by Lee Server
Mitchum exchanged his suit for jail-issue denim blues, though he was allowed under jail rules to keep his own footgear, an expensive pair of brown Cordovans. And he exchanged his old identity for a new one: prisoner #91234. From the concessionaire he bought four quarts of milk and two cartons of cigarettes. No supplies from outside sources were permitted. The chief jailer explained some more rules. Other than his attorneys, he was allowed two visitors per week. All correspondence going in or out had to be scrutinized and censored. Breakfast was at 6:30, soup at 10:00 A.M., dinner at 3:00, lights out at 9:00. The prisoner was given a cup and spoon, which he was required to keep clean.
He was taken to his cell, a tiny cubicle with steel bunks, pairs of two-inch mattresses and wool blankets, a sink, a toilet. It slept two, but for now the actor had the place to himself. The cell door clanged shut. He sat on the bunk, lit a cigarette, and stared down at his cordovans. Sixty days. He thought about Jerry Giesler and his massive fees. They would have to sell the house to pay him off. For what? Any court-appointed pro bono correspondence school ambulance chaser could have gotten sixty days.
At dawn they woke him, gave him a mop and a bucket, and told him to clean up. He was finishing up when they let in some reporters and photographers. It was arranged by—somebody.
A reporter asked him how he’d slept. Fine, fine. He was beginning to like it there. No pictures through the bars, boys, that’s all I ask. I don’t want my kids to see that and get scared. He mopped some more. What did he talk about with the other prisoners? “Oh,” Mitchum said, “we just discuss our lives of crime.”
In the mess hall, slurping his soup, he had a conversation with the tank trusty. “Be careful,” the man said. The word was that somebody wanted to set him up, rack him up in the joint. “They wanted to make me for the whole deuce,” Mitchum would remember. “They didn’t want to be wrong. I didn’t know which side of the fuzz it was. . . . Man, they can do anything they want, you know—charge you with some minor infraction of the rules and you end up doin’ two big ones in Quentin. No fuckin’ way. I couldn’t hack that.”
RKO and Jerry Giesler arranged for their boy to be transferred out of the county jail to the sheriff’s Wayside Honor Farm in a rural area forty miles north of Los Angeles. On February 16 he joined seven other prisoners boarding the sheriff’s shiny new bus for the ride to Castaic. Someone had alerted the press, and a motorcade of reporters followed the vehicle as it pulled away from the Halls of Justice. Mitchum sat in the last row against a barred window with his hat pulled down over his eyes. On arrival his jail cell denims were taken away and replaced with honor farm overalls. The preening supervisors put him through a humiliating performance for the sake of the newspeople who had come all this way to see the actor’s new digs. Everyone tramped over to the dairy barn, where a guard commanded Mitchum to milk a white cow named Daisy Mae. Squatting on a stool he fiddled with the udders, squirting streams of milk all over the place while the cameras snapped and snapped. Then it was on to the cement plant and more forced poses for the photographers. After all this bullshit, the supervisor told him he had missed out on lunch.
Days at the honor farm were long and wearying. You arose at 5:30, ate breakfast, began making cement blocks by 7:00, worked until 4:30 with a half-hour off for lunch. You had the evenings mostly to yourself. You could read books from the library, listen to the radio, play cards. It was a mindless grind. All Mitchum could say in its favor was that he hadn’t slept so well in ages.
He wasn’t, as it turned out, the only celebrity at Castaic. Big Bill Tilden, at that time the greatest and most famous tennis player in the world, was doing a year for contributing to the delinquency of a minor—he had stuck his hand in the fly of a sixteen-year-old male hitchhiker. (Jerry Giesler had refused to accept Tilden as a client.) Mitchum seldom saw the famed sports figure. Among the prisoners, child molesters were targets for physical abuse, and so Tilden was isolated and given work that kept him out of harm’s way.
