Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Restlessness still plagued him. He usually left town whenever a picture wrapped. Sometimes he would just climb into his car by himself and drive away with no destination in mind. Dorothy told a reporter, “Bob is really a bachelor at heart.” But there were great times with the family as well, long afternoons in the pool, or playing croquet, or taking the boys on long treks deep into the wilderness. Times like he had dreamed of having with his old man when he was a kid.

  Some of the crew guys at RKO—in appreciation of Bob’s loyalty to them—had helped him to construct a compact mobile camper when such things were not yet commercially manufactured. To the open bed of a Ford truck they attached a removable corrugated steel cabin containing a refrigerator, butane stove, sink, water tank, a single bed hung from chains on the ceiling, and a convertible double bed on the floor. With Tim Wallace and the boys on board, he took the camper on an inaugural journey, pursuing salmon in the rivers of Idaho, catching two massive beauties that left a choking stink in the cabin when the refrigerator broke down. They drove to Colorado in time for the One Minute to Zero premieres in Denver and Colorado Springs, meeting up with Dorothy for the festivities. She and the boys then departed for Delaware and a lengthy stay with her family. Bob and Tim loaded the truck with alcohol and chili beans and set off to do some spearfishing in the Arkansas backcountry. It turned out that John Mitchum was down in Little Rock finishing up the required ninety-day residence for a “quickie” divorce, a plan that was foiled when he failed to bring a corroborating witness to court. He was standing on Main Street, forlorn, when the camper—now dubbed the “Oochee-Papa-Poontang Wagon” for reasons unspecified but easily guessed at—rolled into town. He grabbed hold of Tim and rushed him to the courtroom, where Wallace gladly improvised lurid tales of John and Joy Mitchum’s incompatibility, and the divorce was granted.

  Howard Hughes had succeeded in turning RKO into a ghost of the once thriving studio, a growing joke and embarrassment in the Hollywood community. With fewer and fewer pictures scheduled and “finished” films piling up or endlessly revised at the boss’s unfathomable whim, there was little product to sell and the studio began losing money at an ever-advancing rate. The need to have something to distribute, no matter how unpromising, meant an increasing dependence on fly-by-night outside sources, expanding the definition of an RKO picture to include Italian art movies (ruthlessly reedited and dubbed) and a ten-year-old Swedish documentary about Siam.

  Relief seemed on the way when Hughes signed a fifty-million-dollar, five-year deal to finance and distribute sixty films produced by the independent team of Jerry Wald and Norman Krasna, a pair of highly regarded pros who boasted that Hughes was giving them “full autonomy.” Instead Hughes gave them the same interference and disappearing act he gave to everyone else. In the three years they remained at RKO, Wald and Krasna were able to make just four completed features. The last of these and the best—perhaps the very last RKO film to be widely considered a classic—was The Lusty Men.

  Jerry Wald had seen a magazine article by Claude Stanush about modern-day rodeo cowboys. He hired the writer and put him together with a migrant New York novelist named David Dortort to develop a screen treatment on the subject. They came up with a heavily detailed, sort of semidocumentary account of the tough, rowdy, often sad lives of the rodeo tramps, moving from town to town across the West, risking their lives for a chance at some elusive prize money. After Robert Parrish dropped out of the project early on, Wald turned to an RKO contract director with whom he had been eager to work: Nicholas Ray.

  The intense, innovative director—formerly Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, Jr., of Galesville, Wisconsin—was a product of the experimental and revolutionary stage companies of the ‘30s in New York—the Theatre of Action, the Federal Theater—and a disciple of Elia Kazan. His directing career in Hollywood had gotten off to a flying start with the remarkable RKO release They Live by Night in 1948, and he had remained under contract to the studio ever since (loaned out to Humphrey Bogart on two occasions). Ray’s first seven pictures varied wildly between brilliant and personal works (In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground) and craftsmanlike jobs of utter anonymity (Flying Leathernecks). Howard Hughes had taken a liking to him, going so far as to overlook Ray’s left-wing associations (even forgiving him after he refused to direct I Married a Communist, a Hughes litmus test), but saw only the craftsman, indiscriminately assigning him to those thankless retake jobs on Macao and The Racket and the outrageous Vestal Virgin Bathhouse sequence added to Androcles and the Lion. It was the pattern of Ray’s entire career, great original film art mixed in with meaningless hack work, right up until bad luck and self-destruction afforded him a premature “retirement.”

