by Lee Server
“Police officers! Freeze!”
Mitchum froze. It took him several moments to comprehend that the flaring roach he still held between his fingers was burning a hole in his flesh.
* Discussions of Crossfire seldom recall—there is only a single mention in the dialogue—that the loathsome racist Montgomery was a Saint Louis policeman in civilian life. “Four years in the jungle on the East Side,” he says to Finley, “I know the score.”
chapter six
Occupation:
Former Actor
MITCHU M CURSED SOFTLY AND released the burning stub.
Robin Ford was sitting motionless, staring fixedly at the opposite wall, as if thinking he might go unnoticed. His only movement was to take the joint from his mouth and flick it under the couch. One of the policemen—Det. Sgt. Alva Barr—came up, retrieved it, then scooped up what Mitchum had dropped. He crumpled the tips and then placed them in the breast pocket of his jacket. Picking up the Philip Morris pack on the coffee table, he examined the contents.
He looked at Mitchum and said, “These are yours?”
Mitchum said, “No, they’re not mine.” But the words seemed to evaporate in the back of his throat.
Barr said, “Don’t give me any business and we’ll get along fine.”
The other officer—Det. J. B. McKinnon—closed a pair of handcuffs on Robin Ford’s wrists. Mitchum then offered up his own.
Barr stepped over to where Lila sat and took one partly burned cigarette out of her hand. It had red lipstick around the tip. He told her to empty her bathrobe pocket, and she took out something wrapped in a page of the Herald Express. The cop unwrapped it and found what appeared to be three more hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes and eight Benzedrine tablets.
He told them they were all under arrest and then picked up Lila’s phone and called headquarters.
Vicki Evans said, “It’s just like the movies.”
• • •
In a matter of minutes the tiny bungalow was filled with lawmen, including Federal Narcotics Bureau investigator William Craig. Mitchum and Ford were frisked, photos were taken, evidence was secured. Policewoman Eleanor Whitney took the two ladies into the bathroom and searched them. Then the cops led the four accused miscreants downstairs and put them into the waiting police cars. The men were driven to the county jail, the women to the Lincoln Heights lockup. They were all booked on the same charge of narcotics possession, a felony with a penalty of up to six years in prison.
Reporters and photographers were already gathered outside both stations, alerted to the celebrity dope arrest. Ford and Mitchum entered past a gauntlet of flashbulbs and barked questions. One photographer snapped Bob with his features contorted; in the printed photo he was barely recognizable. The picture wrote its own caption: “A MAN IN THE GRIP OF DEMON DRUGS.” Inside the station Mitchum and Ford were booked. Name, age, address, identifying marks. When the policeman asked Mitchum his occupation, he replied, wittily, “Former actor.”
According to police, Mitchum had already made a lengthy and damning statement following his arrest by Detectives Barr and McKinnon. In the report, an oddly voluble and square-sounding Mitchum confessed, “Yes, boys, I was smoking the marijuana cigaret when you came in. I guess it’s all over now. I’ve been smoking marijuana for years. The last time I smoked was about a week ago. I knew I would get caught sooner or later. This is the bitter end of my career. I’m ruined.”
Amazingly, the arrest report on Lila Leeds contained a similar unprompted confession with a number of duplicated words and phrases, as if the two suspects had issued a joint statement. “I have been smoking marijuana for two years. I don’t smoke every day. I was smoking that small brown stick when you came in. . . . I’m glad it’s over. Tm ruined.”
Police released Robin Ford’s incriminating statement as well. “Yes, I was smoking that cigaret. I haven’t smoked marijuana for a long time. I really don’t know who lit the cigaret for me. I was smoking it—ain’t that enough? This will ruin me.”
Clearly a side effect of the dope—everyone spoke the same catch phrases.
It was the middle of the night when a Howard Hughes flack got word of the Mitchum arrest. He put a call through to his boss and imparted the bad news. Hughes took it calmly—his anger was reserved for Commies and intransigent females.
“Well, who do we pay to kill this thing?” Hughes asked.
In Hollywood everything from rape to hit-and-run homicides could be—had been—hushed up if you knew the procedure.
But it was too late for that. The press already had the story. In a few hours there would be headlines.
Howard said, “Let’s get him out of jail, keep him from talking, and for Pete sake will somebody call Jerry Giesler.”
