Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  You couldn’t buy publicity like this, they were saying back at RKO, with their heads in their hands.

  The ten—the “Hollywood Ten”—were cited for contempt and handed sentences of up to one year in prison. “I was the hottest director in Hollywood,” said Dmytryk, “and I was going to jail.”

  On November 24, the same day the Ten were being cited, Dore Schary reluctantly joined a group of moguls and board chairmen from the various studios meeting at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. Concluding that the movie industry could not afford to be seen as soft on Reds in the current volatile climate, the group issued a collective statement of intent, a virtual oral massage to the backsides of the committee members, to wit: “We will forthwith discharge or suspend without compensation those in our employ and we will not re-employ any of the ten until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist. On the broader issue of alleged subversives and disloyal elements in Hollywood, our members are likewise prepared to take positive action.”

  It was the beginning of the witch-hunt years in Hollywood, an ongoing industrywide purge of suspected Reds. The film colony split into an assortment of warring factions, the superpatriots and fascists of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals proferring their blacklists and loyalty oaths, the concerned liberals of the Committee for the First Amendment ineffectually marching on Washington, and the leftists and progressives fearfully awaiting their subpoenas or forced to go underground or to squeal on their comrades and try living with that.

  In later years, when asked about the blacklist in Hollywood, Robert Mitchum would speak only a few cryptic, hipper-than-thou words to the effect that he had seen it all coming, and what did you expect? He would recall with contempt how it had been “chic” for people in the movie business making huge salaries to call themselves Communists, how it had amused him to see someone like Eddie Dmytryk sitting on the set reading the Daily Worker, reveling in a fashionable concern for the common man. But Dmytryk had found Mitchum to be sympatico in those days, before it was dangerous, and the actor had been friends with leftists and soon-to-be blacklist victims such as Trumbo, director Joseph Losey, and writer Howard Koch. Mitchum, Losey, and Koch had even planned to collaborate on a theater project in 1947, a political play called The Glass House. “He was an interesting man. Smart. Spoke very knowledgeably of the political climate at that time,” said Koch, the screenwriter of Casablanca and Sergeant York. “I think people tend to see him as another John Wayne figure; maybe he turned into that, I don’t know, but I found that to be very far from the truth at that time. I liked him. I’m sorry we didn’t get to work together.”

  It is surprising that Mitchum—a man with such associates and known to make mention of his days as a longshoreman (one of the more politically suspect forms of labor at the time) and of his authorship of a play, Fellow Traveler, not unsympathetic to Communist strike leader Harry Bridges—did not himself become a target for any of the self-apppointed investigators and Red-chasers, who cast their nets wide and recognized no statute of limitations on radicalism. “The play . . . remains unknown,” he told writer Jerry Roberts. “The HUAC never had any interest in me.” And that was that.

  Anyway, Mitchum would soon have more than enough trouble on his hands just trying to be a good capitalist.

  After the success of Pursued and Crossfire and with a growing positive reaction to his performance in Out of the Past—seen by industry and press people in private screenings, the film still held from release until late autumn—Mitchum was shaping up to be perhaps the major new screen personality of the era. RKO still seemed not to know what to do about it. In recent years the big names had come to RKO for specific projects and short-term deals. The studio hadn’t had to take charge of a truly homegrown star since Ginger Rogers’s peak of popularity in the early ‘40s. David Selznick, still part owner of the actor’s contract, was little help. He had yet to use Mitchum in one of his personal productions (which were becoming scarcer as the decade continued), preferring to rent him out to the highest bidder. When the studio began negotiating with the Berg-Allenberg agency for the services of Loretta Young, Bert Allenberg made a play for Mitchum. Allenberg argued that Mitchum’s current representative could not properly exploit a major star, keeping him in the public eye via live appearances, radio programs, and recordings, and thus ever increasing his value to the studio. Getting Mitchum for Berg-Allenberg somehow became tied in to Loretta Young’s availability for the RKO project. The studio and the agency conspired to wrestle Mitchum’s contract away from Paul Wilkins—the man who had taken the actor from Long Beach theatrics and Lockheed assembly lines to movie stardom. The final deal would give Wilkins an ongoing but reduced piece of Mitchum’s income for the remaining years of his stay with RKO. That done, Phil Berg, in the serpentine manner known to Hollywood agents worthy of their percentages, immediately strong-armed a new contract for their new client. RKO and minority shareholder David Selznick would now be paying the actor three grand every week, less twelve weeks of unpaid layoff per year.

