Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  One of the Mitchums’ new neighbors on Rockingham was the fabulous shock-haired comedienne, Phyllis Diller. “They were darling people,” Diller recalled. “And he . . . uh! The voice, God, just the voice, the body, the attitude, what a guy! Exuded that maleness. And such a character. He would sit and regale us with stories. And he was so proud that he had been jailed thirty-seven times—it was his badge of honor!

  “He was a world-class drinker, God, yes, we had that in common! Ha! He did as he pleased at all times. One evening after I had restored this lovely, beautiful old home of mine, I gave a big ‘all-star’ party. Very grand. A hundred and fifty sit-down dinner. And at every place setting was a large goblet of water with a large goldfish swimming in it. I thought it was amusing, and if they wanted they could take their fish home in a little compartment, a party favor. Mitchum sat down, picked up the glass, and drank it, fish and all! They were often guests in my home because I was crazy about both, absolutely nuts about them. And Robert was nuts about my chili. Well, and properly so! It’s a hundred-year-old recipe, and it’s the world’s greatest chili. And when I had a buffet, there would be all sorts of lovely things, lobster and shrimp and huge roasts, and Robert would just fill up a bowl with chili and lick it clean.

  “Dorothy was a darling person. Straight on. A good mother, a fine friend, no BS, just a nice person. You could feel very comfortable with her. A friend. No game playing. And she had her work cut out with that husband of hers. She’d tell me what a bother it was he was so untrue. But he would declare temporary insanity, and she would always forgive him. I tried to talk her into a divorce. I did! A-haa!We were away on a trip, a mutual friend, Lady Sassoon, her annual ball in the Bahamas. Both in the same guest house. And we were talking about him. You know, we were away from home, what are we going to talk about—men! Look, he would get out of her sight, he’d be surrounded by these beautiful young sluts—I mean starlets—that can’t wait to jump into bed, they’re throwing it in his face, and he couldn’t resist. ‘Temporary insanity,’ he called it. I think the word is horny. And she was angry at him. And I told her there was only one thing to do, divorce him! I had had just enough to drink to tell the truth, to be brutally honest with her. She would have none of it. It was a lifelong affair, she said. They loved each other. It went back to the beginning; they’d been in love since they were kids. . . . Thank God I didn’t marry my high school sweetheart. . . an ugly little rat! But I’m getting off the subject. . . .

  After twelve months—”when the rent came due,” said Bob—they decided to leave the manor house on Rockingham. He had never cared for the place; it felt like old Cole Porter was turning over in his grave every time you belched or brought a muddy boot indoors.

  They planned to rent something in town until an appropriate house could be purchased. That was all going to be Dottie’s bailiwick. Mitchum told Reva to get him the hell out of town quick. He signed for two pictures shooting back-to-back in Europe.

  Anzio was a Dino DeLaurentiis production with funding from Columbia Pictures, shot entirely in Italy with Italian technicians and Hollywood cast and director. Mitchum would be working with Edward Dmytryk for the first time in twenty-one years. After serving nearly a year in prison for contempt of Congress, blacklisted and broke, Dmytryk had made the difficult decision to co-operate with the witch hunters, the only one of the Hollywood Ten to “name names,” after which he returned to work, picking up the pieces of his career, though a certain stigma would haunt him for all the years to come. It would be said of Dmytryk that—after this subjugation—he never again showed the creative power that had been so evident in his films of the ‘40s, but this is to ignore a number of creditable and unusual postblacklist works (such as The Sniper, The Young Lions, and Warlock). In any case, Anzio would not turn out to be one of them.

  “DeLaurentiis was a deal maker more than a picture maker,” said Dmytryk. “When the deal is made he thought the picture was made, all his worries were over. Things I was promised, the weapons, boats, the soldiers, never materialized. We had soldiers with rifles—the rifles were bending. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, come here!’ I looked at it; it was made of rubber, like a child’s toy. All the guns were rubber, they were wiggling in the wind. I went to DeLaurentiis with the rubber gun. He said the guy with the good guns tried to cheat him. I said, ‘I can’t use these.’ He said, ‘Go ahead.’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ The whole picture I was back and forth all the time, demanding a ticket home.”

