Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  The His Kind of Woman mutual admiration society also included the erudite and amusing Vincent Price, thoroughly enjoying himself in a self-mocking performance as the film’s vain, Shakespeare-spouting thespian. “Jane was a lovely, funny girl, with a great attitude,” said Price, “and Bob was just hilarious.” Many a time Price, a gourmet cook, hosted the other two for lunch, serving fabulous meals he had whipped together from scratch. Some days they would all remain on the perfectly pleasant Morro’s Lodge set during the noon break, spread a blanket on the faux sand beach, and have a family picnic, Reva delivering baskets of chicken and potato salad, bottles of wine and beer. “We had a lot of fun on that picture,” Vincent Price recalled. “At least in the beginning, before it got so . . . crazy.”

  In mid-May Farrow shot the last pages of the script and went home, the picture completed. Or so he thought.

  With a growing logjam of unreleased studio features to preoccupy him, and busy with various business concerns and a hectic social life, Hughes would not even look at His Kind of Woman until several months after the production had closed down. Then the tinkering began. Hughes had Robert Stevenson direct some mundane pickup shots and retakes in the last week of October. Then, in December, Hughes summoned scenarist Earl Felton and director Richard Fleischer to his diurnal headquarters at Bungalow 19 of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Felton was a veteran hack writer of the Pat Hobby sort, a cynical wit, and a robust character despite a handicap that required him to get around on crutches. Fleischer was the talented young son of animation maestro Dave “Popeye” Fleischer and a B movie pro looking to move up in the ranks. His crackerjack noir thriller The Narrow Margin, written by Felton, was being talked about as the no-budget sleeper of the year, but Hughes had yet to schedule its release (at one point he had considered permanently shelving the B version and remaking it with Mitchum and Russell). The three discussed the climax of His Kind of Woman and all agreed that the scene Farrow had directed—Mitchum and the bad guys in a brief scuffle on the bridge of a yacht—could be expanded and made more exciting. They sat together all afternoon improvising the additional action, Hughes wanting to work out each and every new slug, kick, and gunshot, Fleischer and Felton screaming their comments for the sake of the aviator’s failed hearing.

  Hughes suggested that the whole assignment could be done in ten to fourteen days, but the story conferences alone continued for the next six weeks, many hours at a time, with Hughes ever increasing the scope of the film’s violent climax. The action would now take place not only on the deck of the yacht but inside as well, in the engine room, in the wheelhouse, there would be a torture scene, a beating, a bursting steam pipe. Nothing had been built for the original production but the small prop bridge, so an entire yacht had to be constructed over the water tank on the Pathe lot. Hughes thought up an elaborate rescue attempt by Vincent Price’s character and some of the hotel guests and some Mexican policemen, a comedy sequence with a sinking rowboat.

  On January 10, 1951, shooting began again on His Kind of Woman. As Hughes examined the daily footage, he would send long, critical memos with maniacally detailed descriptions of the action he wanted to see on film.

  The comical sinking of the skiff beneath Price and his posse did not meet Hughes’s expectations as filmed, and bulldozers were brought in to deepen the cement water tank so that the boat would submerge another thirty inches.

  Of all the newly invented material, Hughes had become most excited by the scene in which an ex-Nazi plastic surgeon offers to dispose of the Mitchum character with an injection of an experimental drug. Hughes declared that he would write the dialogue for this scene himself, and to Fleischer’s amazement Hughes not only wrote it but sent along an acetate recording of himself speaking the German doctor’s lines in a high-pitched TexaBavarian accent.

  Mitchum balked at the new “injection” sequence wherein he was to struggle against Ferraro’s thugs and the doctor trying to shoot him up, the syringe pressing against his exposed vein. “No way Bob wanted to do that scene,” said Tony Caruso. “He’d say, ‘What’s Hughes trying to do to me, man?’ He’d just got over that drug rap and Hughes wants him on screen with a needle going in his arm! And they wanted to have a needle actually piercing his skin, you know? They were gonna have a real doctor do it, everything sterile, but Bob absolutely refused. They told him ‘Look, this is what Hughes wants . . . let’s try to do it.’ Hughes wanted to see that thing going in the skin. And I can remember Bob telling them what he thought, refusing adamantly in no uncertain terms; he was not going to have a needle in his flesh. But Hughes was sending all these messages, ‘Do this, do that. Have Caruso hit him harder. Hit him in the gut. I want to see his fist go in deep’—all that kind of crap.”

