Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Mitchum himself would continue to believe in his possibilities as a singer. Music was important to him, as it was to his mother and brother and sister. He was a great appreciator of music, from Beethoven to Dizzy Gillespie, with an adventurous ear, an aficionado of swing and bop and later of country and calypso, an amateur musicographer with an ever-growing record collection to which he enjoyed listening, alone, for long hours without a break. Mitchum, in fact, identified far more with the life and style of the gypsy jazz musicians, drifting across the country from sleazy nightclub to nightclub, than he did with any of his Hollywood peers in their baronial splendor. Mitchum’s whole private persona, the sleepy nihilism, the jive talk, the taste for weed, were all much more in the style of some hipster musician than of any previous species of Hollywood movie star.

  He still blew a saxophone when the urge struck, noodling in his dressing room or at home, and he sang in public with little urging, at parties and public appearances, occasionally in tune and frequently with a swaggering enthusiasm that could turn an audience on. A female publicist who heard him at a party where much drinking had been going on thought he sounded like a young Bing Crosby and tried to arrange a deal for him with Columbia Records. Label president Paul Weston agreed to let him record a couple of duets with Jo Stafford. But Mitchum’s then boss Howard Hughes got into the middle of the negotiations and the offer dissolved. Mitchum would not have his voice on another record release for ten years following his Decca debut.

  There was anyway no lack of movie work. He happily agreed to a loan-out to producer Charles K. Feldman and Republic Pictures for a film version of John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. Steinbeck had been a literary hero of Mitchum’s since he first read him as a teenager on the road, huddled behind the shelves in the library of some small town not his own. It wasn’t just any Steinbeck adaptation either. The script was by the author himself, and he was personally involved in preparing the film with director Lewis Milestone, who had previously transferred Steinbeck to the screen in 1940’s Of Mice and Men. The production was conceived as prestigious all the way, with the participation of the famed novelist, the still reputable director, music by Aaron Copland, and film processing by Technicolor (it would be Mitchum’s first color movie). With Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Frank Borzage’s Moonrise, the release of The Red Pony was part of oater-and-cliffhanger-prone Republic’s brief, aberrant bid for “respectability.”

  Mitchum was to play Billy Buck, lone ranch hand on a small California spread owned by city-bred Fred Tiffin and his wife, the daughter of an aged pioneer. The story centered around Tom, the couple’s young boy, his attachment to Billy and to the pony given him by his father. Costarring was Myrna Loy as the mother, with Shepperd Strudwick playing her husband, Peter Miles as Tom, and Louis Calhern in Buffalo Billstyle white hair and beard as Grandfather. The film begins as a sprightly, lyrical tale of childhood, with young Tommy fantasizing a ring of performing circus horses and his hero Billy as an Arthurian knight, and Milestones flat, homespun staging looking like the simple color illustrations in a storybook. But the tale soon turns more neurotic and unpleasant, the Tiffins revealed to be on the verge of separation, Grandfather with his endless stories of taming the West a great bore, and when the red pony gets caught in a rainstorm, the maudlin account of his illness and death takes up a good quarter of the running time. Mitchum as the laconic hired hand gives a simple, self-contained, and convincing performance, though the story makes the character tiresome as he heedlessly steals the boy’s affections from his caring father.

  During filming, Mitchum offered his usual share of practical jokes and risque stories for the amusement of the other players. Myrna Loy, though, proved to be something of a challenge, an utterly dignified creature whose poise and withering gaze had the ability to deflate his enthusiasm when many a good gag or raunchy witticism came to mind. He would study her as they sat together in the broiling sun on location. While the sweat poured down his back, Myrna remained cool and crisp in a high-buttoned dress without a pore out of place. “Why don’t you undo a button?” he would ask, confounded. “Aren’t you hot?” She would lift her slender nose haughtily. “Not particularly.”

  Still, she was not entirely imperturbable, and he evidently was not completely deflated. Loy recalled, “Robert Mitchum was a devil. He just about tortured me with his pranks during shooting—particularly when he had an audience. He seized one opportunity when Hedda Hopper came out to the ranch where we were shooting to interview me. As she angled for a story, Mitchum sat there on the porch watching. ‘You know,’ he suddenly interjected, ‘at one point Myrna comes out into the corral and does a dance of the seven veils . . .,’ which he demonstrated in vivid detail, managing to fluster even a tough old bird like Hedda.”

  Writer Luke Short’s Gunman’s Chance was a property that had been kicking around at RKO for some years when director Robert Wise and editor and aspiring producer Theron Warth became interested in it. Wise had been at RKO since he was a kid, working his way up the ladder from porter to assistant cutter (his first assignment, to sync up the beeps on RKO’s beeping tower logo) to editor {Citizen Kane and, more notoriously, The Magnificent Ambersons) and finally director—taking over a Val Lewton picture, Curse of the Cat People, in midproduction. Since then he had toiled in the B unit, but the quality of his work made it clear that Wise was meant for bigger things, so Dore Schary listened closely when the director and Warth pitched their Western. Schary had no interest in hoss oprys per se, but the two employees spoke to him of a mood piece, something realistic, darkly dramatic—something like Out of the Past, like Crossfire.