  The choice of subject matter reflected the spirit of the times, cynical, antiestablishment, antiwar, the era of The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes. No D day, the battle of Anzio had been one of America’s worst military blunders, stemming from Gen. Mark Clark’s reluctance to advance on an unprotected Rome, giving the Germans time to mount an attack on the U.S. beachhead—result, thirty thousand casualties. Mitchum had probably not even read the script (in which he was to play a sceptical war correspondent, a kind of hipster Ernie Pyle) before taking off for Rome that summer, but on arrival—fresh from his second inspiring visit to the grunts in Vietnam—he declared it to be “violently anti-American,” a virtual “crucifixion” of General Clark. Dmytryk defended the facts. The script, he said, was historically accurate; the problem was that in all other ways it stank. Writers were flown in. Changes were made to appease Mitchum. Changes were made to appease Dmytryk. The script was rewritten just before they filmed, sometimes while they filmed; sometimes they went ahead and filmed without anything written down at all. The same old same old. Conceive, plan, prepare, rehearse, then—improvisation, anarchy.

  “I hadn’t seen Bob in a while,” said the director. “We hadn’t worked together since those days at RKO. A lot had happened since then. We’d gone our separate ways. He was still the same relaxed guy, good actor. There were changes, sure. He was a drunk now. But listen, I like to say that I directed all the great drunks of Hollywood. And most—maybe not most, but many of the great stars were drunks—Bogart, Gable, others I can name. And they were the best. And Mitchum would say, ‘Don’t use me after six o’clock.’ But no matter how much he drank at night, or drugged, or whatever he was doing, in the morning he was there, perfect.

  “There was a strange incident, when Bob first got to Italy and DeLaurentiis wanted to have a meeting. So we had a meeting. And when Bob wasn’t working he was drinking and whatever. And Bob, when he began talking, it would become a monologue really. It was beautiful language, nice words, but sentences that went nowhere, absolutely incomprehensible. DeLaurentiis would ask a question and Mitchum would talk and it would be all nonsense. He didn’t slur or stammer, but it made no sense at all. I’ve seen it before, schizophrenics do the same thing. And there was nothing to do. DeLaurentiis looked confused, but English wasn’t his native tongue. So I just nodded and picked up the conversation like there was nothing wrong until Mitchum was asked another question. I don’t know what DeLaurentiis ultimately made of it. Some day, I tell you . . . I’m going to write a book about all the movie star drunks I have known.”

  There were other changes in Mitchum, as Dmytryk perceived him, since those times on the stages at RKO long ago, in the halcyon days before Congressional investigations and wiretapped dressing rooms. “I remembered Mitchum as someone who was always talking up for the little guy, defending minorities, working people. And the Mitchum I saw in Rome had changed completely. He now had all these very right-wing views. Full of these strange conspiracy theories. He was right in the middle of all this kind of fringe political thinking; he had articles with him he could show you and everything. . . . He thought the government was secretly run by outsiders, that Lyndon Johnson had been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, he was some kind of puppet leader. . . . Well, worse than that, worse than that. I don’t want to . . . I can’t begin to go into it, actually. But I must say, thank God, he realized this was something the two of us could not talk about, and it never went into any long discussion or argument.”

  Perhaps sensing condescension in th
e director’s dismissal of these conversational gambits, Mitchum let it be known that he thought Dmytryk an “old fool.” He would goof on him to the other actors. “Dmytryk had his barbells shipped here from Los Angeles, can you imagine?” he would say. One time Mitchum had to run up a steep hill and back for several takes. He found out it was a long shot, a double could have done it just as well. “Oh, Eddie’s going to pay for this one,” he told onlookers.

  Anzio had roles for some other names from the RKO days. Robert Ryan, another Crossfire vet, played a general, and so did Bob’s Lusty Men costar, Arthur Kennedy. But these were old men now, playing old men’s roles. Mitchum felt more at home among the younger and more active members of the cast. Reni Santoni, who had just given a brilliant and hilarious debut performance in the film Enter Laughing, had been loaned to DeLaurentiis by Columbia to play a GI and comic relief sidekick for Mitchum’s hard-boiled lead. “They figured I played a young actor in Enter Laughing, so make this one a guy who likes movies. And we’ll call him Movie! That shows you the level of creativity going on in this thing. Every scene, I was supposed to do an imitation of another movie star. I did it a little bit, but Dmytryk—’Fast Eddie’ we called him—had the good sense to let me take my own approach to it.

