Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Loftin arrived in Asheville direct from doubling Marlon Brando on a motorcycle in The Young Lions. His hair was still bleached blond for that picture, and Mitchum made a great show of taking him down to the local women’s beauty parlor and having it darkened while townspeople looked in through the window.

  A flamboyant, fun-loving character, Loftin enjoyed dazzling people with his legendary gifts. For Thunder Road’s big stunt—Luke Doolin driving to his death, the car rolling over repeatedly and crashing into an electric station—Carey went up to the cameraman and asked him for his “mark.”

  “What?”

  “Where do you want the car to come to a stop?”

  The car was supposed to flip over out of control and spin till it got to the jerry-rigged electric station. The cameraman wasn’t thinking in such precise terms, but he shrugged and pointed to a spot on the ground. Carey took a last puff on a cigarette and tossed it on the spot. He got in the car, drove down the road and turned around, waited for the signal, then moved. The car screeched, skidded, flipped over again and again, and shuddered to a stop. Loftin climbed out, everyone applauded; they moved over to the front of the upside-down car and saw Carey’s cigarette butt lying dead center below the front fender.

  “Carey and Bob had a good time down there,” said Mrs. Loftin. “He said they got stoned on some real moonshine liquor from the mountains, the kind in a jug, and you slung it over your shoulder and passed it back and forth. And they were seeing who could outdrink who, and they were very bleary-eyed at the end of it.”

  Yes, said Al Dowtin, “Bob was kind of interested in knowing about the white liquor. See, there was kind of a mystique to it. Whenever a still would start running, the first liquor that came out would be about a hundred and fifty proof. Then as the mash would run, it got lower. But all the liquor we confiscated always came out about a hundred percent. And about eighty-six is the average for tax-paid liquor. So the illegal stuff was always a bit stronger. Bob liked hearing about that, and I’m sure he probably drank a little of it when he was here. Somebody got some white liquor for him.”

  Was it possible to sample any of the moonshine that had been confiscated, an anonymous source was asked?

  “No, no . . . don’t say anything about that. No.”

  “Bob was just the most regular down-to-earth guy,” said Al Dowtin. “And he always had time, even when he was working, to stop and say hello and kid with people. And I remember one time, I came over to where they were shooting with a good golfing friend of mine, Dr. Brutin. He was in charge of the medical department over there; he was sort of a character. And that day Bob had sent one of his drivers over to bring back a big tub of ice and cases of beer and some drinks. And everybody had their drinks and their ice. And Bob was drinking; he drank everything. And Dr. Brutin says to him, ‘Bob, I don’t know about all this drinking,’ he says. ‘At your age that stuff may not be good for you anymore.’

  “And Bob said, ‘Now lookee here, Doc,’ he said to him. ‘I know more old drunks than I do old doctors.

  With its B picture dramatics, certain zombielike performances, and flat, even primitive visuals (not discounting Ripley’s random moments of surrealism and poetic images, like the final brief cutaway glimpse of nocturnal road, with distant car beams like lightning bugs at the very tip of the screen), it would be difficult to place Thunder Road among Mitchum’s greatest works of film art. Its real distinction is more personal: the movie simply contains more of Robert Mitchum, more of his actual creative participation and more of his heart, soul, and mind than any other. From the sympathetic subject matter—the creation and distribution of high-octane alcohol—to the alienated, outside-the-law hero who feels without a home even in his mother’s kitchen, the glimpses of a close yet dysfunctional family, the film’s almost religious belief in rugged individualism, the obsession with the Deep South, the fetish for high-speed cars, liquor, lonely open roads, and an all-night life, the pessimistic, fatalistic perspective that harkened back to his ten years in the noir trenches—here, more than in any other single film, was Mitchum’s ultimate cinematic statement, his personal vision of life transposed into lurid, downbeat entertainment. A cult film long before such terms for cherished yet disreputable works of art had gained popular acceptance, Thunder Road would foster a rabid underground following, a cross-cultural group of enthusiasts that included southern teenagers, vintage car buffs, film scholars, and an otherwise unclassifiable demographic that desired to watch over and over the cool way Mitchum, while tearing down Thunder Road, flicks a cigarette through the window of a pursuing bad guy’s car. Pop culture critics would be inspired to flights of rhapsody about the film and its delirious allure, most notably Richard Thompson in an ode published in a 1969 issue of December Magazine. “Thunder Road,” he wrote, “is a private myth irradiating the secret corners of a lost existence with the savor of true existentialism. . . . Thunder Road disciples envy those who saw it exactly right: at a drive-in, sitting in their customized Fords and Chevs, just after leaving the high school dance and just before juking on down to Shakey’s Pizza Parlor.” The film’s afterlife in the South—where it was called the “Gone With the Wind of the drive-in”—was a true cultural phenomenon. People would speak of seeing it—like a spotting of the Loch Ness monster—playing to packed audiences in theaters in places like Knoxville and Pikeville, twenty and more years after its original release.

