Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  * David Atlee Phillips was later connected with the Bay of Pigs invasion and numerous other attention-getting CIA operations in North and Central America. Conspiracy buffs have claimed for him a part in the assassination of President Kennedy. In the early ‘60s, his brother James began writing a series of paperback spy novels under an alias: Philip Atlee. The books were notable for their imaginative detail regarding clandestine operations. Mitchum remained good friends with Jim for many years and spoke with David from time to time, and they may have been the source for some of Mitchum’s later “inside stories” of “spooks” and government plots and international conspiracies. James Atlee Phillips’s son, Shawn, a folk rock singer, performed on Donovan’s recording of “Sunshine Superman.” What else do you want to know?

  chapter twelve

  The Smirnoff Method

  WITHIN DAYS OF THE Mitchum family’s arrival at their new tidewater residence in the spring of 1959, Robert had gone to his next job. Home from the Hill, based on the novel by William Humphrey and a script by Irving and Harriet Ravetch, was MGM’s latest foray into the then popular and surprisingly fertile Sleazy Southern Gentry genre. Ingredients common to this category were big old plantation houses, randy and/or cranky patriarchs and their neurotic sons and nymphomaniac daughters, nasty skeletons in the family closets (anything from drunken driving arrests to hereditary insanity), and lots of overripe, bourbon-and-magnolia-scented acting (examples of the genre include The Long Hot Summer, The Sound and the Fury, Written on the Wind, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).

  For two hundred thousand dollars plus a percentage of the gross, Mitchum agreed to play “Captain” Wade Hunnicutt, the ferociously masculine and debauched head of a wealthy East Texas family, husband to an embittered, sexually withdrawn wife (Eleanor Parker in the film), father to a sensitive “mamma’s boy” (George Hamilton) and—officially unacknowledged—to a manly bastard (George Peppard). The role had originally been earmarked for Clark Gable who became unavailable, but it is unlikely that Gable, two decades older and gentler with his screen image, would have been capable of anything like the violent, intimidating physical presence of Mitchum or the cruel arrogance of the actor’s uncompromising characterization. At the same time, it was revealing of a new stage of Mitchum’s career that the studio now considered him for this kind of mature role. The film’s director was Vincente Minnelli—at a career peak, the Oscar for Gigi still warm in his hand as filming began—who had first worked with Mitchum in Undercurrent when the actor had played Robert Taylor’s fresh-faced younger brother. Now Mitch was forty-one and portraying a paterfamilias with a pair of grown sons. Were his days as a screen adventurer and love object fading into the past? reporters asked. All right with him if they were, Mitchum answered. Gray up my hair and let me play granpas, maybe they’ll stop plaguing me with work. He confessed he had only taken the part because of a promise of lots of time off and a location jaunt to an area of Mississippi where he’d heard there was excellent bream fishing.

  For a month they filmed in Oxford, William Faulkner’s hometown. Mitchum found himself, so he said, once again hoodwinked, working long days without a break, the fishing tackle lying idle on the floor of his hotel room. The shooting went smoothly, Mitchum and the director working together with inspired synchronicity and a surprising enthusiasm for one another’s seemingly very different styles—Mitchum the king of just-do-it, outwardly antifussy moviemaking, Minnelli a delicate, aesthetic personality and a rapturous stylist who could spend all day getting a leaf in a gutter to lie just so before committing it to film. Mitchum told Vincente he had many acquaintances like Hunnicutt and was basing his interpretation of the character on some of these men. Perhaps in the philandering and violently macho captain he may have seen aspects of an even closer acquaintance from which to draw his inspiration.

  Mitchum had been around long enough now, his reputation on- and off-screen looming large before him, that the cast’s two newcomers, the two Georges, tended for a while to stare and tremble when working with such a living legend.

  “They were impressed because I was very impressive,” said Mitchum. “I was like someone an old cameraman used to describe when I was over at RKO. He was an Argentine-Italian and I think illiterate. He’d probably started out as Bessie Love’s gardener or something. To him, a woman artist was anyone who made over a thousand dollars a week. If she got less, she had to be a whore. Why else would she hang out with foulmouthed guys and juicers? I was an artist to Peppard and Hamilton in the same way.”

