Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “These rumors that my first housekeeper left because I was walking around undressed are wrong. I let her go because she never smiled. . . . I told her, ‘Wash your hands, little lady, we don’t need you around here any more. . . .’ When the hell does it stop raining? . . . Sure, I get about two hundred thousand bucks for this picture, but I don’t see any of it. Every cent of it goes into a Swiss company. It’s held in trust for my kids. . . . ‘Jobbed’ a man in a barber shop? Do I look like a guy who’s been near a barber shop? . . . I don’t meet any people. I’m here for work. Pubs—I don’t go into them. Not much. I like mixing my own drinks at home. I like my own cooking. . . . If you like, you can just call me Mother.”

  When Paul De Coque, the young Cooma man Warners had hired to drive Mitchum around, learned that a close relative had fallen ill in Sydney, Mitchum gave him several hundred dollars and told him to take the company station wagon. “If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to let me know,” Mitchum said.

  He spent a pleasant day with The Sundowners’ author, Jon Cleary. The Sydney Sun reported it with the headline “BOB’S NOT A SLOB.” Cleary was quoted for the record: “Robert Mitchum is anything but a droopy-eyed slob once you get to know him. He is extremely well read and writes beautiful poetry.”

  On November 12, Dorothy Mitchum arrived in Sydney from California for a ten-day location visit, and reporters swarmed her flight, too.

  “This Mrs. Mitchum’s quite a doll,” said the man from the Daily Telegraph. “Tall and slim and built to all the right specifications. ‘I’m traveling reasonably light,’ she announced when she arrived and wearily deposited a mink coat and a gigantic stack of parcels on top of her luggage. ‘Usually I have to lug a whole strange assortment of things along for Robert. Records and sunglasses and what have you, because he’s always giving things away’ We know, Mrs. M., we know. When we shot down to see him in Cooma he gave us quite a hangover!”

  At the end of the month Dorothy had returned home, and The Sundowners company headed for Port Augusta in the south. From here they would be commuting most days to the sheep station at Iron Knob, a forty-minute drive from the port. Arriving at tiny Whyalla Airport where reporters and fans clamored in the 104-degree heat, Mitchum, looking like a “shaggy caveman” to one observer and hiding his “sleepy peepers” behind outsized sunglasses, brushed aside the crowds and motored off to the luxury cruiser Corsair III he had chartered at a cost of a hundred pounds a week. Dina Merrill recalled, “We saw little of him after work. Everyone else—except for Deborah, who found a little house, but she had most of her meals with us—was staying at this little hotel. We took over the whole place except for a couple of itinerant salesmen passing through from time to time. There were only four of us had their own bathroom, and I was very fortunate I was one of them! And they were the smallest rooms you ever saw in your life. Mitchum, though, spent all his time on his boat out in the harbor. He wanted to get away from all the people who were bothering him. But young ladies were known to swim out there to the boat. It was rather amusing—the women trying to climb on the boat and Mitchum trying to keep them away.”

  Adhering to the code of the sea, perhaps, Mitchum eventually let a few of these aquatic intruders come on board. Some local “sheilas” happily confessed to attending a “wow of a party” on the shaggy man’s cruiser.

  Each morning the company boarded vehicles to take them to the sheep station at Iron Knob, a long, bumpy ride across the hot, barren, fly-infested countryside. “You can’t imagine how hot it was, how dry and dusty,” said Mitchum. “I was clean only twice during the entire shooting.”

  “The dust flew along the whole road,” said Dina Merrill. “It was terrible. I shared a driver and car with Peter Ustinov, who made it at least bearable. He liked to drive and so we used to put the driver in the backseat and the two of us would sit up front, and Peter would sing a different opera every day, not only singing the parts but doing the instruments. He had us laughing so hard we couldn’t get out of the car when we got there.”