In the morning, as attorneys arrived to bail him out, Mitchum was telling reporters a different story from the one the police had supplied. He denied confessing to anything. He had been out house hunting and didn’t even get a chance to join the party.
“I was framed.”
Anyone expecting to find a distraught, ruined man was in for a surprise. Mitchum’s demeanor was coolly sarcastic. “I’m sorry if my new look doesn’t appeal to you,” he said, referring to his jailhouse denim uniform. “It doesn’t appeal to me either. I left the house last night to get something to eat. I swung by Lila Leeds’ place. I sat down, then boom! What makes it worse is that I still haven’t had any dinner. As a matter of fact, I haven’t even had my morning coffee.”
Mitchum sat there with his bare chest sticking out of the denim jacket, chatting and laughing with Ford, sitting next to him, as the photographers snapped away. “Don’t take my picture when my eyes are shut,” Mitchum said. “It makes me look like I’ve just been hit on the head by a stick.”
“Who’s going to bail you out, Bob?” a reporter asked.
“Who knows! I’ve got two bosses—David O. Selznick and RKO. Have you ever listened to Selznick or RKO when they’re peeved? I think I’d just as soon stay in jail. Anyway, if Selznick calls I’ll hang up on him.”
Asked if he expected to be reconciled with his wife, Mitchum smiled wryly. “What, now?” he said. “I would like to hope so, but my wife is a very resolute woman.”
Over at Lincoln Heights, Lila Leeds and Vicki Evans were also sparring with the press, and they, too, were seemingly undaunted by a night behind bars or the potential six-year prison sentence that loomed before them. Posing for the cameras, Vicki pulled up her skirt while covering her face. “How’s this?” she said. Both girls dissolved in laughter. Lila complained about the poor job performance by her two boxers. “They must be police dogs in disguise,” she cracked.
Someone arrived with a morning paper and the first account of the arrests. Lila read it aloud with enthusiasm, like it was a review of Campus Honey-moon. When she reached a mention of the blue bathrobe she’d been wearing, Leeds exclaimed, “Gad! They could at least have said I had my shorts on.”
The four prisoners were released on a thousand dollars’ bail each, pending a habeus corpus hearing on September 3.
Los Angeles woke up to the first wave of news stories.
“ROBERT MITCHUM FACES MARIJUANA COUNT WITH LILA LEEDS,
Two OTHERS”
“NABBED AT ASSERTED ‘MARIJUANA PARTY”
“BOB MITCHUM, 3 OTHERS JAILED AFTER DOPE RAID”
The cops had spoon-fed the press Mitchum’s alleged spoken confession. By the time he denied ever telling the police anything, the first reports were already in print. Rather than investigate the discrepency or question the LAPD’s version of events, later editions would refer to Mitchum’s “contradictory statements,” continuing to validate the confession and perhaps to imply drug-addled confusion as well.
Later that morning the police held a press conference starring the arresting officers and a selection of federal narcotics investigators. In contrast to the unflappable Mitchum and Leeds, their demeanor was anything but cool.
“We’re going to cl
ean the dope and the narcotics users out of Hollywood!” screamed one of the narcs. “And we don’t care whom we’re going to have to arrest! This raid is only the beginning!”
“There is a lot of ’stuff’ being used in Hollywood. We have, besides Mitchum, a number of other important and prominent Hollywood screen personalities under surveillance. Not only actors and actresses, but others prominent in pictures.”
Det. Sgt. Alva Barr revealed that Mitchum had been under police surveillance since the beginning of the year. “When sources reported to me that Mitchum was using marijuana I personally started investigating him. I followed him to various nightspots. I would tail him from home and follow him around all evening. We followed him to parties at several other movie stars’ homes, then to late eating spots and then would wait until he went to bed. Last night we were investigating Lila Leeds when who should walk in but Mitchum.”
The conference concluded on a note of intrigue and the promise of more excitement to come. “Many of the big shots—the stars and other top names—do not patronize small street or corner peddlers, for fear of a shakedown or other dangers. However, we have reason to believe there is an ’inside ring of perhaps no more than three persons, right inside the film industry, who are supplying a large number of narcotics users. Most prevalent use is of marijuana, but we know that other drugs are being used. Information is hard to get. But we get it.