  “I don’t know why Bob puts on his act,” said Minnelli. “Few actors I’ve worked with bring so much of themselves to a picture, and none do it with such total lack of affectation as Mitchum does.”

  Speaking of affectation, both the young actors in the film were giving excellent performances, but Peppard’s came with a lot of baggage. He was fresh from the New York theater and Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, full of thespian the-orums and wary if not outright contemptuous of the ways of Hollywood.

  “Have you studied the Stanislavsky Method?” he asked Mitchum.

  “No,” said Mitchum, “but I’ve studied the Smirnoff Method.”

  Peppard and Minnelli did not see eye to eye. The actor did not like to do certain of his more difficult scenes until he could really feel them. Minnelli (ignoring his own directorial fussiness) told Peppard that was fine for Greenwich Village but in the movies you started to “feel” the scene when you got off the bus at the location. The hot-tempered Peppard decided that instead of compromising he was going to tell Minnelli and MGM to shove it, and shared his decision with someone he imagined would understand, that rebellious spirit Bob Mitchum. To his surprise, the older man advised caution. Mitchum said, “It’ll be a very expensive hike. I’m sure the studio can sue you. I’m certain it will be your last job. Even though you think Minnelli is wrong, do it his way.”

  After three weeks in Mississippi, they moved back to the Metro lot in Culver City for a month, then off on a second location trip to the town of Paris, Texas (”Minnelli shoots all his pictures in Paris,” Mitchum cracked), the actual setting of William Humphrey’s novel. Most of the two-week visit was spent filming a wild boar hunt, Home from the Hill’s great visual showpiece, which Minnelli put together with all the cinematic flourish of his greatest musical sequences. They filmed in an area near Paris that Gigi would not have found sympathetique, a wooded, sulfurous swamp filled with copperhead snakes and quicksand.

  The final stage of the hunt, with the battle between the wild boar and the hunting dogs, was shot back on the MGM lot. A big boar was imported from Louisiana but was found dead on arrival. Instead a big pig was used, and tusks were glued to its face. To make it stagger and fall over, they shot it up with tranquilizers.

  After the last six weeks at the studio, the lengthy film (with a final running time of two hours and thirty-two minutes) was completed early in August, by which time Mitchum was already in Ireland on another job. With Some Came Running, Home from the Hill was the finest of Minnelli’s operatic/neurotic wide-screen melodramas, a lurid, flamboyantly emotional and yet deeply incisive exploration of family life at its most destructive. Mitchum’s powerful performance as the fierce, ultimately poignant Captain Hunnicutt gave more credence to those, like Laughton and Huston, who envisioned the actor triumphing as one or another of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Critics applauded Mitchum’s work, but they were more excited by the strong, youthful, and promising newcomer George Peppard. What could you expect, Mitchum would say. He had been around a long time since the press had first fussed over him in G.I. foe. Yesterday’s news and then some. It was like that old joke you heard actors telling around the lunch table, the rise and fall trajectory of a Hollywood star:

  “Who is Robert Mitchum?”

  “Get me Robert Mitchum.”

  “Get me a Robert Mitchum type.”

  “Who is Robert Mitchum?”

  He began a new three-picture commitment to United Artists with a film produced join
tly by Raymond Stross and DRM, The Night Fighters (aka A Terrible Beauty), an action drama of Irish Republican Army terrorists attacking British interests during World War II. As Dermot O’Neill, Mitchum would play yet another revolutionary and his most reluctant hero to date, a dim and drunken boy-o who joins the IRA on a whim, finds it not much to his liking, and in the end turns informer. Though Hollywood usually took the freedom fighters’ side in films about “the troubles,” this was a British production and so a more objective take on the subject, with IRA members here including ruthless opportunists associating with Nazis and the protagonist a good man at heart who sees the light and betrays his revolutionary friends. At the least it was unusual and intriguing subject matter for a film, and its appeal to Mitchum—revolution, exotic setting, outsider hero, drinking scenes—was apparent.

  Mitchum hired his One Minute to Zero director, Tay Garnett, whose career had fallen on hard times. He had not gotten a feature assignment in five years and was reduced to directing half-hour television programs. Thinking that perhaps his low fortunes were due to bad habits, he had given up drinking and become a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Garnett thought The Night Fighters script lousy and believed it would invite invidious comparisons with Ford’s classic The Informer, but he was in no position to promote negative thinking and hoped it could all be made right once they got to Dublin.