  Happily signed on for Wald’s project, seeing it as an extension of his work in the Southwest in the ‘30s with folklorists John and Alan Lomax, Ray began soaking up the background from Stanush’s files and looking over the locations and dates of the next regional rodeo circuit. There was still no script, just incidents, data, a rough outline of a story. To come up with a filmable text, they sought out a reliable hired gun named Horace McCoy. McCoy was a journeyman screenwriter with the sort of background a journeyman screenwriter often had in those days—World War I flier awarded the Croix de Guerre, Dallas sports and crime reporter, one of the original hard-boiled pulp writers for Black Mask magazine, and author of the acclaimed novels Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? He had also been a rodeo aficionado since boyhood and had his own store of anecdotes and lore to bring to the project. McCoy went to work at once, putting flesh on a skeleton of a plot about a washed-up former rodeo champ who agrees to manage the career of an ambitious newcomer, and how the new champ comes to resent and humiliate the mentor and drives him back into the arena, with tragic results. Typical of McCoy’s best work in Hollywood, it blended strong, flavorful writing with backlot cliches.

  Everyone agreed that Robert Mitchum was the man for the part of the broken-down cowboy—everyone except Hughes, who had to be convinced by the actor himself. Nick and Bob had known each other from the time of They Live by Night, when Mitchum had been ready to play the Indian bank robber Chickamaw in that film (the part eventually played by Howard DaSilva), even making a test with his hair dyed black; but the higher-ups had vetoed it—not a proper role for a star. Now the director talked to him about Cowpoke, as it was then known, craftily connecting the washed-up, drifting character of Jeff McCloud to things he knew of Mitchum’s personal history and inner life. Mitchum thought Ray sounded like a screw-loose prophet when he got going on a subject, but Ray had pushed the right buttons—Mitchum’s fondness for losers and outsiders, his memories of Depression wandering and homeless-ness—and the actor came away eager to take on the role.

  Arthur Kennedy was picked for the part of McCloud’s ambitious partner, the new rodeo champ whose arrogance leads to tragedy. Kennedy had doubts that the role was for him and questioned whether there was enough story to make a picture, but Ray convinced him during a long, liquid lunch at a restaurant across the street from the studio. The supporting role of Booker, a grizzled rodeo veteran gone punchy, went to a character actor recommended by Howard Hawks, Arthur Hunnicutt, then at the start of a noble career as the cinema’s seediest-looking scene stealer.

  Something like two-thirds of the script had been written when it was learned that Susan Hayward, a very big name and yet another actress Howard Hughes lusted after, was joining the cast. This presented a bit of a problem as there was barely a part for her to play. The role of Arthur Kennedy’s wife would have to be rewritten and expanded to fit a major star. And on the double: Hayward, borrowed at great expense from 20th Century-Fox, was available only for a specific block of time that began almost immediately. The actress came over to RKO for a meeting with Ray and Mitchum. Ray talked about the characters and their dreams and feelings in his tangled, inarticulate way.

  After a while, Hayward put down her knitting and said, “Listen, I’m from Brooklyn. What’s the
story?”

  As Mitchum recalled it, Nick turned to him at this point. “Tell her, Bob.” So Mitchum started improvising, trying to catch her interest.

  “She said, ‘That’s all right. Is that on paper?’ And Nick said, ‘Of course!’ and he dragged out toilet paper and all sorts of things. So he convinced her, I guess, that we had a script.”