Visitors came up on the weekends. One of Hughes’s secret policemen drove Dorothy to Castaic on two occasions. Reva Frederick visited once. “Howard Hughes said I had to take Robert candy—Hershey bars—to keep up his energy. He was very worried about that. So I brought those up. You went in. There was a table where you met the prisoner, and a bench on either side. Robert seemed fine. Relaxed. Listened to the news I had and then said goodbye. And we made the long drive back.” Mitchum’s friend Joe Losey appeared one weekend, toting a container of chili from Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood. Don Siegel, about to leave for Mexico to shoot some more of The Big Steal with the unincarcerated actors (using a double for Mitchum wherever possible), also came up, ostensibly to drop off the newly revised script. The manila envelope bulged suspiciously from the candy and things people at the studio had slipped into it along with the mimeoed pages, but the guards didn’t give it a second glance; Siegel realized he could as easily have brought in a couple of guns or some heroin for all anyone seemed to care. Nevertheless, Mitchum emptied the package and quickly hid the contraband under his shirt.
“You are my favorite director,” he said.
“Oh, it’s really nothing,” said Siegel. “Calm nerves, courage, and hatred for authority.”
“We share many, many things.”
Most visitors reported Bob as healthy and happy enough, considering the circumstances. He was at peace with the world, he said. If that was the case, then Associated Press correspondent James Bacon caught him on a very bad day. “I went to see him at the honor farm after he’d been there a little while,” Bacon remembered. “Just to see him as a friend, really, not as a reporter. He was in a kind of a black mood, I guess. He said he had ruined everything, had screwed up all the breaks he had gotten, and why had he done this to his family, all this kind of thing. And he was crying. I mean real tears. I had never seen him like that, never did again. I told him the scandal had made him more famous, and I thought he was going to be bigger than he had ever been. I believed it, but what else was I going to say to the guy?”
Worrying about Mitchum’s state of mind, Howard Hughes decided to go up to Castaic himself and give the boy a pep talk. Hughes had a liaison arranged with the sheriff to allow a special weekday visit and to let him meet with Mitchum in a private room without any guards listening or looking at them. He and Perry Leiber rode up to Castaic in Howard’s old sedan. Hughes was wearing a particularly old and sloppy outfit, faded khakis, a stained shirt, his cracked old aviator jacket, and torn sneakers. They stopped at a roadside store along the way, Howard announcing he had a craving for ice cream. He went into the store and came out some minutes later telling Lieber he didn’t have any money on him. Lieber couldn’t understand what had taken him so long in that case. Hughes tried to explain himself. It was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. They were two hours late for their appointment at Castaic. The captain in charge, under orders from the sheriff, came out to greet the scruffy visitor and offered Hughes the use of his own office for the meeting with Mitchum. Seeing the multiethnic mix of prisoners working on the grounds, the phobic and racist Hughes requested that no prisoners be allowed anywhere near the office while he was still there.
Hughes and Mitchum sat on either side of the desk in the captain’s office.
“Bob, I just came up here to reassure you that RKO is with you one hundred per cent. And I want to ask you if there is anything that I or the studio can do for you under the circumstances?”
Mitchum said, “I need fifty thousand dollars to pay off my legal fees and to buy a decent house for my family.”
“I’ll see to it.” It would be a loan, at 5 percent interest.
Then Hughes handed over the gift he had brought for the actor, a brown paper sack filled with vitamins.
Meanwhile: After jumping bail and becoming the subject of a fugitive warrant, Vicki Evans returned to Los Angeles. On March 10 she went on trial. In a curious turn of events, the testimony of prosecution witness Det. Sgt. A. A. Barr seemed to paint Miss E
vans in a sympathetic light. Barr testified that Vicki had not been smoking anything when they broke into the Ridpath house and then quoted her as valiantly trying to save her guilty pals. “Can’t I take the blame for this?” Barr said she asked him. (“Bob and Lila have so much to lose.”
The jury found Evans not guilty.
