Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  And thus did Lang’s moving drama of the hardships of two selfless, celibate Christian ladies become a lusty tale of adventure, a vehicle for sexy Susan Hay-ward and Bwana Bob Mitchum.

  Lang, Roy Baker (an up-and-coming young English director who had just completed Don’t Bother to Knock at Fox), and a small camera crew took off for the Belgian Congo on a search for suitable locations. Venturing deep within the Congolese jungle, the team faced great hardships, constant heat, rot, insects, and disease. Baker, a “pale-skinned . . . ultrasensitive Englishman” (per Otto Lang), collapsed with fever and had to be shipped home. Lang forged on, returning to Hollywood with lots of exposed film and the realization that no stars could be taken to the pestilent hellhole he had just visited, so White Witch Doctor would have to be made on the lot or at Griffith Park. Loaned to Fox in reciprocation for RKO’s use of Susan Hayward, Mitchum was teamed with his Lusty Men costar for a second and final time. Hard-nosed director Henry Hathaway was assigned to the Technicolor production, guiding the performers around all the potted foliage, process screens, and pot-bellied extras in leopard-skin loincloths. Otto Lang’s spectacular location footage would be interspersed with the glaringly phony soundstage exteriors. The film’s exciting action highlights included Susan Hayward’s molesting of a rubber tarantula and Robert Mitchum’s epic brawl with a man in a gorilla suit.

  Otto Lang: “The character of this white hunter was a man with a shady reputation, and a sultry guy, and we thought Mitchum would be perfect for the part. I know he had up and down periods where he was under the influence, but he had periods where he was completely sober and normal and no one was better than he was. We had nothing but the best experience. He was on time, always ready to go. Do whatever had to be coped with. He and Susan Hayward got along, but there was no particular charisma between them, or any attraction. She was going through a difficult divorce at the time and was not really approachable as a person. In other words, she kept her distance. And Henry Hathaway was a very strong director. Very forceful. And the stars respected that, Mitchum respected that. No one made any difficulties.”

  Notwithstanding Henry Hathaway’s ugly tendency to direct screaming tirades at his crew, it was an easygoing shoot, and Mitchum—not unaware that the picture was as foolish as anything he’d ever done—settled into a big Fox trailer and tried to enjoy his first job in four years away from RKO’s cramped quarters. Between scenes, Mitchum would converse with the production’s technical adviser, Dr. Conway Wharton, a medical researcher who had spent twenty years in Africa. “He wanted me to trace the ethnological history of the little-known Bakuba tribe in the Congo Basin,” Dr. Wharton recalled. For several sequences involving jungle drumming, a percussionist named Eddie Lynn was brought in to establish some authentic-sounding rhythms; and Lynn was working out on the skins one day when Mitchum came over and joined him in a hot, polyrhythmic jam session. “Man alive,” said Lynn, “he was real solid!”

  One afternoon, killing time on the set while waiting for the gorilla suit to come back from the steam cleaner, Mitch put his feet up, tipped back his pith helmet, and favored the press with a philosophical discourse on a favored topic. “I believe,” Mitchum pronounced, with the conviction of Lincoln freeing the slaves, “the average woman should never wear a girdle! I believe a well-proportioned woman is an object of great beauty. I feel that the lines that nature gave us are the ones we should show. . . . I always have had an intense dislike for anything that detracts from the feminine qualities of a woman, and I look upon a girdle as such a device. I don’t see why you should not be able to recognize a person from the back as well as the front.”

