Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Leo Gordon: “He was a first-class actor, Mitchum. First-class movie actor. We were watching him shooting a scene and somebody said, ‘He doesn’t do anything. He’s not reacting.’ I said, ‘You don’t understand what he does. The camera can pick up things that the eye can’t. Wait till you see it on the screen.’ And sure as hell there it was. I thought he was a helluva guy, just as easygoing as can be. We would sit around on the set bullshitting in those canvas-back chairs, and Mitchum loved to regale us with stories of his amorous adventures. I remember there was one he told about being down in New Orleans sometime before and how it was hotter than hell in his hotel room . . . and—he’s telling this—he’s lying naked on his bed and the phone rings. So he picks it up and hears a voice say, ‘Mistah Meetchum? I’m so-and-so, Miss New Aw-lins for nineteen-whatever, and I’m the mayuhs official welcomin’ committee, sugah, and would y’all mind if I came up and said hello?’ And Mitchum says, ’Hell no, I wouldn’t mind,’ and so then she comes up to the room, the door’s unlocked . . . well, anyway, it went on from there and . . . I don’t suppose I better go into the details on this one, but he was quite a damn good storyteller.”

  Mitchum and some of the cast members went on a publicity junket to New York City when Man with the Gun was about to open. “I went—and my mother was even with us because I was so young,” said Karen Sharpe. “It was my first trip to New York and Bob was excited for me. We were on the plane and he’d say, ‘Come here, I want to show you the Statue of Liberty,’ and I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. It was like he didn’t want me to miss a thing. And we got off the plane, I think it was about seven in the morning, some ungodly hour, and there were lots of reporters there to meet us. And just to give them a good picture and—he was so sweet—just to make sure I got my picture in all the papers, giving me a boost, he took me up in his arms and carried me right off the plane! Oh, but when that picture got printed, my boyfriend of the time, Al Martino, got jealous; he thought there was an affair going on, and that really upset the relationship, but that’s showbiz! And Bob was just a wonderful host on that trip for the two or three days we were there. We had to go from one radio show or one newspaper interview to another, very busy, but he showed me around, really watched out for me. And so generous—he took me to Toots Shor’s, this great old hangout in Manhattan, and I remember how he told them that whenever I came in there, I was to be his guest. ‘When you’re in New York,’ he said, ‘you come here, whether or not I’m here or I’m dead and gone, it’s on me.’ That was how sweet he was. I must have been pretty naive back then, but I really couldn’t understand how he had gotten such a bad reputation. The one and only time when I thought, Hm, maybe it’s true the things they say, was when I had to do an early morning newspaper interview with Bob at his hotel. I went up there—I was staying at the Warwick; he was at the Sherry Netherland—and the reporters were there already, and, yeah, it looked like Bob had had a very big night. He was sitting in his underwear, in his shorts, giving an interview. And he was pretty hungover. And Tim was there, his bodyguard and stand-in, and Reva, and they were always together and I wasn’t sure what the relationship was; I was kind of naive about all that stuff. But Bob was sitting in his underwear and giving an interview. He may have been slightly blase—well, I never saw him very passionate about anything, don’t think he was very impressed with himself or anybody else—but he didn’t miss a beat, was up and awake and did his thing, very dependable no matter how awful he must have been feeling.”

  As part of his publicity duties, Mitchum made an appearance on network television—his first ever—guest hosting CBS’s Stage Show variety program. Another, more intriguing TV gig was planned—Toots Shor’s acquaintance Jackie Gleason talked him into appearing on that week’s episode of The Honeymooners—but Mitchum left town and it didn’t happen.

  • • •

  On March 8 he made official the formation of DRM Productions (from his and Dorothy’s initials) for the purpose of creating or coproducing Robert Mitchum movies. It was good for taxes when you did it this way, and, very important, it was a lot harder to get fired when you were your own boss. And more: He really did want to start creating his own stuff. He had even begun coming to the office on Sunset and working on a couple of projected screen stories (in addition to writing new lyrics and patter for his sister Julie’s latest cabaret act). Nothing esoteric—he wasn’t about to get nutty and make art movies with his own income at stake—but he thought they could be good commercial pictures with things in them the public hadn’t seen a million times already and maybe contain a few personal elements as well. One idea, about moonshiners and fast cars in the Deep South, he had been tinkering with for years, but it still needed work.

