Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “You know, it got where I could read what Hawks was thinking,” said Paul Helmick. “And when it came time to turn the camera on Mitchum the first day, he added so much to the scene that when it was over Hawks turned to me and I looked back at him, and he was so happy, like the cat that [sic] swallowed the canary. Because he knew damn well now that he had done the right thing in hiring Mitchum.”

  “It was the first time I’d worked with Mitchum,” Hawks said. “I enjoyed it. The first time I work with a good actor I have fun finding things for them to do. You remember that scene in the bath tub? Well, it was Mitchum’s idea that when the girl walked past, he’d pull the hat over his eyes. I laughed as hard as anybody. You can hear the crew laughing on the soundtrack because nobody knew he was going to do it. Those things are just marvelous.”

  Hawks said, “Any time you get somebody who’s as good as Wayne and Mitchum, you’re going to make better scenes than there are in the script. Because they’re damn good, those two people are together.”

  Some weeks into the filming the director cornered Mitchum and told him, “You know, you’re the biggest fraud I’ve ever met in my life.”

  Mitchum cocked a grin. “How come?”

  Hawks said, “You pretend you don’t care a damn thing . . . and you’re the hardest-working so-and-so I’ve ever known.”

  Mitchum said, “Don’t tell anybody.”

  “Hawks and Mitchum worked together just great, as I thought they would,” said Paul Helmick. “Bob did a wonderful job on that picture. And I don’t think he took a drop the whole picture. Now I’m not saying he didn’t enjoy himself. I remember, a couple of days after we got started in Tucson, before an afternoon call, I was sitting at the table with Wayne and Hawks, we were eating our lunch. Mitchum walked in with one of the best-looking girls I ever saw in my life. I think she was some girl from the local college, a teenager. And he came over to us at the table and said, very straight-faced, ‘Fellas, I’d like to introduce what’s-her-name here. She’ll be with us for the entire picture. She is my new drama coach.’ And then he escorted her away. And Wayne made some crack, and Hawks laughed. And I said, ‘This picture is going to be fun.’”

  “Mitch was really a nifty guy,” said Robert Donner. “Working with him, he was always, you know, saying, ‘I could not fucking care less,’ but he was always the one who was letter perfect, knew exactly what was needed, what was going on.

  “Mitch and Duke got along great, worked real well together, but they were different types of people. Duke was wonderful, and he loved the people that he worked with all the time. But Wayne was always ready to tell you what to do, grab you by the shoulders and put you where he wanted you, tell you how to say a line.” One night, Mitchum recalled, Wayne was sitting outside his trailer putting his wig on. He said, “Goddamn it, Mitch, when are gonna let me direct you in a picture?” Mitchum said, “Duke, that’s all you do anyway.”

  “Wayne could get a hard-on against somebody,” said Donner. “Duke didn’t care for John Gabriel, who was one of the nicest guys that ever walked. (Gabriel: “I walked between Wayne and the camera, and he sort of manhandled me to show me you don’t do that to John Wayne. But later he apologized and complimented my acting. Which was nice of him.”) And he didn’t like Ed Asner, always called him ‘that New York actor.’ What the hell he had against Ed I don’t know. And Duke loved to argue about politics. He would sit sipping tequila with the still photographer, Phil Stern, and it was hours of ‘goddamn liberals’ this and Stern telling him ‘goddamn conservatives’ that.

  “Mitchum was a lot more easygoing. You could play around with Mitch and didn’t have to worry you had overstepped your bounds. He was very generous with the other actors. I remember him whispering something to Adam Rourke—they didn’t know I could hear them—and making sure Adam got to shine in the scene. . . . And when the work was done, he was a lot of fun. He and old Arthur Hunnicutt were a riot together, sitting around remembering stories from the old days. Arthur had been quite a drinker in his day, and he still drank on days when he wasn’t working. His idea of a martini was half gin and half vermouth, and he had it poured into what they called a bucket glass.”