  It wasn’t. The film is best remembered, if at all, for Mitchum’s impeccable Irish accent. “There is still an elemental force in the story,” he said. “But it’s like looking for a diamond that’s been covered in sewage. You know it’s there, but man, does it smell.”

  An incident in a Dublin bar after a day of filming at the Ardmore Studio got more attention than the movie ever would. A short, flyweight Irishman came up to Mitchum and poked him in the ribs with a pencil.

  “Hey, movie star,” he said, “give me your autograph. It’s for me wife.”

  Mitchum said, “Look at the leprechaun,” and told him to wait until he had finished his drink. “But, he didn’t want to wait and told me so.”

  Mitchum took the man’s paper and pencil and wrote, “FUCK YOU,” signed it “KIRK DOUGLAS,” and handed it back.

  The man returned, having read the inscription, pulled Mitchum around, and threw a fist at his right eye. Mitchum looked down and said, “If that’s the best you can do, little lady, you better come back with your girlfriends.”

  Richard Harris, Bob’s drinking buddy and fellow actor in The Night Fighters, said, “He hit Mitchum full in the face when he wasn’t looking. Mitch could have killed him, but he just shrugged it off like he does in film fights. He was wonderful.”

  The man returned with a few more autograph hunters. Mitchum head-butted one of them and sent him reeling. Then two of the others attacked, inspiring Richard Harris and a couple of Abbey Theatre Players to come to Bob’s aid. A huge “donnybrook” ensued, and the police were summoned to break it up. A colorful consensus account of the brawl animated the world’s newspapers the next day, most of them delighted by the possibility that bruiser Mitchum had finally met his match—“MITCHUM REFUSES FIGHT WITH MUCH SMALLER MAN,” “MITCHUM FLIPS FOR IRISHMAN,” and “BLACK-EYED MITCHUM IS MEEK,” said the headlines, one account describing how the movie star was “tossed for a loop by a short, limping Irishman,” while another claimed the brawny Yank had been given a “ju-jitsu flip” and knocked out cold by a midget.

  Warner Bros, and Fred Zinnemann were producing a film of Australian Jon Cleary’s highly regarded novel The Sundowners. It was the picaresque story of the footloose Carmody family, Paddy, Ida and son Sean, and their wandering adventures in the rural Outback, the title derived from the family’s nomadic existence—home was wherever they happened to be at sundown. In 1959, after a series of distinguished box office and critical successes (High Noon, From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma, The Nun’s Story), Zinnemann was at his zenith, the standard-bearer for mature, adult, big-budget filmmaking. His movies were the sort the tastemakers considered good entertainment and good for you, too, and his projects and associates were invariable award nominees and frequent winners. For The Sundowners, Zinnemann cast Deborah Kerr as the loving, long-suffering wife (he had directed her to an Oscar nomination in From Here to Eternity) and Robert Mitchum as the beer-swilling, sheep-shearing, irresponsible Paddy. (Zinnemann had long hoped to work with him and had originally cast him opposite Kerr in Eternity, but Howard Hughes had refused a loan-out). Kerr’s involvement convinced Mitchum to sign on, though it would mean flying to Australia with barely a day off after his Irish sojourn. Others hired for the film were Peter Ustinov as a comical remittance man, Glynis Johns as a saucy hotel keeper, Michael Anderson, Jr., as Sean, Dina Merrill as a station owner’s wife, and a few native sons like Chips Rafferty taking supporting roles. The Carmody’s racehorse was to be played by a well-known retired turf champion, Silver Shadow, and pulling the family cart would be a thirty-year-old named Sam, once awarded the title Most Handsome Milk Horse in a Sydney beauty contest.

  Jack Warner had attempted to get Zinnemann to shoot the picture in Arizona; there ought to be a couple of kangaroos in the Phoenix Zoo, he told him. Zinnemann was adamant, saying that without the uncountable atmospheric details of the genuine locations The Sundowners would look like nothing more than “a half-assed Western.” Glancing again at the returns on Zinnemann’s The Nun’s Story, Warner agreed.

