by Lee Server
Against the odds, and with little enthusiasm from the studio he had created, Zanuck’s “folly” would become his last triumphant success. The Longest Day was a tremendous accomplishment, an entertaining yet relatively uncompromised—no love interest, no subplot, no single hero to root for—war movie, a vast production with a sweep and scale greater than any previous Hollywood epic and yet as compellingly realistic—shot in cold tones of black and gray—as any newsreel, or at least any newsreel that included the presence of Fabian and Tommy Sands. It was hailed by most critics as one of the best war films of all time, saluted by veterans as a fitting tribute to the greatest military operation in history, and it was a worldwide hit.
Though his was a brief role in an episodic “all-star” production, Mitchum could share in Zanuck’s glory. His prominence, bravura performance, and definitive portrayal of an archetypal American action hero (the intrepid yet unpretentious military man) offered a kind of unofficial confirmation of his rank (just below top-billed John Wayne) among those actors representing American masculinity on the screen, circa 1962.
He had been in the movies for twenty years now. A lot of bad pictures, quite a few good ones, and a handful of gems and masterpieces. He was forty-four years old. A little blearier, a recurring beer gut that had to be worked off from time to time, but overall a fine physical specimen, the passing years giving his ferretlike “garage mechanic’s mug” a few more character lines and an added soulful weariness that did more good than harm. And as for the state of his acting, with recent efforts like The Sundowners, Home from the Hill, and Cape Fear among the incontrovertible evidence, Mitchum’s great ability as a movie actor—his range, depth, and power—clearly overwhelmed all but a very few other stars on the scene. Mitchum was in a uniquely flexible place in the Hollywood hierarchy of the day: he was a veteran star with the stature to play the classic American genre roles like the cowboy and the soldier and give them an iconic power no young newcomer could match, and yet he was an adaptable and modern presence as well, a professional risk taker and not inextricably tied to a backward-looking style or genre like Wayne and other older stars. The movies were changing, the old taboos dying off. Hollywood was on the brink of a new era in film realism: more violent, more sexual, more unconventional; and Mitchum was, almost uniquely among his contemporaries, perfectly positioned to thrive in the iconoclastic climate to come. With the full maturation of his talent and the authority of middle age now upon him, and with the arriving Zeitgeist embracing the sense of cool and the antiheroic attitude that had long been the actor’s emblematic persona (embracing, even, the use of marijuana), the ‘60s—if such backward prognostications can be given any value—should have been Mitchum’s decade much the way the ‘40s seemed to belong to Bogart. It would only have taken some interesting scripts, another series of challenging parts like the ones that had so frequently enlivened his career in the past few years, some continued alliances with talented directors like Zinnemann and Huston, a little good luck, and the ability to give a damn.
chapter thirteen
Poet with an Ax
MITCHUM RECALLED THE FIRST years of his Maryland residence as a “lost, nostalgic, splendid isolation.” He did not miss Hollywood; and the town, he said, did not miss him. “I was never very social in California and I’m not social in Maryland. But Maryland is a place in which it’s easier not to be social. . . . In Maryland I can be as unsocial as I want. . . “
It was a place to do nothing. Belmont Farms so inspired Mitchum’s native indolence that he found himself incapable of meeting even his modest goals of catching some fish or “writing a little.” Returned from months away on a picture somewhere, he would quickly melt into the scenery, sleep when he could, eat, drink, watch the squirrels and the raccoons, wait for another beautiful sunset. “I wouldn’t even crank up the boat and go fishing,” he said, “just goof, sit there and stare. . . .” A place in town delivered the papers and magazines but he never read them, only the comic strips (”The only part that changes”). Never answered the telephone. He was up at six-thirty, sprawled on the king-size bed by nine in the evening. Sometimes he waited for the eleven o’clock news on the television, sometimes just drifted off. Dottie supervised what farming they did, the soybeans and corn, a few animals, and she managed the business dealings with the tenant farmers. Mitchum was pleased to know the place was self-sufficient, unless, he said, you counted the liquor bills.