  At $120,000 per annum, Mitchum’s base pay was considerably less than the $468,000 Humphrey Bogart earned that year as the highest-paid actor in the world, but for a man who continued to see himself as essentially a drifter “between trains,” the numbers seemed unreal, beyond his grasp. He still lived in a shitty little house, often bummed a ride home at night, and dressed like a ranch hand. He still could not manage to hold on to much cash, and in those postwar years the income taxes on big earners were all but confiscatory. Anyone without the savvy to have capital gains or other tax shelters could find himself taking home ten cents on the dollar. “I always spend all I have—much or little,” he told a friend. “It really doesn’t matter to me.” He was known as an easy mark for a quick loan. People would promise to pay it back the next day, but the next day he often couldn’t remember who they were or what he had given them. Someone introduced him to a business manager by the name of Paul Behrmann. He was a slick character with an Errol Flynn moustache who favored flashy custom-made blazers and carried himself at all times in a manner that suggested he had the world by the testicles. Behrmann met Mitchum for lunch at Mike Romanoff’s.

  “Let’s talk turkey, Bob,” he said. Behrmann told him he was going to have to decide, when it all ended, did he want to go out like Greta Garbo, with a fortune tucked away, or did he want to get out like Buster Keaton, a bum over at Metro—he’s gag writer now—scrounging for peanuts from the people who used to work for him. Behrmann said the time had come for Bob to start investing his dough, and wisely. Mitchum spoke of his distaste for the RKO brass telling him what to do and confessed to his ambivalent feelings about acting, how he sometimes dreamed of chucking the whole thing. “Sure!” Behrmann said. “But for that you need ‘Fuck you’ money. Like Garbo.”

  A few liquid lunches later, Mitchum signed on with the dapper financial guru. His paychecks and bills would now be sent directly to Behrmann’s office, while he and Dorothy would be given a small weekly stipend to cover household and incidental expenses. Behrmann told him that if he stuck with the program, in four, five years he could be a millionaire.

  That summer another Mitchum entered the picture business. As he had followed in his brother’s footsteps so many times in the past, now John Mitchum found himself working as a movie actor. An agent ran into him on Santa Monica Boulevard and told him he looked perfect for a role in a picture they were currently shooting over on Cahuenga. It was something called The Prairie, starring someone called Alan Baxter. The director, a German emigre named Frank Wisbar, looked him up and down and said, “Jah.” A couple of scenes later, a stunt coordinator rehearsed him for a brawl with the star. He was to throw a left, then take a right from Baxter, then go into a clinch. John recalled in his memoir, “I hadn’t been told that I was supposed to ‘pull’ my punches in accepted film-fighting style.” His left pounded into Baxter’s face just above the le
ft eye, blood squirted across the set, and it took six stitches to close up the wound.

  The film for which RKO had sought Loretta Young was called Tall Dark Stranger, the title eventually changed to Rachel and the Stranger to accentuate the presence of Ms. Young, then enjoying the biggest success of her long career as Katie in The Farmer’s Daughter (she would win the Best Actress Oscar for it). Based on stories by Howard Fast and scripted by Waldo Salt, Rachel and the Stranger was a pastoral love story with dollops of comedy and adventure, set on the Pennsylvania frontier of the 1800s. Davey, a dour, widowed farmer, takes a spunky bondwoman as his wife to do chores and care for his young son. Ill-treated by her husband, Rachel is drawn to his friend Jim Fairways, a dashing and seductive backwoods hunter. Jealousy and an Indian attack spur Davey’s romantic feelings, and he and Rachel decide to live happily ever after, while Jim returns to his life of adventure.

