Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  The South of the Border intestinal disorder known to strike visiting Americanos had spared the Big Steal company until one fateful day on a rural location. Siegel was rehearsing a scene with Mitchum and Greer and was ready to roll when Mitchum suddenly took off for the bushes. Siegel decided to do a close-up of Jane Greer instead, and cameraman Harry Wild lined it up. Then Greer ran away. Siegel looked around. “Jesus Christ. Shoot Pat Knowles through his window,” he told Wild. Wild was nowhere to be seen.

  “I showed no sign of diarrhea until early afternoon,” Siegel recalled. “Then Montezuma struck.” Two presumably nonunion grips held him over a small stone bridge above a stream “for what seemed like hours.”

  Considering Mitchum’s recent troubles, Hughes and RKO had shown either great ignorance or a perverse sense of humor in sending the actor on to Mexico, particularly to a region known for the high quality of its cannabis crop. “In Mexico they knew all about what had happened to him,” said Jane Greer. “He was treated like a hero. They worshipped him because of the marijuana. And they would come up, smiling, offering him some samples. Slip it into his pockets. Peasants would put some in the cuffs of his trousers—’Here, please try our crop of marijuana, Senor Mitchum!’ Oh my, he had a hard time keeping away from it because they just loved him down there.”

  Siegel’s skills as a montage director at Warners served The Big Steal well. He was required to help Sam Beetley piece together a relatively seamless finished product out of footage that—due to the protracted shooting schedule—jumped from winter to spring landscapes within the same sequence and revealed his stars to have amazing weight gains and losses within the brief span of the film’s story. In the end, the slapdash quality of the film seemed to work in its favor. Brisk, amiable, pointless, it resembled a seventy-one-minute live action Roadrunner cartoon. The New Republic reviewer said it best, calling The Big Steal “a ludicrous miscarriage of an adventure picture”—and he liked it. For Siegel, in retrospect, it was the real beginning of what would be a long and frequently distinguished career as a maker of fast, tough, action movies.

  Dorothy had joined her husband in Mexico for the last week of filming. While they were away, the children were left in the care of a nanny. On April 28 a precocious five-year-old Christopher Mitchum and four other kids had a run-in with a store owner on Cahuenga Boulevard, not far from the Mitchum home. When the store owner chased them away, young Chris ran into an oncoming car. He was rushed to Hollywood Receiving Hospital and treated for cuts and bruises. When Bob and Dorothy got back and heard of the incident, they were newly motivated to move out of the small house and congested neighborhood.

  They both wanted a place with plenty of breathing room, a place in the countryside with space for the kids to play and—Dorothy doubtless hoped—to isolate Bob from trouble and his odious cronies. Old friend Tony Caruso knew just the place. “I talked him into moving out by me in Malibu Canyon,” said Caruso. It was an unspoiled and underpopulated area. People kept horses and rode them in the hills. You could be a forty-minute drive from the studios but feel as if you were in Oregon. “I said to him, ‘Bob, they’re bothering you everywhere you go in town. You move out there, nobody’ll find you, you’ll get some peace.’ And we found him a property on Mandeville Canyon Road, just a half block away from me. And he bought it and we were neighbors for quite a while.” As he had promised he would, Howard Hughes OKed a loan to the Mitchums for fifty thousand, to be paid back in installments beginning six months hence.

  The Mandeville place was luxurious but down-home, a rich man’s farmhouse. The interior spaces were huge by Mitchum family standards, and when they unpacked their meager furnishings from Oak Glen, the rooms seemed to tower over everything like the great halls of a castle. The master of the house settled into a relatively idyllic existence. He swam, sat by the pool, played with the kids for long hours, lay on the floor listening to records and reading Josh and Chris the funnies while they crawled across his stomach. He was all any parole board could hope for. Other stars eventually moved into the neighborhood. Richard Widmark. Gregory Peck. Tony found Don Defore a place across the street from Bob. An El Rancho Broke-O reunion. But the canyon remained off the beaten track, out of the limelight. “It was a quiet life,” said Caruso. “No fancy party scene. People would get together for a drink. Bob would come over to my house; he’d invite Toni and me over to his. I don’t remember ever seeing many people at his place in all those years.”

