by Lee Server
Herb Speckman landed the tiny L19 and came to the camp to see what was happening. “It was the standard routine; the big man stands around, we all spit, shake his hand, he says, ‘Hoo-haa.’ He didn’t sing or dance for us or anything. There was an Australian one time did a little magic act and brought in a couple of girl dancers. That was more appreciated, to tell you the truth, rather than the movie stars coming, saying, ‘Here I am, boys, touch me.’ I went over, shook his hand. He said, ‘Oh, so you’re the guy . . . That was damn close, mister.” I said, ‘Yeah, a little closer than I like, but it didn’t scare me.’ He kind of saw the humor in it by now. We shot the shit for two minutes. What else were we supposed to do, kiss the hem of his cloak? He drank a lot—but that’s OK, most of us did—and went away.”
“He just sort of slobbed into the jeep and he left,” said Peterson. “I think the only reason he came up from Quantri is somebody told him there was a bottle of Black Label scotch there. And he found it.”
These celebrity tours were not intended to be particularly dangerous—a killed or captured movie star would not be good publicity for the war—but Mitchum would come to claim numerous hair-raising adventures and close encounters with the enemy during his Vietnam sojourn. There was the time, he said, when his helicopter transport got lost, wandered across enemy lines for a while, finally found an American base, and touched down just as the place was bracing for a major attack.
“Robert Mitchum? What are you doing here?” asked the CO, as Mitchum recollected it for journalist Jerry Roberts.
“Anything to get out of the house,” said Mitchum. “I take off, eleven minutes later they got hit—six survivors. . . . That was the beginning of the end of the Assau Valley Massacre.”
“He got back from Vietnam with ninety million tiny scraps of paper,” said Reva Frederick. “Just about every boy he met over there gave him a message to take back. Pieces of paper with phone numbers, names. And Robert sat down for days and called every number. Just little brief conversations with wives and mothers and fathers. ‘I just saw your son and he wanted me to call and say hello. He’s doing fine, looks good. He’s doing a good job over there.’ Called every one.”
Mitchum signed up for a second tour, and in February 1967, spent two more weeks roaming among the troop encampments and military hospitals. On his way home, he spoke at a news conference in Bangkok, Thailand, offering a spirited and at times baldly propagandistic defense of the Pentagon’s enterprise. The United States, he told reporters, was not engaged in a war in Vietnam. It was strictly a self-defense action. “We are trying to build schools, roads, and hospitals. But the enemy is shooting, and the Allies must shoot back to defend themselves.” The Vietcong were enemies of humanity, Mitchum explained. Referring to the antiwar efforts at home and abroad, he said enigmatically, “Because of a very emotional involvement in Vietnam, the American image leaves something to be desired. We have the largest standing army in the world. But there is no need to display our power. Power rests in the unity of the people.”
Mitchum’s two USO tours were ample evidence of his patriotism and bravery, but he nevertheless seemed to feel a need to embellish the visits with a greater strategic importance and an unlikely personal glory. He told reporters that he had certainly not gone to ‘Nam on any handshaking tours but on what he referred to as “undefined missions sanctioned by the government.” Through the years, and depending on the occasion and the hour of the evening, he would claim to have participated in as many as 152 missions, undefined or otherwise, many of them hush-hush dealings with CIA “spooks” and the like. Reva Frederick recalled, “I would hear him telling these stories to interviewers who were very gullible and were happy to get a good story, and nobody ever checked anything. I’d think, Holy shit, where is this stuff coming from! I’d just laugh and so would he, afterward.”
Returning from Saigon, in his safari suit, lugging a souvenir crossbow, Mitchum stopped over in Honolulu. He looked like shit, people told him. He told them he hadn’t slept in nearly three weeks. He put in a call to Dorothy.
“I expect tears of rejoicing that I’d been spared and that I’m back in one piece. And then she says, ‘You know, I’ve sold the place.’ And I say, ‘What place?’ And she, ‘Our place. Belmont Farms. . . . I sold the farm—cows, farmhand, and all.’”