On March 24, a week before his scheduled release (ten days shaved from his sentence for good behavior), Mitchum was expelled from the honor farm and sent back to the county jail. Chief Jailer Charles Fitzgerald assured reporters it was no reflection on Mitchum’s behavior at the farm, but a steady stream of visiting agents, writers, and reporters from Hollywood had begun to interfere with the work schedule at the brickyard. Climbing off the bus in Los Angeles, Bob was bronzed from the sun, had grown a thick moustache, had lost ten pounds. Reporters caught him en route to his cell.
“I feel wonderful,” he declared. “I worked hard, slept well and batted .800 on the softball team. We won seven out of eight games.” Castaic, he said, was “like Palm Springs, without the riff-raff.”
The final week went by without incident. After breakfast on Wednesday, March 30, Mitchum was released from custody. Reporters were waiting. “I’ve been happy in jail,” he told them, tailoring his opinions for public consumption. “Nobody envied me. Nobody wanted anything from me. Nobody wanted my bars or the bowl of pudding they shoved at me through the slot. I did my work and they let me alone.” He had developed a new taste for privacy. “I’m through with my so-called pals. I’ll see only my wife, my two children, and a couple of close friends. Parties? I’d stand out like a monster at a party. I’m typed—a character—and I guess I’ll have to bear that the rest of my life.” He was going back to work as soon as possible, he told the group. “I’ve got to. I’m broke. . . . And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading for home.”
The house on Oak Glen offered more of the same. The studio had sent a publicist to take charge. Dorothy couldn’t believe it. Her reunion with her husband was to be a staged event for publicity purposes. She held her tongue, but it wasn’t easy, watching the RKO man posing them, patting their hair like he was grooming a couple of poodles. Bob put a comforting arm around her, and she pressed her head to his chest and smiled thinly at the far wall as the strangers asked questions and scribbled in their little pads, took pictures, flooding the room with flashes of ugly white light. Yes, it was great to have Bob home again, and thank you for asking.
An article Mitchum supposedly penned himself, published in Photoplay magazine a few weeks after his release from jail, asked the question: “Do I GET ANOTHER CHANCE?” (subtitled: “Sixty days—time enough for a man to think”).
In the last few months I’ve been surrounded by shadows. Deep, dark shadows through which little sunlight has filtered. Financially I am back where I started. But the bitter pills I have swallowed have made me a better man. I have attained a peace of mind which I did not think possible.
I think too many of us are apt to carelessly overlook little infringements of the law and the moral code. Some of us find ourselves taking one step too far . . . refusing to heed the little warning signals of our conscience until it is too late and disaster has overcome us.
Now I am facing life with a new sense of responsibility to the world, to myself, and above all to my wife and our two sons. No matter what is cooking for me in the future, I am dedicating my life to dispelling the cloud hanging over my family. . . .
A stirring plea for understanding and forgiveness from a reformed sinner, it shared the Photoplay page with an advertisement for a Lysol douche. “Be confident of your appealing feminine daintiness,” read the ad, “truly cleanse the vaginal canal.”
chapter seven
Phantom Years
DOWN IN TEHUACAN, MEXICO, in the rift valley 150 kilometers southeast of Mexico City, director Don Siegel had been wrestling with a dilemma: how to make a movie starring a man who was not there. The screenplay had been revised and stripped down to accommodate the special circumstances, making The Big Steal even more of an exercise in abstraction. The whole thing had devolved into an endless car chase—no premise, no plot, just chasing. All day long on a highway in the sun-roasted valley he filmed the actors driving from right to left, left to right, occasionally directing them to look in the rearview or over one shoulder. Siegel had wanted to postpone the location shoot until Mitchum was available, but still more scheduling problems prevented that—William Bendix and Patric Knowles had commitments to other studios, the permits from the Mexican government were restricted to certain dates. Why they weren’t shooting the whole megillah on the Gower Street lot and in Griffith Park Siegel didn’t have a clue. The Big Steal had started out as a tough thriller, but as the project fell into disarray on location Siegel felt that no one could take it seriously, and he began to direct the actors to play everything for laughs, or at least tongue-in-cheek.
