by Lee Server
“Intellectual snobs,” Mitchum called them, and went home with the leading lady.
While their other in-production romances had faded away with the wrap party, Mitchum’s and MacLaine’s affair, much as she had anticipated, grew only stronger after the filming concluded, their pleasure in each other’s company an irresistible force. They began seeing each other regularly, for days and weeks at a time. With his spouse in Maryland and hers in Japan, they had the rest of the world to themselves. MacLaine became Mitchum’s partner in wanderlust and they journeyed off to favorite cities and far-off places. Paris. London. New York. New Orleans. They were happy, wealthy hoboes, bumming around the world, MacLaine following Mitchum’s lead, having “no sense of time or purpose.” In Manhattan they went to jazz clubs, hung out with Dave Brubeck and other Mitchum acquaintances, Robert discoursing on musical esoterica, playing hipster professor to MacLaine’s doting student. In Louisiana they scored absinthe and buckets of oysters and gorged till they were seeing stars. They moved into an old barge on a secluded estuary in bayou country. Mitchum could make himself at home anywhere. Soon they were holding court with the locals, filling their cups, and trading tall tales.
Mitchum delighted in her lithe twenty-eight-year-old dancer’s body and a face he told her was “treacherously beautiful. . . like some enchanted goblins.” She was bright, funny, spirited. Her days as the Sinatra Rat Pack’s mascot had made her a sturdy drinking buddy and as unshockable as a Brooklyn stevedore, but she could be earnest and sensitive and had a burgeoning, ambitious intellectual curiosity.
Mitchum, to MacLaine, was a mysterious and fascinating creature, with his hidden depths and contradictions, variously cynical, poetic, coarse, romantic. She loved his stories and his rich, recondite, and often surreal verbiage, though many a time she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
He was hard to understand in many ways. Once, in a farmhouse they rented outside Paris, he watched her taking a bath and tears began welling in his eyes; he told her he was crying because she looked so beautiful. The same man, she knew, was quite capable of outbursts of rage and violence. On one occasion he went after a driver who had cut him off on the road, ramming into him again and again for miles, grinning, eyes afire. MacLaine looked at him beside her and could only chillingly see the killer he had brought to life in The Night of the Hunter.
The two of them were together when President Kennedy was shot, and they sat side by side in front of the television, day and night, watching the news unfold. It didn’t matter what you did with your life, Mitchum whispered after hours of silence, staring at Kennedy’s coffin, there were always bastards out there waiting to grind you down.
When family or professional obligations took them in different directions, they might not see each other for months but remained in touch with long, intimate phone calls. His words would often haunt her, MacLaine remembered. They would visit each other’s sets, and insiders’ tongues wagged, though the affair would not be hinted at in the columns until much later. “I remember I was playing golf early one morning with Max Perkins, who was director of publicity for Warner Brothers,” said showbiz reporter James Bacon. “And Max got a call from the head security guard at the studio, said Mitchum was in his dressing room with Shirley MacLaine and he was drunker than hell and making all kinds of noise, and everything else was going on in there. This is about seven, eight o’clock in the morning and they’d been there all night. So Perkins called Jack Warner and asked him what they should do. And Jack Warner said, ‘Hell, if she keeps him in his dressing room we at least know where to find him. Tell the guard to make sure they have enough ice. ‘”
Mitchum and MacLaine would work together again, briefly, in What a Way to Go! the grandiose Comden-Green satire in which Shirley was to play a sweet small-town girl who weds and buries a series of millionaires, each husband played, briefly, by a major male star—Paul Newman, Dean Martin, Dick Van Dyke, Gene Kelly, and Mitchum, who took on the role of Rod Anderson, a jet-set industrialist.
The director was J. Lee Thompson. “We were setting up What a Way, and Shirley and I were in New York to meet with Darryl Zanuck. We were there about a week and Bob Mitchum arrived, and we would all go out to dinner together every night. So I knew the situation. They weren’t broadcasting the fact. Well, they were both married. Shirley would never refer to Robert as anything other than a good friend. But they were having great fun together and were great fun to be around. And I think they were probably very much in love with each other.
