by Lee Server
In Los Angeles, his actor and performer pals tended to be from the fringes of the showbiz hierarchy, colorful or eccentric characters or good storytellers or good listeners. There was Richard “Lord” Buckley, the avant-hip nightclub comic and monologist—as in “The Nazz,” his swinging history of Jesus Christ—with whom Mitchum shared a love of esoteric language and black dialects (it was because they both had part American Indian ancestry, they decided, and thus were both “honorary niggers”). There was actor Billy Murphy, who’d been in G.I. foe and The Sands of Iwo Jima, a strange cat who dressed all in black like a Western bad guy and had a favorite saying (”You bet your life, mister—and you may have to”) and a personality that struck fear in the hearts of directors and casting agents. There was Morty Guterman, an agent with the Feldman Company and Robert’s favorite companion for deep-sea fishing trips to Baja, and Peter Simon, a paraplegic who had worked with Marlon Brando on The Men and whom Robert became friendly with through Dorothy’s work with Los Angeles charities. There was actor Robert “the Wing Commander” Rothwell and movie extra/construction worker George Fargo, aka “Gray Cloud” because of the cloud of smoke that seemed always to be swirling around him. (Mitchum’s world was at times like one of those Howard Hawks movies where everybody had a nickname. There was “the Hog” and “Seed Sacker,” and the man himself was known to the gang as “the Goose,” as in the one that laid golden eggs and from his peculiar chest-out-thrust walk.) “The way Sinatra had his Rat Pack, Bob had a lot of guys he could pull together when he wanted to go off somewhere,” said actor Roy Jenson. “He’d say, ‘We’re going to New Orleans,’ or down to Mexico. And he’d go off for days or weeks, someplace like Mazatlan, he loved it there, taking four buddies with him, to drink with him. And there had to be four guys because it was like duty, nobody could keep up with him the whole time.”
Sheldon Reynolds remembered a Mitchum gathering in the late ’50s. It began, for him, one night in Paris: “It was about three o’clock in the morning, I was not entirely awake, and the phone rang. It was Mitchum. I said, ‘Hi.’ He said, ‘Let’s get together.’ I said, ‘Wonderful. Why don’t you come to Paris?’ He said, ‘Well, that’s a long way. Why don’t you come to California?’ I said, ‘Well . . . let’s compromise, we’ll meet in New York.’ And he said, ‘OK,’ and hung up the phone. I went back to sleep and in the morning I said to the woman I was going with, ‘Was I dreaming or did I get a call last night from Robert Mitchum?’ She said, ‘Yes, I think you did.’ So I called his number in California and I spoke to Dorothy. I said, ‘Could I talk to Bob? He called me last night but I’m not sure what we said.’ And she said, ‘I don’t know either, but he got in the car and said he was driving to New York.’ I said, ‘Well, do you expect that you’ll hear from him soon?’ And she said, ‘I think I will hear from him. He left without his wallet and he has no money’
“Well, that was typical is all I can say. And we did meet in New York some days later. He had driven across country by himself. He would meet people and he could sleep anywhere and just took things as they came. I remember him telling me about driving into a gasoline station somewhere in the South. The man filled up the tank, and as Mitchum was paying, the man looked at him and said, ‘Ain’t you that actor fella?’ And Mitchum said, ‘Yeah.’ And the man said, ‘Well, how about that.’ And he said, ‘Have you had dinner?’ And Mitchum said, ‘No.’ And the gas station man said, ‘You want to come home; we’ll give you something to eat.’ And off he went, taken care of for that night. I asked him how was the food and he said, ‘I think it was squirrel stew. Tasted like squirrel. Seasoned with buckshot.’
“In New York I stayed in the Hampshire House and he stayed in the Sherry Netherland, as I recall. And we picked up Trevor Howard, he joined the group. Trevor just showed up, I don’t know from where. There was a lot of drinking. And Trevor said we must go to this great little jazz bar, very tiny place he had discovered. Trevor insisted nobody went there, it was an out-of-the-way place. So we got into a taxi and the little place was just above Broadway and Forty-second Street. It was packed. The musicians were playing behind the bar, and they stepped down to come meet Mitchum. Everyone recognized him, and the place just kept getting more and more crowded. And things got out of hand, and the police came and they took us away in a police car. And Trevor, with this crowd around and getting pushed into the police car, said, ‘I don’t understand it; this place has gone all commercial!’