“Hollywood can let this serve as warning! We are out to get the ‘inside ring’!”
With Mitchum whisked into seclusion, the press sought comment from his employers. Columnists like Louella Parsons, with the clout to have their calls taken, found RKO execs—sitting on millions of dollars in unreleased Mitchum pictures—guardedly loyal. No one at the studio, they stated, believed Mitchum was an “addict.” He had never given any signs of being doped and had turned in some very fine performances. David Selznick, typically voluble and opinionated even without any hard facts at his disposal, declared the boy was “sick” and should go into a sanitarium immediately to undergo treatment for his “shattered nerves.”
Parsons, in a column printed the day after the arrest, mindful of the studio’s investment, was conciliatory but stern and reflected a typical Reefer Madness— era knowledge of marijuana. “He could still be cured,” she wrote, “providing he wanted to be. Barney Ross and other addicts have been successfully treated, and certainly this 31-year-old actor, who is at the peak of his fame, should realize it is up to him to get himself on his feet.
“Mitchum,” she revealed, “was in a state of mental collapse following his release. He was ordered to bed and to sleep and not to talk.”
Mitchum had left the jailhouse and disappeared. Reporters staked out the Oak Glen house, the RKO lot, and the Berg-Allenberg offices hoping to catch up with him, with no luck. Now it can be told: Howard Hughes asked his trusted publicist Perry Lieber to keep Mitchum under wraps, and Lieber took the actor to his own house. The publicity man’s teenage son, Perry, Jr., came home to find Mitchum installed in the guest room. “He was just hanging out. Very friendly, a great guy. He didn’t seem particularly nervous or upset or anything like that. He was just taking it one hour at a time. He ate dinner with the family. He played the piano, sang. He didn’t act like he was worried about anything.” Perry brought a couple of girlfriends over, impressing them greatly when he introduced his new housemate. “I got very popular with them,” he recalled.
As Mitchum played the piano and flirted with the high school girls, the senior Lieber held a strategy meeting with attorney Jerry Giesler. Considered the most brilliant trial lawyer in California and renowned as the “attorney to the stars,” Giesler’s headline-making Hollywood cases included a Charlie Chaplin paternity suit and the first of the Errol Flynn rape trials. “Bob had nothing to do with getting Giesler,” said Reva Frederick. “It was all Howard Hughes’s doing.” Lieber and Giesler went over what scant information they had so far and crafted an official RKO-Selznick joint statement.
“All the facts about the case are not yet known,” it read. “We urgently request the press, the industry and the public to withhold its judgment until these facts are known.
“Both studios feel confident the American people will not permit Mr. Mitchum’s prominence in the motion picture industry to deprive him of the rights and privileges of every American citizen to receive fair play.”
Asserting his handling of the case, Giesler himself issued a similar statement, adding, “There are a number of unexplained facts and peculiar circumstances surrounding the raid in which Robert Mitchum was involved. His many friends have expressed their opinion that when all the facts are known that he will be cleared.”
The only statement from Lila Leeds’s camp was less optimistic. Her fair-weather agent, Louis Shurr, told reporters, “She had a promising career and was headed for success, if she had only behaved differently. It looks now as though she’s blown her chances sky high.”
The following day, September 2, with more details about the raid plus the police press conference, newspapers everywhere spread the story across the front pages, with banner headlines. The issue of the Los Angeles Examiner became a kind of Robert Mitchum Special Edition, with a front-page feature and no fewer than seven sidebar articles, including “IM RUINED,’ SAYS MITCHUM AFTER MARIJUANA ARREST,” “POLICE TELL HOW THEY PEEPED THROUGH WINDOW AND JAILED FOUR,” “MITCHUM HOLDS HOBO INSTINCT: HAD VARIED JOBS BEFORE FILMS,” and “MITCHUM ‘SICK,’ EXECUTIVES SAY.” Articles reported that the actor’s coworkers were stunned by the reports: “News of Mitchum’s addiction to marijuana took the movie capital, and the nation, by complete surprise.”
The papers reported an instant freeze in the Hollywood-area marijuana trade. “Insiders” told how the homemade cigarettes, “up to now relatively easily obtainable at a dollar apiece if one knew the contacts, couldn’t be bought for any amount of money. The scare is on. Those that had it have ditched it, and those that use it are laying off.”
