by Lee Server
Mitchum returned to Hollywood and set about putting together a cast and crew for his moonshine movie. His choice to direct the picture was decidedly unconventional yet emblematic. Sixty-two-year-old Arthur Ripley was an eccentric and mysterious figure in American film circles. To those who had worked with him in the course of his peripatetic forty years in the business, his behavior and appearance had engendered as much comment as his undoubted talent. He was a gloomy presence in his early days and prone to fits of truculent shouting as if, said one observer, “unseen demons were fighting his ideas.” He seldom changed clothes or bathed; and while making a film for Walter Wanger in the ‘30s, Ripley looked so frighteningly unkempt that intermediaries hid him under blankets when the fastidious producer visited the sets. In the beginning a film editor (he chopped von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives from twenty-four reels to fourteen on a train from Los Angeles to New York), then a Mack Sennett gag writer, he partnered with a young Frank Capra in creating a series of features for silent clown Harry Langdon. Ripley, it was said, gave Langdon his “dark” side. Joshua Logan, who codirected a film with him in 1938, declared, “Ripley was a true movie man. . . . He knew everything there was to know. An inspired man, almost a clairvoyant, it took careful knowing to appreciate him.” In 1942, Ripley directed Prisoner of Japan, from a story by Edgar Ulmer, completing it in five days; the picture cost $19,000 and made $350,000. His mood-drenched romance of Nazi refugees in the Caribbean, Voice in the Wind, took eight days to shoot and the New York Times said it contained “more art per linear foot than most Oscar winners.” Ripley made one more feature in the mid-’40s, the great, bizarre film noir The Chase, starring Peter Lorre and Steve Cochran, from a novel by Cornell Woolrich. And then . . . mostly unemployment and obscurity. At the time Mitchum went looking for him, it had been over ten years since Ripley had directed anything.
“Anybody else would have tried to get some established director or some hot new talent that everyone was enthusiastic about,” said Reva Frederick. “It was typical of Robert to come up with Ripley. He got these ideas from the back of his head, you didn’t know where. He said he had seen one of the man’s movies years ago, he couldn’t remember it exactly, but he thought that was the sort of guy he wanted.” Mitchum was intrigued by the filmmaker’s outsider rep—he compared him to Nick Ray as another artist “people just didn’t believe in”—and by his legendary economy. “He was a very gifted man and a drinking fellow,” said Mitchum, “a tall, sonorous, big-nose character from Brooklyn, teaching at UCLA when we nailed him.” Said Reva, “We found Arthur Ripley. Oh boy. He was one hundred and ninety years old or looked it. He liked to drink, and when he drank he didn’t know where he was, where he lived, or how to get back home. Robert liked him.”
His next idea was even more inspired, but by no means economical. Mitchum wanted to costar in the film with Elvis Presley. The young musical sensation had appeared in just one film so far, Love Me Tender, stealing the picture right out from under the nominal star (and Mitchum’s friend), Richard Egan. In Thunder Road, Mitchum wanted Presley to play his character’s upstart young brother.
He showed up at Elvis’s hotel suite one day, with a screenplay in one hand and a fifth of scotch in the other. Members of Presley’s omnipresent posse escorted him inside to meet the twenty-two-year-old King. Elvis was a confessed fan of Mitchum’s and confided that the actor’s high, upswept hairstyle in one picture had been the inspiration for his own much-talked-about pompadour. Mitchum chuckled, poured himself a drink. They chewed the fat, Bob trotting out some old standards, the escape from the chain gang, snapping hound dogs, and such. Elvis told his friend Russ Tamblyn that Mitchum’s exciting stories had left him “all shook up.”
At last, feeling the two of them had established a pretty good rapport, Mitchum got down to business. “Here’s the fuckin’ script,” he said. “Let’s get together and do it.”
According to Presley’s pal Lamar Fike, a witness to the meeting, Elvis told Mitchum they would have to discuss it with his manager.
Mitchum said, “Fuck, I’m talking to you. I don’t need to talk to your manager. Let’s do the picture.”
“Well, I can’t,” Elvis said. “Not unless the Colonel says I can.”