  Horace McCoy revised his pages to accommodate a role worthy of Miss Hayward’s stature. Louise Merritt became the third side of a triangle, the strong-willed wife who agrees to follow her husband’s dangerous season on the rodeo circuit in pursuit of her own dream, the money to buy a home. The script remained unfinished, though, when McCoy dropped out just before filming was to begin. He had a book deadline looming and more movie offers (he would cowrite the other rodeo movie of 1952 as well, Bronco Buster, directed by Budd Boetticher), and a frantic Jerry Wald had begun pestering him with suggestions. Mitchum’s absurdist recollection of the writer’s departure went like this: “Horace came in one day—he had undergone some strange metamorphosis and was sort of jiggling up and down—and he had a paper, and he said, ‘Now, shes standing at the exercise bar and stretching out like this . . . and the miner’s lamp is still burning in his hat, he’s got a lunch box. . . .’ He read us this scene and we didn’t know what the hell. . . . Nick said, ‘What’s that?’ and Horace said, ‘Only the greatest damn scene ever written!’ and he turned around and walked out.” McCoy would not be back until months later, returning on a whim to compose the rodeo announcers’ authentic-sounding introductions and comments heard over the loudspeakers.

  David Dortort was reassigned to the project, and another writer, Alfred Hayes, worked on several scenes from ideas Mitchum and Ray came up with during the filming. Jerry Wald contributed a few moments here and there, and yet another writer, One Minute to Zero’s rewrite man Andrew Solt, served as a stopgap for one scene without even knowing what the picture was about. Many of the sequences shot on location at actual rodeos would be very close to pure improvisation. As in that better-known make-it-up-as-we-go-along movie, Casablanca, the ending—Mitchum’s death—was uncertain through most of the production. As Ray remembered it, “We started shooting with twenty-six pages of script and we wrote every night. So there wasn’t much besides instinct and the reactions of my actors to what we had done the day before to what we were going to do the next day.”

  Filming got underway just after Christmas, beginning, in continuity, with McCloud’s poignant return to his childhood home and his first meeting with Louise and Jeff Merritt. Despite all the pressures surrounding the production—particularly Susan Hayward’s looming departure date—Ray worked slowly. And mysteriously. He felt his way around each scene like a blind man and often took to his director’s chair for long periods of staring at the set or at an actor and pondering his next move. Bob nicknamed him “the Mystic.” Ray liked to have the actors take part in his search for the psychological or poetic values in a scene, in part a tactic to keep them concentrated, stirred up, make them active collaborators, not just line readers. For Mitchum, who had made forty-five films now without even speaking to some of the directors involved, Ray’s detailed, dramatic approach to the job took some getting used to. “When I act, I come in and say, ‘What page is it and where are the marks?’ But Nick is a fellow who likes to discuss the scenes with the actors . . . what my background was, what the background of the rodeo bulls and horses was. . . .” Mitchum cracked that he was out of the frame a lot of times because Ray kept his camera on the actor who had listened the most when he was “talking about Stanislavsky and those people.”

  Despite the mocking recollections, Mitchum and the director got along very well. Ray, for all his Russian theater “mysticism,” was no aloof Sternbergian aesthete but eager for creative collaborators and all too human, another macho fuckup—boozer, ladies’ man, degenerate gambler. Mitchum found himself drawn more deeply into the creative process in the making of The Lusty Men than he had ever been before. Ray came to feel, as a few other directors would throughout the actor’s career, that Mitchum’s legendary indifference was a protective mask against disappointment or humiliation; and if you could prove to him that the job was worth the risk, he would work as hard as anybody. Ray found that Mitchum had several characteristics in common with that other notable tough guy actor, Humphrey Bogart. Both were genuine sight readers, and both were good for up to six takes only and then would stray or dry up. If there was still a problem or a technical mistake with the sixth take, Ray would go to something else and come back to it later. As for Mitchum’s fondness for drink, another trait he shared with Bogie, Ray had been told that he was “the second biggest lush in town” and warned to beware of shooting past sunset. But, happily, in the entire production they would lose only one morning to Bob’s being “too red-eyed” for the camera.