Then, as if to calm these insiders’ rattled nerves, it was announced that Capt. Lynn White, police narcotics detail chief, was out of town on a fishing trip and the narcotics division had decided to pause in their investigations until dope users, frightened by the Mitchum case, “were not so chary of their conduct.”
“Perry Lieber had made the call to Dorothy,” said Reva Frederick. “They had been separated and she was going to stay back East, as I understood it. Perry called, said, ‘You must get out here right away’ They needed to show him back together with his family. And I think she realized that if his career went downhill her prospects went downhill. So she came. But I think she headed back with very little knowledge of what the hell sort of commotion was going on.”
Dorothy Mitchum and the boys and a relative who had offered to help with the driving headed west from Delaware. The car barely stopped until they reached Las Vegas, Nevada, where it was arranged for Dorothy to rendezvous with RKO representatives. Alerted reporters were waiting for her, describing Mrs. M. as “nervous and distraught.” They stayed for an afternoon and evening at the El Rancho Hotel, then departed in the middle of the night, crossing the desert to Los Angeles, reaching the Oak Glen house just after 10 A.M. The crowd that had been gathering since dawn closed in on the arriving sedan. Dorothy cried, “Please, I’m awfully tired,” and herded the children to the front door. Bob stepped into the doorway, the family embraced, then disappeared inside.
Reva Frederick arrived and left an hour later with Jim and Chris. “They were very worried about the effect on the kids and thought it best to get them far away from there,” Reva recalled. “It was such a madhouse. So I got them and took them to my mother’s house. And she took them out to Palm Springs for a week.”
At one in the afternoon the RKO reps began admitting photographers and reporters, four or six at a time, all that could fit into the living room of the modest home. Bob and Dorothy—the wife wearing a “ballerina gown” and looking as if she had been crying, Bob dressed up as if for
church—sat on the sofa, clasping arms, rubbing their cheeks together and kissing.
Dorothy wished to speak only via a typewritten statement handed out by a man from the studio:
Everybody ought to be able to see that Bob is a sick man. Otherwise he couldn’t be mixed up in a situation like this.
Our differences were the same kind all married couples get into. We have made them up. I love my husband and am back home to stay with him.
I am indignant that not only Bob but our whole family should have to suffer simply because he is a motion picture star, because otherwise I don’t think that all this fuss would be made.
I’m sorry that I can’t answer the newspaper people’s questions today. I have driven all day and all night to my sick husband as fast as I could and have had no sleep at all, so I hope they will understand this and forgive me.
I have only one favor to ask and that is that nobody bothers our children. They’re very young and they love their father and they don’t understand what it’s all about.
“Anything you want to add?” Bob was asked.
“Just 30—at the end,” he said.
“Is this a reconciliation—or were you ever separated?”
“Reconciliation is a hard word. Reunion is better.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“I’m very happy about my wife’s attitude.”
“Was your marriage ever in jeopardy?”
“Every time I went to the studio,” Mitchum said, smiling.
“And every time he didn’t shave,” said Dorothy.
“What are your immediate plans?”
“Lunch,” he said.
It was during this period of anxiety and uncertainty that Robert’s mother and sister, Julie (and soon after, his half-sister, Carol), began their involvement with a spiritual order that was to become a part of their lives forever after. Two actor friends of the family had come to offer support and, along the way, preach the benefits of their faith. They were Baha’is, members of the modern-era religion begun in Iran—dismissed as a mystical sect by some majority religions—that stressed principles of tolerance and universal brotherhood. “They invited Mother to a Baha’i ‘Fireside,’” said Julie. “I wouldn’t go. I wanted no part of religion! We found out that Mother had read all about the Baha’i long ago in a Charleston newspaper after a visit by the son of Baha Allah. And she came to realize that what she had read had stayed with her and that she had been a Baha’i in essence for decades. At first I was reluctant to open myself to what she had found. I was probably one of the nastiest agnostics that anyone could ever be. But I finally got the picture.” Julie would speak to Robert about the faith, found him quite sympathetic—even an ad hoc adherent—to many of its philosophical and spiritual tenets, but Robert was sceptical—that was the nice way to describe it—regarding any organized religion, and not even in this time of crisis could he be persuaded to give up his status as a registered “independent.”