Dorothy had gotten to hate their Maryland paradise. Mitchum could stroll in, feed the horses and watch television, then slip off in the night to London or Mexico. There were snowstorms in the winter, heat, humidity, and bugs in the summer. Every time a wasp bit her, he said, Dorothy would look at him accusingly. “Sell the joint, if that’s how you feel,” Mitchum had told her more than once. “We can live at the Waldorf-Astoria for what it costs here.”
Still in Honolulu, Mitchum called Reva in Hollywood. “You’re in the middle of moving,” she said, “so I’ve prepared a list of pictures you may care to do. It’ll solve your problem of finding a roof over your head.”
He picked The Way West, three months in the Northwest. It was from his friend “Bud” Guthrie’s novel, the Oregon Trail jazz. The book had gone through a blender and came out like Peyton Place Takes a Wagon Train, and the backers were sure it would be a smash. Directing the film would be Bob’s friend from Track of the Cat and the Blood Alley debacle, Andrew V. McLaglen. Trained by Wellman, Budd Boetticher, and John Ford, McLaglen had gone on to a successful career in television and features, becoming one of the very last Hollywood filmmakers to specialize in the Western.
“I went to have lunch with Mitchum and Harold Hecht, the producer,” McLaglen remembered. “Kirk Douglas was signed to the part of the senator. And we flat-out said to Bob, ‘Which part do you want? The husband or the scout? Take either part, whichever you want.’ And all during lunch he wouldn’t say, just ‘I don’t care; I don’t care.’ And he never would say. So what the hell, we gave him the part we thought he was best for, the scout. And he shrugged, and I’m awfully glad it worked out the way it did, because Widmark was perfect for the other part and Mitchum was perfect for the scout.”
Fine, Mitchum said. Love to play a trail scout. Smaller part, more time off. Good fishing in Oregon.
It was an enormous and complicated production, and for McLaglen and his crew as much a feat of engineering as of cinematic craft. Rivers had to be forded, wagons had to be raised and lowered from the tops of cliffs by antiquated means. It was no picnic for the cast either. “Physically, that was as tough as it could possibly be,” said Jack Elam, Weatherby in the film. “Working on the cliffs and in the sand and all that shit. On top of a mountain, the top of a ski run that was bone dry in the summer. Everybody had to take a ski lift to the top. All the equipment went up by ski lift. You’re up there, hundreds of feet up, nothing but rocks to fall on. Goddamn scary. And no facilities, just bare rocks. If you had to go to the bathroom, it was a matter of a half hour down and a half hour up, and we’re up there all day. And then long days in the river, cold water, a lot of risks of drowning. Lowering wagons down the cliff, and we all had to take part in it. Some people landed in the hospital. So the whole picture was one tough son of a gun. But Andy—McLaglen—he was wonderful through the whole thing. Stayed calm through thick and thin.”
“Andy really knew how to handle physical things,” said Terry Morse, assistant director on The Way West. “Well, he was about six foot seven himself, so nothing really intimidated him. A great, great guy. And for all the difficulties, he kept it right on schedule. We had a month in Eugene and two months in Bend. No interiors, studio stuff, to speak of at all.”
Though they had both appeared in The List of Adrian Messenger, this was the first time Mitchum and Kirk Douglas had worked together since Out of the Past. Douglas’s great success since then had, it seemed, done nothing to mellow his drive or competitiveness. “Kirk was arrogant and rude to everybody,” said Terry Morse. “That’s the kind of guy he was, and nobody really liked Kirk. He wanted everything his way. He was not a pleasant person to be around.”
“My introduction to Kirk Douglas on that picture,” said Harry Carey, Jr., “was while I was sitting in a chair, reading a paper. And Douglas comes over and jerks it out of my hand, says, ‘That’s my paper!’ That’s how he introduced himself. Later, we got to where we could just about say good morning to each other. But he was really full of it. A real pain in the neck. He tried to take over the thing at some point. Widmark got furious at it, very agitated. He screamed, ‘You’re not directing this goddamn movie!’ Really raised hell with Douglas. But Bob just laughed at it.”
“It was very dumb of him to try and provoke a confrontation with me,” Mitchum told Dick Lochte. “So many guys wear their balls in their pockets. Tightening their guts, shouting ‘Look at me, I’m a wrestling champion.’ As far as Douglas is concerned, all I have to do is whack him one between the horns and it’d be all over. And he knows it.”