“Frank Sinatra was supposed to be in the film. Each of the stars was getting a certain salary, and it was quite a lot for two weeks’ work, but Sinatra suddenly wanted about three times that amount and the producers decided they wouldn’t pay it. And so we moved on. I would have liked Gregory Peck to do it, but he turned it down or was doing something else. And I suggested Bob, and Shirley was consulted, and of course she liked that idea.”
Mitchum’s segment in What a Way to Go! had an odd, coincidentally metaphoric resonance for those in the know. His celebrity tycoon character is seen to lead a glamorous, globe-trotting existence with sexy Shirley MacLaine in tow, while secretly longing to return to his overalls, jug of corn liquor, and favorite moo cow back on the rustic farm of his dreams (which, after he mistakenly tries to milk a bull’s testicles, is the scene of his sudden, violent death).
For three years Mitchum lived in a floating captain’s paradise, drifting shift-lessly from spouse to sweetheart and back again. He returned to the farm periodically, and Dorothy and the kids still joined him on location trips, coming to Hawaii while he filmed Rampage (a restfully enjoyable final entry in the dying Great White Hunter genre, with Jungle Bob tracking a mythical leopard-tiger. It was, said the star, “a lot of dancing girls, banjo playing, and bull”) and keeping house in England during the shooting of Man in the Middle. Dorothy knew all about Shirley. She could count on old “friends” from Hollywood to keep her up to date on her husband’s transgressions. It was another passing fling, she must have thought, but Two for the Seesaw came and went and MacLaine did not go with it. The gossip continued. Things appeared very tense as Mrs. Mitchum had to to confront the idea that her husband might finally have found someone else. There were reports of public feuding, of Dorothy arriving at the Rampage producer’s party with some male friends and then departing in a fury the instant Robert arrived. Tongues waggled about a New Year’s party at Romanoff’s, Dorothy attending teary-eyed, and no sign of her husband. Hollywood hands wondered if they were finally seeing the disintegration of one of the town’s longest-lived and supposedly indestructible marriages. Dorothy no doubt wondered the same thing.
She might have taken solace from the fact that Shirley MacLaine had no clearer idea of where it was all heading. Getting Bob to consider the future was like trying to catch a handful of air. For all their intimate time together, he remained in many ways as elusive and ultimately unknowable a character as when she had first determined to make him “a project.” Peel away one layer, MacLaine found, and there was another enigmatic surface underneath. Sometimes it just seemed as if there was no there there. She believed that he had not a single strongly held personal opinion, was “emotionally committed” to nothing. “He had no desires,” she wrote, “not in relation to food, an evening out, or an evening in. His attitude toward lovemaking was the same. He never took the initiative. He enjoyed it certainly, he was sweet and tender, but I never really knew what he wanted. Anything was OK.”
His refusal to articulate his feelings on subjects about which MacLaine was contrastingly voluble made for increasingly explosive encounters. Once, in a hotel room in New York, she became so angry that she dragged him to his feet and out the door and shoved him onto the floor in the hallway. She paused before slamming the door shut, waiting for his response.
Mitchum, in the hall, on the floor, said only, “I’ll tell him when he comes in.
At times MacLaine’s frustration with Mitchum would grow so great that she wo
uld daydream—shocking herself—of committing some very violent act on him, something terrible, whatever it might take to stir the man from the world of indifference in which he seemed to be living. She would decide to be done with him and then find herself drifting back. They would make plans to meet somewhere in the world and Mitchum wouldn’t show, no explanation. That was the end! No more. And then he would track her down somewhere, they would find the old harmony, and the affair would bloom again. Friends told MacLaine that she was drawn to difficult men, and she began to wonder if the key to the relationship wasn’t somehow all tied up with conflicts in her past and with another difficult, distant man she had tried to love. In grappling with Robert, two decades older, MacLaine wondered, was she trying to resolve issues she had had with her father? Mitchum’s opinion on this theory would remain unrecorded.