  For nearly two months, shooting “night for night,” the El Dorado company worked the graveyard shift. Work began around five, and dinner would be served at about ten, then filming would be resumed—some nights until they “ran out of dark.” The actors and crew would try to sleep during the day, but it was difficult to adjust to the odd hours. Robert Donner: “You had breakfast at. . . I don’t know when the hell we’d have breakfasts. You got so screwed up with the hours, you didn’t know what time it was after a while. You just knew when the sun went down you were supposed to start working.” During the night, many actors would slip off under a wagon or onto an unlit porch on the Old Tucson street and try and catch a nap, though it was hardly restful knowing that Hawks might be looking for you at any moment. “Mr. Hawks was spontaneous, always changing things,” said John Gabriel, playing the varmint Pedro. “So you just had to hang around because you never knew when he would need you for a scene.”

  Donner: “I remember lying there on the street behind the wardrobe. It was getting to me, staying up all night every night. I sat up all of a sudden and screamed, ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ And Jim Davis, stretched out near me, lifted his hat back and said, ‘Aw, stop it, if you were home you’d be on unemployment anyway. Go back to sleep.’ So I went back to sleep.”

  On a normal work night the actors might be dismissed at about 2 A.M. While some slid into bed at that point, others went looking for whatever entertainment might be had in Tucson Old or New at two o’clock in the morning. There were poker and blackjack games in the rooms. And for those who were up to interpersonal relations, there were a pair of local girls, possibly cousins, known affectionately as Filthy Phyllis and Rotten Ruth, who loved movie actors very much. The bar at the Ramada Inn, where most of the company stayed, could usually be kept open under special dispensation. One week there was a contingent of rowdy Lufthansa pilots in town for training. Seizing half the bar for a private Oktoberfest, they delighted in cutting off the ties and other articles of clothing from anyone walking near, pinning them to the bar, and generally acting like drunken morons. One night a bunch of the El Dorado guys were heading for a card game when Mitchum veered off, saying, “I’m going to the bar and check out the heinies.” He was going to mess it up with the Lufthansa guys. Everybody rolled their eyes and went the other way. It was some time later when Mitchum showed up at the card game in Ed Asner’s room, and he wasn’t alone. Casual as can be, like nothing was out of the ordinary, Mitchum had a German tucked under his arm. Seeing a Lufthansa pilot in a headlock, people in the room shouted, “Hey, Bob, let that guy go!” Mitchum said, “Oh, he’s all right. We came to play some cards.’”

  Bob Donner recalled, “With the German in the headlock he comes over and sits down at the table. Keeps the German’s head tucked under his arm—the guy’s on his knees now—and starts playing a hand. And Mitch’d lift the cards and he’d let the guy see and he’d say, ‘What do you think, heinie? Should we hit?’

  “A little later things got pretty rowdy and there was a beating on the wall. And Ed Asner says, ‘Jesus, guys, keep it down, for god’s sake! Hawks is sleeping in the next room!’ And it quieted down for a while, and then Bob or somebody would start something and the noise would start. All of a sudden we hear BAM! BAM! BAM! from outside. And everybody runs to the door. And there’s Hawks in his long John pajamas with a six-shooter, firing away. And he says, ‘Goddamn it! If I see anybody not in their bed in five minutes they’re on the goddamn plane out of here!’ And it was like rats in the night, everybody scurrying!”

  The company departed Tucson for Los Angeles on November 22 and continued shooting on the Paramount lot until the end of January 1966, wrapping up some three weeks and a half million dollars over the original estimate. In April, in Palm Springs, Hawks screened a preview for friends an
d family. His son told him, “A sheriff shouldn’t sing,” and so the director cut a jailhouse musical number with Mitchum singing and Arthur Hunnicutt playing harmonica. The film opened in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, at the end of the year but was held back until the summer of ‘67 for its American release. It was a smash everywhere it played; and in Paris, where Hawks had become a brand name like Hitchcock, the lines ran around the block all day and all night.