  At Iron Knob Mitchum encountered something even more intimidating than the local autograph seekers. “Those sheep in Australia stand as high as a pony, and I didn’t know where the hair left off and the meat started,” he said. He was always very tenderly disposed toward animals, and the prospect of shearing the plumply beautiful four-hundred-pound merinos—and doing it at top speed, taking the entire fleece off in one piece—filled him with dread. “He was terrified of cutting off a nipple, or a vein running close to the surface under the sheep’s left jaw,” Fred Zinnemann recalled. “This would make the sheep bleed to death. Mitchum was unable to do the job without first having several bottles of beer.”

  The actor was more in his element during the film’s big brawl between the two rival gangs of sheepshearers. Now at last he found common ground with the Aussies who, on a merciless 108-degree afternoon, took to the action with ecstatic enthusiasm, slugging, jumping, breaking ribs, continuing long after Zinnemann and several assistants had repeatedly screamed, “Cut!” Mitchum, said the director, “had great fun.”

  . . .

  On December 17 Mitchum, Kerr, Ustinov, and others from the production boarded a Pan Am Boeing 707 headed for the States and a Christmas break before a final few weeks of interior filming in London. Reporters and others once again dogging his trail, Mitchum remained grumpy and incommunicative, saying only that he had seen little of the country he was leaving, had done nothing else but work, and was completely “cheesed off.” Harumphing his way to the aircraft, Mitchum was intercepted by a small girl and appeared to visibly soften at her request for an autograph.

  “I have a little seven-year-old daughter, too,” Mitchum said, and scribbled on the Aussie girl’s pad: “In a country which with casual aplomb regards the anachronism of the kangaroo and the platypus—the being homo sapien is a disgusting oddity—Merry Christmas, Bob Mitchum.”

  He then picked up his bag and boarded the plane.

  Mitchum’s performance in The Sundowners met with universal acclaim. Perhaps the unusual backdrop and a contrived accent helped the critics to see beyond the widely perceived notion of Mitchum as an actor who simply “played himself.” As Paddy Carmody, a living, breathing creation without a hint of artifice or theatricality, Mitchum gave perhaps the greatest demonstration of his supreme command of a naturalistic acting technique that was as rare as it was—generally—underappreciated. (Of course, this is not to deny that the charming but irresponsible and selfish vagabond Carmody had possibly more than a little in common with the man who portrayed him.)

  It was a unique and wonderful movie, had a warm humanity, a jaunty sweetness, an enticing, lyrical aimlessness. The simple yet poetic imagery, the rowdy humor, the sense of the sublime in the everyday brought to mind the work of John Ford but minus Ford’s sentimental or melodramatic excesses. The Sundowners, even Mitchum had to admit, was no gorilla picture. The film received numerous award citations and nominations at year’s end, with Mitchum named as Best Actor by the venerable National Board of Review in New York. The Sundowners got five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Deborah Kerr, but Mitchum, to many people’s surprise, was not recognized by the Academy. The film was a good earner at its initial engagements in New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities, but its returns faded in the rest of the country. Zinnemann believed that a misconceived and misleading publicity campaign accentuating the sexuality of Deborah Kerr (”the impression given that she . . . could hardly wait for the sun to go down so she could lay her hands on Bob”) harmed the film’s potential success.

  Although contractually entitled to top billing for The Sundowners, Mitchum ceded the position to Deborah Kerr at her request. “I told them by all means . . . and that they could design a twenty-four sheet of me bowing to her, I couldn’t care less.”

  His curiously unpleasant relations with Australia continued long after his final departure. The country served him with a substantial income tax bill for hi
s Sundowners earnings. He refused to pay, claiming he had never been working for an Australian employer, but the Oz tax collectors harassed him for several years to come.

  Mitchum remained in London to make The Grass Is Greener for producer-director Stanley Donen. It was an ersatz Noel Coward drawing room comedy about a high-born English couple and the restless wife’s tentative fling with a rich Texas tourist. The all-star production had Mitchum working once again with Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons (his third go-round with each) and for the first time with Gary Grant, who took over when Rex Harrison withdrew after the death of his wife, Kay Kendall.