  On the heels of DRM’s announcement, Mitchum signed a long-term, five-picture deal with United Artists, the financing and distribution organization for which he had just made three films in the last eight months.

  Confidential Magazine: the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world, Tom Wolfe called it. Created by New York publisher Robert Harrison, the William Randolph Hearst of sleaze, the man who had given to America Titter, Wink, Flirt, and Beauty Parade, Confidential was the prototype for a new generation of movie magazines not dependent on studio support and eschewing regurgitated publicity-department fodder in favor of hot gossip, pillow talk, lurid disclosures of celebrities’ hidden pasts and secret sexual preferences, and, on a slow news week, pure and simple slander. In May folks picking up the new issue of Confidential found an article by a certain Charles Jordan, Hollywood investigative reporter. The title of the story was “Robert Mitchum, the Nude Who Came to Dinner,” and the jaunty, cryptic deck read like this: “The menu said steak. There was no mention of a stew. And one guest was not only fried—but peeled . . . It’s a pretty crazy story even for a guy who did time in a Hollywood clinic on charges of flying too high with Marijuana Airlines!”

  All was explained on the pages that followed, an intimately detailed account of a party supposedly cohosted by Charles Laughton and producer Paul Gregory at Gregory’s home on Ocean Front Walk in Santa Monica. Arriving late with an anonymous female friend and three sheets to the wind, wrote Jordan, actor Robert Mitchum proceeded to take off all his clothes, then lurched his way to the dinner table where, as Laughton and others averted their eyes, he doused his nude body with ketchup. “This is a masquerade party, isn’t it?” said the brawny star. “Well, I’m a hamburger!”

  Mitchum called up Jerry Geisler. Publisher Bob Harrison, editor Howard Rushmore, the managing editor, and two associate editors were slapped with a lawsuit asking one million dollars in general, exemplary, and additional damages. No one had thought to do such a thing before. It was a risky proposition for Mitchum of all people to sue an underhanded rag for such a trivial story, especially when the magazine could so easily fill an entire special double issue with more authentic and more damaging tales of his misadventures. Possibly he was bowing to family pressures. It was believed that when his son Jim had recently been eased out of a snooty private school he was attending, it was because the principal was repelled by the Mitchum reputation. (Jane Greer and Dore Schary promptly removed their own children from the school in protest.) Dorothy told a reporter, “The backwash of these sensational stories about Bob is hurting our children. Jim idolizes his dad, and the other kids keep ribbing him. He’s always getting into fights sticking up for Bob.” But the press couldn’t really take all the credit for Mitchum’s rep. That was what you called blaming the messenger. Mitchum said it was “a case of fighting for your good name. People are inclined to believe what they read in magazines.” But it was the lawsuit that spread the story, garnering him a new wave of newspaper headlines, his most peculiar yet—including “MITCHUM DENIES ROLE OF NUDE BURGER; SUES”—and millions who had never even heard of Confidential now woke up to read—and perhaps believe—an account of the magazine story Mitchum was denying.

  Overnight he was hailed by his fellow movie
stars as a hero, a crusader. A blow for liberty had been struck at last! Published since December 1952, Confidential had entered the movie capital like a festering contagion. What made it seem so threatening to so many celebrities was that the scandal rag burrowed deep within the substratum, relying on a newly tapped network of paid industry insiders to provide information, luring them—local reporters, wardrobe ladies, butlers, bartenders—to violate the Hollywood omerta, the code of silence that had previously protected so much bad behavior. The magazine used private detectives, people settling grudges, people telling tales out of school, people informing, naming names—it was like the HUAC witch-hunt days all over again, except that instead of Commies Confidential was rooting out adulterers, drunks, and scumbags.