“And we had some days of this and then the two wives, Dorothy and Helen, Trevor’s wife, arrived in town. And everyone was to meet at 21. It had been a very long night, the night before. And everyone met up at 21, but Trevor didn’t show up. He hadn’t come back to his hotel and Helen became worried. ‘Where is he? Has something happened to him?’ she said. ‘Don’t either of you know where Trevor is?’ And we knew where we had last seen him, with some girl, but we didn’t tell her that. So Mitchum and I went off to try and find Trevor where we’d last seen him. But all we could remember from the night before was that it was a building on Fifth Avenue, nothing more, and Fifth ran for a hundred blocks. We didn’t know what to do. Then Bob remembered it was a building with a large doormat out front. So we drove along Fifth Avenue and at every building where there was a doormat, we stopped. And Mitchum would call to the doorman and say, ‘Was I here last night?’ And finally one doorman said yes, and Mitchum said, ‘And where did I go when I was here?’ And we went upstairs to somebody’s apartment, some girl, and Trevor was up there sleeping and we got him back to his wife.
“At the end of the week, everyone dispersed. But Mitchum wanted to stay on the road. And I wanted to see my sister, who lived in Washington, so we drove there in his car. And we stayed with my sister and her husband. I offered him the spare bed, but he said he would sleep on the floor. He really could adapt to any circumstances. I don’t recollect he had any plans after that. He had the ability to, as we say, drift. One day in Washington we said good-bye, and he got back into the car and drove off. I have no idea where he was headed and, I think, neither did he.”
Not long after he returned from the Caribbean, Mitchum ran into Johnny Mercer in Beverly Hills and told him about all the great music he had heard in Trinidad and Tobago and perhaps even sang him a tune or two. Mercer sent him over to Capitol Records in Hollywood. Capitol had been talking to Robert about an album for some time, but no one had ever come up with a game plan. The calypso thing appealed to everybody. Harry Belafonte had recently made a huge splash with his recordings of authentic and quasi-authentic Caribbean songs, including the chart-topping hit “Banana Boat (Day-O),” and sexy, so-called exotica records, from high-octave Andean warbling to Balinese bachelor pad instrumentals, were all the rage. Now Robert Mitchum was going to be calypso’s great white hope. He went into the studio for a couple of weeks in March 1957 with a crew of cocktail jazz and rock ‘n’ roll pros and some backup singers and made like Lord Melody on a dozen jump-up tunes, including “Coconut Water,” “Matilda” (with an innovative calypso-rock arrangement), “I Learn a Merengue, Baby,” and “Mama, Looka Boo Boo.” The resulting album, Calypso—is like so. . . , was an enticing romp, equal parts Belafonte, Martin Denny, and karaoke bar. It was the first time—until his series of accented film roles in the ‘60s and ‘70s—that Mitchum got to show off his talent for foreign accents, belting out the Carib ditties with scrupulously authentic intonations. As Caucasian calypso albums went, it was a masterpiece; and the cover photo—Mitch and a fistful of Jamaican rum in a Technicolor beach bar, complete with vaguely dusky maiden—was alone worth the selling price. But music lovers didn’t buy many copies, and the man went back to his day job.
In the summer, Mitchum was in Hawaii to film exteriors for The Enemy Below, the first of two films he made with the former boy crooner turned producer-director, Dick Powell. A drama of World War II set entirely at sea, it detailed a battle of wits between the commander of a U.S. destroyer and his enemy counterpart aboard a German submarine. Mitchum’s Cap
tain Murrell was his first establishment hero since his last war movie, One Minute to Zero; and the part did not inspire much enthusiasm from the actor—it was what they called a “solid” performance. The Enemy Below was part of the late-’50s trend toward antiwar films, specifically the liberal humanist subset that included The Young Lions and The Bridge on the River Kwai—films that in the cool of peacetime attempted to put a human face on the old enemy. When Mitchum had started in war pictures, it was all about slaughtering “krauts” and “Japs.” Now the movies wanted you to understand them. A graduate of live television dramas, Wendell Mayes, wrote the script from a story by Comdr. D. A. Rayner. Powell and Mayes had originally intended the film to have a tragic, haunting end as Mitchum is trying to save Curt Jurgens’s U-boat captain. “The moment Mitchum gets hold of him and starts pulling him aboard,” said Mayes, “the ship blows up, and at that point you pull back to watch this tremendous explosion, and you keep pulling back until there’s nothing left for the audience to see but the great vast empty sea. . . . There’s much more feeling if they should die, one finally trying to help the other after trying to kill him. But the studio said, ‘No, you like both of them. You can’t kill them. It’ll disappoint the audience.’ So we had the ending with them standing smoking a cigarette on the back end of the destroyer.”