  Then (as now) it was an enormously entertaining film. A sloppy film, to be sure—meandering, misshapen, with bit and supporting players giving line readings not worthy of a high school play, and the lines themselves often not much better, wardrobe that had the neatly pressed look of a dude ranch masquerade, continuity errors like that notorious shifting crutch, and other failings. And yet it suceeded in a way that many more ambitious and more disciplined movies never could. As Hawks had promised, in lieu of a plot it offered Wayne and Mitchum “riding again,” a study more than a story—of friendship and redemption, danger and good times. For some admirers of El Dorado, its concentration on its heroes’ infirmities and physical deterioration—paralyzing bullet wounds, alcoholism, both stars on crutches at the fade-out—and the inclusion of an Edgar Allan Poe poem with its references to failing strength and the Valley of the Shadow—revealed this as Hawks’s elegy on aging and death. For many more, though, its value was of the less profound but likely more pleasurable sort, as a funny, violent, engaging, rather antiquated movie that played across the screen like a favorite old tune heard on the radio one more time.

  It was arguably the last great Western for everyone involved.

  “You ask if I have one favorite memory of working with Mitchum, and I do,” said Robert Donner. “It was late one night in Old Tucson. There were hours when none of us had anything to do but wait, and if you were looking for Mitchum you could usually find him off by himself in the dark street. You could find him by the glow of his cigarette. He smoked those Gauloises, French tobacco, smelled like shit. And you’d go walking in the dark on the street there, and you could see the little glow. And from the dark he called out to me. He always called me ‘Mother Donner.’ And I sat down there and we talked. I was new in the business, and I didn’t know my head from a hot rock and he knew it. And Mitchum talked and tried to tell me a few things, and finally he said to me, ‘Just know that this business can afford you some wonderful opportunities. Don’t miss them, boy. Don’t waste it. You’ll see great things. . . .’ He said, ‘The movie business has been like a magic carpet for me. I’ve been to places, seen things . . . wonderful things.’ And I could not even begin to imagine what kind of things Robert Mitchum had seen, you know. So we just sat there in the night, and he went back to smoking that shitty French cigarette. I don’t know. I guess it’s not much, but that little conversation stayed with me. You remember funny things like that when you look back. . . . “

  *”We’re all excited, thinking this must be some incredible restaurant the way Hawks has been talking it up. And we get to this gas station outside Nogales—a cafe run by the people who run the gas station. But, dammit, the food was just as great as he said it was!”

  chapter fourteen

  Baby, I Don’t Care

  “SOME PEOPLE IN THE Defense Department kept nudgin’ me—’Why don’t you go find out?’ Next thing I knew I was fallin’ off an airplane at Ton So Nhut . . . and it’s 117 degrees.”

  The conflict in Vietnam was raging, no end in sight. At home, public opposition to American involvement in the war was becoming more heated, soon to explode. Morale had begun its steady downward crawl among the fighting troops. Hoping to raise the soldiers’ spirits, as well as provoke some much-needed positive press, the USO—in addition to sending out vaudeville shows of the Bob Hope sort—had been organizing more low-key “handshake tours,” asking Hollywood celebrities to go to Vietnam at government expense and spend a little time meeting and talking to some of the boys in the camps and hospitals. Those who went included Robert Stack, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Lana Turner, John Wayne, Hugh O’Brian, and Martha Raye (who became a fearless virtual fixture in the war zone). Mitchum had never shown much interest in the war till now (he had barely spoken a word in public about World War II, for that matter). But maybe, he said, it was time he had a look at what they were doing over there with all that tax money. Protect his interests. It also sounded like a hell of an adventure.

  Flown out on a government aircraft, Mitchum spent his first days in Saigon, wined and dined in tropical colonial splendor, meeting and greeting the military elite (General Westmoreland awarded him an autographed glossy), hearing the company line on the war. He was taken to military hospitals and toured the wards filled with injured Americans, young guys with missing arms and legs and faces half blown off. The visits had their intended effect—it wasn’t easy to remain neutral or indifferent about the war when you saw what the enemy—whatever their cause—was doing to these hometown boys. He was taken out to villages and shown good works projects, Americans putting in sewage systems, building schoolhouses. He was impressed, and pissed off. Why didn’t they show any of this noble shit on the news back home?