  “You know what that Mitchum Confidential story was?” said James Bacon, syndicated columnist and friend of the offended party. “That was based on a story Mitchum told me, and he probably told a lot of other people. He said he was with Charles Laughton and this other guy, and of course the two of them are both fags, and they’re eating dinner and, I don’t know, they can’t take their eyes off Mitchum, I guess. So Mitchum said he opened his pants, took his cock out, laid it on the plate, and poured ketchup over it. And he says to them, ’Which one of you guys wants to eat this first? “Now that’s the story he was telling. And I guess what happened is a reporter in Hollywood, one of them writing for Confidential on the quiet, anonymously, wrote this story up but it was too raunchy for the magazine and the magazine changed it around to ‘I’m a hamburger’ or whatever it was, so they could publish it. And the funny thing is, Mitchum became convinced for a while that I had written the story. We’d run into each other and he’d give me a funny look and say, ‘Hey, Jim, still writing for Confidential?’”

  Giesler wanted no settlement or apology, only a courtroom trial and a million bucks. Believing that a jury was more than likely to side with a handsome movie actor over a sleazy scandal rag, and further believing that once they settled with or lost a lawsuit to one of their celebrity subjects they would be inundated with more of the same and be run out of business, Harrison and his crew decided to try and defeat Mitchum . . . the Confidential way.

  Bob’s brother, John, remarried, was back in Los Angeles and working regularly these days as a journeyman actor in the movies. Not long after news of the lawsuit hit the papers, he was making a picture called Man in the Vault with William Campbell. One evening they were shooting some scenes in Art Link-letter’s bowling alley in West Hollywood and an off-duty deputy from the sheriff’s department was providing security. The deputy struck up a conversation with John Mitchum and invited the actor to come over to his place for a drink when they were done shooting. Mitchum dropped by as he said he would. The cop had impressively luxurious digs and a new Cadillac in the driveway. The drinks flowed, and the deputy started talking to him about Robert, feeling him out, making cracks. “That brother of yours probably acts like a real big shot, huh? Everybody’s got to kiss his ass, I bet. . . .”

  Long story short, it turned out the deputy knew some people willing to pay real big bucks if John was able to get them some evidence proving his brother wasn’t such an upstanding citizen. John told him he would think about it. Next morning he went to Jerry Giesler’s office and repeated all he had heard. “Those Confidential bastards!” Giesler cried. He came up with an idea: John should pretend to accept the offer and try to find out what they were plotting. And so did Brother John become an undercover agent in Jerry Giesler’s counterintel plot to beat the Confidential boys at their own game. John began meeting with the deputy, stringing him along with fake glimpses of Robert’s dirty laundry and promises of something big to come. It went on like that for a while, with nobody getting much in the way of evidence against anybody.

  One day the sheriff’s deputy waylaid John on the street and told him his people were through waiting. He made John get into the gold Cadillac, drove him across town, and took him into a ground-floor apartment in a luxury apartment building in Beverly Hills, the offices, it would turn out, of Hollywood Research Inc., command central for Confidential’s fact-gathering and surveillance agents. The place was filled with big, tough-looking guys, and some of them looked like they were packing heat. There were desks around the apartment topped with phones and recording and listening devices and files and photographs. John was taken over to the head tough guy and recognized him—it was Fred Otash, a notorious ex-LA cop turned private eye, Hollywood fixer, problem solver, leg breaker, a big mean Lebanese, looked like Joe McCarthy with muscles.

  “Where the fuck’s that story you’re supposed to deliver?” Otash screamed.

  John wrote of the moment, “I looked over at Otash’s silent, glowering gunmen with the bulgy jackets. It was confession time. ‘I tried. God knows I tried.’ My voice was trembling and I started to cry. ‘But he’s my brother and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.’”

  Otash screwed his face into a meaty mass of disgust. “Get out . . . you sniveling bastard!”

  Mitchum got out.

  Apprised of the situation, Giesler told John his life was probably in danger and thanked him for his time.

  John took his family and got out of town for a while.

  Confidential’s lawyers fought the Mitchum suit for over a year. In the end they successfully argued that the publication had technically never done business in the State of California and the case was dismissed. By then, however, other celebrities had followed Robert’s lead, and many of these subsequent lawsuits were successful in court, greasing the way for Confidential’s emasculation in 1957 and the end of a brief but colorful era in the history of journalism.

