Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Hi!” Shirley squealed. “I just surprised Bob. He had no idea I was coming!”

  “Oh . . . ,” said Carroll. “. . . wonderful . . .”

  MacLaine invited her to come on over to “their” bungalow for cocktails. Not wanting to be impolite—though she had certainly envisioned different circumstances for her visit to Mitchum’s bachelor pad—Baker went, and found MacLaine wriggling on Bob’s lap and the two of them smooching it up. So much for what John Mitchum had called the “kiss-off.” The frolicking pair were already well into a large pitcher of bone-dry martinis. Baker drowned her disappointment, then stumbled back to her bungalow and passed out.

  For the next few days, Mitchum and MacLaine were together happily as in the past, with no discussion of more recent acrimony and ultimatums. They frolicked with the Masai, “commiserated” with the whites still whining about Uhuru and Mau Mau, and drank. “Shirley was great fun, and the whole of the unit loved her,” said Neame. “She loves any sort of adventure and she was really enjoying being there with Bob and everyone and getting to know our tribe. Several of the women had their babies on the set, and it was considered by the Masai to be good luck if the child is brought into the world by a white woman, so Shirley was present with the midwife for the delivery of two or three babies.”

  It was plain to MacLaine that as much as she still cared for Mitchum, the fire had cooled. His philosophy of life—his nihilism, his belief that shit just happened, his commitment to a lack of commitment—could never be her own. The sense of frustration he had provoked in her, though, she took as an object lesson. “I was drawn to him,” she would write, “not only because he was nearly twenty years older and a father image, but because through him I could learn how essential it was for me to inform others of what I wanted, needed and was committed to in life.”

  She took off on a solo safari to the north and eventually went onward to India for some spiritual study. It was over, but MacLaine never quite forgot. “I don’t think they saw each other or talked in later years,” said director J. Lee Thompson, “though Shirley still cared about him, yes. I was doing a picture with Bob many years later and she called me, wanted to know—how is Bob? Is he OK? It was very sweet.”

  A journalist friend of the lodge’s English proprietor had filed a story on the Moses group, strongly implying—before Miss MacLaine’s arrival—that Mitchum and Baker were in the midst of a romance. This set in place a wave of gossip and countergossip back in Hollywood—which eventually brought both Baker’s and MacLaine’s husbands flying to East Africa to keep an eye on their women. Dorothy, though, told columnist Earl Wilson she wasn’t going anywhere—“I’ve been through this a good many times before,” she said.

  When the troublemaking journalist showed up at the lodge again, Baker piled a tray full of food and dumped it on his head. The outraged proprietor then told Frank Ross they could all get the hell out. But it so happened that Baker, Mitchum, and a few of the other actors were going to Nairobi that evening for a state dinner with the country’s new president, Jomo Kenyatta. Carroll told him of their imminent eviction from the lodge, and Kenyatta assured the beautiful blonde that his chief of security would “silence the landlord forthwith!”

  The charismatic African leader was particularly delighted with Mitchum, who sat beside him during the elaborate dinner and regaled him with raunchy stories of Hollywood. (Mitchum would later boast to Tim Wallace how well he had hit it off with Kenya’s “head nigger.”)

  . . .

  Catching word of all the expected new arrivals, and having gotten pretty fed up with three hours of driving each day, Mitchum decided to forego the comforts of the sportsman’s lodge and moved himself into a dressing room caravan out at the edges of the Masai village. And so, for the remainder of the production, he lived in the wild, keeping an eye out for beasts and becoming an honorary member of the adjacent tribe. He spent late nights around the fire in the camp, sampling the cow’s blood milkshake the men imbibed for strength and passing around some of his own deadly brews. He took part in dances and ceremonies and learned the art of spear-throwing. “I loved it,” he would say. “Those natives are honest folk—never steal anything except one another’s women, but that’s okay under their code. They hunt with their spears, can hit a dime at fifty paces, and the men do no work at all. They’ve got the right idea. Sleep, eat, make love, kill a few lions and when you start to get bored, move on to the next county. The only thing I didn’t dig was all the blood you’re supposed to drink.”