  Obeying no discernible logic, RKO had once again chosen to cast its own hot property in a supporting part. Mitchum as Fairways would be billed third after Young and William Holden. Holden, the fair-haired boy-next-door in a number of prewar movies, had returned from several years in the armed service looking considerably more mature and ready for the tougher, more cynical parts that would define his career. But Sunset Boulevard was still in the future, and Holden’s postwar comeback vehicles, Blaze of Noon and Dear Ruth, would hardly seem to put him in a superior position beside RKO’s biggest male star. But what the hell, Mitchum decided. If they didn’t know what to do with their investment, it wasn’t his lookout. With three thousand coming in every week, he went along without complaint, looking at the bright side—it was a change of pace for him, a good-natured role, and a chance to sing (vocalizing “Londonderry Air” in the tension-filled atmosphere of Pursued hardly counted as a musical showcase). Something new, and at the same time another variation on the established Mitchum persona, the Fairways character was described in the film as “a walking man with an itch in his heels”—rootless outsider, adventurer. He would have at least the opening sequence to himself, begun with the credits still fading, an unhurried walk in the forest, strumming a guitar and crooning in a pleasant if tenuous voice one of Roy Webb and Waldo Salt’s ersatz folk tunes—”O-he, O-hi, O-ho.” It was the first of six originals written for him to sing in the film. That was more songs than Crosby did in an average musical.

  Norman Foster was directing. A callow actor in the talkie era, when he was known as Mr. Claudette Colbert due to his wife’s greater success, he turned to directing in the ‘30s, mostly Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan pictures until an association with Orson Welles set him off in unexpected directions. He had only recently returned from making films in Mexico. Mitchum rolled his eyes when he heard that Foster—married now to actress Sally Blane—was Loretta Young’s brother-in-law, but the director showed no inordinate signs of favoritism or indulgence and was amiable and amenable to all concerned.

  Newlyweds Robert and Dorothy Mitchum. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Robert Mitchum in Farewell, My Lovely (1975). Copyright © 1975, E. K. Corporation/Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

  William Boyd (as Hopalong Cassidy) and Robert Mitchum (as a badman) in Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943). Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

  Robert Mitchum in his first starring role, as cowboy hero of Nevada (RKO, 1944). Courtesy New York Public Library

  Dorothy and Robert, circa 1944. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

  Robert Mitchum with Dorothy Wellman (Mrs. William Wellman) on machine gun, during filming of The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). Courtesy of William Wellman Jr.

  Robert Mitchum and newly organized fan club, the Mitchum Droolettes, 1946. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Inducted into the Shoshone Tribe, Mitchum gives Chief Owanahea the secret handshake. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Robert Mitchum relaxing with costar Barbara Bel Geddes on the set of Blood on the Moon (1948). Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947). Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

  Mitchum in the frenetic climax to His Kind of Woman (RKO, 1951). Courtesy Cinedoc

  Mitchum and Robin Ford in police custody, wardrobe by LAPD. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  “Officers Must Put Prisoners Inside Cage”: released on bail, September 1, 1948. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Mitchum behind bars for marijuana possession. Note fine-grained cordovans. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Courtroom hearing: Lila Leeds, attorney Grant Cooper, Vicki Evans, attorney Jerry Giesler, Robert Mitchum. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Domesticity: Robert Mitchum with wife, Dorothy, and son, Christopher, circa 1949. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

  Mitchum learned to play the saxophone during a brief term in high school. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

  Robert Mitchum and tiki girl, circa 1950. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Advertisement for Where Danger Lives (1950) starring Robert Mitchum and Howard Hughes protegee Faith Domergue. Courtesy Cinedoc

  Mitchum visiting costar and buddy Jane Russell on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Advertisement for His Kind of Woman (1951), directed by John Farrow (and Richard Fleischer). The quirky film noir was a pet project of RKO boss Howard Hughes and remained in and out of production for more than a year.

  Only four years older than Mitchum, Loretta Young had been a movie star for two decades. She had a steely capacity for self-preservation and, like Marlene Dietrich and a few other savvy veterans, cultivated a technician’s knowledge of lights, lenses, and camera angles so as to better maintain her celluloid allure. Mitchum would watch with amusement as she calibrated her head movements just before the camera rolled, making the infinitesimal adjustments that would let the light fall on her face with enchanting perfection.