  Schary assigned an “inexpensive” writer to the project, fifty-six-year-old veteran Lillie Hayward, whose long list of credits ranged from Boris Karloff horrors and Dorothy Lamour sarong sagas to My Friend Flicka and The Biscuit Eater, and two months later she turned in a finished script. “She did a damn good job,” said Wise. “And we got ready to make the film. Then I got a call from Sid Rogell, an executive producer, and he told me I better come up to Dore Schary’s office before they gave the picture to another director. A couple of fellows from my own agency had come in and wanted Schary to let one of their more expensive clients do the picture.” The person they had in mind was Jacques Tourneur, and the agents talked up a repairing of the Out of the Past team; this would be a perfect project for Tourneur and Bob Mitchum. Schary told them, “No, this is Wise’s picture, he and the producer dug up the material, we’ll stay with them.” But he liked the other half of their idea, and Blood on the Moon as it was now called (coincidentally, the title of a novel by Mitchum’s boyhood literary hero Jim Tully) had found its star. Jim Garry was another of Mitchum’s outsider roles, a solitary gunfighter-for-hire with a conscience, the script’s mysterious stranger about to be made even more mysterious by the actor’s enigmatic style. The rest of the cast fell into place—architect Norman Bel Geddes’ refined young daughter Barbara, recently signed to a long-term contract; Robert Preston, playing his patented role of the corrupt best friend; Walter Brennan as a grizzled homesteader.

  Robert Wise had a craftsman’s soul. Without any need for personal expression in film beyond the telling of a good story, still his craftsmanship was thorough, even obsessive. Synthesizing techniques he had gleaned from his two creative mentors, Val Lewton and Orson Welles, Wise set out to make Blood on the Moon a studied, uniquely atmospheric Western. He familiarized himself with the styles of the period and the mundane details of cowboy life by poring over stacks of old photographs. Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca—it would be something of an Out of the Past reunion after all—was chosen to give the film a downbeat, realistic look, to capture a dark, wintry outdoors and the dim, shadowy interiors of an era lit by flickering oil lamps. Having spent all that time looking at Citizen Kane rushes in his editing days, Wise knew the dramatic effect of sets with ceilings, and he had the Blood on the Moon interiors built with visible, realistically low-slung ceilings wherever possible, one more ominous, claust
rophobic element in what would be the moodiest Western ever made. To costume the film, Wise hired Joe DeYoung, a specialist in Western attire who had also worked on Howard Hawks’s Red River. DeYoung came up with the authentic but idiosyncratic, sometimes bizarre outfits (bearskin and gaudy plaid coats, derby hats) that would give the film another of its distinctive qualities.

  Mitchum, in beard, greasy hair, high-domed Stetson, and chaps, was going to look like anything but the conventional well-groomed, respectable Western hero. Wise: “The first scene we shot after Mitch got outfitted was in the barroom. Walter Brennan was sitting at a table with a couple of pals and Brennan was very interested in the Old West, it was a hobby of his. And I’ll never forget when Bob came on the set, just standing there, with the costume and the whole attitude that he gave to it, and Brennan got a look at him and was terribly impressed. He pointed at Mitchum and said, ‘That is the goddamndest realest cowboy I’ve ever seen!’”

  Location shooting began outside Sedona, Arizona, where a studio construction crew built ranch houses, corrals, and other sets from scratch. The stunning red clay hills of Sedona gave Wise pause. “I took one look at that scenery and realized how beautiful it would be if we were shooting color,” he said. “But I didn’t regret using black-and-white. The stuff Musuraca shot was just marvelous.” True enough: the cinematographer’s shimmering blacks and whites in his cloud-covered Western landscapes look like Ansel Adams photos come to life, while the predominantly nocturnal town scenes and interiors are every bit as atmospheric and painterly as Musuraca’s work in Out of the Past and his other noir extravaganzas. Bad weather plagued the company in Arizona. Preproduction delays plus a looming deadline before Mitchum went over to Selznick had put them on a tight schedule. Now snow and heavy cloud cover that not even Musuraca knew what to do with began to cost them whole days. It was Wise’s first A-budget picture and he was determined not to blow it. “We tracked the weather like we were at NASA with a rocket launching. Every day I received three different weather service reports, one from a company in California, one from a government weather bureau, and one from some station in Winslow. Not one of them got it right.” The only solution was to stay nimble. When the good weather shifted to another part of the valley, the company would quickly pack up and shoot something there. In the end they would have to return to California with some scenes—including the big cattle stampede—left unshot, filming these at a ranch in Calabasas.

  “Bob was just fine to work with,” Wise recalled. “He liked this part and he contributed a number of ideas. It was interesting to watch him working out the scenes. He never wanted to do too much. Just enough and then hold back a little, leave something a little unspecified. He was very bright, very facile, quick with language. But he liked to give the impression that he somehow wasn’t articulate. I always thought he was a little embarrassed to be an actor. That this was sissy stuff. He should be a stevedore or a fireman or something. He never said this, but it was a feeling I had about him.