  The weird, hard-to-believe saga of RKO under Howard Hughes was moving ever closer to its inevitable, annihilating conclusion. In September 1952, Hughes unexpectedly sold his controlling interest in the studio to a quintet of businessmen, a syndicate headed by Ralph Stolkin of Chicago. Within weeks of the syndicate taking charge, a New York newspaper exposed the members’ various ties to racketeering and organized crime. The revelations shocked Hollywood’s scandal-fearing poobahs and infuriated the already shaken RKO stockholders. The confusion brought activity at the Gower Street property to a standstill. For several months in 1952-53, as studio chroniclers Richard Jewell and Vernon Harbin described it, “RKO had no president, no chairman, no production head, and was controlled by men who couldn’t run it and wouldn’t allow others to take charge.” The new owners tried to dump their shares, but no one wanted to go near such an albatross. Finally, to the rescue came . . . Howard Hughes, who in February agreed to take control of the studio once again, keeping the syndicate’s $1.25 million down payment for his pains. Hughes was ready to go on as before, but this was not going to be easy now, with so many suddenly alerted to RKO’s strange state of affairs. With the company drowning in red ink and ridicule, stockholders began looking into Hughes’s management style, incredible squandering of company funds, and sleazy self-indulgence—the vanity productions, the endlessly shelved features, his virtual white-slave racket, filling the payroll with imported starlets, most never even to glimpse a working movie camera. Hughes was pelted with lawsuits, many of them containing lurid accusations regarding his private life. People joked that RKO now employed more lawyers than actors. Thumbing his nose, Hughes announced the studio’s first new production in seven months, a “spectacular” adventure called Second Chance, to be filmed in color and in the exciting new “3-D” photographic process, and starring Robert Mitchum.

  • • •

  Dorothy had once said that her husband was a bachelor at heart, but that didn’t mean she liked it. With a new baby in addition to two adolescent boys to be minded, she found Bob’s honorary bachelorhood increasingly hard to stomach. Early in March 1953, Hollywood gossips reported that the actor had been kicked out of his home and was living in a rented apartment in Beverly Hills. A series of indiscretions or one lease-breaking outrage—the exact cause of the rift was never revealed, but Dorothy’s anger was sufficient to make her change the locks and the phone number at 1639 Mandeville.

  Mitchum explained it to the press like this: “I guess I was pretty irresponsible and brought too many people into the house and Dorothy felt I was a complete nuisance.” He hoped the “trial separation” would be brief. He was “very much in love” with his wife, he said. “I want to live with Dorothy and my three kids. I am going to do everything in my power to win her back. Sunday is our thirteenth wedding anniversary, and I’m going to ask her to have a date with me.”

  On Sunday a sheepish Mitchum showed up at the Mandeville doorstep, bearing gifts—a Spanish lace mantilla and a silk skirt and blouse from Italy. He took her to Ciro’s. Bob said he was sorry and wanted to come home. He would be going to Mexico soon for two weeks to shoot the new picture and wanted her to come with him. Kind of a little honeymoon. No kids. Just the two of them—and a Hollywood film crew.

  Bob played it hangdog back at the doorstep at the end of the evening. “Can I take you out again?”

  “You may call,” she told him.

  Second Chance was about an American palooka fighting tank town matches somewhere south of the border, and how he becomes involved with a dame on the run from a gangland enforcer. To get permission to shoot in Mexico, RKO had to send the script to Mexico City for approval. The propaganda minister sent it back with a letter telling RKO it had been an honor to read the truly fine tale of the American palooka and demanding that the script be changed to eliminate a number of scenes and references insulting to all Mexican people and their Spanish-speaking neighbors. These offending passages included the hero’s depreciative classification of Latin American women as “tamales,” another line stating that “there is no hot water South of Laredo,” and a dialogue sequence about the battle of the sexes, all of which were found offensive, ineluding the line “Latin American men beat their women once a week regularly and if they did not the women would miss the beatings.” Although they regretted compromising the integrity of a piece of fin
e art like the Second Chance screenplay, RKO agreed to the changes and deletions, and the filming permit was granted.

  A few weeks before shooting was to begin, Mitchum got a copy of the script. He sat down and tried to read it, but every few pages, he said, he found himself going back to the front to look at the names credited with writing the thing. He was sure they must all be the producer’s grandchildren. The hero was some kind of chickenshit fighter who had killed a guy in the ring and was very sensitive about it. In the movies the fighters were always sensitive, and people were always trying to pay them to take a fall and they were never interested in that kind of thing. He had known a lot of boxers in his time, Mitchum reflected, and he had never known one like that. Sometimes a fall was the best thing for everybody concerned. You got tired, you stuck your chin out, took ten, and settled down for a little rest. Why not get paid for it? He went to a story conference with director Rudolph Mate, producer Edmund Grainger, and their associates. Grainger, said Mitchum, liked to analyze the structure and meaning of the screenplay and was fond of big words like regenerated and catalyst when explaining why one character did this and another did something else and how it all tied together with a pink ribbon. The others would listen, said Bob, wait until it sounded like the guy had come to the end of a sentence, and then nod with enthusiasm.