Colonel Parker didn’t care about sentimental shit like Mitchum’s influential hairdo. The price for Presley was most of Thunder Road’s estimated budget, and that was more or less the end of that. Presley did accept an invitation to come over to the Mandeville house one weekend. Young Chris Mitchum, used to seeing famous faces drop by and pretty blase about it, was stunned by the visit. Gregory Peck, Jane Russell, these people were just . . . neighbors. Here was a star! Presley ate roast beef at the dinner table, then played the piano and sang and did a couple of duets with his host. Bob’s stock climbed several points in his children’s eyes.
Mitchum’s oldest son, sixteen-year-old Jim, had sprouted up to his father’s size and was getting bigger, and people often joked that they looked like twins. Bob decided to give him a taste of the family business and cast him to play Luke’s young brother, offering him a minimum salary of $280 a week. “I’m a producer first and a father second,” Mitchum said. Other roles went to Gene Barry (the federal lawman), Jacques Aubuchon (the gangster villain), Mitch Ryan and Peter Breck (young punks), and to singer and Las Vegas lounge sensation Keely Smith, making her acting debut as Luke’s chanteuse girlfriend. “Robert had come into the office one day some time before,” said Reva, “and he said, ‘I have heard the greatest record of all time!’ He was just crazy about that record, Louis Prima and this girl he said had a great voice, Keely Smith. So fade out, and now we’re casting Thunder Road and Robert says, ‘Let’s see if we can talk to Keely Smith about the part.’ He wanted her and that was that. He had a theory that anyone who could sing, who could deliver a lyric, could act. This didn’t turn out to be correct, but she was a very nice lady.”
Mitchum cowrote two songs for the film, “The Whippoorwill” and a title theme, “The Ballad of Thunder Road.” With the latter he had no luck fitting the lyrics to a piece of music that worked until his mother tried the words against an old Norwegian dancing tune she knew, sort of a polka. Eureka. Mitchum recorded a version of “The Ballad” for Capitol, which in September rose to number sixty-two on the pop-rock charts.
The legion from Hollywood descended on Asheville in the autumn of 1957. Mitchum took over the Governor’s Suite at the local hotel, and Thunder Road people filled every other room in the place and a motel and a few boardinghouses as well. Locations were scouted and chosen all over town and on the roads and mountains outside of Asheville and over in nearby Transylvania County. Extras and all bit parts were cast from among the local population, including high school students, businessmen, and local celebrity Farmer Russ, a popular radio disc jockey who would play the laughing lout in the nightclub sequence. Al Dowtin took Mitchum next door from the ABC to Hoyle’s Office Supply Store, a former car dealership that had its own parking garage, and they made an arrangement with owner Red Hoyle to use the garage and part of his outdoor parking lot and to build an office set in the back. “He came in and he said, ‘We’d like to film a movin’ picture in your parking area,’ Red Hoyle remembered, “and I said fine, OK. And they made it into a body shop back there and filmed things and jumping out of the window and so on.” The Hoyle building became Thunder Road’s improvised studio for a number of interiors and exterior scenes. The store remained open and people would come in to buy their pencils and stationery while Mitchum and the others walked in and out making the picture. “He was a fine fellow, Robert Mitchum,” said Red Hoyle. “He treated me fine. They were there for some weeks and he brought a lot of people to the store ‘cause he would come on in when he took a break, and walk around, sit down on the office furniture and say hello to people, so forth and so on. And people came around, two, three hundred women there all the time. Those ladies would come up and see him shoot scenes. I thought they were coming to see me, but they really came t
o see him.”
The film company settled into Asheville, Mitchum telling them all to mingle, make themselves part of the scenery. It was the locals who had trouble acting natural as they gathered in crowds for hours at a time watching the filming or froze in place, slack-jawed, watching Mitchum and Keely Smith cruising down the main street in an open convertible. At night the movie stars were often to be found at the nearby nightspot, The Sky Club, located inside an actual castle built by an eccentric rich man. “They were all up there all the time,” said Mickey Hoyle, Red’s son. “That was a private club, the only place you could get drinks by the glass. Everywhere else you had to brown bag it. They shot part of the movie in there, too.”