Til tell him when he comes in.
One evening MacLaine showed up at John Mitchum’s door—according to John in his memoir—with a half-gallon of vodka in one hand and her high-heeled shoes in the other.
“Read this,” she said, thrusting an unfolded letter before him.
John perused the letter. It was from Robert. In high-flown prose he described to her a painful, native loneliness he dared not ask her to share.
What did it mean? she wanted to know.
Assuming that honesty and utter frankness were the best policies, John told her it was “the kiss-off.”
Sad to say, he had heard about similar letters forty, fifty times before. John told author George Eells that his brother went “into this deep, expansive, profound reasoning why he can’t see them anymore, because he doesn’t really want to get involved. . . . When it comes down to the decision, Dorothy always wins hands down. Talk about a con artist.”
As John recalled it, MacLaine heard his blunt explanation, roared, “That son of a bitch!” and flung one of her high heels in the direction of the television set, which as it happened, in the way of a good Mitchum brothers story, was just then midway through a broadcast of One Minute to Zero, starring brother Bob.
“Robert had . . . a tremendous fondness and love for Shirley,” said Reva Frederick. “Under certain circumstances it would have . . . what should I say. . . could have culminated in something permanent. And he was very unhappy that something could not be done about a particular situation. He adored her. But he was not free to go further.”
“Why couldn’t he get free?”
“There was a hold on him. Maybe it was within his own mind. But he couldn’t do it.”
“Obviously you mean something to do with his marriage. Was this a general feeling he had, or are you saying there was some specific reason he felt he could not leave Dorothy?”
“Yes. Yes. A specific reason. I don’t want to get that personal. I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. Too many people still alive.”
“Is this reason he stayed married . . . this hold he felt. . . is it something . . . is it a key to understanding Robert’s character?”
“Oh, no. No. Oh, no, you’ll never understand that. I don’t know that anyone ever did.”
From the moment he first read Arthur Miller’s screenplay of The Misfits, John Huston wanted Robert Mitchum for the lead opposite Miller’s wife, Marilyn Monroe. The character of the existential “last cowboy” was a perfect part for Bob, Huston thought, and the director looked forward to continuing the creative and personal alliance forged in those balmy tropical days and nights on Tobago. He tracked Mitchum to Dublin and sent him the script. Mitchum thought the thing made no sense at all but read with interest the scenes of the hero wrestling with wild horses on the desert flatlands of Nevada. Huston had nearly killed him the last time, Mitchum thought, and this looked like it would be his second opportunity. He alerted his secretary that if the director called, “Tell him I died.” The part went to Clark Gable—who did die shortly after completing the film. Many said it was in large part due to the physical demands of The Misfits as well as the endless aggravations of working with Monroe. Mitchum would later regret his decision. Perhaps the great Gable—with whom he had spent many a pleasant evening over an open bottle—would still be around. And Marilyn—she was soon gone, too. Sad, scrambled child. Perhaps he could have helped out there as well, keeping an eye on her, bringing her back to earth with another slap on the ass. He liked to think he was one of the ones, the last few, she really trusted.
It was some time before he saw Huston again, crossing his path in a hotel bar in London. John gave him the reproving fish eye.
“I’m pretty disappointed in you, Bob,” he said. “Turning me down like that.”
Mitchum said, “What are you doing with that creature, John?”
Huston had a little pet monkey with him at the bar. The monkey’s red-striped penis was extended and the director was plucking at it as he stood there, a drink in his other hand.
