Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Jane Russell remembered, “According to Sternberg, we were not supposed to eat or drink on the set. No grip was allowed to have a Coke in the corner. Nobody.” Mitchum began bringing in bags of food and coffee, and handing them out to one and all. Sternberg was enraged, told Mitchum he was going to be fired. Mitchum said, “If anyone gets fired, it’ll be you.” Sternberg had a lecturn at which he would stand and where he would place his copy of the script. No one was to go near the lecturn, so Mitchum began having his lunch there, leaving half-eaten pickles and greasy wax paper all over the director’s pages.

  “Joe was really something,” said Mitchum. “He told me, ‘We both know this is a piece of shit and we’re saddled with Jane Russell. You and I know she has as much talent as this cigarette case.’ I replied, ‘Mr. von Sternberg, Miss Russell survives, so she must have something. Lots of ladies have big tits.’”

  Speaking of which:

  Howard Hughes, monitoring the daily footage, took his usual great interest in Jane Russell’s appearance on screen. Regarding a gold lame dress worn in one sequence, Hughes wrote a long and vividly detailed memo. “The fit of the dress around her breasts is not good,” Hughes complained, “and gives the impression, God forbid, that her breasts are padded or artificial. They just don’t appear to be in natural contour . . . It would be extremely valuable if the dress incorporated some kind of a point at the nipple because I know this does not ever occur naturally in the case of Jane Russell. Her breasts always appear to be round, or flat, at that point so something artificial here would be extremely desirable if it could be incorporated without destroying the contour of the rest of her breasts. . . . I want the rest of her wardrobe, wherever possible, to be low-necked (and by that I mean as low as the law allows) so that the customers can get a look at the part of Russell which they pay to see. . . .”

  With so much of Jane Russell filling the screen, there was hardly any breathing room for the film’s second female lead, Gloria Grahame, performing the underwritten—she claimed “unwritten”—role of the villain’s croupier mistress, a part originally earmarked for Jane Greer (Hughes still in the grip of his love/hate fixation with that alluring woman). Grahame thought Hughes was deliberately sabotaging her career, too. He would not even look at her brilliant work opposite Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (directed by her new and soon-to-be ex-husband, Nicholas Ray) and he refused to loan her to Paramount to costar in A Place in the Sun (the part that would bring Shelley Winters an Oscar nomination). Instead of that she was doing Macao and a part requiring only that she look sexy and blow on dice.

  The atmosphere on the set continued to deteriorate, von Sternberg becoming victim to variations on the “Farrow treatment,” his belongings tampered with, a reeking Limburger cheese smeared through the engine block of his car. Mitchum claimed to have taken him aside and warned him not to make “assholes” of the technicians and grips. “He’d be nice when I was there and when I was away, not so nice,” he told Dick Lochte. “What was I gonna do, bat him around? He only came up to here.”

  Upon its completion, the film was put through a grueling preview process, shown to random audiences in return for their critical reaction. New production head Sam Bischoff (replacing Sid Rogell, who finally decided he had taken his last 3 A.M. call from Howard) gauged the audience responses and mixed in his own hard-nosed musings for a consensus opinion. Macao was too atmospheric, too weirdly sexy, too full of irrelevant details and artistic filigree. Apparently, instead of another Jet Pilot, the director had delivered something like a Josef von Sternberg picture. One preview card noted that a bare-chested Mitchum (waiting for his laundry) looked fat, and one card from a twelve-year-old girl said that he smoked too much. Bischoff decided that the picture was going to need a lot of work, though not necessarily from Josef von Sternberg. “Instead of fingers in that pie,” wrote the director of what was to be his final American feature film, “half a dozen clowns immersed various parts of their anatomy in it.”

  A few days before Christmas, the Hollywood Women’s Press Club announced Mitchum the winner of their annual Least Cooperative Actor or Sour Apple Award. Olivia DeHavilland, winner of Least Cooperative Actress, did not acknowledge the honor, but Mitchum wired the club at their annual luncheon: “Your gracious award becomes a treasured addition to a collection of inverse citations. These include several prominent mentions among the Worst Dressed Americans and a society columnist’s 10 Most Desirable Males list happily published on the date I was made welcome at the county jail.”

  Present at the luncheon to receive a Solid Gold Apple Award as Most Cooperative Actress was Miss Loretta Young.