  Of the five men Mitchum had tried to sue, one died of cirrhosis of the liver a few months later, one was shot in the Dominican Republic and went into hiding and an early retirement, and one—editor Howard Rushmore—was in the backseat of a taxi on Manhattan’s East Side when he pulled out a revolver and murdered his wife and then stuck the barrel in his own mouth and put his thumb around the trigger.

  But that, as they say, is another story.

  * Kramer’s difficulty in landing a star for The Defiant Ones was the basis for a joke that made the rounds of the Hollywood party circuit, supposedly revealing of certain actors’ proclivities, their respective egotism, bigotry, or pretentiousness: Kirk Douglas agreed to make the film but only if they cut out the role of the other prisoner; Mitchum agreed but only if the other prisoner was white; and Marlon Brando would make the film but only if he could play the part of the black man.

  chapter ten

  Foreign Intrigue

  IN JUNE 1955, THE Norwegian tramp Fern River carried the Mitchums across the southern Atlantic from New York. For a week they moved slowly over an empty ocean, doing nothing. There was nothing to do. Sit in the sun, read—half his luggage was books—eat in the tiny dining room. It had taken a day out of New York for the six other passengers—retirees and college professors—to get used to the movie star on board. Now he was just Bob, stretched out on the deck, telling stories at the captain’s table at dinner. One morning he woke up, looked through the porthole, and saw Africa on the horizon. They moved up along the coast of Morocco that morning and entered the port of Casablanca. The Norwegians advised them to stay on the boat as there had been much unrest in the country of late and many foreigners attacked on the streets. Bob said, “Hell, they were probably just having a little fun with ‘em.” He and Dorothy and two other passengers hired a taxi to take them around. They left the car at the entrance to the walled medina and walked through the old gated entrance, settling down for a drink at a cafe on the square. Gawkers began to whisper to each other, gathering for a look at the famous visitor. In no time, Mitchum recalled, the square had filled with “ragheads,” maybe three hundred people pushing, edging forward, surrounding them on the narrow street. People whistling, shouting in Arabic. Somebody, said Mitchum, “remembered that it was to crowds like this that revolutionaries come to start a riot.” He
got his party up and moving as the crowd followed, many of them chanting his name, eyes full of fire. The others hurried to the car, unsettled, with hundreds of Moroccans in cotton frocks closing in behind them. “Get in the car, Bob!” someone shouted. But Mitchum paused, basking like a Roman emperor, until someone grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him into the car and the driver hit the gas.

  And on to Europe.

  Sheldon Reynolds was American television’s expatriate boy wonder, only twenty-six in 1951 when he began producing, directing, and writing a weekly series called Foreign Intrigue, a cloak-and-dagger drama distinguished by its authentic European backgrounds. Reynolds staggered Hollywood TV producers with the amount of production value he could squeeze into a low-budget show—each episode seemed to be shot in a half-dozen countries. This he accomplished through a variety of clever improvisatory strategems, shooting exterior sequences for an entire season at each location, then returning to his bases in Paris and Stockholm to write scripts and shoot interior scenes that would match up with what he had shot on the streets of Rome and Berlin and so on. The show was a hit, running for five seasons and 156 episodes. Then Reynolds came to Hollywood, wanting to “expand his horizons” and set up his first feature film. He shared the same agent with Robert Mitchum, and so they were brought together for a meeting on the set of Not as a Stranger. Mitchum liked Reynolds, knew his TV show, liked his nontraditional ideas about shooting a picture, and liked the idea of hanging around in the glamorous capitals of Europe. Mitchum said, “Let’s do something.” The problem was Reynolds didn’t have a script—he didn’t have a story even. The agent said he would be committing Mitchum to a summer picture within the next two weeks. Reynolds said that if he’d wait two weeks, he would have a script. He sat down and batted out a complete screenplay in the next eleven days. Mitchum liked it, United Artists liked it, and the picture was on.