Huston smiled. “Well, kid, I think he likes it. . . . “
All was forgiven, the friendship continued. Huston soon offered him a small role—a guest starring appearance—in his delightful, gimmick-ridden mystery thriller, The List of Adrian Messenger (the leads going to George C. Scott as the detective and Kirk Douglas as the villainous master of disguise). The film was full of cameos by an assortment of famous name “suspects”—Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis—supposedly hiding under pounds of makeup, their identity to be revealed as each man ripped off his wig and rubber face in a jaunty epilogue. Mitchum was, in fact, the only one of the guest stars to actually play a real part—a scheming Englishman in a wheelchair who gets dumped into the river, making good use of the East End accent with which he had impressed Charles Laughton back in Maryland. “He was marvelous,” said Huston.
Not long afterward, Mitchum considered another and more intriguing collaboration with the man. He read a play Huston had written in his youth, Frankie and Johnny, a flowery, hard-boiled dramatization of the lurid folk tale of love and murder—originally written for marionettes, no less. Mitchum wanted to make a film of it (with humans, not puppets), not starring but directing and producing. It would be set in ‘20s Chicago, with a lot of period blues and South Side jazz on the soundtrack and a few original songs by Johnny Mercer. He wanted Nelson Algren, author of The Man With the Golden Arm, to write a screenplay. The idea, of course, came to nothing.
The urge to direct a picture came upon him every now and then. Watching all the incompetents and dullards he found himself working with was its own sort of inspiration. Better me than let that guy waste someone’s money again, he would say. “Most directors would be more gainfully employed sitting at Schwab’s drugstore reading the Hollywood Reporter over somebody else’s shoulder.” But then he would imagine actually having to arrive on the set before anybody else, or sitting in a room for months with a cutter . . . or having to look at dailies. It gave him the creeps just thinking about it.
Max Youngstein, associated with Mitchum as a producer and executive at United Artists in the ‘50s, became more closely allied with the actor when he married Mitchum’s good right hand, Reva Frederick. Working under the aegis of Mitchum’s production company (newly renamed Talbot Productions after the home county in Maryland), Youngstein became interested in a property, a novel by Howard Fast called The Winston Affair. It was a story set in India during World War II, concerning the trial of a psychotic American lieutenant accused of murdering a British soldier. He thought it would make a compelling and exotic courtroom drama on film and that the character of the ambivalent American defense attorney would be a nice change of pace for his star. Mitchum agreed to do it, but by then they found that the rights had already been optioned to Marlon Brando’s Pennybaker Productions. As it turned out, Brando himself was not interested in the project, which came to be titled Man in the Middle, but his company had to make something to maintain their legitimacy for tax purposes. Producer and Brando’s business partner Walter Seltzer explained, “Pennybaker had to validate itself, and Marlon didn’t want to work. We had optioned Howard
Fast’s book, and Max Youngstein came to me and said, ‘You beat me to it. Can we throw in together?’”
Youngstein and Seltzer flew to London to meet with Mitchum, then finishing his chores on Adrian Messenger. Seltzer: “And that first meeting was the one time for me when Mitchum lived up to his reputation as something of the playboy of the Western world and beyond. It was at the Savoy Hotel in London. He was drunk. So drunk he walked out of his shower and out of his hotel room and wandered down the hallway and into the elevator, naked. Completely starkers. I think he said he was trying to get a cup of coffee. It kind of startled me—as well as everybody else who was a resident at the Savoy Hotel. A waiter and a valet took him and ushered him back to his room.”
After working with Brando for several years, Seltzer was no stranger to eccentric behavior, though Mitchum’s nature walk did give him pause. “But as it turned out, once we got started he proved to be a professional in every respect. He was on time, knew his lines, and didn’t make any trouble. There was only one occasion when he held up production and that was to take a call from Shirley MacLaine in New York. They had a romance going on. He just broke away in the middle of shooting a scene to talk to her for a half hour and didn’t care about anything else. But he couldn’t enjoy the conversation much because I came and stood at his elbow, looking at my watch the whole time. Otherwise, he was a great professional and very helpful to the film as a whole. Bob was very good with France Nuyen, who was a little unsure of herself, and he did a lot to help her performance and boost her confidence. He was not quite as much help with Trevor Howard, who could be . . . odd.”