  Mitchum and Grant fell into a mild, undeclared rivalry. Grant fretted that Mitchum’s casual style was making him look overrehearsed, and whispered to wardrobe that Bob’s understarched shirts were perhaps a tad sloppy even for a Texan. Mitchum complained that his role seemed to be entirely a matter of saying, “Really?” and, “Oh?” in between Grant’s monologues. He liked Cary well enough, found him expectably charming, though rather odd and a solid square. “No sense of humor,” he told Chris Peachment and Geoff Andrew. “His humor is sort of old music-hall jokes. ‘What’s that noise down there? They’re holding an Elephant’s Ball? Well, I wish they’d let go of it, I’m trying to get some sleep!’ I guess that was when he was coming off his LSD treatment.”

  The finished film was a polished bore. Hollywood’s Stanley Donen, in his expatriate phase, had directed with such artistocratic preciocity he might have been expecting a knighthood for his labors. Neither of the male stars was well served by the material. Grant’s purring, ironic suavity always worked best when he played quasi-hustlers or schlemiels, not smug noblemen; and Mitchum, enacting a ballsier variation of what screwball comedy aficionadoes would know as the “Ralph Bellamy role,” was constitutionally ill-equipped to do this sort of brittle, one-raised-eyebrow frolic. For Mitchum’s sardonic wit and fatalistic insouciance to resonate he needed a dangerous setting, a life-or-death situation, not a plush London vacation. Sparkling Jean Simmons, with little to do in a ditzy best-friend role, stole the picture from all of them.

  . . .

  Even worse was an all-American comedy, The Last Time I Saw Archie, ostensibly based on the army experiences of veteran Hollywood scribe William Bowers and his adventures with an amiable con man of a private named Archie Hall. It was a first attempt at humor for the ordinarily glum producer-director-actor Jack “Just the Facts” Webb, the frog-faced star of television’s Dragnet, here playing the wry, long-suffering Bowers to Mitchum’s impudent Archie. Television was the operative word: The whole thing resembled an extended episode of a sitcom, from the cheap gray sets, functional photography, and presence of supporting players like Louis Nye, Don Knotts, and Joe Flynn, to the characters and jokes out of a lesser episode of Sgt. Bilko. It lacked only the canned titters and guffaws of a laugh track—and brother, it needed them. No attempt was made to make the supposed World War II setting look anything other than 1960s contemporary, and the cast of jowly, middle-aged actors were all twenty years too old for their parts. The film was relentlessly modest, even by sitcom standards, with little or nothing happening for most of the running time. The script posited Archie as a world-class operator who fascinates and infuriates everyone he meets, but the character Mitchum actually brings to half-life on screen is bland and indescribably lethargic. The real Archie Hall, William Bowers’s army buddy, sued the filmmakers for invasion of privacy, but the dullness of Mitchum’s incarnation made defamation of character a more appropriate charge. Mitchum relished referring to this mediocrity as his favorite film of all time, based on a simple equation: four weeks’ work times a hundred thousand dollars a week.

  During the Belmont Farms years, when work took him back to Los Angeles for weeks and months, Mitchum made his headquarters at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the “pink palace” above Sunset Boulevard. The hotel pampered its celebrated guests with customized service, and Mitchum’s personal guest file included a stipulated eye-opener and hangover cure that was destined never to be added to the regular menu—bourbon and orange juice blended with honey and eggs.

  As a guest, Mitchum did not always return their graciousness with model behavior. His suite became a rowdy bachelor pad at times. Longtime bellman Jack Keith recalled one four-day-long Mitchum bacchanale as most likely the wildest in the hotel’s history. “It had everything—booze, broads, and guys. It went on in two suites, Mitchum’s and this other fellow’s, which were together. All I can remember is everybody walked around in various stages of undress.”

  . . .