  . . .

  On January 10, 1958, Bob and his son Jim made an appearance on Frank Sinatra’s short-lived and poorly received (”One of the biggest disappointments of the season,” said TV Guide) weekly television series on ABC. Sinatra, said the New York World-Telegram, “didn’t just walk through his show, he shambled, shrugged, and could not have cared less.” Clearly, then, what the show cried out for was the caring presence of Robert Mitchum. He and Sinatra did a half singing, half crosstalk number, a hipster’s variation on an old Gallagher & Shean vaudeville bit.

  FS: Oh, Mr. Mitchum!

  RM: Yeah, Dad?

  FS: I have heard that you’ve made records, more or less.

  RM: More or less would be more right, and unless you’d like to fight, that sarcastic tone I’d thank you to suppress.

  FS: Sarcastic? Me? Ha ha, perish the thought!

  Jim Mitchum, after a taste of movie acting in Thunder Road, announced that he was now planning to make a career of it. He began trying out for parts and landed a role in an Albert Zugsmith production starring Steve Cochran, The Beat Generation. It was the sort of credit that had an asterisk attached to it—Zugsmith liked to fill his teen drive-in pictures with a lot of starry surnames, and the children of Edward G. Robinson, Charles Chaplin, and John Barrymore were a lot cheaper than their famous parents would ever have been. Jim certainly had more natural ability than some, but his uncanny resemblance to his father minus the charisma would not make things easy for him. Whether indicating reticence, disinterest, or something else, Pappa Bob’s public statements regarding his son’s would-be career were never a public relations agent’s dream. Aside from the very big break he handed the boy in letting him appear in Thunder Road, Robert seldom enthused over Jim’s prospective stardom. Instead his tendency was toward blunt honesty, telling a reporter, “Jim is an over-privileged kid from Brentwood and likes whatever the equivalent of Schwabs is for his set.” Mitchum added, “It’s difficult for him; he’s a grown man but has been deprived of the experience of maturity.”

  In the summer Robert and Dorothy went to Greece. The Angry Hills was a novel by Leon Uris about an American correspondent, a reluctant hero joining the Greek resistance fighters after the surprise German invasion in 1941. Buying it for the screen, producer Raymond Stross and associates had originally sought Alan Ladd for the hero role, Mitchum claimed. “But when they drove out to his desert home to see him he’d just crawled out of his swimming pool and he was all shrunken up like a dishwasher’s hand. They decided he wouldn’t do for the big war correspondent. Some idiot said, ‘Ask Mitchum to play it.
That bum will do anything if he’s got five minutes free.’ Well, I had five minutes free.” (Back in the desert, according to Alan Ladd’s biographer, the diminutive actor would read Bob’s comments and have a severe attack of shingles.) Mitchum was once again playing the revolutionary and the outsider, and once more taking a three-month jaunt far from home.

  It was a British production with Hollywood’s Robert Aldrich—then in self-imposed European exile—hired to direct. Aldrich found the idea of the story alluring—”an American coming of political age and assuming commitment and responsibility during the early days of the last war.” The screenplay by the novel’s author, however, Aldrich thought completely unfilmable. But the commitments were irretrievably made. On July 1 the cameras had to turn. The director sent for one of his most valued past collaborators, A. I. Bezzerides (Track of the Cat), with whom he had made Kiss Me, Deadly several years before.

