whole MGM ambience too damn refined for his tastes. They all wore their tradition-of-quality consciousness on their sleeves, and there was a rigid caste system in place. “L. B. Mayer would lick the floor clean at the approach of Greer Garson,” Mitchum said. “I was always an outsider and I wasn’t subjected to that caste system, so I’d speak to anyone. But there were definite demarcations in the hierarchy.” He began to appreciate the “democratic” style at RKO, where the bosses were barely distinguishable from the grips.
There was nothing like an aura of elitism to bring out the vulgarian in Bob. He took to calling Miss Garson, Metro’s stately queen of the lot, “Red,” and claimed to have come to their kissing scene after a robust lunch full of onions and Roquefort cheese, making the great lady’s eyes roll to the back of her head. He had no rapport with director George Cukor, who—perhaps having conferred with his friend Kate Hepburn—seemed to treat the young RKO loan-out condescendingly, as mere beefcake. Mitchum worked up an imitation of him, too, all puffy lips and lisping effeminacy.
“The two did not get along much, clash of personalities I suppose,” Metro research librarian and Cukor friend Elliott Morgan said. “But the whole thing was a disaster, you know.” Shooting on location at Victorine Ranch in Monterey, Garson was doing a scene on the rocky shoreline when she was hit by a sudden ten-foot wave that mashed her against the jagged stones and then washed her out to sea. The cameraman jumped in and saved her, but she suffered numerous scrapes and bruises. Taking stock after seeing how she had nearly sacrificed her life in the making of a stinker, Garson began demanding what proved to be impossible improvements in the amorphous script. There were long delays while the queen of the lot remained in her dressing room awaiting the rewrites and refusing to speak to Cukor. “Things have come to such a pass,”
wrote a visiting reporter, “that when the director wishes to speak to her, he tells his assistant; the assistant tells Miss Garson’s maid; the maid delivers the message, then comes out again and tells the assistant director, who tells the director. Everybody is in a state.” Mitchum’s good graces mattered little to an MGM house director like Cukor, but Garson’s growing displeasure was another matter. He assessed the situation, said, “Oh dear,” and called in sick.
With Cukor out for the duration, the studio recruited Mervyn LeRoy to fill in. LeRoy tried to make sense of the various script revisions, worked for some weeks, and then disappeared, replaced by Victor Saville, Jack Conway, and anyone else with some free time on their hands. Shooting and reshooting continued into the summer, followed by months of editing and reediting. All the fiddling ultimately left the film with a free-floating, dispossessed sense of time and space, the narrative assembled as if at random out of flashbacks within flashbacks and multiple voice-overs. Cukor refused to have his name on it, LeRoy followed suit, and Desire Me would become the first Hollywood feature released without a director credit. As Mitchum said of the experience, “Nobody desired anybody.”
Central casting had tossed up a standrin for Bob Mitchum named Boyd “Tyrone” Cabeen. It was a lowly job—you stood on a hot set during lighting setups so the star could relax in his dressing room—but to watch Cabeen in action you might have thought he’d been cast for the lead in Hamlet. He had matinee idol good looks, an impudently charming personality, an assortment of little-exploited talents from sketch artist to fashion designer, and was a demonic, dedicated womanizer, boozer, and hell-raiser. He and Mitchum got along like gangbusters and soon became inseparable drinking buddies and mischief makers. “Mitchum would say anything and do anything—he didn’t give a shit,” said James Bacon, the Hollywood reporter and columnist. “And Tyrone was worse! He was crazy, this guy. You never knew what the two of them might do. Tyrone thought nothing of seeing some girl he didn’t even know and going under her skirts and giving her head, in public. One time I was sitting with Bob at a place called The Coach and Horses over on Sunset, and we’re watching Tyrone, he’s got this broad he just met and he’s screwing her at the bar. And she’s loving it. And at one point there he stops long enough to pick up her drink off the bar and he dips his cock in it and stirs it around!”