  The greater part of Mitchum’s two-week visit was to be spent in the field, roaming by helicopter and light aircraft from one U.S. encampment to another, fanning across the jungles north of the capital city. Dressed in the khaki safari suit favored by TV correspondents and Hollywood bwanas, Mitchum, accompanied by an army public relations man or other assigned “minder,” would drop from the skies onto tiny landing fields the size of a parking space, where he would be welcomed by the top brass and shown around. The usual itinerary included a quick tour of the base and an hour or so of shaking hands and making small talk, encouraging words for the troops—then back to the Huey and the next camp on the list. He posed for pictures, signed autographs for anyone who wanted one, and collected phone numbers and messages from kids who knew their moms would be thrilled to hear Robert Mitchum telling them their boys were OK.

  Special Forces veteran Daniel Carpenter, stationed at a Green Beret encampment “so far out in the bush that everyone seemed to have forgotten about it,” would recall that the coded announcement of a VIP visit was greeted as an oncoming headache by the camp commander until the VIP was revealed to be Robert Mitchum.

  “No shit,” said the North Carolinian captain. “You ever see Thunder Road?”

  Mitchum arrived by helicopter with a diffident navy lieutenant, got the usual grand tour, shook some hands. The navy man wanted to wrap things up and get back in the helicopter, but Mitchum said, “Relax, man. Anybody got a drink around here?” They trudged over to the local clubhouse, a contraption made of ammunition boxes and Playboy centerfolds. Mitchum asked what they charged for a drink, then asked how much it would be to buy the whole bar. The captain didn’t know. Mitchum told him to figure it out. Then, Carpenter wrote, Mitchum “took a fat roll of bills from his pocket. It cost him a couple of hundred to buy the bar. The troopers drank free, on his tab, for months.”

  Mitchum played some craps, lost most of his roll, and took off.

  Herb Speckman, another Vietnam War veteran in the field during Mitchum’s tour, recalled his first sighting of the roving movie star:

  “The gentleman landed at Dong Ha air strip and they wanted to take him up to Quangtri Province, where there was no runway. We didn’t get many entertainers that far out, maybe two in all that time bothered to drop by. And Mr. Mitchum was going by jeep, about a ten-mile drive. They were worried about the man and decided to assign one of the most talented of our pilots—which of course would be myself—to escort the little convoy. Mitchum got off the airplane and got into a jeep. I was told to take care of him, flying overhead in an LI9, stay close, make sure they didn’t get attacked, that they got there all right. I watched them all load up, and then I got in my airplane, fired up, and followed them. And I stayed quite close, and then I came up from behind to get a better look. I made one pass and tore the antenna off the jeep that he was in.
Scared the shit out of him. He was extremely irate. It was probably a twelve-foot whip antenna, and the wing of the airplane took it right off, which didn’t bother me. I got a little closer than I intended. I didn’t intend to kill anybody, just to give them a little fright. And I had a good three feet to spare before I would have actually hit Mitchum’s head. But, you know, if you never had a big engine suddenly come at you from behind, just missing your head by a few feet, it can give you a little scare.”

  “Yeah, I remember when Mitchum came up there to Quangtri,” said Norman Peterson, a pilot and air liaison officer at Mitchum’s destination in the jungle. “He was the only one besides Martha Raye. Came in by jeep, which was a little dangerous coming through there. We called it Indian country. Friend of mine buzzed him, knocked his antenna off. He was angry. Said, ‘Wait till I get ahold of the SOB that buzzed us!’ See, if the enemy had attacked him on the road, he had no communication. But nobody attacked Mitchum. I don’t know who’d want to.

  “Yeah, Mitchum came in,” said Peterson. He was wearing a bright pink shirt. It wasn’t becoming. He went over to the officers’ club, an old tin-roofed French building with ten bar stools, and he drank up my bottle of Johnny Black Label I was saving for me and another guy and the other guy got killed. Mitchum came in sober, got drunk, and they had to carry him out of there. Mostly what we had was cheap stuff, but Mitchum must have smelled my Black Label. Black Label was hard to find at that time. I had to bring it up there from Thailand. And I was sitting at the table with the rest of them, and the army said, ‘Pete, you got a bottle of Black Label.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, present it to Mitchum.’ The way they said it, I didn’t have much choice. And Mitchum uncorked the thing and he didn’t even give me a drink of it. I told him, ‘Give me a drink.’ I put my glass out. Nothing happened.”