  He found the Masai women a fascinating, even alluring lot, shaved heads, greased in fat, earlobes stretched, sprinkled with cow urine, and all. He attended a ritual dance by the females of the tribe and called them “the most electrically feminine women—I mean you could feel it—I’d ever come across.” As a token of their affection, several tribesmen offered him the loan of their wives. But Mitchum, through with married women for the time being, graciously declined.

  The downside to all that natural living was a nasty case of dysentery, chills, and severe diarrhea. His plumbing refused to settle down for several weeks. The doctor told him it would have been smarter if he had sought aid after the first symptom had appeared.

  The first symptom was lethargy. Mitchum said, “How the hell was I going to recognize that?”

  The good relationship between the film company and the Masai ended on a sour note after the manufactured village was burned down for the camera—as had been planned from the beginning. “The burning went well, we got it all on film,” said Ronald Neame. “And then we broke for lunch. Suddenly in the middle of lunch there was a terrible explosion from the burned down village. We all rushed to see what had happened. A big oxygen tube that was used for lighting flares and things had been left on the ground. It had overheated and exploded. One of the Masai had gone back in among the rubble—presumably he had forgotten something, and he was there at just that wrong moment—and the explosion killed him. When the other tribesmen learned what had happened, it became very nasty for a time. They came after us, surrounded us, and pointed quite a few spears in our direction—which, by the way, were all made in Birmingham, England—and I can assure you it was no joke. When they threw those spears, they could kill a lion. And they were particularly angry with one of my assistant directors who they held responsible for the explosion because he had gone into the village first. And I was scared that they would kill him outright, right there in front of us. Finally they were convinced that it had been a careless accident, and that the man had brought it onto himself. The chief had a meeting with his committee and decided that five head of cattle should be given to the dead man’s wife. Mitchum? Yes, he was there at the lunch table when the explosion went off. He took it calmly. Went on eating, probably.”

  Mister Moses would turn out to be a bright and gorgeously scenic adventure movie and one of the few films to make good use of Mitchum’s talent for blithe comedy, here in a charming and funny performance as a lovable hustler who permits himself to be “outhustled.” The film’s final image of Bob, Carroll, and elephant, Mitchum’s latest variant family of sundowners, traipsing off to their next unknown adventure without a tribe or a home to call their own, was resonantly emblematic.

  After Moses, Mitchum felt more than ever before a reluctance to go back before the cameras. He was forty-six, and already the word retirement fell easily from his lips. He remained in Maryland for some months, “goofing off.” He was devoting more time and money to his horses. His racer Belmont Scare looked like a champion in the making. But even in this gentlemanly rich man’s sport, his notorious past dogged him, biting him on the ass. Intending to run Belmont Scare in a quarter horse stake race at Sunland Park in New Mexico, Mitchum was found to have falsified a Racing Commission license application. On the form he had denied ever having been arrested or convicted on a criminal charge. His horse was denied a license, and Mitchum was barred from entering all New Mexico racetracks.

  Jim Mitchum was still looking for stardom. He wo
rked steadily, but a breakthrough role eluded him. He was impressive in Carl Foreman’s antiwar movie The Victors, but it was a nasty part in a nasty film—it did not become his G.I. Joe.

  His brother, Chris, had grown to young manhood on the farm. He was widely regarded as a very nice kid. Chris was intelligent, sweet-tempered, sensitive. He still hoped to be a writer and was a good student at the various universities he attended. He seemed to understand his father’s temperament better than most and accept it, but the yearning for some more emotional connection with the man had to be there all the same. Chris had met a girl at high school in 1962. They went together for a couple of years, and then he and Cindy decided to get married. His mother thought he was being young and foolish, tried to talk him out of it. He couldn’t remember his father having an opinion on the matter. Cindy came from a warm family. “Her father used to kiss her good night, and she’d kiss him good night. My family just isn’t that way,” Chris told a reporter. “I think Cindy felt, because she didn’t walk in and get hugged and kissed, that she was unwanted. Which isn’t the case. It’s just a matter of our family structure being different.”