  Filming continued off and on for three months. One day Vincent Price threw a party on the set, an anniversary celebration—he had begun working on His Kind of Woman exactly one year ago. Fleischer took the miles of footage to an editor and put together the new climax. With all the material Hughes had asked for, the first cut of the climactic scenes alone ran an hour and twenty minutes.

  Hughes eagerly viewed the edited reels at his private screening room in the Goldwyn Studios. Afterward he lavished praise on Fleischer and his colleagues. It was great, great stuff. But there was one problem, and it wasn’t the fact that the movie now ran an impossible three hours. Hughes said, “I don’t like the actor who plays Ferraro.”

  Fleischer said, “But he’s in nearly everything I just shot.”

  “Yes, well,” said Hughes, “we’ll get another actor and redo everything.”

  Fleischer was then directed to begin a comprehensive search for a replacement Ferraro. After narrowing the candidates to three finalists, Hughes had Fleischer direct each of them in a test scene with Mitchum—the scene in which the star received his on-board beating. They settled on a man named Robert J. Wilke, and Fleischer went right to work reshooting the scenes. He was nearly finished when a man collared him outside his office. The man’s name was Raymond Burr. He was an actor. Howard Hughes had sent him over. He would be replacing Robert J. Wilke.

  “Mr. Hughes said to tell you I will be playing Ferraro now.”

  As Fleischer recalled it in his autobiography, throughout the maddening months of their work together, Mitchum’s behavior had been exemplary. But now at last, in this sixth or seventh go-round for these same bruising scenes, the actor began to show the strain. “Mitchum took to drink. . . . He began stashing vodka in water glasses at strategic places all over the set. Whenever there was a delay of some sort, there was always a glass at hand. I didn’t catch on for quite a while. It often puzzled me how he could start a scene sober and finish it drunk.”

  Late in May the last shot was at hand. As sick of the proceedings as everyone else, Fleischer dreamed of nothing but wrapping it up and getting the hell away from there. The lighting for the setup wasn’t ready until late in the afternoon, and Fleischer knew that in these hard-drinking final days it was not a good idea to ask anything of Mitchum past 5 P.M. But the desire to conclude the whole awful assignment was so tremendous, the director decided to chance it.

  It was not a wise decision. A very drunken Bob Mitchum arrived on the set. Two stuntmen playing tough thugs were supposed to drag him into the salon of Ferraro’s yacht and hold him before the German doctor. When Fleischer called, “Action!” Mitchum unexpectedly swung the two men ahead of him and sent them crashing onto the floor. Fleischer stopped the take. Thinking it was some kind of misunderstanding, he again explained what he needed, and Mitchum and the stunt guys started over. Again the pair were thrown to the floor. Even as he knew he was courting disaster, Fleischer felt compelled to go on. The third take was nothing but a brawl, the stuntmen now responding in kind to Mitchum’s experiment in improvisation. Fleischer screamed, “Cut! Cut!” as the three men rolled around the set, knocking over the furniture and nearly giving a heart attack to the elderly actor who played the German doctor.

  The stuntmen scrambled
or were thrown to a neutral corner and Mitchum stood alone on the set, hunched down, panting savagely. The crew stood around in stunned silence. This was Fleischer’s first opportunity to work with a major movie star. It was not going as he had hoped. In a quiet, controlled voice the director told Mitchum he had made a fool of them both.

  At this mild rebuke Mitchum exploded. Screaming obscenities and violent threats, he began throwing things, overturning the lamps, collapsing a heavy poker table, tossing chairs. He smashed the windows out, kicked down plywood walls and doors, toppling the entire set, then staggered off the stage, grabbing for every stray chair and sending it flying through space.

  “I’ve had it with this fucking picture! I’m sick and tired of being taken advantage of. . . . Stinking directors, and fucking fag actors riding on my back! Fuck you! And fuck Howard Hughes, too!”

  He raged his way across the hall, lurched into his dressing room trailer, and slammed the door shut.

