Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Due to RKO’s ever-increasing deficits and its stockholders’ constant scrutiny, Howard Hughes no longer had the luxury of turning down high-priced offers for his biggest star’s services. Mitchum was thus loaned to 20th Century-Fox to costar with that studio’s latest and greatest asset, and an old acquaintance of Bob’s, Jim Dougherty’s former teenage girlfriend, Norma Jean Baker. After seven years of wiggling at the periphery of the movie business, Marilyn Monroe had at last achieved fame if not fortune, and with her appearances in Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had become the most exciting and talked-about movie star of the day. (Nevertheless, Mitchum’s representatives waged a successful battle for their client to be given top billing in all studio advertising and publicity.) River of No Return was to be a superspectacular aimed—like Second Chance but with considerably better prospects—at separating TV-addicted audiences from their living rooms. It would be produced not with the sideshow gimmickry of 3-D but in Fox’s own revolutionary technical process, anamorphic wide-screen Cinemascope, with multitrack stereo sound, color, awesome locations in the Canadian Rockies, marauding Indians, white-water rapids, and Marilyn Monroe squeezed into revealing dancehall-floozie mufti and skintight blue jeans.

  Actually, River of No Return was a cheap B Western that had just growed like Topsy. Fox originally planned to shoot it in a couple of weeks on the wild Snake River in Idaho. Paul Helmick, scheduled to be the assistant director and unit manager on that picture, had scouted the locations. “It was going to be a small thing,” Helmick recalled. “About twenty-five people, cast and crew sleeping in tents and eating at the campfire. All of a sudden Zanuck decided it was going to be a big picture with Marilyn and Mitchum, and Otto Preminger was going to direct. I thought that meant I was off the picture because I had done one with Otto before and that did not work out. So I thought the minute he was assigned I was out, which was fine with me because I did not care much for Otto. But I was very much in. So now we had to rethink where the picture could be made, now it was a matter of finding locations where you could have a good hotel, food and lodging for a hundred, hundred-and-twenty-five people, an airport not too far away, good communications, and so on.”

  New ultrascenic locales were chosen at Jasper and Banff Springs near Lake Louise in western Canada and comfortable accommodations secured at the stately old Banff Springs Hotel. There was still snow on the mountains and some of the roads had been clear for only a matter of weeks when members of the company began arriving in June, making preparations for the complicated and dangerous river rafting sequences that were the film’s primary raison d’etre. A special train brought the cast and Preminger the eighty miles west from Calgary to Banff, a publicized event that brought out curious ogling Canadians all along the route.

  A sweet but often intransigent personality even among sympathetic collaborators, Marilyn did not react well to Preminger’s patented screaming-Prussian act. “Otto,” said Paul Helmick, “was a complete pain in the ass. Vicious, impatient, very crude to people, especially to women.” Filming had barely begun when Monroe and the director stopped speaking to each other. “Not a word. It was the biggest mismatch I’d ever seen,” said Paul Helmick. “They absolutely detested each other.” The telephone lines to Los Angeles sizzled, with each camp complaining about the other’s bad behavior, and Fox telling them both to shut up. The Angel Face contretemps forgotten, Preminger turned to Mitchum for help; and Bob would become the single tenuous line of communication between Monroe and the director.

  A major source of unpleasantness, and not just to Preminger, was the presence of Monroe’s drama coach—really her surrogate mother—Natasha Lytess. “Horrible woman,” said Reva Frederick. “And smelly. If only someone had taken her out and given her a bath.” Otto dismissed Lytess as an annoying phony from the get-go—”She was passing herself off as a Russian, for reasons of her own, but she was in fact German”—but Marilyn had an absolute Trilbylike devotion to the woman and her professional advice. Lytess would sit at the sidelines during filming, conferring with the actress before a take, overriding the director’s instructions, signaling Marilyn to demand another take or to refuse to do another one, depending on whether the coach was satisfied with the first. Her most damning influence on Monroe’s performance was an insistence on every syllable of every line being enunciated distinctly, advice the actress followed to an absurd degree. Marilyn, said Preminger, “rehearsed her lines with such grave ar-tic-yew-lay-shun that her violent lip movements made it impossible to photograph her.” To Mitchum, holding her in his arms for a shot, she looked like she was doing an imitation of a fish. He slapped her on the ass—which he found was also undulating uncontrollably—and snapped, “Stop the nonsense! Let’s play it like human beings.” He managed, said Preminger, “to startle her and she dropped, at least for the moment, her Lytess mannerisms.”