His one active interest in those years was a growing involvement with quarter horses, the swift, muscular southwestern breed used in ranching and, to more glorious effect, in rodeos and special quarter-mile races. The cowboy from Connecticut who “didn’t know a horse from a mule” and could hardly get mounted in his Hopalong Cassidy days had developed into a first-rate rider, winning compliments from expert horsemen like Budd Boetticher, and horses and their breeding had become a subject of great fascination for him. He had made a lengthy study of the history of Thoroughbreds and could talk for hours about various breeds and breeding techniques, could discuss the genetic formula of every champion, and trace the pedigree of numerous top racehorses back practically to the conquistadores. At Belmont Farms he was able to take his hobby from the theoretical to the practical, purchasing a racing quarter horse stallion and a brood mare, eventually keeping a stable of more than a dozen racing and working quarter horses and becoming part of the network—a separate subculture, in fact—of wealthy western and southern Thoroughbred quarter horse breeders. Now and again Mitchum would load up a stallion and trailer him across country—”I’m off,” he’d explain happily, “to get my horse laid.”
In Maryland he would occasionally come out of his refuge, accepting a dinner invitation from one of the neighboring gentleman farmers or venturing into town for a special event, to pin a medal on a local beauty contest winner or some such. Visitors were rare, a relative now and then and that “true friend” or two who were willing to make the complicated journey, flying into Baltimore, renting a car, driving into the backwoods. One who came was Charles Laughton, not long before he died, staying nearby in Washington, D.C., to make what would be his final film, Advise and Consent, for Otto Preminger. He was playing a Dixie senator in the movie and complained to Mitchum of his difficulty in getting the Deep South accent right. “It’s as if they had hired you to play a Cockney, Bob,” he said. Mitchum abruptly responded with perfect East End locutions.
“Remarkable,” said Laughton.
One day a fellow came down the half-mile entrance drive and up to the front door looking for the man of the house. Mitchum came out, ready to throw the stranger off the property.
“You don’t recognize me, do you, Bobby?” the man said.
It was Manuel Barque. They hadn’t seen each other in thirty years.
“I don’t fucking believe it,” Mitchum said. “You son of a bitch!”
Manuel laughed and told him to watch his language. Bob’s old delinquent pal was an ordained Methodist minister these days.
The idle life at Belmont Farms never lasted more than a few months at a time. Eventually the call would come from good old Reva with a new job lined up for him. Sometimes she would airmail a script for his approval; on other occasions, if he was sufficiently restless, a brief rundown on the phone and a starting date would be all that he asked. And then he was off, leaving Dorothy behind to wonder what sort of mischief he might get into this time. Now, in Maryland, she was more cut off from his other life than ever. She couldn’t keep him on the farm permanently. But did she even want to? The little flings were going to happen no matter where they called home. At least there was the satisfaction of knowing that was all they would ever be . . . little flings. The other women had never meant anything more than a cheap thrill, an inebriated evening’s entertainment forgotten by the next morning. He had found his one soul mate, in sickness and in health; she could take comfort in that, anyway.
It was the prospect of working with Shirley MacLaine as his costar that finally got Mitchum to agr
ee to do Two for the Seesaw. He had seen her in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and been struck by her offbeat beauty and sly, dramatic style. Perhaps with her, he thought, they could make something interesting happen on-screen, though he doubted it. He was convinced that they had found the wrong man for this picture.
William Gibson’s play had been a sizable hit on Broadway, a two-character, bittersweet romance about a pair of mismatched lovers, a stuffy, midwestern lawyer running from a broken marriage and a spirited ditz living in Greenwich Village. The original production had starred Anne Bancroft as bohemian Gittel Mosca and Henry Fonda as Jerry Ryan, the depressed attorney. Walter Mirisch, whose company had produced The Apartment, no doubt had that Best Picture winner much on his mind when he put Gibson’s play into production. Indeed, with its overcast black-and-white New York backgrounds, apartment-house setting, funny/sad romance, and, of course, Miss MacLaine there to play another lovelorn New Yorker, it was—short of Jack Lemmon’s and Wilder’s participation—as close as Mirisch could get to making The Apartment, Part II.