  Robert did not make the wedding, maybe didn’t know it had occurred. “I don’t even think he was in town at the time,” Chris said. “He was off on a picture somewhere.” There was always the telephone, the reporter offered—all he had to do was pick it up and break the news. “That’s getting into sentimentality,” Chris said. “He’s not that way. He doesn’t express it. I think my mother called and told him. He said, ‘I hope it works out.’

  “I think that being raised the way he was, having had such a tough childhood, Dad had to become the type of person who finds it actually embarrassing to express himself emotionally. I understand him as a person. I don’t resent him or hate him or feel he’s cheated me out of anything. . . . I respect and admire him. . . . Of course I love him. Very much so. Only sometimes I don’t necessarily like him.”

  In the summer of 1965, Reva called with an offer. “Howard Hawks wants you to do a cowboy picture with John Wayne.”

  Mitchum said, “Tell Howard to call me.”

  He called.

  “You want to tell me a little bit of the story,” Mitchum said.

  “No story, Bob. Just you and Duke.”

  Well, what the hell. Anything to get out of the house.

  A year shy of seventy in 1965, Howard Hawks was coming to the end of an extraordinary career as a motion picture director. In the course of nearly fifty years of making movies, he had been responsible for a great many milestones of popular entertainment, including Scarface, Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Red River, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Though for most of his working life he had no public profile a la DeMille or Hitchcock, Hawks had long been held in the highest esteem within the mogul camps of Hollywood, a man known for decades as a hit maker and a star maker. He was drily funny, icy of manner, an American aristocrat; also self-absorbed, arrogant, and, according to his biographer, a credit hog and a deadbeat not above stiffing the local grocer. Beginning in France in the ‘50s and then—by the mid-’60s—in cultural and academic circles in Britain and the United States, Hawks had been “discovered” as the great unknown master of the cinema, with critics and movie mavens championing his weighty skill as a story-teller and explicating his peculiarly personal obsessions with masculine cameraderie, stoicism, sexual humiliation, and basso-voiced starlets.

  Hawks had planned to make a film out of Harry Brown’s novel The Stars in Their Courses, a violent and tragic tale described as a “Western Iliad,” and put his frequent collaborator Leigh Brackett to work on a screenplay while he completed another film, Red Line 7000. A race-car melodrama for the drive-in set, full of vapid young faces, bad acting, and awful, ersatz a-go-go music, Red Line was Hawks’s attempt to prove he was one sexagenarian who was still “with it,” and at this he failed dismally. With the unreleased picture almost certain to crash and burn—and his previous film, the underrated Man’s Favorite Sport, considered another disaster—Hawks scurried to reteam with his frequent collaborator and the movies’ only sure thing, John Wayne (rebounding heroically after losing half a lung to cancer). Now having second thoughts about his dark, six-gun Iliad—the thing was just too damn sad; everybody died in it—he jettisoned Brackett’s just-completed screenplay, which she considered the best work she had ever done, keeping only the title, El Dorado, and a couple of early scenes, in favor of something less tragic, less risky, and more fun, something not unlike his last Wayne Western, Rio Bravo. So much not unlike it that screenwriter Brackett referred to the revised story line as Rio Bravo Rides Again. As in the previous film, the plot would now center around a town and a jail-house under siege, with its cast of characters including a drunken lawman to be rehabilitated (it was Dean Martin in Bravo), an arrogant youth, a sassy female (or two this time), an old coot, and so on. Brackett balked at the quasi-plagiarism—even though she was cribbing from herself, having written Rio Bravo as well—but could not stand up to the intimidation tactics of Howard and the Duke, who stood over her and growled, “If it worked once, it’ll work again!”

  . . .

  El Dorados central relationship was that of two old comrades, one an aging hired gun (Duke’s role), the other a derelict sheriff. Hawks needed an actor who was vaguely contemporary with the fifty-five-year-old Wayne and had sufficient stature not to be (in Hawks’s phrase) “blown off the screen” by the larger-than-life actor. Such personages were in short supply. Mitchum, indeed, seemed an all but inevitable choice. Mitchum’s stoic masculinity, underplaying, and deadpan humor were right up Hawks’s alley. Hawks had, in fact, placed the actor on his casting wish lists for many past productions.

  But that was then.