At last came word that the production’s greatest problem, the absence of the leading player, was about to end. Mitchum, just a few days out of the jug, had landed in Mexico City and was on his way. Knowing how much had to be done and how little time he had, Siegel prepared to shoot Bob’s first scene as soon as he arrived.
The hired car rolled into town just after noon. A boy from the hotel ran to get Siegel and brought him over to the entranceway where a big black sedan was standing, a couple of hotel staffers peering into the back windows. The driver from Mexico City was sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette.
“Where’s Mitchum?” Siegel asked.
The driver blew smoke and pointed to the car. Siegel cracked the door and saw his star and another man—described facetiously as Mitchum’s bodyguard. The other guy was passed out cold, but Mitchum seemed to be conversing with him anyway.
“Drunk?” Siegel asked the driver.
“A whole bottle of tequila. Maybe two.”
With the help of perhaps three-quarters of the hotel staff, the two big men were extracted from the automobile and carried to their rooms. Bystanders watched the amazing parade, the mumbling Hollywood star crossing the lobby atop a human palanquin, another man being toted horizontally as if on a stretcher, and a third man, the gringo movie director who looked like a seedy version of Harry James, walking upright and cursing the other two.
Siegel was damned if he was going to lose the whole day to this nonsense. Up in the actor’s room he ordered a pot of coffee and made Mitchum suck it down. Patric Knowles popped in, and Siegel showed him the problem. Knowles said they had to get him down to the hotel’s steam room. It was a trick Errol Flynn had taught him.
“A half hour of steam and he’ll be good as new.”
Mitchum was already becoming a bit more cooperative, Siegel thought. He and Knowles got him up, one under each shoulder, took him downstairs to the hotel gym, and led him inside the steam room.
“Steam’s the thing, Bobby,” said the dapper Knowles.
Mitchum punched him in the head. Knowles cracked his skull against the sweaty, hot wall and then lost his footing on the damp floor. Mitchum pulled him halfway up and clobbered him some more.
Knowles screamed.
Mitchum proceeded to beat the tar out of him. The director, trying to stop him, leaped on Mitchum’s back and was instantly thrown off. He did it again. “When I tried to grab him, he would spin his shoulder, which sent me spinning around the wet walls.” It was all that goddamned exercise in prison, Siegel decided painfully. “Mitch was in the best shape of his life.” Siegel crawled over to help the groggy, moaning Pat Knowles, and the pair struggled out of there.
“He was one tough hombre,” said Siegel, “with a mean streak that we could not handle.”
• • •
“Bob joined us in Mexico straight out of prison,” said Jane Greer. “His hair had been chopped off. He had a great tan, he was in great shape from breaking rocks, and he looked wonderful. I didn’t know how they were going to match him with the film they had shot before he went away.”
Seeing Gr
eer and Mitchum together as he lined the pair up for a shot, Don Siegel wondered how he was going to match either of them. Mitchum was certainly tanner and leaner. He had trimmed at least three inches from his gut. Greer, though, now well over four months pregnant, had developed a noticeable pouch. Christ, Siegel thought, they’ve exchanged stomachs!
“I didn’t want anyone to know I was pregnant,” said Greer. “But there was no place to hide down there. I wore one outfit, and it was ridiculous for anyone being pregnant—a slim skirt, a little bolero jacket, a tight sash around the waist. And every scene in that open car. I had to stay on a diet like crazy. Cottage cheese and fruit.
“The location was a little rugged, you know, a long drive up these winding roads, nothing around but the natives with their little huts. Then all day in the car getting shot at by Bill Bendix. And I was prone to morning sickness. I had a supply of these little pills I took so I could get through the morning and the rest of the day. I was driving out in the limousine with Bendix, and I sneaked a pill into my mouth. He wanted to know what it was. I said, ‘It’s for the turistas. Montezuma’s Revenge.’ He said, ‘Oh really? Give me some of those.’ And he liked them and starting taking them from me every day. He thought the pills protected him, and he drank all the local water, ate the ice. I had to send to my doctor for more pills. But I didn’t want to tell anyone I was pregnant.”