  “Give us your thoughts on the script, Bob?” someone said and Mitchum started flipping through the pages, offering his own insights.”Here’s a new twist, the heavy smiles all the time. . . . Now this is a real moll . . . she can’t have babies or nothin’ . . .”

  “Yes, but,” said the producer, “she’s regenerated in the catalyst!”

  Sydney Boehm, an ex-crime reporter, was called in to do a rewrite.

  If the script was stricly B-unit stuff, the studio’s big “comeback” picture would at least be given the veneer of a superior production, with color (a first for Mitchum at RKO), exotic location shooting, and most exciting of all . . . 3-D. The invention with which Hollywood hoped to counterattack television, 3-D was a stereoscopic process supposedly offering audiences an illusion of lifelike depth, though it was quickly perceived as a gimmick best utilized for special-effects sequences and for throwing things at the camera. Howard Hughes, who had already experimented with three-dimensional effects in the way he had costumed Jane Russell, Janet Leigh, and Jean Simmons, was immediately intrigued by the process.

  Cast opposite Mitchum as the “moll” was thirty-two-year-old Linda Darnell. A frequent Hughes bedmate for many years (he had once offered to “buy” her from her husband, cinematographer Pev Marley), she had come to RKO after more than a dozen years at Fox. Hughes had great respect for her talented curves and believed they would make a fitting subject for his studio’s first use of the 3-D camera (though Darnell, feeling overweight, would end up refusing to wear the revealing dresses of Hughes’s imagining and spent most of the film in a conservative dark suit). The villain of the piece, a ferocious mob hit man, would be played by Jack Palance, the fascinating and often disturbingly intense Elia Kazan discovery who had been in Hollywood for three years, alternating between eccentric leading man parts and great scene-stealing heavies. He would give Mitchum one of his rare opportunities to do cinematic battle with a bad guy his own size and strength.

  On April 11 the Second Chance company flew to Mexico City and from there continued by car and bus to the scenic colonial town of Taxco. So many scenes had been dropped or rearranged for filming on their return to Los Angeles that what they did shoot amounted to a week’s worth of the stars running back and forth across the cobblestone streets and coming in and out of an assortment of doorways. Mate attempted only one elaborate sequence, Bob’s big boxing match, filmed at the Plaza de Toros in Cuernavaca, with locals filling the seats and cheering the all-day match between Mitchum and a young former boxer named Abel Fernandez. Hour after hour the pair bobbed and weaved under the killing Mexican sun, while Mate and his crew strove to maintain the precision focus required for 3-D filming. Inevitably, as the wearying fake fight continued, some of the blows the two exchanged landed with unintended impact. “I got knocked out three times,” Mitchum recalled. “Cut!” Rudy Mate would shout. “Bob, it is in the script, you are supposed to win the match!” The star’s agony would be mostly in vain because problems with the extras staring into the lens and the erratic lighting conditions meant that the fight would have to be at least partly restaged back in Hollywood.

  Dorothy had agreed to accompany Robert on the trip, and he had tried to stay out of trouble for the entire week. But sometimes trouble found you. The RKO publicists had arranged for Mitchum and Palance to attend a charity dinner for Boys Town in Mexico City on the Saturday before their departure. Mitchum was brought up on the podium to hand over a (studio-supplied) check for five thousand dollars. An American college boy got into an altercation with the actor en route to the toilets and ended up sprawled across a table. There were shouts and curses, and it looked like the boy’s friends wanted to stage a second assault. As photographers jockeyed for a good angle, the RKO publicists decided it was time to get the celebrities out of there.