  “I was associate producer on El Dorado, and Hawks and I were very close by this time,” said Paul Helmick. “I had been good friends with Mitchum, but we hadn’t seen much of each other in a while. We were casting the picture, and Hawks was trying to think of somebody to play the Dean Martin part. I said, ‘The guy for that part is Bob Mitchum.’ Hawks said to forget it. We mentioned everybody in Hollywood, none of them as good as Mitchum. So I suggested him again. Hawks said he was good, but he was trouble. He’d heard too much about his drinking. I said, ‘Howard, let me tell you something. Mitchum has done these pictures with these directors who don’t know what the hell they’re doing. And Mitchum loses interest, he goes off the deep end, parties all night, does whatever.’ I said, ‘Howard, with you, you know your business. When you want to do any experimenting, the actors are glad to do it; they trust you know where you’re taking them. I don’t think you’ll have a problem in the world.’ And Hawks said, ‘Mitchum is real good. Let’s try and get him. But I’m telling you I don’t want any drinking.’”

  Filming got started on the streets of Old Tucson (the same location used for Rio Bravo—of course) on October 11, 1965. Oddly, Hawks planned to shoot relatively few scenes using the bright blue Arizona skies and scenic landscapes but set most of the film’s action on the Tucson streets at nighttime. They would be shooting “night for night,” and the cast and crew were advised to get ready for an unusual schedule—work beginning at five or six in the evening and lasting until dawn some nights. Vintage Hollywood cameraman Harold Rossen was brought out of retirement with a mandate to light up the town in imitation of Frederick Remington’s evocative nocturnal paintings.

  Though the new version of El Dorado was mostly complete on paper and Leigh Brackett was in Tucson finishing it up, the relationship between what they filmed on a given day—or night—and anything written in the script was often tenuous. Hawks had a relaxed and semi-improvisatory approach to the work. “You have to run the thing,” he said. “You have to tell them what to do . . . but they do it their own way and in doing so lead you into many, many things.” He liked to sidle up to scenes, handing actors a revised line or two, giving them the freedom to get comfortable with their parts and make something une
xpected happen. And sometimes, when nothing happened, that was all right, too. It was just a movie. Mitchum got a kick out of Hawks’s studied casualness. He did an amusing imitation of him that involved standing silently at length, staring portentously, holding his chin as he pondered, then telling everybody they could go home for the day.

  “Hawks was not like some of these directors, watching the clock, yelling and screaming,” said Robert Donner, who played Milt, one of El Dorado’s sleazier bad guys. “He took things at his own pace, had his own way of doing things. And Howard thought nothing of closing down the show and taking everybody down across the border into Mexico to eat at some restaurant he liked.*

  “The idea with Howard was to make a good picture but have a good time doing it. He didn’t drive himself crazy with the little details. That’s how you got that business with Mitchum holding the crutch under the wrong leg in some scenes—crutch keeps switching left to right in different scenes. So they stuck a piece of dialogue in there—’Don’t you know which leg you got shot in?’ or something. That was a result of the fact that Hawks saw the mistake and said, ‘Hell, the audience won’t give a damn. We’re not gonna go back and reshoot for that.’”

  Mitchum liked Hawks’s way of working—it was what he ended up doing on his own on many films anyway, trying to get something halfway real out of dreadful scripts; but now it was done in a spirit of calm and of communal creativity, not desperation. Since nobody, including Hawks, had a real strong idea where it was all going from day to day—the script was “written in sand” as one cast member put it—there were some false starts. Mitchum had begun playing his soused sheriff—J. P. Harrah, “a tin star with a drunk pinned on it”—for realism, making him pathetic and terrifying. Hawks said, “Well, that’s the way Dean Martin did it. What else have you got?” And so Mitchum went in another direction, to a broad comic style, mugging and doing pratfalls that had cast and crew in stitches. It was so well received that Mitchum set a new tone for the proceedings (Hawks liked to say he was happy to turn any picture into a comedy if he could). The film went into areas of pure farce at times (according to Hawks, James Caan, as the annoyingly callow youth Mississippi, never knew his part had turned into a comic one or he’d have “tried to be funny”; Caan said he did figure it out, and you can tell because he starts smiling after every line).