  At other times, when Marilyn was not in need of her aid, Natasha would wander among the rest of the cast offering unsolicited advice in gloomy Garbo-like tones, as when she told the boy playing Mitchum’s son, Tommy Rettig, that child actors lost their talent at just about his age. Rettig immediately began having trouble with his lines and sobbing before a take. Preminger had Lytess barred from the set. Then Monroe refused to come out of her dressing room. Darryl Zanuck wired Preminger that Marilyn was “money in the bank,” and he would have to do whatever it took to keep her working. Again Preminger must have thought, this was not how they would have treated Hitler.

  Monroe’s peccadilloes seemed never to bother Mitchum. He thought she was an essentially sweet and funny but often sad and confused person. Eternally vulnerable, uncertain of her talent, she was prey to exploitation and a victim of her own bad judgment. Perhaps a key to their relationship—and he would have no easy time convincing anyone about this—was that Mitchum found Monroe sexually unappetizing and never tried to bed her. While others cared to see only her voluptuousness and easy availability, Mitchum saw a frightened and possibly disturbed child-woman, not his cup of tea. Perhaps, too, his lack of ardor had something to do with what he claimed was the secret source of Monroe’s neurotic temperament and chronic lateness: her vagina. Due to the peculiar nature of her female plumbing, Mitchum discovered, Marilyn would experience an unusually strong, debilitating menstruation and an excruciatingly painful premenstrual period that could sometimes last for nearly the entire month. Mitchum claimed that many a time, as people on the set stood around cursing her selfishness, Marilyn lay in her dressing room immobilized with cramps, embarrassed and suffering.

  While in Canada—and until her boyfriend Joe DiMaggio arrived, hot on the heels of a rumor that Monroe and Mitchum were having an affair—Bob assumed a kind of older brother role for Marilyn—if a teasing and mischievous older brother. Mitchum was amused by her attempts at intellectual self-improvement, mockingly claiming she was forever studying books on psychology or human sexuality, looking up from the pages now and then with wide-eyed innocence to ask him, “What does the author mean by . . . anal eroticism?” One day she yearningly remarked that she hadn’t seen her man Joe in some time, and Mitchum’s boisterous stand-in Tim Wallace supposedly suggested they take up the slack with “a round robin.”

  “What’s that?” Marilyn asked.

  “You know, you and me and Mitch,” Wallace said, leering.

  “Ooohh,” said Marilyn. “That would kill me!”

  “Well, nobody’s died from it yet!” Wallace snickered.

  “Oh, I bet they have,” Marilyn told him. “But in the papers they just say . . . the girl died from natural causes. . . .”

  “I wouldn’t say she was dumb,” said Reva Frederick. “She was just a very young woman in her mind and had a lot of growing up to do. She was a nice girl, always said hello to everybody, asked how they were, caring. But it was all a bit overwhelming for her. She was very simple and sweet. I remember once we were in her dressing room and she was dying to show us a present she’d gotten from Joe DiMaggio. It was a
gorgeous, very expensive black mink coat. And she grabbed it and put it on and everybody said, ‘Marilyn, don’t put that on, you’ve got body makeup on, you’ll stain the whole coat!’ And she said, ‘Oh, it’s all right. I’ve got orange sheets, too!’ But she was a nice girl.”