  “Mitch and Bob Preston became pals and they spent a lot of time getting under the skin of the girls, Barbara and Phyllis Thaxter. Teasing, practical jokes . . . nothing sexual particularly, well, nothing inappropriate, but they gave them a hard time.” (Bel Geddes already had enough irritation to deal with from her lack of previous riding experience, nursing a perpetually tender rear end.) Mitchum and Preston agreed to Wise’s suggestion that they film their big fight scene without stunt doubles. “In keeping with the realistic style of this film I wanted to avoid one of those extremely staged-looking fistfights used in all the movies, where the stuntmen did this elaborate, acrobatic fighting and you saw the real actors only in closeups. I wanted this to look like a real fight, with that awkward, brutal look of a real fight, and when it was done for the winner to look as exhausted as the loser. And Mitch was excited about this. He knew exactly what I was going for. I think he probably knew more than I did about barroom fights like this one.” For three days the actors crashed around the set, creating the film’s most memorable sequence, an ugly, ferocious and realistic brawl, two figures clawing at each other in the near darkness, fists and faces smeared with glistening blood.

  Blood on the Moon was, after Pursued, the Western genre’s second and even more visually evocative move into the dark world of film noir. And Robert Mitchum was the one and only noir cowboy. It was a long way from heroes like Hopalong Cassidy or Jim “Nevada” Lacy to the brooding, brutal, unpredictable Jim Garry. In a performance that mixed a familiar, audience-friendly Hollywood archetype—the tough, laconic Westerner, the reluctant hero—with distancing characteristics of alienation and nihilism not yet codified by any modernist “school,” Mitchum again proved to be an actor of stunning originality.

  • • •

  Paul Behrmann’s system of handling all Bob Mitchum’s financial affairs and giving Bob and Dorothy a small weekly stipend was awkward at times, a bit humbling, but it was working. It freed Mitchum of irksome everyday responsibilities like paying bills on time and balancing a checkbook, and now—via Paul—they were putting away some real money for a change. The savings account was approaching six figures. Bob told Dorothy they were going to put a good piece of it toward a big house in a better neighborhood. It wasn’t safe for the kids where they presently lived. You couldn’t go out the front door without fear of being hit by a car or truck, and the air was foul. Traffic in Los Angeles seemed to double with every passing year, and the main road just below the house was now a roaring effluvium he referred to as “Monoxide Alley.” Big house with a good chunk of land around it, that was what he was going to get them, he said.

  Paul Behrmann became a personal friend. And a generous one. He frequently took the Mitchums dining at good restaurants all over town, and often after that to a nightclub for a show and drinks, always picking up the tab. Paul made himself almost one of the family, an uncle or big brother dropping by the little house in the Valley for breakfast, sitting at the built-in table in the tiny kitchen in his natty blazers, reading the Times and Variety while the rest of the household scuffled about sleepily in pajamas and T-shirts; he’d sidle up to Bob with a bit of gossip about his other celebrity clients, and then it was time to dash off and make them all some more money.

  Or maybe not. When the Mitchums returned to Los Angeles from Oregon, Dorothy couldn’t reach Behrmann and went to the bank to get some cash. She found to her shock that all but fifty-eight dollars was gone from their accounts. Bob told her to let him handle it and went to see Behrmann. “My best friend and trusted manager,” Mitchum would later say of the incident, “admitted the complete disappearance of my funds and refused an accounting.” Saying he was “more hurt than angry,” Mitchum declined to prosecute. In private, though, he brooded over the matter, contemplated revenge. One night with a buddy he got a little “hot” and planned in detail a torture murder of the man who’d betrayed him. “How close I came to killing the son of a bitch,” he would recall. Mitchum heated up but did nothing. In light of subsequent events, it’s possible that the actor knew or learned more than he was telling about Behrmann and his activities, perhaps concluding that doing nothing was the safest way to proceed. In any case, Mitchum’s seemingly passive acceptance of the theft left his family reeling in disbelief. Bob had behaved strangely in the past, to be sure. Even those who knew him best often said they never had a clue what the man might do next. But there was something about his reaction to this incident that seemed so weird to Mitchum’s mother that she met with Paul Behrmann herself on the q.t. and came away with Behrmann’s very different version of what had happened to the bank accounts. Behrmann had instilled in her, said Mitchum, “the belief that I . . . in reality was myself the thief.” It was hard to know what to believe, but Julie Mitchum liked Behrmann and believed in him, and she had heard some shocking things from people in her circle that Bob’s studio RKO was out to try and sever their star from his influential manager. In any case, Bob was clearly a confused character, and it was thought that he migh
t benefit from some professional attention. “My mother and sister,” said Mitchum, “doubting my sanity, implored the cooperation of my wife in suggesting a visit to a psychiatrist.”

  Mitchum agreed to their suggestion—”What could I do? It was the family consensus”—and submitted himself to the leather couch in the Beverly Hills office of Dr. Frederick Hacker.

  “Mr. Mitchum, do you know why you have come here?” asked the doctor, described by the patient as a dead ringer for Walter Slezak.

  “Because my family thinks I’m crazy.”