  Under the terms of his parole Mitchum was forbidden to associate with known criminals and undesirables, which officially cut him off from most of his old hangouts (though he did heedlessly play host to a couple of friends he had made in Castaic). To his wife’s delight, they were forced to socialize with his more respectable acquaintances. Jane Greer and her husband, Edward Lasker, became good friends of the couple and often had them over to their soirees. At one of these, Greer seated Mitchum next to a recent Nobel Prize winner: “I thought William Faulkner and Bob Mitchum would be a good match so I put them together. Loretta Young was there with her husband, and they were very, very Catholic. Loretta’s husband, whose name escapes me, heard that Faulkner was writing The Left Hand of God for Howard Hawks and he was grilling him. ‘You’re writing about a priest, a man of God? I don’t think you’re the right one to write this.’ And Faulkner said, ‘Oh? Well, they’re paying me to write it.’ And he was relieved to turn to Bob, whose colorful manner of speech really tickled him. I remember they were talking about studio contracts and Howard Hughes and Bob said, ‘Well, you see, I’m a tall dog on a short leash. It’s long enough to let me up the wall, but if I try to jump off the other side I’m hanged.’ And Faulkner said to me later on, ‘I really like the way that boy talks.’”

  Hughes did put Mitchum on a leash while the actor was on parole. He assigned a man to keep an eye on him, Kemp Niver, a big, glowering ex-cop and Commie hater who looked a bit like a wolf drawn by Tex Avery. He had been operating a private detective agency in LA (Discreet About Others’ Indiscretions was the agency’s motto) until Hughes lured him away to head up his secret police force. Now he was playing Bob Mitchum’s baby-sitter, supposed to go everywhere Mitchum went, leaving him alone only when they got back to the man’s house in the evening.

  “Yeah, I remember him,” said Tony Caruso. “He was like a parole officer. He was assigned to try and keep Bob out of trouble. . . . Hahaha. . . . Good luck!”

  Mitchum didn’t much enjoy having the fuzz, even the ex-fuzz, constantly underfoot. “The crew at the studio hated him,” said Reva Frederick. “They just didn’t like the idea of a snoop. Some of them got a big bucket of paint and threw it all over Niver’s convertible.” Eventually Hughes’s private dick agreed to loosen the strings a bit and allow Bob to go out and about without a chaperone as long as he would tell Niver in advance where he was planning to go and would check in periodically by phone. One night Bob and Dorothy came back to their car and found that someone had put a couple of joints on the front seat. Mitchum called Niver, and he rushed over and extracted the contraband. They never found out who planted the stuff, but there was a strong feeling that the actor was still under threat of another setup.

  Niver was, in fact, only the most visible of Mitchum’s watchdogs. The actor was under nearly round-the-clock observation during this period, Hughes’s ever-growing corps of spies and electronic eavesdroppers tailing him, tapping his phone, bugging his office and trailer and probably his house as well. Mitchum’s uncertain legal situation was the ostensible excuse, but Hughes was doing the same thing to dozens of actresses and politically suspect employees at the studio, as well as to a number of women he merely hoped one day to meet and date. He had become a Hollywood J. Edgar Hoover, a lascivious Dr. Mabuse, ever poring over surveillance photos and telephone transcripts, gathering info, intimacies, dirt. Ever since the Beverly Hills plane crash, said friends and associates, Hughes’s behavior was becoming stranger and stranger.

  In July Mitchum started work on a picture, Hol
iday Affair. Something different now, a sweet comedy with a Christmastime setting. Producing and directing was Don Hartman, a longtime Paramount screenwriter who’d worked on some of the Hope-Crosby “Road” pictures. The story concerned a war widow with a young son and her conceivably amusing entanglement with a free-spirited drifter-through-life. A bit oi Bachelor Mother, a touch of Holiday, and plenty of schmaltz. Although he would not be beaten, pull a gun, or ride into the sunset, the character of Steve Mason was still a recognizable Mitchum archetype, footloose, antiestablishment, an outsider.