  The production of The Racket in 1928, an adaptation of a hit Broadway play by Bartlett Cormack, was one of Howard Hughes’s earliest ventures in the cinema and a groundbreaker in the nascent gangster genre. Like so many of the plays, novels, and films of the era written by wised-up big city reporters, The Racket—the story of a tough cop out to bring down a big crime boss—daringly and thrillingly exposed the corrupt underbelly of American society. Twenty-two years later, in the wake of the headline-making Estes Kefauver investigations into organized crime, Hughes decided the time was right for a remake of his early hit.

  Hughes commissioned another ex-crime reporter and a hot screenwriter of the moment, Samuel Fuller, to write an updated version of the Prohibition-era text. The irrepressible Fuller turned in a typically provocative, anarchic script in which the good cop and the bad crime boss were two sides of the same coin—both of them uncontrollable psychos. Hughes and producer Edmund Grainger opted for something more conventional, and a shooting script was quickly flung together by William Wister Haines and W. R. Burnett (one of the inventors of the gangster genre and a past master of incorruptible-lawman stories). Mitchum would play the cop hero, one of his rare establishment roles, though Captain McQuigg’s straight arrow is certainly an outsider in his bought and paid for metropolis. Mitchum’s glum, stone-faced performance evidenced a distaste for the part. He was reteamed with his Crossfire costar Robert Ryan snarling his way through the role of the old-style racket boss Nick Scanlon.

  The new film, directed by John Cromwell, another man whose once distinguished reputation had become faded, would turn out old-fashioned and a bit oafish but still hard-hitting in its blunt portrait of the pervasive corruption and criminal domination of a big American city. Hughes’s update anticipated what would become the dominant thematic trend in the gangster genre in the next decade, the view of crime as another form of efficient big business with corporate rules of behavior and no room for hotheaded mob bosses determined to take things “personal.” The Racket would also anticipate the fascist cop fantasies of the Dirty Harry ‘70s, with its nonjudgmental display of matter-of-fact police brutality and necessary rule-bending. In the course of his investigation, McQuigg blithely sanctions the beating and jailing of an innocent bail bondsman, tears up a writ of habeus corpus, and calls for a suspect’s arrest in this sarcastic exchange:

  McQuigg: If he resists there’s a city ordinance against expectorating on the public pavement.

  Officer Johnson: That includes expectorating broken teeth, sir?

  McQuigg: Oh yes, that’s very unsanitary.

  Some of the right-of-center contributions by W. R. Burnett went even further in this vein—for example, having the cops kicking and wiping their feet on Scanlon’s dead body—but these were not included for fear of censorship.

  The Racket was shot quickly, in thirty-two days in April and May of 1951, and a seriously ailing John Cromwell left it at that. Hughes and Burnett then cooked up a few new scenes—a violent chase and gun battle—and a framing device with a crusading crime commissioner (Hughes belatedly remembering to tie into those Kevauver Committee headlines). These were directed early in June by Nicholas Ray, Mitchum doing this work just days after he finished wrecking the His Kind of Woman set.

  Ray did such an efficient job that he was handed another ignoble task, directing retakes and new material fo
r Macao. These took up most of July and a few days in August. In the time since von Sternberg had been removed from the studio, Sam Bischoff and his minions had made such a botch of dismantling and reediting the unsatisfactory director’s cut that Mitchum claimed his character would come through a door and run into himself on the other side. The revised script pages were considered so hopeless and unplayable that Ray and Jane Russell drafted Mitchum to take a whack at it. “Jane and Nick came up to me with a big legal pad and several pencils and said, ‘Write it!’ So I got in the dressing room in the morning . . . they got a secretary to type it up . . . and we’d shoot it in the afternoon.” Exactly how much he contributed to the released film is difficult to say—the Ray-directed scenes add up to about one-third of the release cut—but there seems some agreement that the amusing scene with Russell wielding an electric fan and spraying the room with pillow feathers (”What are we, delegates to a peace conferance!”) is the work of screenwriter Mitchum.

  Gloria Grahame, in the process of divorcing Nick Ray when she heard he was reshooting and reediting Macao, cracked, “If you can cut me out of the picture entirely I won’t ask for any alimony.” (In fact, she would have to appear in some of the new scenes, these directed by yet another overseer—Mel Ferrer.)