  Mitchum arrived at Kingsford Smith Airport at three in the morning on September 28, straggled wearily from the plane he had been on for what seemed like weeks, only to see a mob of Aussie reporters charging him, he claimed, screaming, “How do you like our beer?”

  Housed at the Hotel Australia in Sydney for a few days to rest and soak up the local speech patterns, Mitchum sparred with some of the nation’s impudent newspapermen, who trotted out a long list of the actor’s transgressions for amiable discussion. Sucking at a vodka and tomato juice, chain-smoking Mexican cigarettes, Mitchum claimed it was all a case of mistaken identity. “I’m no tough guy. . . . All the public knows is some silver, chromium-plated jerk. How could they really know what I’m like?” And as for that marijuana beef, Mitchum explained once again that his conviction had been removed from the record. “Well, all this was news to me,” wrote one Down Under Winchell next day. “No mention of this expunging the conviction never [sic] got to Australia. But try as I might, I couldn’t budge Bob Mitchum from his story. So that was the sum total: he isn’t a jailbird, he isn’t a drunk, he isn’t a brawler. And he was too big for me to argue with. So I left.”

  With a cast made up largely of English and American actors, Zinnemann prayed they would all be able to approximate an Oz accent that would at least not sound ridiculous. Mitchum astounded him. “His Australian accent was perfect; he had the uncanny knack of making any accent sound as though he had been born with it.” Zinnemann found Bob amusing and delightful company, was much taken with his “colorful” way of expressing himself. “If, for instance, he had to go to the toilet, he would say, ‘I’ve got to drain my lizard,’” Zinnemann said. “He is one of the wittiest and most respectful men I have ever met.”

  Deborah Kerr, arriving with boyfriend Peter Viertel, the movie writer and novelist, renewed her respectful love affair with Mitchum. “It was an honor to feed her lines,” Mitchum said, “even in this godforsaken country.”

  They began filming in the area around the small town of Cooma. Mitchum moved into a hired house. He had a cook, a chauffeur, and an English secretary/manservant. He fished in the local “alpine” stream and caught a single trout. The weather was bitterly cold, and fires burned in every room of the house. It poured rain and production shut down. From the start, Mitchum seemed to react badly to the aggressively starstruck Australian public. “He didn’t get along with the Aussies very well,” said Fred Zinnemann. “He felt victimized and outraged by the blunt possessiveness of the local fans and autograph-hunters.”

  In Cooma he was followed everywhere he went. An audience gathe
red to watch him eat a steak in a local restaurant, standing stock-still for each course as if they were watching a play. The gawkers, a foul mood, and the rotten weather sent Mitchum into hiding in his villa at the edge of town. He was reportedly “bored stiff,” but seldom ventured outside. “He’s like a caged tiger waiting for production to start,” said his shuddering personal assistant, Brian Own-Smith of London. “He’s a regular Lonely Garbo,” wrote one newshawk. Cooma’s citizenry kept their eyes open, but spottings of the American movie star were rare and were much talked about when they occurred. There were tales told that he had insulted a woman in a hotel and that he had “jobbed” a man in a barber’s shop. “He’s a real sleepy lizard when he’s sitting in the sun,” a postman was quoted. “Then I watched him cross the street. He’s the breathing image of Paddy Carmody, I tell you!” An eleven year old had a run-in on the road and reporters rushed to gather her story. “He gave me his autograph,” said Bobundra’s Jill Singleton. “Gee, he’s a beaut bloke.”

  One Sydney reporter on the scene managed to wrangle his way inside the Mitchum manse and found the actor fixing an onion-laced beef stew. “Robert’s a real homebody,” said Own-Smith. “He’s a marvelous cook, the dishes he makes are delicious! He went into Cooma twice, but many people followed him. Of course Robert likes meeting people and signing autographs but he doesn’t like it when they crush all around him. Some people try to be too smart. They push an old piece of torn paper under his nose and say, ‘Sign this, you!’ and not even ‘please.’ That’s when Robert jumps up and grabs them around the neck and says, ‘Where are your manners, buster?’” In the kitchen Mitchum stood over a bubbling concoction while a maid scrubbed vegetables, the chauffeur searched for black pepper, and the valet drank vodka beside the broom cupboard.