  “It was a disaster area. The Italian way of filmmaking was baffling. Nothing got done. And I remember Dmytryk saying, ‘I’ve had better production value on pictures that cost ten thousand dollars!’ There was no script. There was some idea, which might have been cool, about men making war because they like to, because they need to. Somewhere that was in there. But what it turned into was seven dwarves lost in the woods. In this war movie, seven guys win the war.

  “Mitchum . . . yeah. ‘The Goose.’ When I first saw him they were shooting out in Naples at this huge congressional hall, opening scene of the picture. We were introduced and he was curt. ‘How are ya. So what. . .’ I thought, Hm . . . OK. Kind of disappointing. I was very much a fan of his. I found out later he had just had a big disagreement with Dmytryk over something.

  “When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx—I’m from a New York Puerto Rican background—they had an expression ‘Moto eyes.’ I guess it was tracked back to Mr. Moto—you smoke some grass, your eyes get an Asian look. And when I was a kid I remember my mother talking about Robert Mitchum, the pot smoker, and his Mr. Moto eyes. He was a consumer of marijuana, of all horrors! Fade-out, fade-in, I’m in my early twenties in a hotel room in Italy with Robert Mitchum and smoking some superior, superior grass! We eventually got to be friendly after that first gruff encounter, and he soon recognized me—it was the late ‘60s—as a guy ‘of the time’; in other words, he figured, ‘I can get loaded with this guy’ And we did, quite often. And it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  In Bari the drug dealer came calling with a huge attache case for interested cast members. Drop it down on the bed, click, click, swing it open. Pills in one corner, hashish over there, hash oil, grass, kif from Morocco. All the world’s bounty. Whatever your heart desired. “The Goose loved to get high. The first night Mitchum sent for me he says, ‘Uh, I have some stuff that you might find . . . interesting.’ And he had gotten some spectacular Afghanistan hashish. He would share his dope; I will say that. He was very, very generous. And he was a connoisseur, like a wine expert with this stuff. And he’d be interested in your opinion. ‘Tell me what you think of this shit.’

  “He was a great storyteller and a great mimic. Did voices, could imitate anyone. I did some routines, too, and he really appreciated my humor. I could do a dynamite black imitation. I could do some niggas would have him falling down laughing. He loved that stuff. He had a doper’s perspective. Humor, rock music. What was he? Almost fifty. But he was hip. We’re sitting in the hotel room in Italy one day. We were smoking some excellent grass. A friend had sent it from the States stuffed in a doll. And a friend of mine had just come from London and had one of the first copies of Sgt. Pepper—the Beatles. It hadn’t even hit the States yet, not even released yet. And here we are high, listening to Sgt. Pepper, this incredible hip thing at the time; nobody had heard anything like this before. And at one point I’m so thrilled by something I hear I want to turn and share it with this old duffer, in my youthful arrogance, explain what it’s all about to the old-timer. And I started to explain, and he very politely, with a little hand gesture, just kind of said, ‘I’m already there, man.’ He was incredibly cool. And there we are, I’m sitting with Robert Mitchum smoking dope and listening to Sgt. Pepper for the first time and we’re wearing our World War II clothes, combat boots and dog tags! It was like I had left reality and gotten into some very unreal realm.”