It’s not clear why he became fixated on Mitchum for the role of Jerry Ryan, a character who would have much more comfortably fit any number of more conventionally middle-class and repressed-looking stars, including Gregory Peck, William Holden, Glenn Ford, and Fonda, several of whom Mitchum recommended to Mirisch after turning down the picture, twice. Hiring Mitchum for the part was—as would be the case with the later Ryan’s Daughter—casting against type. But it was also miscasting.
In lieu of Wilder, Mirisch hired the man who was perhaps the secondhottest director in town after his spectacular success with West Side Story, Bob’s Blood on the Moon director, Robert Wise. “It was one of the few times I went on a picture where the cast was already set,” Wise recalled. “The two stars were signed and I had nothing to do with it. And no, I don’t think Mitchum was ever quite right for the part at all. He was more believable and better in rougher, outdoor kinds of stuff. But as I say, when I came on, the casting was set.”
The stars met for the first time in the producer’s office at the old Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. Mitchum arrived, barely acknowledging anyone’s presence, lit a Gitane, and blew smoke at the ceiling.
MacLaine tingled.
She was seventeen years younger than Mitchum. She had been thirteen when Out of the Past played in the theaters in Virginia, and Robert Mitchum had become her girlhood idol. Most movie stars had once been movie fans like everybody else, and it was one of the strange phenomena of the business, this coming together as equals and working with people you had once known only as thirty-foot gods and goddesses on the big silver screen. It could feel like entering a dream.
“Don’t let me take up too much space,” Mitchum said, shaking her hand and then lumbering into a chair. “I’m basically a Bulgarian wrestler. I’m not right for this part.”
“You’re wonderful,” MacLaine gushed impulsively. “I’ve admired you for so long. . . . I think you’ll be great.”
The cast and a few key technical people went to New York City for ten days of exteriors. “We opened it up a bit from the play,” said Robert Wise, “just enough to give a sense of New York. And then everything else we shot on the stage back in California.”
Soon after filming began it became clear that Mitchum and MacLaine were most compatible, were getting along splendidly. In public, on the set, they were a pair of cutups, entertaining each other and the crew to the point of exasperation for director Wise. “They got to ribbing and telling jokes and making us all laugh, so that the biggest problem we had was getting the two of them to settle down and get into the scene and rehearse. Finally I had to call the crew and everybody back twenty minutes early from lunch break and I talked to them. I said, ‘Listen, guys, we’ve got to stop being such a good audience for these two. We simply have to stop encouraging them or we’ll never get this picture done.’”
In truth, there was something beyond compatibility going on. MacLaine’s girlhood crush had been reignited and was now combined with some deeper, more mature response to the enigmatic man she deemed in so many ways her exact opposite: a drifter through life, a dedicated underachiever. As they played their roles of Gittel and Jerry falling for each other, it was becoming a case of reality mimicking the movies.
Mitchum began driving her home from the studio. He would talk, tell stories, recite poetry. MacLaine listened, spellbound, reveling in the sensitivity she found lurking beneath the “Neanderthal” surface. Mitchum pulled out all the stops. He quoted Shakespeare, peeled pomegranates for her with one hand, told her he was a caged lion . . . “a poet with an ax.”
Shirley swooned.
When she took a week off from filming and went to Hawaii to cool down and think things over, she returned to find Mitchum acting bereft. “When I didn’t see you, I felt deprived,” he told her.
The friendship deepened.
It was a banality of the business, the midproduction affair between male and female costars. Acting together, particularly in a love story, was such an intimate, vulnerable experience for some performers that brief backstage romances were almost inevitable, and with so much money riding on the hoped-for “chemistry” between a film’s leads, such affairs were often encouraged by producers or directors, sometimes nearly insisted upon. MacLaine, though married (to Japan-based producer Steve Parker), was a free-spirited character and had experienced her share of flings and on-location alliances with previous leading men. Mitchum, though, from the start, seemed to hold the prospect of a longer-lived fascination. “I found him to be a complex mystery,” she would write, “multifaceted, ironically witty, shy to the point of detachment. . . . I felt I’d be missing the adventure of a lifetime if I just did my job and walked away from what I intuitively knew was a deep and stormy fragility.”