There were the usual injuries and near disasters. Mitchum took a fall twenty feet down one of the ship’s open metal stairways and landed on the deck on his back. The doctor told him, “Your back’s sort of. . . broken.” He returned to work in a brace. On another day, shooting aboard the destroyer escort Whitehurst at sea off the coast of Oahu, Mitchum as the pretend captain signaled the firing of loaded depth charges. The charges misfired or the men at the ash can racks misheard the order, and instead of two charges, nearly a dozen were exploded, making the entire ship convulse, sending everyone on deck tumbling, short-circuiting the engine room, knocking out one engine, and causing a leak.
David Hedison: “The Enemy Below was my first film under contract to 20th Century-Fox in 1957. Robert Mitchum had always been one of my favorite actors; and when I first met him on the set, I can remember being a bit awkward, but he very quickly put me at ease. It was Doug McClure’s first film as well, and we were both very proud and happy to be appearing with Mitchum in our very first film—I mean, how lucky can you get? During the course of filming I had a line where I had to bark out a command: ‘Right full rudder!’ I thought I had delivered the line quite well, but Mitchum kept insisting I had said ruther not rudder. I told him he was wrong, but he wouldn’t let it go, even after seeing it on film. More than thirty years later I bumped into him and his lovely wife, Dorothy, at a restaurant. ‘Well hello,’ I beamed. ‘How have you been?’ ‘Just fine, Al,’ he said, ‘but I’m telling you, you said ruther?”
The second of the Powell productions was The Hunters, based on a superb, cold-blooded novel by James Salter, the story of a warrior breed of jet fighter pilots in the Korean conflict.
“While we used the title,” said writer Wendell Mayes, “what I wrote was from start to finish an original screenplay. There wasn’t anything else to do, because the novel could not be adapted. It was too internal. They do make mistakes in Hollywood in buying material.”
Powell lured Mitchum with a partial script. “It seemed fine to me. I got to fly a fighter plane and spend a lot of time in the Officers’ Club in Japan. ‘And you can go to Japan early and scout it out for a couple of weeks,’ he said. That sounded good, so I said yes. Then he sent me page thirty-one. And I found out my plane crashed and I spent the rest of the film carrying some fellow on my back. ‘You ought to cast that part by the pound,’ I said. ‘What’s Sinatra doing?’ But of course they saddled me with some hulk who got heavier by the minute.” And no trip to Japan. “We did the whole thing on the Fox ranch.”
He had originally planned to do a different Korean war drama, Battle Hymn, the story of Col. Dean E. Hess, a minister who became a fighter pilot and killed numerous Asians. Universal offered Mitch the part until the righteous colonel threw a fit. “I cannot possibly allow a man who has been jailed for taking drugs to play me on the screen!” said Hess. Mitchum couldn’t find the piece of paper that said he had been exonerated and so let it pass. Hess happily agreed to have himself portrayed instead by Rock Hudson, whose skeletons, unlike Mitchum’s, were still hermetically closeted.
“You got problems?” asked Robert Mitchum in a flavorful article he penned for the Hollywood Reporter. “Well, climb on the pad and tell old Dad. I don’t have any. Or, I didn’t have until producing a picture messed me up. As the man said, ‘It all started with a cloud in the sky no bigger than a man’s fist.’ Home crouched on the couch one night, it occurred to me that we might get a motion picture out of moonshiners and government tax men trying to outwit each other in the southeastern area of these United States.