“Well, somebody like Kirk Douglas and somebody like Mitchum, they were poles apart in personality,” said Andrew McLaglen. “Bob was an easygoing guy, and Kirk was more volatile. But there was never a feud. I felt within myself that Kirk probably wasn’t one of Bob’s favorite guys, but you’d never know it. Bob wasn’t the kind of guy that goes spouting off with that kind of stuff.”
Mitchum was so laid-back during much of the filming that—while shooting scenes along the banks of the river—he would actually pick up his fishing pole and cast a line into the water—between takes.
“Sometimes,” said Morse, “he would get so concentrating on the fishing that he would walk away from the set, start moving along downstream. All of a sudden we’d be ready for him and he’d just disappeared. We had to assign a production assistant to keep an eye on him when he started wandering off down the river. He loved to fish. He was a great guy. You know, his brother, John, came along for that one, had a small part. They got along great, and Bob took care of his younger brother.”
“You never saw Bob at night,” Jack Elam said. “The rest of us usually got together, most of us staying at the same motel, and we had cookouts and dinners, and John would be there every night playing his guitar. But Bob stayed by himself most of the time.
“We worked so hard on The Way West, it was a shame it got such mixed reviews and kind of died somewhere on the vine. At the time we were shooting it, we really thought we were making a damn good picture.”
“The funniest thing I remember from that one,” said Dobe Carey, “was one morning in the woods outside Eugene. It was about seven o’clock in the morning and Bob stumbles over to the set. It’s a real cold morning and he’s got an army fatigue jacket pulled up around his ears. His hair’s a mess. He’s got on dark glasses, and he’s not even sure where he is yet. And this guy runs up in his face, yelling, ‘Bob, I want you to meet the only lady sheriff in the state of Oregon!’ And he pushes forth this fat little lady in her sheriff’s uniform. And Bob takes a long pause to look at this woman, and he says, ‘Glad to know you, Sheriff. Tell me something, do you know anyplace around here where a guy can go to get laid?’ And oh God, they were both shocked. The woman couldn’t believe her ears. And they both ran off. But, you know, it wasn’t a good idea to bother Bob that early in the morning.”
Despite some well-staged action, epic images, and beautiful photography, The Way West was not a success, hamstrung by the soap operatic plot and melodramatic overkill. As for the film’s remarkable star trio, for all of Douglas’s dynamic histrionics and fine work by Richard Widmark, the consensus was that Mitchum (wearing buckskins and a shaggy wig he said made him look like “Gravel Gertie”) walked away with the picture in a typically underplayed yet strong and moving performance as the old trail scout gradually losing his vision. Though he seems to have assumed it by happenstance, Mitchum’s role was a custom fit, one more lonely, stoic outsider turning his back on civilization by the fade-out.
Driving himself up to Oregon, he had heard an obscure country and western record on an obscure country and western radio station somewhere beyond Bakersfield. The song was called “Little Old Wine Drinker Me,” and it spoke to him. Later in the year he hooked up with Fred Foster, president and creative head at Monument Records, and traveled to Nashville, Tennessee (with some supplementary work in Hollywood), to record an album of easygoing pop and country pop tunes, some new, some old, including “Wine Drinker,” “Sunny,” “Wheels (Keep A-Rollin’),” and two of Mitchum’s own compositions, “Ballad of Thunder Road” and “Whippoorwill.”
With jaunty, bleary, and on- and off-key vocal stylings like some hybrid of Dean Martin and Keith Richards, the record conveyed the ambience of something improvised at a truckstop roadhouse around four in the morning. The album, called That Man Robert Mitchum . . . Sings, was released with a striking cover photograph (and no type), a close-up of Bob in a pink shirt and a tousled, modified Beatle hairdo, and on the back were exuberant liner notes by Johnny Mercer. “I don’t suppose Bob Mitchum is the greatest singer in the world,” Mercer began, with candor, “but he is one of the greatest guys in the world. . . . The same carefree attractiveness that you find in his acting, you will find in this Monument album. . . . What some would call a ‘maverick,’ and that’s how he is about how he sings . . . just as he always has been about his career and what people thought of him. His beat is impeccable, only a shade behind Bobby Darin, and if a note is too high for him, what the hell—he can act his way through it. I think the quality of his singing will surprise you. . . . If I sound like a ‘fag,’ sue me.”