  Bob and Dorothy, Jack Palance, and the rest of the Second Chance group were taken to a popular nightclub on the Reforma, where they were joined by a party of Mexican film people, including Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez, the well-known actor-director (a seminal figure in the Mexican cinema but perhaps best remembered for his portrayal of the evil warlord Mapache in Peck-inpah’s The Wild Bunch). They had barely gotten to their table when a drunken stranger—as it turned out, a member of the military elite—came over to meet the Hollywood estrellas.

  Jack Palance recalled the night: “I’d had a couple of drinks at a party and because of the altitude I was feeling pretty awful. Mexico City is eight thousand feet above sea level. Mitchum and I had already escaped one near brawl, so we went to a club somewhere and as we came in a big Mexican general got up and embraced Bob. He tried to do the same with me but I wasn’t feeling like it, so I pushed him away. And he fell, right there on the floor. Well, you know what a general is in Mexico? God—right? The next thing you know he’d drawn a gun on me. . . .”

  Emilio Fernandez rushed in to halt the conflict, a dubious choice for peacemaker as he was notorious for his hot temper and was rumored to have shot a number of people, including a movie critic who had offended him with a bad review. Sure enough, things heated up again, with Fernandez shouting, “Fucking Mexicans!” and pulling out a pistol. “I’m getting the ladies out of here,” said Mitchum and rushed for the exit. One of the general’s men fired what sounded like a machine gun. Palance picked up a table and hurled it at him.

  “Suddenly,” said Jack, “there was this big drama going on.”

  People dropped under tables in screaming confusion while shots zinged back and forth across the room. As El Indio continued firing, giving him cover, Palance made his way out through the kitchen and escaped. By then Mitchum and company were safely inside their limousine and heading across town.

  The “general,” it turned out, was the big cheese in federal security and had a nasty reputation for unwarranted arrests, torturing suspects, that sort of thing. Jack Palance was put under wraps until someone could locate the offended officer and RKO could write out a large check for another charitable donation. Palance told reporter Roderick Mann, “Of course, when I got back to the States, I found old Mitchum had taken all the credit for my rescue.”

  • • •

  With everyone safely returned to Los Angeles, filming continued on the studio lot. The climactic scenes, conceived for maximum stereoscopic thrills, took place on a cable car suspended between two mountain peaks in the story’s imaginary Andean locale. When the car stalls at the midway point, Mitchum is elected to swing from a rope to the nearest ledge and scramble for help. He returns with a rescue team and confronts killer Palance. The pair slug it out as the last threads of cable snap from the dangling car.

  Palance was an idiosyncratic method a
ctor known to lose himself in his characters, a risky pattern for one who enacted so much on-screen mayhem. “He would go back behind the set and work himself up to a real state,” said Reva Frederick. “Huffing and puffing. It was odd.” A stuntman warned Mitchum that Jack was planning to give him a hard time in the cable car fist-fight and to keep his guard up. The two rehearsed their moves, but once they began battling their way in and out and on top of the set it was difficult to stick to the script. Palance gave him a hard one in the head. Mitchum’s ears were ringing and he lost his footing for a moment, then, sure the punch had been intentional, moved back in with a fury, slugging the other actor in the gut. Palance let out a growl and vomited across Mitchum’s shoulder.

  Second Chance opened to good business and moderately positive reviews. Critics were distracted by the ocular assault of the 3-D effects, not by the story, which seemed even more threadbare on the screen than it had on paper. For RKO’s vaunted big picture of the year, the film was sloppy and cheap. The location trip to Mexico had provided little more than some raw-looking, second-unit-type footage. The rest was a cramped, operetta-style soundstage South America, the cable car climax a cheesy mix of obvious toy miniatures and back projection. Even the music sounded subpar, like the generic library cues used by Poverty Row studios for their three-day Westerns. But “the great unwashed,” as Mitchum referred to his loyal fans, seemed to enjoy it. What the hell. The film was as effortlessly watchable and as easily forgotten as a gaily colored dream. Mitchum performed his empathetic tough guy characterization with a refined minimalism. Given nothing to do, he did it to perfection.