“Sure, actors have problems, but I’ve found production problems come lower than a hungover snake. . . . “
In fact, Mitchum had been fiddling with the idea of a “moonshine adventure” for years, letting it simmer and take shape in his mind. It was now to become the subject of his first personal production: Thunder Road. Although he had influenced the final form of many of his films through the years, writing dialogue, pinch-hit directing, contributing to them in myriad small and large ways—and he’d been the coproducer and uncredited cowriter on Bandido!—it had taken him four years since his escape from RKO to take this next important step toward complete creative independence.
He met a smart, affable writer working for Batjac, John Wayne’s production company. James Atlee Phillips was a Texas newspaperman turned mystery novelist (The Case of the Shivering Chorus Girls, Suitable for Framing) and a tyro scenarist, a footloose character with a fertile imagination. He and Mitchum hit it off, and they began discussing the actor’s idea for a movie about the southern moonshine business. Mitchum had worked up a story line concerning an ex-soldier returned to his Smoky Mountain home, running illegal liquor across the state, trying to outwit and outrace the authorities; and another writer, Walter Wise, had done a draft, but it needed a lot of work. Mitchum wanted more details, an inside feel for the milieu. He and Jim Phillips decided they would go to Washington, D.C., on a research trip. Jim had a brother, David Atlee Phillips, a rising star in the CIA. The men from Hollywood came to see him at his office, which Mitchum claimed was located behind a false front, the facade of a brewery. Brother David made some phone calls, smoothing the way for them to meet with officials at the Treasury Department.*
Schmoozing officers of the department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division, explaining his desire to make a film documenting their glorious battle against the moonshine menace in the American South, Mitchum came away with a promise of full cooperation for his project. For days he and Phillips pawed through Alcohol and Tobacco’s criminal files and case histories, then carried on their research at the Library of Congress, learning about the ancestry of southern mountain families and spending some time listening to the library’s collection of regional folk music and rare “hillbilly” recordings.
One day Mitchum turned up in Asheville, North Carolina, a scenic crossroads and summer retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was the birthplace of a writer whose work Mitchum had always admired, Thomas Wolfe (Wolfe on Asheville: “. . . the cool sweet magic of starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of dark, the slope, the trees . . .”), and the town was no stranger to the moonshine trade. Mitchum checked in at the old Battery Park Hotel and, with an introduction and authorization from Washington in his pocket, he telephoned the treasury’s man in Asheville, John Corbin, and asked if they could get together.
“Are you some kinda joker?” said Corbin. “Robert Mitchum the movie man:
A meeting was arranged, and Corbin brought along Al Dowtin, a respected local legend and overachiever, former sports hero, former FBI agent, and champion golfer, now the head of the local ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) Board.
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“I was chief of the law enforcement for the Asheville ABC,” said Dowtin. “The liquor stores had just been voted in in North Carolina, and so liquor sales had just become legal in Asheville at the ABC store; but prior to that the only liquor we had coming in to Asheville, which is a town of fifty-six thousand people, well, it was illegal. So mountain liquor—white liquor, corn liquor—was the basic alcohol used by most people. And they did a good business, I would say. There was stills all over them mountains in western North Carolina. About eleven hundred stills. And when I was working with Alcohol Tax we arrested over ten thousand people. You’re asking me how did we find the stills? Well, we would get information. There’s always some good people in a neighborhood who don’t like to see people sellin’ liquor.”
Dowtin sat down with Bob Mitchum and they talked moonshine. “He was just about as down-to-earth a fella as you ever saw. And we talked, and he wanted to know if we could furnish him all the information he wanted on the moonshiners’ tricks and how they operated and all that business. He asked a lot of questions. And o’ course we wanted to help him anyway we could. So we filled him in on everything he wanted to know, told him some adventures. I had some car chases, shot down the tires on a car. Once or twice someone shot at us from up the hill. Most of the time, though, I told him, it was like this; we treated folks right, that was my belief. We’d arrest them, and rather than put handcuffs on ‘em, we’d tell ‘em, ‘Come to the office on Monday and turn yourself in.’ I tell you, we treated people right. . . . See, where you get in trouble in life is treatin’ people wrong.”