  Holiday Affairs costar was to be the sparkling young actress Janet Leigh. Under long-term contract with MGM, Leigh was being loaned to RKO on a three-picture deal, a situation that left her feeling anxious and a bit betrayed. Although she had not been in Hollywood long, Leigh already had an unpleasant history with RKO’s odd owner. Her publicity buildup at Metro, the widely dispersed photos of the fresh-faced bubbling beauty, had caught Hughes’s eye; and in his usual fashion he ordered his quasi pimps, “Get me that.” Leigh’s agent pressured her into going on a date with Hughes. As a potential romantic interest she found him resistible—as old as her father, presumptuous, and generally a weirdie. He conned her into taking a brief airplane ride, and then flew her to Las Vegas for a long, prearranged occasion. It was the sort of Hughes schtick that had made lots of actresses melt in their bucket seats, but not this time. Leigh felt only angry and frightened. Hughes persisted with his unwanted attentions, began following her to restaurants when she went on dates with other men or on evenings out with her parents, seating himself at the next table and staring at her. “He was stalking me!” Janet Leigh remembered. “It was nerve-racking. You can imagine how I felt when Bennie Thau called me into the office and said, ‘Janet, I have wonderful news. RKO is going to borrow you for three pictures. You’ll be working with Robert Mitchum and John Wayne. It’s a tremendous opportunity for you.’ And for the studio, because they were going to make a fortune on the loan-out. Which I didn’t mind at all. I was happy if I could help them because they were sure helping me. But RKO! I said, ‘You don’t understand. This man has been trying to intimidate me. All these things have been happening. I don’t know what he has in mind for me if I go over there.’ And the man at MGM just said, ‘Now, honey, we’re sure there’s nothing to worry about. This is a business situation, nothing more. There’s no funny business. We’re talking about a lot of money at stake here. So you go and do as we say’ And I must have still looked nervous because he added, ‘Look, I’m a phone call away if anything goes wrong.’ And that was all they wanted to hear about that.”

  Leigh would not escape serious aggravation and harassment from Hughes during her lengthy stay at RKO, but the making of Holiday Affair, at least, with the avuncular and easygoing Don Hartman in charge and Bob Mitchum for her love interest, she would recall as a happy and fun-filled experience.

  “I was a fan of Bob’s from seeing him in the movies, and I was excited to be working with him,” said Leigh. “I was pretty naive and green then, and the fact that he had been to jail and that he had actually smoked marijuana, wow, this sounded really exciting and dangerous. And when I did see him for the first time it pretty much confirmed my impression of him. . . . I had driven onto the lot at RKO. I noticed some commotion from one of the bungalow dressing rooms, and then I saw coming out of the bungalow Mr. Mitchum, playing a saxophone and leading an entourage of six or seven people behind him. Like the pied piper! And they headed down the studio street, Bob playing the sax and his entourage marching and dancing behind him, the way they do at those New Orleans funerals, where they play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ That was my first sight of Bob Mitchum. And it made a very vivid impression on me.

  “When we did start to work together I found him to be just the most delicious person in the world. An extremely good actor, as everybody knows now, but he was so easy and cool, he never looked like he was acting. He was actually very intense and focused on what he was doing, but you were never aware of it. And working with him, he brought out that quality in you, which was great. I learned a lot from him. But he was such a tease. And I was so gullible and such an easy target!”

  In a breakfast scene with child actor Gordon Gebert, Leigh stopped acting after the kid lost his concentration and started playing with his cornflakes. Don Hartman said, “Janet, don’t you ever stop in a scene like that! You missed a great opportunity. When something like that happens, you improvise. You should have stayed in character as his mother, told him to listen or told him to stop playing with his cornflakes, as you would have done in life.”

  “He was absolutely right,” said Leigh. “It was a great lesson. I never stopped a scene again. But, oh, then Mitch took advantage of it. I was in the kitchen and he’s supposed to come up and turn me around and give me a little kiss and I’m supposed to be a little surprised. Instead he comes up, turns me around, and kisses me in a way that you would never do on a first date! And I knew he did it just to catch me off balance, and he did. I was so shocked I couldn’t speak. And Don Hartman liked my reaction so much they kept it in the film.