Released as a single in May 1967, Mitchum’s “Little Old Wine Drinker Me” broke the pop charts and for several weeks was the number one country and western record in various markets across the country. Dino would later record the tune and have a major success with it, but Mitchum’s 45 remained the preferred choice of jukeboxes throughout the Southwest for many years to come. Despite the record’s good showing, Mitchum made no follow-up to That Man.
Back in Los Angeles after seven years, wanting to make an appropriately impressive return to their old stomping ground, Dorothy had taken a lease on a spectacular manor house on Rockingham in Brentwood that had been the home of Cole Porter for twenty-three years. “Comfortable, dreary, and expensive,” Mitchum called it. Trina, now a stunning-looking teenager, was enrolled at the tony Westlake School for Girls. His beloved quarter horses were scattered, stabled at an assortment of California locales—”a couple of ‘em in rooms at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” he said. Eventually they would be brought together again at a small ranch—seventy-six acres—he purchased in rural Atascadero, a couple of hundred miles from town.
After the Mitchums’ years of relative isolation in Maryland, there was a comforting feeling of coming home, being accepted back into the fold by the town’s extended showbiz family. Bob could even be persuaded to put on a jacket and tie and attend an occasional party and public gathering. They met up with old acquaintances they hadn’t seen in ages. Of course, some of these had been avoided with good cause. At a reception given by Henry Fonda for his daughter, Jane, and her husband, Roger Vadim, Mitchum and Wild Bill Wellman found themselves in the same room for the first time since the ugliness at San Rafael. “I went there with my father because my mother was ill that night,” said Wellman’s son William. “There was a ton of people at the party. At some point in the evening Mitchum arrived and worked his way to the end of the crowded hallway and came into my father’s view. They’d had that feud on since the time he had fired Bob on Blood Alley. Dad was much older then and pretty tame, but he’d had a few beers and he was still capable of getting out of hand. Mitchum didn’t see us. He was standing there smoking a cigarette and holding a drink. My father spotted him and started practically running at him. And I thought, My God, he’s going to hit Mitchum! And I’m rushing through the crowd trying to catch him and protect my father. And when Mitchum saw him coming at him, he spilled his drink he was so startled, you know, about to get hit by this old man. And Dad grabbed him around the shoulders and hugged him, and Mitchum hugged him back
, and the next thing they’re grinning and sitting down and talking for the longest time.”
Though they had known each other forever, it was during this period, after their pleasant months together on El Dorado, that Mitchum and John Wayne became—for a time—pals, roistering around town together—though never, of course, within sight of Mrs. Wayne (that Blood Alley–era feud remained alive). Mitchum was ever amused at the way Duke played his role in life to the hilt, wearing four-inch lifts to make his six-foot-four-inch frame still more impressive—gave him that funny walk, Mitchum said—having his car roof raised so he could comfortably keep his Stetson in place while driving. Once Mitchum came to Wayne’s production office and listened to him screaming at his staff, knocking chairs over in a seemingly volcanic fury. Then, slamming his office door shut, he grinned from ear to ear and pulled out a jug. “You gotta keep ‘em Wayne-conscious,” he said. Despite his posture as a scold of young libertines, Wayne enjoyed getting smashed and, according to Mitchum, wasn’t as square as he might appear. When a young actor and pot-smoking buddy asked, out of curiosity, whether John Wayne would ever get high when they were together, Mitchum told him, “Duke will do anything. He’ll do it all.”
“They were pretty funny together,” said Paul Helmick. “I remember one time there was a big party to welcome Barbra Streisand to Hollywood. It was held outdoors at Ray Stark’s house. I was invited because I was going to be the production manager on the picture Funny Girl. It was the elite of Hollywood there. And who shows up stumbling around in the garden but Mitchum and Wayne. Just the two of them, no women or nothing, crashing this party. I said, ‘What the hell are you two doing here? This is a formal thing; they don’t want a bunch of cowboys here!’ They said, ‘We want to meet Barbra!’ And Wayne said, ‘How’d you ever get mixed up with a nice outfit like this?’ And I told him, ‘I only do cowboy pictures if I can’t get on a good musical. . . .’”