  Gregory Peck and British director J. Lee Thompson were making The Guns of Navarone in Europe when the star handed the director a copy of John D. Mac-Donald’s novel The Executioners. Peck was going to make it the first feature for his new production company, with Universal picking up the tab. “We were working so well together,” said Thompson, “and he was very happy with Navarone. He said, ‘Read this. I’d like us to make this one next.’” John D. MacDonald, one of the last of the writers to come out of the hard-boiled pulp magazines, had written a tough, merciless suspense story, and screenwriter James R. Webb’s adaptation would be even tougher: the story of a lawyer whose life becomes a nightmare when a sadistic ex-con he helped send to prison returns seeking revenge. No simple hooligan, Max Cady cleverly perverts the law to protect himself even as he stalks and terrorizes the attorney and his young family. Hitchcock’s Psycho had recently set a new standard for movie suspense, and Peck thought that a film of The Executioners could deliver the same kind of terrifying thrills with a much more realistic story.

  “I liked the book very much,” said Thompson. “Greg had a script being prepared, we signed the contracts, and I came to make my first picture in Hollywood. Originally there was a certain budget, and it was assumed that Greg would be the only star in this, his own production. We considered some other actors. Rod Steiger was one, and Telly Savalas was another. We actually tested Savalas, and he gave a very good test for the part. But these were character actors, or at least secondary actors compared to Greg. At some point in discussing it together, we began to talk about having the villain played by an actor of equal importance, make it a much stronger matchup from the audience’s point of view, and then Mitchum immediately came to mind. There were some problems—he was not available in the beginning and it meant changing the budget—but once we had seen Mitchum in the role we knew he was superbly right for it, and Greg did what had to be done to get him.”

  Mitchum came to a meeting with Thompson and Peck at Peck’s office on the Universal lot. He had no interest in doing it, he said. He had been working too much. He was going back to his farm in Maryland and taking a long rest. Peck and Thompson got him talking about the script, about the character of Max Cady. Yes, Mitchum admitted, he had liked the story, the way it showed how the law really operated, how the cops held all the cards, bent the rules to serve their ends, and how one man gave it back to them. That was something you didn’t see too often. “Who else could do this, Bob?” Peck and Thompson asked. “What about Jack Palance?” That’d be over the top before the opening fade-in, Mitchum said. “The whole thing with Cady, fellas, is that snakelike charm. Me, officer? I never laid a hand on the girl, you must be mistaken.”

  “We discussed the part thoroughly,” said J. Lee Thompson, “and when we heard Mitchum’s thoughts we were more convinced than ever that he would be terrific for the role. And I think by the end of the meeting he now realized that himself. But he still couldn’t make up his mind and wouldn’t agree to it.”

  Mitchum flew back to Maryland. In the morning there was a delivery: a bouquet of flowers, a case of bourbon, and a note—”Please do the film!” A little later in the day he called Los Angeles. “OK. I’ve drunk your bourbon. I’m drunk. I’ll do it.”

  They were calling the picture Cape Fear.

  Web’s adaption was set in the Carolinas. Director Thompson traveled around scouting locations mentioned in the book but didn’t like any of
them, then found a town in Georgia he thought would be perfect. “Fucking Savannah!” Mitchum said, when he learned where the film would be made. “They railroaded me in that town, man. They may still have a warrant out for me. . . . “

  “Oh, he spoke at length about what he thought of Savannah,” J. Lee Thompson recalled. “How much he disliked the people there. He had a definite grudge. And he had it the entire time we filmed. We got down there and he had a great big chip on his shoulder about the whole place, had contempt for everyone there. And he loved that he had come as a big movie star, where everyone was asking for his autograph, and before they had thrown him in jail.”

  “We were all put up at the DeSoto Hotel,” said Assistant Director Ray Gosnell. “And word got around that Mitchum had had some problems in Savannah in the past, but I think he settled down and enjoyed himself. It was a very, very friendly place. And the day we arrived there was a convention of southern hairdressers, all these females from beauty salons all over the area, and they were very friendly and made quite a welcoming committee for Mitchum and some of the members of the crew. I don’t think some of them ever got to their own rooms at all that night.”

  “You know, Mitchum would give the impression he didn’t take the job seriously,” said Thompson. “He would go out and have a good time all night and come to work and act like he hadn’t learned his lines. You know, sort of saying, ‘What is this thing; where are we?’—looking at the script like it was for the first time. But then he would work perfectly. Highly professional. He just goes in and does it. And he was superb.”