Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Mitchum had been all for hiring his old buddy Trevor. The two—who first met in Mexico in the ‘50s while one was shooting Bandido! and the other was finishing Run for the Sun with Richard Widmark and Jane Greer—had had their share of adventures through the years, and Mitchum was, besides, a great admirer of the man’s acting talent. However, Howard had been all but black-balled of late due to his drinking.

  “He had a bum reputation then,” said Walter Seltzer. “But he wanted this job very badly; and Guy Hamilton, the director, and I went out to visit him. He was with his wife, a lovely actress named Helen Cherry. And he was demonstrating to us that he was clean and sober. He very dramatically showed us that he was having tea while the rest of us were swilling drinks. And he did convince us he would be OK, and of course he was a fine, fine actor, and perfect for this role of a military doctor.”

  The problem with putting Mitchum and Howard together on a picture was that Bob could drink for days on end and still work, but Trevor could have two belts and lose all control. On Howard’s second day on the film, he and Mitchum had done some private conferring before they were called to the stage. The Englishman was helped up to a platform on the courtroom set that had been rigged so a camera could shoot from a very low angle below his feet. It was soon discovered that Howard was very clearly wearing one brown sock and one white sock, and when this was pointed out to him, along with the fact that they could not shoot a British major in such attire, he went into a drunken fit, screaming, threatening all who approached, absolutely refusing to change his socks.

  “I got a frenzied call to come to the set,” said producer Seltzer. “Trevor was up there on this platform, really stoned, acting like he was under siege because they wanted to change his socks. And there was Mitchum, watching it all, very amused.”

  Guy Hamilton, who had not yet made his remarkable ‘60s spy movies, Goldfinger and Funeral in Berlin, had directed big Hollywood personages once before, filming The Devils Disciple with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. “My pleasure and joy in working with Bob Mitchum,” Hamilton recalled, “was in direct contrast to my previous experience with Hollywood stars. I still think of him as one of my favorite people, both as an actor and as a human being. I found him to be extremely professional for the ten, twelve weeks we were together. Always knew his lines, always helpful, never complained about anything. That was his approach to everything. Why make waves? As an actor Bob understood the importance of listening, which is very, very rare for American stars—they’re the world’s worst listeners. Bob listened very carefully. And if all else failed in a scene, you knew you could always fall back on Mitchum’s reaction shots, which could say more than the dialogue. Also, Bob was an amazing sight reader. It was like a magic trick. I used to arrive in the morning with pages of script I’d rewritten overnight. I’d say, ‘Bob, I’m sorry about this, but the dialogue is all changed.’ I was expecting all sorts of troubles. And he would look at it and say, ‘OK, that’s fine. Great.’ And he knew it all. And he knew everybody else’s part. Tremendously helpful. The continuity girl didn’t have to work because if anybody dried up on a line, Bob could read it to them from memory. He was a very generous actor and was enormously helpful with the less experienced members of the cast.

  “I was very impressed with Bob as a person. He was huge when he stuck his gut out and walked around with that extraordinary sort of puffed-up pigeon chest of his. But he was a very gentle soul. A very liberal human being and quite modest. He liked to pretend that he was an idiot. And he was very happy pretending to the world that he was a moron, because it made life simpler. He could be left in peace and quiet. But he was a very bright human being. And, oh yes, he played a mean saxophone. We had a dummy band on the set—a recording played the actual music—and the instruments were left around. And Bob had wandered off into a corner with the abandoned saxophone, and I discovered him there, blowing away . . . a real mean, jazzy saxophone. Just wonderful.”

  With the filming of interiors at Elstree Studios efficiently concluded, it was belatedly decided to send Mitchum, Hamilton, and a small crew to India for a week, a kind of glorified second-unit shooting miscellaneous atmosphere and background shots in the streets and buildings of New Delhi. “We were not there very long, but it was a tough location,” said Walter Seltzer. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the amount of dirt and squalor we encountered. Most everybody got sick—I didn’t and Mitchum did not—alcohol might very well have helped there—but the rest of the crew reacted very badly to some of the bugs that one picks up. We had a number of dinners we were invited to, one at the British ambassador’s house, and some other special evenings with the local dignitaries. And Bob went and behaved just fine, a fine representative of America. Bob was a consummate performer, and he knew when he could turn it off and when he had to behave.”