  Fleischer tried to keep from being sick. He quietly told his assistant to get the set fixed and then went home. After a sleepless night, the director returned to the studio next day full of anger and outrage. He stormed into Mitchum’s trailer to demand a public apology. Mitchum saw him, moaned, “Oh God,” falling to the floor and crawling underneath his couch, disappearing completely. Mitchum couldn’t face him, he said, and begged him just to go away.

  Fleischer felt the wind go out of his rage. “You . . . son of a bitch.”

  “I must be,” said Mitchum.

  In spite of—or aided by—its spasmodic production history and cluttered auteurship, His KindofWoman would turn out to be one of the most original and entertaining of Mitchum’s RKO releases. Unlike Hughes’s other fussed-over features, with their choppy editing and reduction to just-the-facts simplicity, Woman, two hours long in the final cut, was luxurious, digressive. John Farrow’s careful staging was left intact, the film full of atmospheric long takes and sweeping tracking shots until Fleischer’s takeover and the gritty climax on the boat, all percussive cutting and unusual handheld camera work. A worthy bookend to his work on Out of the Past, Frank Fenton’s dialogue was tart and tough throughout, full of memorable, wised-up banter. Showing no indication of the genre-busting turns to come, the opening scenes were purest noir, a shadowed, violent, after-midnight landscape of all-night diners, rented rooms, snarling guard dogs, crooks, cardsharpers, a beating around every corner. The dialogue invoked Mitchum’s personal identification with the alienated loser hero in his first moments on screen at an LA greasy spoon.

  “Where you been?” asks Sam the counterman. “I ain’t seen you since the last rain.”

  “Palm Springs.”

  “Hustling the millionaires?”

  “I went down there to cure a cold. I wound up doing thirty days.”

  “For what?”

  “For nuthin!”

  The expressions of Dan Milner’s amiable, weary nihilism might have come direct from a Mitchum press interview of any vintage. “No, I’m not busy,” says Milner, about to be hired for a mission to oblivion. “I was just getting ready to take my tie off, wondering if I should hang myself with it.”

  With Mitchum’s third-reel arrival at the Baja resort, the film would shift gears and keep on shifting them, alternating unpredictably between tropical moonlight romance, comedy, murder mystery, and extreme violence (only Anthony Mann’s brutal noirs contained anything to match the sadistic fury of Fleischer’s and Hughes’s belt buckle and hypodermic melee). The unhurried narrative easily made room for random, beatific vignettes: Jane Russell’s squalidly glamorous introduction in a flyblown Nogales cantina, warbling an insouciant Sam Coslow ditty (”Five Little Miles from San Berdoo”); Vincent Price’s farcical assault on the villain’s yacht, with offhand tribute to Buster Keaton; and Mitchum standing over an ironing board ironing the wrinkles out of his cash (”When I’m broke I press my pants,” he explains), a moment worthy of Bunuel.

  As Hughes and everyone else had suspected, Russell and Mitchum made a wonderful team, a young man and woman who looked, in critic Manny Farber’s phrase, as if they would do in real life what they did here for RKO. Magnificent physical specimens ideally paired, together on the screen they appeared at all times as if just back from or en route to the nearest boudoir. Hughes loved the film and excitedly made plans to exploit what his friend Louella Parsons was calling “the hottest combination that ever hit the screen!” On Wilshire Boulevard he hired a massive billboard and had the film’s poster art—the stars in a languid horizontal embrace—loaded into a bright golden frame studded with gas jets ejaculating fire. The first night it was up and running, Hughes arrived at 3 A.M., stood on the street corner, and stared for some time at the blazing creation, Jane and Bob cuddling in the flaming sky. Then he got back into his car and ordered the whole thing torn down.

  His Kind of Woman opened to mixed reviews—the New York Times called it one of the worst Hollywood pictures in years—and moderate earnings. The film would have registered a nice profit but for the nearly one million dollars Hughes had spent on five months of retakes, added scenes, and cast changes.