  “The producer and Uris had worked for a year on a script and it had to be thrown out,” Bezzerides said. “It was no good. The whole thing had to be rewritten, and the producer didn’t like that much. . . . I was writing this thing while they were shooting.”

  Bezzerides renewed his acquaintance with Bob Mitchum. “He could never pronounce my name, so he’d say, ‘Hey, Bazza . . . Bizza . . . Beezareet. . . . Hey, man, what are you doin’ here?’ I asked him, ‘Why are you doing this piece of shit?’ We were on location in Athens. He said, ‘Well . . . I’ve never been to Greece.’

  Director Aldrich’s misgivings about the film only grew as the shooting began. The script was not coming together. The half Greek, half British crew did not get along. Few of the Greeks spoke English, so that instructions had to be relayed back and forth through translators, and there was a great deal of confusion. And then there was Mitchum. Aldrich was a powerful masculine personality who could bring out the best in many of the screen’s toughest hombres, men like Jack Palance, Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, and he and Mitchum should have clicked—but did not. Aldrich had known Mitchum since assistant directing The Story of G.I. Joe (indeed, Aldrich sometimes claimed to have been Mitchum’s “discoverer,” the man who actually recommended him to Wellman for the picture), but they had never developed a friendship. Now, in Greece, as the cameras turned, the director came up against what he called an “inability to find any personal or creative or even emotional routes to discover whatever it is that must be discovered to make Robert Mitchum function as an actor.”

  Theodore Bikel, playing the movie’s extremely seedy, wheeler-dealer, fifth columnist Tassos, observed the conflict between director and star. “Mitchum was very professional; he did everything really, really well. He also could turn ornery if you made him do something he didn’t like. Let loose a whole string of invectives. But Aldrich was not intimidated. He was not the kind of director who gave in to anyone. He had a short fuse and he would yell. And so in the end Mitchum did what Aldrich wanted, but he didn’t necessarily like it.”

  A columnist got Mitchum on the phone for a comment on the work in progress. “I play a mute war correspondent who gets to freeload on the Greek peasants,” he said. “He has trouble with the goats. There are goats all over. . . . I don’t know if he’s a hero or a villain. I’ll be clearer on that when the writer gets back.”

  They had been shooting for about a week. Everyone was staying at a lovely hotel on the beach just outside Athens. The picture was falling apart. After dinner one night Aldrich went down to Mitchum’s cabana overlooking the water and told him they should talk.

  Aldrich said, “We’re making a lousy movie. I’m trying the best I can, and I sense you are, but it’s not working and I don’t know what to do.”

  Mitchum said, “Don’t you understand what we’re making? We’re making a gorilla picture.”

  Aldrich stared at him. “What is a gorilla picture, Bob?”

  “A gorilla picture is when you get two hundred fifty thousand dollars for doing all the wrong things for ten reels and in the last shot you get the girl and fade into the sunset. That’s a gorilla picture. I don’t care how well you make it, it’s still going to be a gorilla picture. Now if you understand that, you’ll be very happy. If you don’t, you’ll be very unhappy.”

  Aldrich said, “I don’t understand that. So I’m going to be very unhappy. . . . I don’t want to make a gorilla picture.”

  While Aldrich suffered, Mitchum enjoyed his Greek vacation. “We had a lot of fun on that location,” said Theo Bikel. “There was a lot of music, there was a lot of good wine—well, perhaps not good wine, but a lot of it. The nights on the town could be excruciatingly late. Things don’t start in Greece until midnight. There were quite a few nights when we would be in the nightclubs until four or five in the morning, and there would be a seven o’clock call on the set. Luckily my part in the film was such that 1 could go on camera looking like shit.”