  “I’m afraid I threw you a little into the shadow then,” she said guilefully after a take.

  “Honey, I don’t give a damn,” he told her, or said he did.

  In August the Rachel company left Hollywood for a six-week stay in Oregon, filming exteriors in the woods of Fox Hollow and along the Mackenzie River near Eugene. The principal actors and Foster were assigned houses rented from the locals. Mitchum’s had a scenic view of the chilled Mackenzie. Provoked by locals and sportsmen gushing over the river’s bounty, he took up fishing in his off-hours. Grabbing a rod, a book, and a bagful of beers, he would amble off by himself for the entire day or until somebody came to retrieve him, a habit he would continue at future locations on many another film when an unspoiled waterway was at hand.

  Though they would call themselves friends in the years ahead, and Mitchum would speak approvingly of Holden as a man and as an actor, the two stars seemed in the beginning to be far from compatible. Holden was prone to melancholy and bouts of debilitating self-doubt. He was a heavy drinker but a lonely one, more likely to hide away with a bottle than to hoist a few with some comrades. In Oregon, Mitchum’s self-assurance and flamboyance only increased Holden’s funk. Loretta Young, among others, observed his plunge into insecurity on the days when Bob was on the set.

  “Why are you so nervous?” she said to him. “You have the lead role. He doesn’t get the girl, you do.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Holden.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Bob Mitchum has gotten under your skin.”

  “You’re crazy,” said Holden, but his discomfort continued to show.

  Loretta Young could be a pious and preachy character, Mitchum found. One morning following a dinner party she had thrown at her rented home, she cornered her costars and confronted them about their previous night’s imbibing. After berating them for drinking nearly two bottles of whiskey, she declared that they were both going to be big stars for years to come and if they turned into drunks they would never get to enjoy it.

  An obsequious Holden mumbled tha
t she was probably right.

  Mitchum momentarily raised an eyelid. “Are you finished, Mother Supenor?

  A devout Catholic, Young frowned on unseemly behavior of all kinds and particularly disapproved the use of bad language in the workplace. It was generally understood that there was to be no swearing by anyone within miles of Loretta’s delicate ears, a tall order considering that in the movie business even the child actors cursed like sailors. To enforce this edict, Loretta instituted her infamous “curse box,” requiring an immediate donation (to be forwarded to one of her Catholic charities) by anyone on the set uttering a forbidden epithet. This provoked one of the most durable of Mitchum anecdotes. In the pithiest version of the story, an assistant explained to Bob how the curse box worked, with its sliding scale of penalties.

  “It’s fifty cents for ‘hell,’ a dollar for a ‘damn,’ a dollar-fifty for ‘shit’—”

  “What I want to know is,” said Mitchum, in a voice that could be heard throughout Oregon, “what does Miss Young charge for a ‘fuck’?”

  To further publicize Rachel and the Stranger, and by way of fulfilling his agency’s promise to spread his stardom to other fields, Mitchum was signed to a recording contract with Decca Records. At the company’s Hollywood studio, he sang full-length and more carefully produced versions of the six songs written for the film. With “folk” still a decidedly obscure wing of the popular music scene in America, these were more easily seen as novelty recordings, partly sung, partly spoken, with only the spare backing of jazzman Dave Barbour picking at a guitar and Walter Gross playing an authentically Early American-sounding harpsichord. As he had in the movie, actor Gary Gray joined Mitchum on the comical “Just Like Me,” lyrics revised here to refer to his “Uncle Bob.” They are interesting, odd recordings. Mitchum’s singing voice is musical but frail, barely able to hold up to the modest range of the tunes. The spoken parts came in plenty handy. No trace of Mitchum’s iconic personality shows through; instead he sings “in character,” and a retrospective listening finds certain moments like the weirdly cross-talking monologue section of “Foolish Pride” rather creepy, as if one were listening to crazy Preacher Powell from Night of the Hunter making his first record. Decca released “Rachel” and “O-he, Oh-hi, O-ho” as a double A-sided 78, to not much success, and the company made no further requests for the actor’s time.