  Just three months after shooting on His Kind of Woman concluded for the first time, Hughes reteamed his brawny stars for another exotic thriller: Macao. “There is no other place like it on earth,” claimed the screen treatment. “Macao, in the China Seas across the bay from British Hong Kong. Where gambling is the heavy industry and smuggling and dope peddling come as naturally as eating. To this island of commercial sin comes NICK, a young grifter wanted back in the states—and NORA, a girl who never got the breaks. Both hard as nails, cynical, strangers. And on the same boat, posing as a salesman, comes a hardboiled New York cop, sent out to capture a fugitive-racketeer who is now the Frankie Costello of Macao. . . .”

  On this premise, fashioning a shooting script, slaved writers Norman Katkov, Stanley Rubin, Edward Chodorov, Walter Newman, Bernard Schoen-feld, George Brickner, Frank Moss, and most likely anybody else at RKO with a working typewriter.

  Early in the summer, second-unit man Dick Davol was dispatched to Hong Kong and Macao to shoot background footage. Davol found Asia in an annoying tizzy when he got there. Cameramen were not welcome and everyone had their hand out. He cabled Hollywood to be prepared for his whopping big expense account:

  It was necessary to pay for every setup under cover. Here are a few of the people who were appeased:

  Macau Chief of Police

  Propaganda Minister

  Immigration Officers

  Custom Officers

  Macao Harbor Police

  Hong Kong Immigration Officers

  Hong Kong Policemen

  Communist Custom Patrol Boats

  Sampan Owners

  Chinese Junk Owners and Crews

  Communist Business Owners

  Screenwriter-producer Jules Furthman, Howard Hughes’s most valued creative collaborator, had urged his boss to bring Josef von Sternberg back from an involuntary retirement to direct John Wayne and Janet Leigh in Jet Pilot, an anti-Communist aviation romance. Sternberg was one of the handful of true artists of the cinema’s first half century, but a surfeit of arrogance, artistic intransigence, and bad box office had sent him wandering in the wildnerness, without a feature film credit in nearly ten years. Always a connoisseur and exponent of movie eroticism, Hughes remembered fondly the humid results of Sternberg’s work with such screen beauties as Evelyn Brent, Esther Ralston, and Marlene Dietrich. It was an arousing idea, to unleash the director’s caressing camera on some of Hughes’s own objects of desire—Janet Leigh and a collection of shiny jet-propelled aircraft.

  Sternberg performed his task professionally if without much enthusiasm (Hughes was to keep Jet Pilot in postproduction for nearly a decade), and he was then sent across the lot to take the helm on Macao, which began principal shooting in August. This one at least sounded like a more sympathetic assignment, the title evoking memories of the maestro’s brilliant earlier forays in the myste
rious East, Shanghai Express and The Shanghai Gesture. Indeed, the opportunity to linger in another Oriental dreamscape of his own creation captured von Sternberg’s attention at the start. He oversaw the design of a vivid backlot Macao of latticework fishing nets, artfully bobbing sampans, black cats, streets filled with gaudy chinoiserie signage, and cast a populous of exotic bit parts, Sikh traffic cops, blind beggars, beautiful Chinese “high-low” gamblers in slit skirts.

  The project offered all sorts of intriguing possibilities, not the least of them in the matchup of director and star. By all rights Mitchum should have been ideal raw material for von Sternberg’s molding. In Morocco in 1930, the director had drawn from Gary Cooper a sensational performance unlike any other in the actor’s career, impudent, languid, cool—it was, in fact, a kind of proto-Mitchum performance. Now the director would be working with the real thing, so to speak. As to the script, the trivial intrigue of Macao’s plot was no pulpier than most of von Sternberg’s earlier classics, and one could imagine, left to his own devices, his magically transforming the prosaic screenplay into something like another exotic reverie in the manner of Morocco, Shanghai Express, or The Devil Is a Woman.

  The circumstances, alas, did not prove conducive to flights of oneiric self-expression. RKO in 1950 was not Paramount in 1930, and the director’s despotic methods and arrogant manners were no longer looked upon as those of a world-renowned cultural icon but of a tiny, obnoxious has-been. Mitchum would recall him with little more than contempt: “He was very short and sort of arty, and he was from Weehawken, New Jersey, but he had a German accent—he was very German. I said, ‘Where did you get that accent, Joe? You’re from Weehawken, N.J.,’ and he said if I wanted to know anything about anything, to come to him, he was the omniscient artist. He had a junk shop in Weehawken.”