  Robert Mitchum’s longtime assistant and confidante, Reva Frederick, teaching Robert and Charles McGraw how to blow a bubble during the production of One Minute to Zero (1952)Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum in Otto Preminger’s River of No Return, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1954.Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Mitchum on the French Riviera with starlet Simone Silva: all an unfortunate misunderstanding.Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Preacher Powell and the children: Robert Mitchum, Billy Chapin, and Sally Jane Bruce in The Night of the Hunter (1955), directed by Charles Laughton. Courtesy New York Public Library

  Observing an operation, future physician Lee Marvin, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Mitchum, in Not as a Stranger (1955), directed by Stanley Kramer. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  The great William A. Wellman, director of The Story of G.I. Joe, Track of the Cat and a would-be Mitchum starrer, Blood Alley. Here seen in San Rafael, California, at the time of Mitchum’s firing. Courtesy of William Wellman Jr.

  Mitchum Confidential: L. A. Herald Express headline.

  Advertisement for Thunder Road (1958). Courtesy New York Public Library

  Robert Mitchum’s wife, Dorothy, and their three children, Jim, 17, Chris, 14, and Petrine, 6, arrive at London Airport en route to Athens, Greece, to join Robert, filming The Angry Hills, June, 1958. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum in The Sundowners (1960). Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Mitchum as gunfighter Martin Brady in The Wonderful Country, from the novel by Tom Lea (United Artists, 1959). Courtesy of author’s collection

  Robert Mitchum and his producer, Gregory Peck: the violent climax to Cape Fear (1962). Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  “Fun to be a movie star.” Robert Mitchum and friends circa 1963. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine in Two for the Seesaw (United Artists, 1962). Courtesy New York Public Library

  Robert Mitchum astride a lesbian elephant, filming Mister Moses (1965) in Kenya. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, with Charlotte Rampling in Farewell, My Lovely (1975), from the novel by Raymond Chandler. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Robert Mitchum as Victor “Pug” Henry in the television miniseries, The Winds of War (1983) Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  Robert and brother, John Mitchum, Los Angeles, 1989. Courtesy Andrew Fenady Productions

  Robert and Dorothy Mitchum attending a premiere, 1995. Childhood sweethearts, together for more than sixty years. Courtesy AP/Wide World Photos

  The end: the front page of New York’s Daily News, July 2, 1997. Copyright © New York Daily News, L.P. reprinted with permission

  Mitchum had arrived in Greece without much enthusiasm for the local females. “They all look like they’re wearing moustaches to me,” he said. With time, though, he would come to have a more sympathetic point of view. “Women swelled around the movie set,” said Bikel. “These were more liberated Greek women, fascinated with the stardom of Mitchum. One of them latched onto him. I would see her in the
trailer a few times.

  “He was very funny. One night in Athens we were at a nightclub and there was a female impersonator performing. Mitchum was quite taken by what he saw. He said, ‘Boy, she is something! I’ve got to have her.’ I said to him, ‘Bob, you can’t!’ He said, ‘What do you mean? Why not?’ I said, ‘Because, the person you’re looking at. . . it’s not a she, it’s . . . it’s a he. . . it’s an it.’ And he said, ‘I don’t care about the plumbing. She’s gorgeous!’”

  Another member of the cast, Stanley Baker, a legendary carouser in British film circles, had been eagerly anticipating his first drinking match with the man who—in regard to alcohol consumption—he took to be his American counterpart. The match ended with Baker unconscious and carried back to his hotel, while Mitchum carried on for another four or five hours until dawn and then headed off to breakfast and work.

  “I had a very bemused view of all this,” said Theo Bikel. “I tagged along, as the house intellectual. I liked Mitchum. He was pleasant, fun to be with. Sometimes we sang together, in the restaurants, sitting around in the evening. I would take out the guitar and do folk music, and then he would take a turn with it and do a blues number. Later, as the night wore on . . . Mitchum was not a particularly pleasant drunk. Some people when they drink get mellow. He didn’t. He got robust and belligerent. And you got the feeling that you better steer clear of him when he was that way. He had a general orneriness. He was a bit of a redneck. His whole background came out of the sort of poor white trash environment where there was mistrust for anyone and anything that wasn’t of their ilk. I got that feeling. And his tendency was to needle; and if you’re sitting with him and you’re a Jew, as I am, you needle the Jew. But he was very nice most of the time, and I don’t want to neglect that. It’s important to say that he was a very pleasant human being who had a dark side to him.”