When word spread that Mitchum was living in Asheville, he was paid a visit by a committee of Indian tribesmen from Lane, South Carolina. Relatives, it turned out, from Mitchum’s paternal grandmother’s side of the family. Mitchum embraced them warmly and staked them all to a night’s entertainment. “They were among the most frightening people I’d ever met,” he said. “They were pure blooded Blackfoot, wild-looking men who, if you gave ‘em too many drinks, would tear down the motel.”
Very soon it became apparent that Arthur Ripley would not be making Thunder Road in anything like four days. The working atmosphere was extremely relaxed, the script vestigial. Bossman Mitchum ran a loose ship, to say the least, and the shooting schedule became a meaningless affectation. Gene Barry, playing Treasury agent Troy Barrett, arrived at the location for an expected three-week stay. “But I got there and—it was a nice little town, Asheville—I found they were making it up as they went along. Arthur Ripley was an elderly man, very intelligent, very articulate, knew camera angles, all the technical aspect. But he was very slow. And Jim Phillips, a nice guy, clean-cut looking young man, was constantly writing new scenes, taking advantage of whatever local color they found, and some of the people there were very colorful. And my three weeks were up and Jim Phillips would say to me, ‘Don’t go, I’ve written a great scene for you.’ And my three weeks came and went and they kept me for another six weeks. And my wife would call and say, ‘When are you coming home?’ And I said, ‘Don’t complain, they’re enlarging my role!’”
“Hell, yes, Jim got behind in the writing,” said Al Dowtin. “Jim, he liked to drink a little beer, and I guess most all of us do a little bit, occasionally. And he had a hard time keeping ahead of what they were going to shoot and coming up with a script. He did all his writing in his hotel room. But anyway, he was a real nice guy. And I don’t think Mitchum minded waiting for the pages, he was having such a good time.”
Actor Jerry Hardin, playing one of the moonshine drivers, had been at a summer stock theater in Virginia when Mitchum passed through town and hired him for Thunder Road, his first film. “Mitchum,” he said, “was the most laid-back man that I had ever seen. The business of acting was very casual with him. The thing that was of primary importance was his relationship with the company. He loved to party and practical jokes were de rigeur. One night he got ahold of about six dozen baby chicks and put them into one guy’s room—I think he was the stunt driver. And then everybody waited for the man to stumble home after having a good deal of liquor. And the man came and the chicks were everywhere and so were their droppings, and the guy was floundering and flopping about—this story lived on the set for weeks afterward.
“Mitchum represented to me the most extraordinary physical specimen. He partied all night sometimes, and he would come to the set, they put a little bit of makeup under his eyes, and he would work the whole day. You never could see it on the film. Absolutely astonishing. His conquests were a legend, all kinds of wild tales flying around. Women were coming from all over to pay attention to Mitchum, and Mitchum was, how shall I say, paying attention to them—until his wife showed up. There was talk about him making love with nearly every woman in North Carolina. I don’t know how much of that was accurate, but he was clearly popular.”
“Oh my, yes,” said one Asheville resident, confirming this conclusion. “He was quite a ladies’ man.”
“There was one morning, after a very full weekend,” a member of the company recalled, “and Mitchum was on the set, very abashed, and he was telling how he had partied so hard that the whole weekend had become a blank. His wife had just gotten into town, he said, but he had somehow lost track of her; and dawn came and he was confused, his head hurt, and he saw that he was in bed with some woman. And Mitchum thought, ‘Oh shit! Where am I? My wife’s in town; I can’t get caught doing this again!’ So he got out of bed very quietly, he could barely open his eyes, and he put his clothes on and climbed out of the window and ran away out of there and down an alley without looking back. He wandered around and made his way to the set and passed out. When he woke up and the crew were getting ready, he noticed that he didn’t have his wristwatch. . . . He had forgotten his wristwatch in the woman’s bedroom, and it was an expensive watch, a gift from his wife, had his name inscribed, a little message and everything. And he said, ‘Oh, Jesus, I don’t even know where I was, and I left my goddamn watch there. My goose is cooked.’ And he was agonizing about this all morning, trying to remember where he was last night and who the woman was. And about midmorning his wife came to the set. And she said, ‘Bob, I noticed you forgot your watch on the bedstand this morning; I brought it over.’ He was so drunk he didn’t even know he was in bed with his own wife and had snuck out of his own room. I don’t know if the story is correct, but it has a definite ring of truth to it from what was going on there, and he’s the one told me the story.”