  As Mitchum, Monroe, and Preminger filmed and fought, the second unit was putting together the action and stunt sequences on the same locations. There were setbacks. The Indians on the warpath in the film were to be played by a contingent of authentic tribesmen from the area, but they kept falling off their horses and were eventually replaced by cowboys from Saskatchewan, who could ride but not bareback, and they too spent much of their time tasting dirt. The work on the wild Bow River was exceedingly dangerous, made even more so apparently by the caliber of the local assistance. Roy Jenson, working as a stunt double on the picture, recalled, “One time the stunt coordinator, Fred Zindar—he and Norm Bishop were taking the raft down the rapids with the camera mounted on the nose—nearly washed down the river to Hudson’s Bay because the guy in the rescue boat was out of gas. These guys were major idiots. I remember the first time we came down the river, and one of them was supposed to throw me this rock tied to the end of a rope. I would then take it, tie it off, and pull the raft in to shore. I wasn’t even looking up, and he throws it and hits me in the head with the rock.”

  Big Roy Jenson, an aspiring movie actor, was playing football for the Calgary Stampeders that summer when he talked his way into a job as Robert Mitchum’s stunt double. Coming from the area, Jenson had found it easy to convince Otto Preminger that he was an expert at running the Bow, but this was in fact his first attempt at such a thing. Jenson, veteran stuntwoman Helen Thurston doubling for Monroe, and Harry Monty, a midget (and formerly one of the Wizard of Oz Munchkins) doubling for Tommy Rettig, would have many moments of sheer terror before their job was done. “Some of that stuff still comes back to haunt me today,” said Jenson forty-five years later. “We were up at the top of the river one time, and we had to go over these Mickey Mouse falls. They didn’t look like anything. Six- or eight-foot drop, not shattering, a flow drop. But unknown to us there was a big rock, and when we went over on that damned raft it hooked on the rock and started to tip over. The only thing that saved us was I used to work in lumber camps and I had spikes on my shoes. I was on the back panel, and I remember Harry the midget going by in his corduroy pants and I reached out for him, and the adrenaline was going so strong through my entire body that I pulled out the entire crotch of his pants. I got to the other end and swept it off. But we all thought we had had it. The closest people were a couple of hundred yards away. The midget was in total shock, but Helen was cool, she was an old-time stunt gal. I was too busy trying to save our lives, my life, to get scared. I got scared later on, back in the motel room I shared with the midget, remembering what had happened.”

  Mitchum would often appropriate the incident, telling people he and Marilyn had been on the overturning raft, but in fact the stars were permitted to work only on a raft that had been secured to the riverbank. Not that they had it risk-free: Monroe painfully twisted her leg scrambling on the rocks and was reduced to walking with crutches by the time she left Canada.

  Due to the odd liquor laws in Alberta, Mitchum and many of the others in the River company spent most of their free time within the confines of the Banff Springs Hotel, one of the only places in the area where you could get cocktails or hard stuff, outside of the government-run liquor store. “Bob would be at the bar, telling stories, or in his hotel suite, sitting up on the armoire with twenty people below him, sitting on the armoire with a bottle of gin, telling stories for days, and he was a marvelous entertainer,” Roy Jenson recalled. “Really great. And I was young and naive and everything and trying to keep up, but no way. I was so far out of my league. Mitchum was incredible. The guy could drink two or three quarts of gin and not even show it. One night I went out with Bob and Murvyn Vye, he was the heavy in the picture. And we were drinkiing for hours. I’m just ripped out of my mind. I finally go away and I get a steam bath and a massage and a nap and have some dinner and I come back, and they were still there, talking and drinking! Christ!”

  Later in the summer another team of filmmakers arrived in Alberta to shoot a Universal International production about the Canadian Mounties, Saskatchewan. Raoul Walsh was directing and the star was Alan Ladd, playing a part that had originally been offered to Mitchum. A number of the Saskatchewan people moved into the Banff Springs Hotel. Ladd was a recluse, seldom seen. One of the other visitors from Hollywood was apparently not so stand-offish. The woman in question, Paul Helmick recalled, “had the hots for Mitchum. She wanted to get into bed with him, made it clear. And he made it clear that he didn’t want to by peeing all over her. They went up to her room. I saw him right afterward; he came back to the dining room or wherever we were, and that was what he told me he did. Pissed all over her.”