  “Both Bob and Wendell Corey were such devils with me. There was a scene at the Christmas dinner table, I’m sitting with my mother and my father and my son, and Bob and Wendell, my two suitors, one on each side of me. And they were so naughty, each time while I did the scene Bob and Wendell would reach under the table and put a hand up either leg. And I didn’t know what to do. I thought, ‘If I react to it and stop the scene going on with all the other actors, I’ll just look like a complete ninny’ And I would tell myself, ‘They aren’t really going to go any farther with it,’ but then I would think, ‘With those two, God, maybe they will!’ Oh, they just did it to unnerve me. It was so funny. And they never cracked a smile. They were both so cool.

  “It was really a very happy set and we did good work. Bob and Wendell played off each other so well. I thought it was a charming, wonderful picture.”

  The gentle film had none of the sexual or violent content that generally provoked Howard Hughes’s interest or meddling. Aside from private instructions to the hair and wardrobe people (he had them make Janet Leigh wear a shoulder-length fall and in one scene a sweater so tight it made her breasts stand out like traffic cones), Hughes left Holiday Affair alone. The film was completed on the second day of September and was playing in theaters by Thanksgiving week. Other Mitchum starrers for Hughes would not have such an easy time of it.

  Back in the Halls of Justice curious events were unfolding. Corruption and mob activities in Los Angeles had reached one of their periodic breaking points. It was widely understood that Mickey Cohen, king of the dope, prostitution, and gambling rackets, had a sizable percentage of LA city and county law enforcement in his pocket, and reform-minded elements in the DA’s office were aching to take him down. Investigations into organized crime activities had been going on throughout the summer of 1949, with a grand jury sworn in and wading through a mounting dunghill of incriminations. Enter, stage left, Paul Behrmann, former actor’s agent and business manager convicted on grand theft charges, at liberty on five thousand dollars’ bond while awaiting an appeal decision and desperate to stay out of San Quentin. He contacted the office of District Attorney William E. Simpson with an offer of evidence concerning a big-time sex-and-extortion crime ring headed by one Mickey Cohen. Simpson rushed him before the grand jury and Behrmann spewed a lurid bouillabaisse whose ingredients included beautiful hookers, horny businessmen, candid photographs, tax-free payoffs, mob enforcers, an “assistant of Claude Marsan, French love teacher,” and a woman known only as “Bootsie.” He detailed a thriving racket involving reputable rich men being entrapped by party girls, then shaken down for large sums, Mickey Cohen collecting 60 percent of the take and the girls keeping the rest. He named names, including two that were familiar to scandal buffs: Lila Leeds and Vicki Evans (both women indignantly denied any such involvement in the racket). The DA invited or subpoenaed testimony fro
m everyone Behrmann mentioned, including the victims.

  Lila, linked by Behrmann to the shakedown of Ben Klekner, owner of a Hollywood correspondence school, was grilled at length about her relationship with the former agent. Her behind-closed-doors recounting of the Ridpath reefer pad raid triggered an unexpected reaction from DA Simpson, who suddenly announced that the Mitchum conviction might be “reinvestigated to determine whether extortionists had engineered the case.” Behrmann suddenly didn’t feel like talking anymore. When Simpson attempted to have him cited for contempt, he disappeared; the DA then petitioned a bench warrant for his arrest. Behrmann surrendered days later, claiming it was all a misunderstanding, but Judge Clement Nye—the same man who had sent Robert Mitchum and Lila Leeds away—remanded him to a jail cell pending a new bail hearing.

  For more than a year the district attorney’s office quietly looked into the circumstances surrounding the Mitchum arrest. On January 31, 1951, just days after the completion of the actor’s parole period, the Los Angeles Supreme Court quietly announced an extraordinary legal reversal. “After an exhaustive investigation of the evidence and testimony presented at the trial,” said Judge Nye, “the court orders that the verdict of guilty be set aside and that a plea of not guilty be entered and that the information or complaint be dismissed.”