  To Mitchum it was a season of deja vu, returning to one unfinished project after another, traipsing from set to set, climbing into the costumes and parts he thought he had discarded months before. At any given time he had three pictures in various states of incompletion. Hughes had movies piling up all over the place, movies being rewritten, reedited, movies just lying on the floor somewhere, some of them two years or more out of production. It was a helluva way to run a railroad, Mitchum thought, but as long as his paychecks cleared, it was really none of his business. Doing the public a favor, keeping some of those things out of the theaters, he figured.

  chapter eight

  Our Horseshit

  Salesman

  ONE MINUTE TO ZERO was Mitchum’s first war picture since G.I. Joe, but genre and a noisy soundtrack were about all it had in common with Wellman’s masterwork. A tale of the then-current Korean “conflict,” it was action-packed, jingoistic propaganda, notable mainly for the unprecedented use of gory combat footage (e.g., charred corpses) and a grotesque and miserably self-justifying sequence (apparently based on fact) in which Mitchum’s Colonel Janowski orders the murder by shelling of innocent refugees, including old people and small children, because there are Communist soldiers hiding among them. Slackly directed by veteran Tay Garnett, the film suffered as well from poor writing, terrible comedy relief, and a dull romance.

  It didn’t help that the production had fallen into disarray from the beginning. Exteriors were to be filmed in the rugged country surrounding Camp Carson army base ten miles outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. When the company arrived in late summer, the area was experiencing unseasonably bad weather. In September it snowed for days on end. Costar Claudette Colbert was struck down with pneumonia and a 104-degree fever, stayed under doctor’s care for a week, and then flew home. Actor William Talman became afflicted with the same ailment, while director Garnett was hospitalized with influenza. Actor Charles McGraw stepped into a hole and broke his ankle, and crew members housed in Anderson tents at the base came under attack by rattlesnakes. After weeks of futile negotiations with Joan Crawford, Colbert was replaced with Ann Blyth, and the script had to be revised to accommodate the considerably younger actress. RKO sent writer Andrew Solt to the location, where he would hole up with Garnett every night, then type out new scenes hours before they were due to be filmed. All the delays necessitated the company remaining in Colorado for an additional month, by which time the weather had long turned seasonably bad, with snow and hailstorms, and leaves having to be wired to trees to match the shots taken in summer. John Mitchum, now billing himself as John Mallory, had nabbed a small part in the film as an artillery officer. He was supposed to stay with the company for less than a week, but the weather problems and various screwups conspired to keep him on the payroll for nearly two months.

  With the filming proceeding in fits and starts, cast and crew were provided with a great deal of free time, which the majority devoted to drinking, card-playing, and skirt-chasing. Until he was asked to go elsewhere, Bob Mitchum could be found most nights at the Alamo Hotel’s Red Fox Lounge, a local hangout. Colorado Springs was 5,800 feet above sea level, and Bob soon learned the mixed delights of high-altitude boozing, where one drink hit you like two. One night word had spread of his attendance at the Red Fox, and people from all over the area, mostly females—schoolteachers, mothers, women from the air base, girls below the drinking age—crowded into the lounge, surging around Mitchum, who was way beyond plastered. Breaking free from the clawing hands of autograph seekers, he climbed onto a couch, emptied his drink, then turned his posterior to the frenzied fan club and exploded a noisome fart.

  There was another nightspot in town, a black club called Duncan’s, where hot jazz bands performed. A bunch of the guys from the movie arrived for the show, filling a big table near the stage. Charlie McGraw spotted some good-looking local girls in the audience and invited them over, and John Mitchum was immediately taken with one of them, a sweet young woman named Nancy Munro. It turned out to be a momentous night for them—John fell in love, and he and Nancy became husband and wife some months down the road (after a complicated split from his current spouse, Gloria Grahame’s sister, Joy).

  On November 7 Bob and RKO stock player Charles McGraw—who proved to be a compatible sidekick, a kind of mini-Mitchum who reputedly drank two cases of beer and slept four hours per day—were standing at the bar of the Red Fox in conversation with a lieutenant colonel and an off-duty military policeman, both from Camp Carson, when in through the doorway from the Alamo lobby came a private named Bernard Reynolds. According to eyewitness reports of the incident, the lieutenant colonel looked over the private and ordered him to button up his jacket.

  “Reynolds said something to the colonel,” recalled Lee Haynes, the military cop who was standing beside them. “And that’s when Mitchum grabbed him.”