As if to forestall the same charges of nepotism he often leveled at the Hollywood establishment, Mitchum made sure not to play favorites with his sixteen-year-old son. “He’s had no formal training,” said the father, “so I raised hell with him on the set whenever he goofed or got self-conscious in front of the cameras. I was much rougher on him than on any actors I’ve ever worked with.” With the rest of the Thunder Road company, Mitchum was both a benevolent and a creative producer. For many segments of the film he was codirector as well. Ripley at times restricted himself to the technical and visual details of filming while Mitchum would casually take over with the actors. Mitchum was particularly good at coaching all the film’s nonprofessional bit players.
Along with everything else the cast and crew were soaking up, Mitch encouraged them to ingest the film’s background and subject matter, to get involved. “Mitchum went to considerable lengths to expose us to the inner workings of the whiskey-running business,” said Jerry Hardin. “He had guys talking to us who had driven the cars, and there were Drug and Alcohol people around telling their stories. A good deal of effort was put into wising us up to what was going on, so we knew what everything looked like and felt like. It was very important to Mitchum as we made this film that everyone felt like they were part of the atmosphere.”
“I said to Bob, ‘I’d like to know more about what these agents do,’” Gene Barry recalled. “And so he arranged it for me to go with some of the real guys on a raid into the hills. And this group of tough-looking guys came up to the hotel, said, ‘OK, we’re here.’ And first they gave me a pair of boots to wear. Then they shoved a gun in my hand. I said, ‘What’s this for?’ They said, ‘You may have to protect yourself where we’re going.’ And we drove around the back roads up above Hendersonville, and then we went into the woods on foot. And then we came charging into this still someone had built there in the woods. But the moonshiners had been tipped off and got away with their goods. Somebody told them we were coming. It was very clannish around there. Or maybe Mitchum tipped them, you never know!”
There were those who wondered just exactly which side Mitchum was on in the struggle between white lightning and the law. At some point during the shooting, two Alcohol Tax people Mitchum had spoken to in Washington came down to see how things were going. They came to the set and observed the shooting of several scenes, and it began to occur to them that their friend Bob was not
playing a Treasury agent after all but was portraying a criminal whiskey driver. “Here’s what happened, and I don’t know how you ought to handle it,” said a man on the scene who would prefer to go unnamed. “They came down and saw what the picture was about. And they saw how Bob was outsmarting the Alcohol Tax agent and making the agents look kind of like the whiskey runner was a little bit smarter person. Well, I mean this was purely fictional, but they didn’t quite like that. And they didn’t know what to do, so they sort of pulled out of cooperating, just backed away from the whole thing and went back to Washington.”
The cars that were used in the film had been obtained at no little effort. Production manager John E. Burch was sent combing the hills for the sixteen-year-old Mercurys and other hopped-up moonshiner transporters. “Here was old Dan with a pocket full of Hollywood green,” said Mitchum on the matter. “Everytime we found what we needed, we also found one of the local mountain boys had just bought it.” Eventually, though, a souped-up fleet was put together for the would-be bootleggers. “Everything we drove was an authentic whiskey-running car they had gotten from sources,” said Jerry Hardin. “There was nothing faked. We were running around town with these hot engines everywhere. Mitchum was fascinated by the cars. And he was very proud of what the car he was driving could do, how it could outrun the police. Mitchum was really into it, like he’d become one of these whiskey runners. He was in the center of this world and really enjoying it.”
While all the actors in the chase scenes were required to do some highspeed runs through the town and up and down the wooded highway, the difficult and dangerous stuff was left to an amazing stunt driver named Carey Loftin (the man with the baby chicks in his room). A Hollywood legend, Loftin had been driving—and crashing—high-speed vehicles in the movies for decades (and would continue to do so for another forty years). Loftin’s dexterity at the wheel was extraordinary. It was believed that his vision was literally superhuman—he could see through fog, for example. “What would be a blur to you or me,” said his widow, “was crystal clear to Carey. So it was like everything moved slower for him and gave him more time to adjust to it. His reactions were so fast that he could catch a flying bug between two fingers just putting his hand up—just two fingers.”