  River of No Return was completed in Los Angeles, where Mitchum and Monroe would do their white-water rafting indoors on a hydraulic platform in front of a giant process screen, while men stood to the sides and splashed them with buckets of water and shot steel-headed arrows into the solid oak logs at their feet. Having reached the end of his contract with Fox, Preminger left for Europe with the Indians still on the warpath, and a number of brief scenes and retakes were directed by Jean Negulescu. The simpleminded but exciting and colorful film was hugely popular, Mitchum’s most successful picture to date, though it would be hard to deny that the larger share of the audience came to gaze upon second-billed Marilyn Monroe, the most talked-about woman in the world. Marilyn, anyway, was his fan. “Mitch,” she told a reporter, “is one of the most interesting, fascinating men I have ever known.”

  RKO, wriggling in its death throes, exercised the final contractual option for another year of Robert’s services. His salary was now five thousand dollars a week. But he was not happy. The money was at most a third of what he might be making on the open market; and RKO, now clearly incapable of competing with the rival studios, was threatening to diminish his future prospects as well with every lousy project they threw at him.

  He turned down his next assignment, Susan Slept Here, set to costar young Debbie Reynolds, saying he was not prepared to attempt a part requiring singing and dancing (the eventual film, made with Dick Powell, would have little of either). Mitchum had been a cooperative employee all these years—barring a few broken chairs and windows and some bad publicity brought on along the way—and had done pretty much any piece of shit they had offered; nevertheless, the studio refused to back down. Playing hard ball, they sent notice to Mitchum’s agent that he was required to begin work on Susan on the morning of November 13 or be put on suspension without pay.

  Fuck ‘em. He took the suspension.

  Now with some free time, he pondered life after RKO. All too aware that owners kept the big money, he and a collection of drinking buddies—Paul Helmick from River of No Return, a Texan named George McGee (the brother-in-law of New Orleans hotelier Frank Monteleone), Paul Lally, and David C. Moore—announced the formation of a television production company they were calling Westwood Productions. Incorporation papers were filed in Sacramento on November 23, and a press release detailed their plans to rent studio space and begin production of their first series program in the spring. Helmick: “Mitchum and I used to do quite a bit of drinking. So we were sitting around one day and he says, ‘We ought to get into the television business.’ I said, ‘Well . . . that’s right.’ He said, ‘Let’s do a series or something. Maybe more than one series.’ I said, “OK.’ And TV McGee—we called him that because he wanted to be a partner—put some money behind this company we formed. And Mitchum said, ‘Come up with an idea.’ And I said, ‘I’ve got one.’ I said, ‘You take the Saturday Evening Post? He said, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ And he called to his wife, Dorothy, to get him a copy of the Post. I said, ‘Look at the back page.’ And the back page was a maid—what was her name? A cart
oon. Hazel. I said, ‘There’s our show.’ He said, ‘That would be a good show; you’re right.’ But the guy who did the cartoon wouldn’t give us bunch of guys the rights to it. He didn’t want any part of Robert Mitchum and this crew doing his beloved Hazel. So we discussed this among ourselves and somebody said, ‘Screw it, he’s got no rights if we do the same thing about some other maid. What’s another good name for a maid?’ So I said, ‘We’ll call her Amy.’ Bob said, ‘Great.’ We formed a company, we went looking for a studio and found some cheap space with standing sets. But Mitchum kept procrastinating. Then he got a picture to do out of town. And then he came back and said, ‘Let’s do it,’ but I was going off to Egypt for a year to do Land of the Pharaohs with Hawks. So that was kind of the end of that.”

  A few moments after midnight on December 2, Off. J. N. Ryan saw a dark Jaguar roar across Wilshire Boulevard on San Vicente at approximately seventy-five miles per hour, which was approximately forty miles above the speed limit. He kicked his motorcycle into life and gave pursuit, with red light flashing and siren on. The Jag did not slow down but took evasive action, turning off the boulevard and onto the dark side streets. The chase continued on to Brentwood where, at Avondale Avenue and Hanover Street, the speeding automobile pulled to a sudden stop. The door opened and Robert Mitchum stepped from the car, holding his keys out to the uncertain motorcycle cop.