  On one of these “special” evenings, Mitchum claimed, he became the fixation of a maharajah’s daughter, and the two reconvened in his hotel suite that night for a lengthy discussion of Hindu erotic art and other pertinent matters. Mitchum’s driver, meanwhile, introduced him to the delectably powerful sub-continental strains of grass and hashish.

  Mitchum sat between Hamilton and Seltzer on the long return flight to London. “It was an endless, very boring trip,” said Guy Hamilton. “Sixteen hours? I can’t remember. Touching down every five or six hours to refuel. But I was feeling relaxed, finally. The picture is over, the last shots are in the can. And there’s a very helpful stewardess always asking, ‘Can I fill your glass?’ And I’m drinking away happily. But Bob’s not having anything, which is slightly odd. And occasionally he would get up, go to the loo, come back again, go again. And I see that Bob is acting high; he’s really flying. I think, how’s that? He hasn’t been drinking. Then I see, when he bends down, he’s got one of those tiny little British Airways zip bags, flight bags, holding it between his knees.

  “I said, ‘What have you got in there?’

  “He gives me a beatific grin and shows me, and it’s absolutely stuffed with marijuana, raw, not rolled, right off the farm.”

  “What the hell is that?” Walter Seltzer asked.

  “You know, man,” Mitchum said.

  Seltzer said, “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s hemp!”

  Seltzer said, “Jesus, Bob, what are you doing? This is a public flight, not a chartered flight! Where the hell did you get it?”

  Mitchum chuckled. “You’re a naive son of a bitch. One of the drivers in New Delhi supplied the entire crew.”

  “And then,” said Seltzer, “he peeled off some and rolled it. I said, ‘Bob, you’re not going to try to take that into London, are you?’ He said, ‘What do you mean, I’m not? Of course I am.’”

  Guy Hamilton: “We started coming into Heathrow and Bob closed up his bag. And we land and head off for Customs. And I was thinking as we got off—oh, God, I still need him to do some postsynching and this and that; what will we do? And he’s already got one strike against him for this sort of thing. And I was remembering some other actor who was picked up and how they threw the book at him. And I start falling behind, walking at a distance, feeling very nervous and rather sick. And Bob reaches the Customs man, who recognizes him, says, ‘Hello, Mr. Mitchum! Anything to declare?’ And Bob waves his little British Airways bag and the Customs man says, ‘Right, carry on. Good luck!’ And Bob walked straight through without a pause. I nearly collapsed. I went and retrieved my luggage and by then Bob was away and gone. . . . “

  “I had to kind of admire it,” said Walter Seltzer. “He wasn’t scared of anything.”

  Returning to the States, Mitchum told a reporter that he’d been on his best behavior while abroad, trying to fight the misconceptions people had about him. “After making all those gangster pictures,” he said, “there’s a general impression I’m up to no good.”

  The Man in the Middle was not well received by the critics, most of them decrying its slow pace and Mitchum’s sluggish performance. Fo
x dumped the film with little to no support, and it soon disappeared, barely earning back the star’s salary.

  The colorful story of Mister Moses, derived from a novel by Max Catto (Fire Down Below had been his as well), followed the adventures of an American con man and diamond smuggler in the wilds of East Africa, passing himself off as a savior to a dispossessed tribe, posing as an unlikely Moses leading them in an exodus to a new homeland. It was to be the first Western film shot in Kenya since the country’s recent independence from Britain, though the story line of a white scoundrel leading an adoring African tribe was hardly an endorsement of the new self-rule.