  “I grabbed him by the lapels,” said Mitchum. “He kept yelling and swinging his arms around and I grabbed him. I asked him to behave himself, but he shook his right arm loose and swung at me. I ducked the punch and we both fell to the floor.”

  Haynes said he thought that after Mitchum had shaken the soldier it was all over, and he turned away. “When I looked back, I saw Mitchum had Reynolds down on a couch and was banging his head against a table.” Some bystanders tried to pull the men apart. “They had Mitchum standing up,” said Haynes. “It was dark in there, but I saw Mitchum kick Reynolds in the head.” Another witness, George Wright, a civilian worker from the base, told police that he saw Mitchum kick Private Reynolds in the face.

  It turned out Reynolds was a sometime heavyweight prizefighter who had knocked out nineteen of twenty-eight opponents and was ranked tenth in the world at that time.

  “I stopped in the joint for a hot buttered rum,” Mitchum reflected, “and bang, I was right in the middle of it. I wasn’t angry. It was just a saloon hassle. I just roughed the guy up a little but that’s all.”

  Reynolds was taken to the camp hospital and treated for a possible skull fracture.

  “An actor is always a target for the belligerent type of guy who thinks he is tough and movie he-men are softies,” said Mitchum, in a studio press release run up the flagpole by RKO’s Phil Gersdorf. “I never start a fight, but I assure you I can always finish one if there is no other way out. This one was unavoidable and I’m sorry it happened.”

  “MITCHUM KICKED SOLDIER, SAYS BRAWL WITNESS” and “COL. BOB MITCHUM IN BAR BRAWL; GI HOSPITALIZED” were a couple of the headlines that appeared across the country the following day. Back in Hollywood an RKO spokesman claimed that Mitchum was simply trying to protect fellow actor Charles McGraw. “Mitchum’s rough and ready,” said the spokesman, “but he’s not th
e vicious type.”

  He would later cop to the kicking charge, sort of. “It wasn’t the Marquess of Queensberry rules,” he said. “I brushed my foot across his head to say, ‘See, fucker, you see what I could do to you?’” (Or as he put it to another reporter, “When you fuck with the ape, be ready to go the router)

  Howard Hughes hated sharing his stars with other studios. Loan-outs generally meant huge profits (the vast difference between a star’s loan-out price and his actual salary), and if done with care and the projects became award-winning hits, say, they could greatly increase the value of these human assets. But as the head of RKO, Hughes’s eccentric methods showed little concern for profits and even less for prestige. It is impossible to say what direction Mitchum’s career might have taken had Dore Schary and David Selznick remained in control of it, but there is evidence of some places it did not go, thanks to Hughes. He refused to respond to feelers from the Broadway producers of A Streetcar Named Desire, who wanted Mitchum to follow Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski. The great Howard Hawks had hoped to work with Mitchum on one project or another for years, but the director’s feud with Hughes kept it from happening. And Columbia head Harry Cohn begged Hughes to let them have Mitchum for the role of the top kick in From Here to Eternity, the part that ultimately went to Burt Lancaster. “Jesus, Bob,” Howard told him in explanation, “you don’t want to be going over there with those Jews. You don’t want to be associated with those people. . . .”

  A producer at RKO had once laughingly explained to Mitchum his place in the Hollywood hierarchy. “Every studio has its horseshit salesman,” he said. “And you’re ours.”

  Mitchum tried never to think about the lost opportunities. Why fight City Hall. Paint his eyes on, change the leading lady, and shout, “Roll ‘em.” Did it matter which fucking picture you made? They were all just masturbation aids, something for the folks to think about when they got back home and took their pants off. “Have you ever seen a typical Mitchum fan?” he asked a reporter. “Glazed eyes . . . haven’t shaved . . .” All his movies, he would explain, were a variation on a formula he called Pounded to Death by Gorillas. Fade in on broad-shouldered Bob as a huge gorilla looms up behind and hits him on the top of the head. Boom! He crumples. Boom, boom, he keeps falling down, but he keeps getting up again. Cut to a little girl skipping through fields of daisies. As the writers didn’t have that part figured out yet, they cut back to Bob. Boom, boom, the gorilla still knocking him down. At last the ape collapses from exhaustion. The little girl comes in, says, “I know he’s around here someplace, I just know it.” Finally, she peels away the gorilla and there lies the hero. Cradling him in her arms, the girl looks straight into the camera and says, “I don’t care what you think—I like him!” Fade out. The End.