  Mitchum took some of his castmates on night patrol. He dazzled them with his powers, left them in the dust—they were half his age! Just to watch him making his rounds through the Roman night was astonishing entertainment for the young actors. Watch the women, mooning and purring in the streets and lobbies and bars. Oh, Mr. Mitchum, and where are you staying? Oh, that’s near my room, perhaps I can come visit. Running into a half-lushed Ava Gardner at Dave’s Dive. They all go over and sit with Ava in this dark joint, while she and Robert canoodle in the booth. Holy shit, Reni Santoni remembered thinking, is this for real? “And for all that life, that movie god life he had, he never took it seriously. Always had that ironic perspective. Could not care less. Look who he picked for his entourage, an entourage of one: Tim Wallace. Tim was the coarsest creature on earth. Farting was Tim’s chief amusement. He was riding in the elevator, three or four other people in there going down, Europeans. Suddenly the elevator is filled with the unmistakable stink of one of Mr. Wallace’s gas specials. Lofted through the hotel. Mitchum turns to him and whispers, ‘You . . . dog.’ Tim looks around at the other people and says, ‘What’s the big deal? Dey don’t none of ‘em speak English.’ He was quite, quite coarse. He’d see a girl sitting somewhere with her legs apart and come running to report: ‘Jeeze, you can almost see her whole minge!’ This charming creature is who Mitchum brings to Rome!

  “It was a joke to him, being a movie star. We were going into a restaurant in the city, about three or four guys, and just before we go through the door, he stops. Puts his shoulders back, adjusts that little tilt to his head. He said, ‘Hold on, guys, I have to get my attitude ready. It’s taken me twenty-five years to get this shit down. . . . OK. I’m ready.” And then he goes through the door as Robert Mitchum, movie star! Everybody bows down. Ah, Signor Mitchum, ah signor! Ahh! He was very aware of how absurd it all was, and he had a great sense of humor about it!”

  A shabby, would-be Longest Day with a woeful lack of spectacle or firepower, Anzio was the least distinguished movie to which Mitchum had offered his services since his days as a B movie bit player. The film had one distinction: The theme song played over the opening credits, sung by Jack Jones, a cocktail cha-cha thing with lyrics (impossibly credited to the great Doc Pomus) about “gentle dreamers” finding “war is necessary hell,” was the worst in the history of the cinema.

  . . .

  From Rome Mitchum went to Madrid to begin filming Villa Rides. Since Sergio Leone had struck gold there, it was the new home of the American West. Europeans had started making imitation Hollywood Westerns with great success, so now, of course, Hollywood had to come to Spain to make imitation spaghetti Westerns. Villa Rides, a version of the life of the Mexican revolutionary, was a project for Yul Brynner; and Sam Peckinpah, then drifting in Hollywood, had been hired to write the screenplay and—more tentatively—to direct the picture. Peckinpah turned out a typically intense and violent piece of work, a deeply ambivalent portrait of Pancho Villa as half-noble, half-monster. Yul Brynner read it, said it made Villa look like a bad guy, and Peckinpah left the project. So, no Peckinpah-directed life of Villa, and Mitchum would not get to work with a man who might well have proved to be a most simpatico collaborator. Buzz Kulik, a television director now making features, was hired. “The Peckinpah script? Three-quarters of it was in
Spanish!” said Kulik. “I think he was married to a Spanish woman he was trying to impress. We threw most of it out, had to start almost all over again. Hired Robert Towne. He came to Spain, and he would be working on tomorrow’s dialogue the night before.”

  Peckinpah had originally been told his screenplay would have to include “a white face” in addition to all those darker, revolutionary ones. He came up with an American mercenary character, “a man without direction or ambition, who seldom thinks about the future.” For this part the producers thought of, yes, Robert Mitchum.

  Towne summed up the proceedings as he saw them: “A million dollars tied up in salaries between the two guys, and they figure it will take maybe two million to make the movie, so they say, ‘What the hell, we might as well go ahead and get something for an extra million. We’ll come out of it somehow.’ What happens is you pay a lot of people a lot of money to make a movie that nobody particularly wants to make.”

  They filmed in the hills and valleys outside Madrid and in the tiny village of El Casar de Talamanca, filling in for the Mexican town of Chupadero. The cast was comfortably housed at the Castellana Hilton. Brynner, wearing hair for the first time in years, thought Kulik an underwhelming talent. Kulik thought the same of Brynner. “He knew he wasn’t that great an actor, so he was on the defense all the time. Plus, he had a bad back, so we were forced to do lots of cutaways when shooting him. He goes to mount a horse, you cut away, you cut back, and we’ve lifted him up on the horse.