  Nick Ray did his best to bond with Susan Hayward as well—he zeroed in on a mutual enjoyment of Thomas Wolfe—and certainly drew from her an excellent performance, but she remained typically tempestuous and cranky—Mitchum called her “the Old Gray Mare”—and on one occasion held up production when she refused to play a scene as written. With her contract running out, an emissary was sent running from the stage to the writers department to grab the first writer he saw. “I went down on the set where sat, pouting, Susan Hayward,” said Andrew Solt to Ray’s biographer Bernard Eisenschitz. “This woman had the foulest mouth that I’ve ever heard in my life. She sat there and said, ‘No, I’m not going to say these lines, they insult me.’ And there sat Mr. Mitchum, who couldn’t care less, and Nick blowing his top.” Taken aside, Solt was informed about Hayward’s imminent departure. Solt wanted to read over the script. “You can’t read the script!” he was told. “You must start now!” Demanding to hear at least the briefest precis of the story, Solt then managed to come up with some dialogue which, if nothing else, Miss Hayward found not insulting.

  The actress’s final scenes were completed in a flurry of activity, then she hurried off to Fox to shoot The Snows of Kilimanjaro and an exhausted Nick Ray went into the hospital. Robert Parrish, the director originally set for the film, took over for a week and shot three scenes. Ray came back and completed the remaining studio sequences before heading off with cast and crew on a two-week location jaunt (all of Hayward’s scenes were filmed on the sound-stage and at a couple of rustic spots in Los Angeles). The man who had directed Mitchum’s first starring vehicles, the man who had gotten him his first dressing room, Ed Killy, had fallen in the ranks by this time and worked as Ray’s assistant during the location shooting. At Tucson, San Angelo, Pendleton, and other rodeo venues, they filmed the events as they happened and then shot improvised scenes with the actors, some of them made up on the spot. It was in the footage shot on location (not the unfortunate soundstage “outdoors” of some scenes) where Ray’s handpicked cinematographer, the legendary Lee Garmes (”a renegade,” the director called him) really showed his stuff, in windblown images that evoked for some the photographs of Walker Evans or the Dust Bowl scenes in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. “The whole quality of it was something,” said Nick Ray. “I think the kind of loiny sexiness of the hills, of the foothills, was treated as no other cameraman I’ve ever seen do it, in black-and-white, particularly.”

  As the company moved from rodeo to rodeo, and despite the number of bones they saw breaking before their eyes as cowboys tumbled through the air and crumbled in the dirt, Mitchum and Kennedy fell under the spell of the testosterone-charged atmosphere, and each took a turn—violating the terms of their studio insurance coverage—riding a wild horse and a Brahma bull. Mitchum would recall his bumpy ride: “I get on . . . and they all say, ‘It’s OK, he’s just a retired old bronc,’ and this thing is turned loose . . . and I can’t get off him. They’d go in and try and pick me off and my horse would turn around and kick the pickup horse. . . . I’m bleeding from my hair by this time. . . .”

  Even Ray felt compelled to show he had what it took, hopping
aboard a bucking bronco at the San Francisco Cow Palace. “I guess,” he said, “we all have a little of that wildness in us.”

  They returned to Hollywood, filming a few more bits and pieces, and then Ray began putting the whole thing together. At Jerry Wald’s insistence, an alternative version of the ending had been shot, with Mitchum surviving and going off into the sunset with an ex-girlfriend. David Dortort believed that Jerry Wald never understood what the picture was about and cared only that audiences liked happy endings. In the end Ray prevailed, and Jeff McCloud expired as planned. Mitchum claimed he had Reva sneak into the editing room and throw Wald’s version in the incinerator.

  The actor was sufficiently intrigued about how it had all turned out that he did something he hadn’t done in a long time. “Have you got any film cut together that I can see?” he asked the director.

  “Sure,” Ray said, “I’ve got about seven reels for you.”