  Producing the film was Frank Ross, the man who had once interviewed an unknown Robert Mitchum to play Demetrius in an aborted production of The Robe back in the actor’s $350-a-week days. Mitchum was now offered four hundred thousand dollars for his participation in Mister Moses, much of his role to be played atop the back of an elephant. One more time the actor’s choice of project evidenced his preference for and identification with a reluctant adventurer, a man whose goodness is masked by a surface of cynical self-interest, a personable con man, outsider, friend to the disenfranchised. Carroll Baker, the sensuous blonde who had come to fame in 1956 as the thumb-sucking nymphet in Baby Doll, took the role of a missionary lady who fights and then falls for Robert’s flim-flam man. Others in the international cast included the black American actor Raymond St. Jacques, Briton Ian Bannen, and Canada’s Alexander Knox, plus five hundred Masai tribesmen recruited for the bargain rate of a few shillings a day. Ronald Neame would direct. Once a premiere cinematographer, he had directed several excellent, intelligent British features—Man With a Million, Tunes of Glory, The Horse’s Mouth—and was still several years away from the Hollywood superproductions like The Poseidon Adventure that would occupy him later.

  “We met for the first time in Nairobi,” said Neame. “I’d flown in from London and Bob from California, and we’d arrived within a couple of hours of each other. I phoned him, said, ‘Let’s meet and say hello. How about the bar at eight o’clock, and we’ll have a couple of drinks to celebrate the start of the picture?’ And we met and I found him to be, then and always, the most relaxed company imaginable. We had our drinks, and neither of us remembered that Nairobi is ten thousand feet above sea level, the alcohol hits you at least twice as hard, and instead of having dinner we both got so inebriated that the next thing I remember is being in bed. And that was my first very friendly and amusing meeting with him. And from the first day of production onward for twelve weeks or so he was the most congenial company and one of the best actors I have ever known.”

  Much of the shooting would be done near Lake Naivasha, three hours from Nairobi. Here an entire village of mud and dung huts was constructed to house the Masai and for use as a principal set. Each tribesman was allowed to bring along one wife apiece, with the exception of the chieftain, who was permitted a quartet. “The chief became my assistant director,” said Ronald Neame. “He was the man who all the villagers followed, so he was my liaison with the Masai—who I have to tell you were really very charming, very nice people. Everyone thought of them as savages, but in their own way they were highly civilized. The chief spoke only Masai, that was translated into Swahili and from Swahili to English, and back again when I had to tell him something. It did get to be a bit much, but it worked. He was great. I wished I could have had him in Hollywood. The only problem was that they coated themselves with this mudlike ochre substance that had a terrible odor. Once you got used to it it wasn’t so unpleasant, but when some of us would get back to our respective wives at night. . . mine would say, ‘Well, you really do smell of Masai this evening.’”

  The closest accommodations considered appropriate for the stars and crew were an hour and a half drive from the location in an old colonial hunting lodge at Lemura. Mitchum and Baker were installed in the lodge’s two “luxury” bungalows, in actuality a pair of wooden huts with porches, separated from the main building by a hundred yards of overhanging vegetation, snakes, and ravenous insects. Everyone was advised to stay on the property at night as there were said to be contingents of Mau Mau terrorists still wandering about, robbing and murdering Europeans. Only days before the Moses people arrived, an Englishman who had been bicycling home in the evening was waylaid and hacked to death.

  A hall in the main building of the lodge became a makeshift screening room. “The film we shot all went back to England for processing,” said Neame. “Whatever we shot after lunch one day and before lunch the next. It was sent out in time for the five o’clock plane for Nairobi. Processed in England the following morning, printed by the next morning, and sent back to Nairobi. We had a terrible projector and a bedsheet for a screen to view the rushes on, and everything looked awful. It was better not to look at them at all. Bob never had any interest in seeing them. He was very casual about what we did after he had done his job. He was very secure as an actor and knew what he had given me. I’ll tell you something about Mitchum. On the first day of shooting, a scene between Bob and Carroll Baker, the producer, Frank Ross, was standing discreetly a bit behind the camera. We finished the shot and I said, ‘Let’s print that. Move on.’ And he came up to me and said, ‘Ronnie, he didn’t do anything. He just walked through it. This is awful. Why don’t we get him to do more?’ I said, ‘Frank, wait and see what it looks like when you see it on the screen.’ It was a wonderful thing about this man as an actor. He appeared to do nothing. Underacted. But some—I don’t know what—some magic made it very powerful on the screen.”