“Mitchum and Shirley liked each other very much, that was obvious,” said Robert Wise. “They kidded each other and it was pretty spicy kidding, pretty ribald. I had to have a closed set for a while; I was kind of embarrassed over what they were saying to each other. I can’t cite you chapter and verse of what it was, but it was pretty dicey [e.g., Wise, rehearsing the actors in a scene: Bob, can I see the end bit again?/Mitchum: You mean just the pink part?]. . . . Maybe they were having an affair. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. But I had a difficult time getting them settled down to do a scene.”
Jerome Siegel, Wise’s assistant director, had a better view of what was developing between Seesaw’s stars, dealing with them away from the set and first thing in the morning each day of the production. “It wasn’t an obvious thing by any means,” said Siegel. “They were very subtle about it. You never saw anything where you could be sure there was a romance going on. But it didn’t surprise me when I did hear about it.
“They were both very happy, fun, relaxed together. They kept the set relaxed, no tension. They were both very down-to-earth people—well, not down-to-earth, they were pretty unusual characters actually, but they acted like regular people, not big stars. Mitchum in particular was very warm, just one of the boys, a great guy. He liked to have his secretary bring in a bunch of stuff for lunch, and he’d invite the guys to sit around and shoot the breeze and eat lunch with him. No entourage, no yes-men. And surprisingly, the drinks were all Cokes and tea, no hard liquor at all.”
Malachy McCourt, the Irish roustabout, raconteur, and actor, met Mitchum at breakfast time, not lunch, and had a different experience regarding the star’s liquid intake. Playing a bit part in a party scene, McCourt mentioned to Mitchum that they had a mutual friend in Richard Harris. “Of course, once I said I was a friend of Harris’s he just assumed that I was of the drinking fraternity . . . and he was quite correct in that assumption.”
Mitchum invited McCourt to his dressing room one morning and brought forth products from the homeland, bottles of Guinness and Irish whiskey. “We had a long talk as we sampled these refreshments, and I found him to be a highly intelligent man, very well read. Had a good sense of irony, d
idn’t take himself seriously. He had this tough facade but there was a softness within it all. Our conversation touched on many things and he spoke very eloquently of Ireland, he had a feeling for Irish mysticism, for the Celtic twilight. I found him to be a very bright man who had become a bit lost in his stardom, a man who thought he ought to be doing something else besides standing before the camera for a living.”
The pair were eventually joined by Frank Sinatra, in the vicinity shooting The Manchurian Candidate. “He was just popping in to say hello, that sort of thing. They were very chummy, a very easy relationship there. And Mitchum sat him down and poured him two large beakers, one with Guinness and one with the Irish whiskey. Sinatra gulped with dismay, drinking at that time in the morning, but he bravely downed a very good portion of both, and then made his farewell. He was still a very thin man, Sinatra, and I’m sure it was hitting him harder than it hit Mitchum or myself. But at that hour of the morning it was a bit much even for me, to be quite honest!”
The assistants came calling—Mitchum wanted on the set.
“Fuck off,” he told them.
“But Mr. Mitchum, Mr. Wise is ready for you. . . . “
“Fuck off.”
Glasses were filled, Mitchum gathered McCourt round. “’Sing “The Bold Fenian Man” for me!’ saith this grand actor, and together we sang.”
Whatever the qualities were that had made Two for the Seesaw a hit on Broadway, they did not appear to have been replicated in the film adaptation. And as Mirisch’s Son of The Apartment, it lacked the wit and bite, the romanticism and ineffable weltschmerz of Wilder’s masterpiece, or anything close to it. Mitchum had delivered a perfectly good and often touching portrayal of the depressed, square Middle American who cannot in the end cope with the unconventional. But as he had suspected he would, Mitchum brought to this homely role certain inappropriate physical and stylistic qualities, not to mention distracting biographical baggage, that were bound to make the customers uncomfortable. From the critics he received some of his worst and most contemptuous notices since the RKO days, as if the part of Jerry Ryan had been taken on not by a seasoned and acclaimed dramatic actor but by one of the cast from the Bowery Boys series.