  Each morning at dawn, Mitchum’s driver, a local man named Sampson, would take him to work, a bracing wake-up ride over what was more trail than road. Sampson knew only one mode of driving—dangerous. He would take them along the dirt highway like a bat out of hell, all but running over anyone walking or riding on the same thoroughfare. More than once he barely avoided a head-on crash with a wild beast and Mitchum would go flying from his seat as they nearly toppled over, careening off the road and onto the grass, and would look up from the floor in time to see a giraffe prancing by on the road where they had been a moment before. Robert complained, but to no effect, even though Sampson professed great fear of losing his job. After a few days of these death-defying rides, Mitchum insisted on driving himself to the location, while Sampson moved into the backseat and napped or enjoyed the view.

  An even more uncomfortable ride was the one Mitchum had to take aboard a supposedly trained pachyderm named Emily, imported from South Africa. Shades of Marilyn Monroe, the elephant actress proved to be difficult, often refusing to come to the set or to perform once she got there. The trainer had warned them repeatedly that Emily should not be separated from her girlfriend, Susie, but Susie had been considered an unnecessary expense. Now, seeing the error of their ways, they had the other elephant shipped in, and Emily became instantly cooperative. “The trainer was quite right,” said Ronald Neame. “The elephant was a lesbian. Once we brought her girlfriend to the set, she would do anything we asked.”

  For Mitchum it was like a return to his first awkward days riding horses in Kernville but even more chafing and straining on the thigh muscles. Perched ten feet from the ground, legs widely splayed, he would roll and sway for up to six hours a day in the heat and dust. “Christ,” he complained, “I might as well be with Ringling Brothers. At least there’d be a tent over my head, and I’d get to fuck the lady midgets.”

  Unlike Emily the elephant, the other female star of Mister Moses was no lesbian. Carroll Baker had come away from a problematic marriage to film and theater director Jack Garfein, and now, thousands of miles from home, in what she called the “primitive . . . titillating” atmosphere of the African wilds, she found herself falling under the spell of an erotically appealing leading man. Described by Baker as a “gorgeous hunk” who “paraded his manliness twenty four hours a day,” Mitchum seems to have unwittingly reduced the actress to a state of almost painful concupiscence.

  Place
d within whispering distance of Mitchum in their isolated bungalows beyond the hotel, Baker found herself spying on him through her shuttered windows. “Barefooted and barechested,” she recalled, “he would strut on his front porch . . . sheening with sweat. I was driven to distraction.” He would pace the porch like a “tiger in heat,” then lie half-naked in the hammock there, “hypnotically swaying toward me and away from me as a perpetual prurient invitation.”

  Baker’s infatuation grew with each passing day and night, but the object of her affections seemed completely oblivious. Indeed, he would seldom have even a kind word for his costar. Mooning over Mitchum, Baker took cold showers, downed an herbal tea prescribed as a tranquilizer by a Masai witch doctor, and slid tribal “discouragement” charms into her undies. “I wanted so much to be faithful to Jack and our marriage vows,” Baker wrote in her memoirs, “but where was I to find the strength?”

  On one particularly torrid evening a couple of weeks into filming, her ardor at the boiling point, Baker finally made up her mind to throw caution to the wind and make her feelings known to the irresistible actor. In the midst of plotting her seductive next move, she heard a knock on the bungalow door. Thinking it could be no one else at that time of night but her coveted next-door neighbor, Baker recalled “shaking in anticipation” as she flung open the door and saw a grinning Shirley MacLaine standing there.