Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “Bob was a great guy, did the job, no problems at all,” said Burt Kennedy. “He was from the old school, like Duke, Henry Fonda. No problems, no questions, just get the job done. He liked to make wisecracks, put himself down. Mentioned El Dorado one time, said, ‘On that one I played John Wayne’s leading lady’ He was a bright guy, liked to pretend that he wasn’t most of the time. But it was a joke. I remember one time we went to dinner, invited to the house of a friend of his. Turned out the guy was dean of architecture at Arizona University, and Bob sat all night talking about ancient architecture with the guy.”

  Reporter Tim Tyler found Mitchum’s “get the job done” attitude to be undercut by frustration and barely contained loathing for the work—at times un-contained. In Tucson, observing the shooting of an uncomplicated scene among the crowd gawking at the “flat miserable” star in action, Tyler wrote, “As soon as the director yells ‘cut’ Mitchum explodes. Literally explodes. He sprays a string of four-letter words all over the astonished tourists who have come to watch their hero work. He dances and minces all over the Western street in a wild, furious and very accurate imitation of a fairy. Then, as the tourists stare dumbfounded at one another, he shuffles off in his chaps to the location cafeteria, muttering, ‘Every time the same goddamn role, the same goddamn role.’”

  With barely a pause, Kennedy and Mitchum reunited for a second Western, The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, shot in the mountains around Chama, New Mexico, near the Colorado border. This one was mixed with satire and farce, in the vein of Kennedy’s earlier comedy Western, Support Your Local Sheriff. As in El Dorado, the film explored the idea of an aging cowboy hero, Robert Mitchum here playing a lawman put out to pasture, teaming up with another involuntary retiree, a train robber played by George Kennedy—an exuberant, picture-stealing performance, particularly in contrast to Mitchum’s glum, even dull work in the film.

  Maybe, at fifty-one, he was living the part. This so-called generation gap that they were writing think pieces about was beginning to deprive Mitchum of some of his hip edge. Everybody was a rebel these days, an outsider. Kids were all using drugs, marijuana was practically passe. Some of the young actors he was working with on the latest pictures were into the more advanced mind-altering capacities of LSD. And on that other great controversial topic of the day, Vietnam, Mitchum was now firmly entrenched on the counter-counter-cultural side. At a party George Kennedy threw at a Mexican restaurant, Mitchum went into a kind of kill-’em-all rant involving mass bombings and how to destroy the North Vietnamese supply of fresh water. “We’d all had a few,” said John Davis Chandler, one of The Good Guys’ bad guys. “And he was just getting outrageous, more and more out of line with this prowar thing. And I’d had a few and I said something like, ‘Well, I think we should get the fuck out.’ Something like that. ‘If we can’t win it, get out.’ And he just turned to me, furious. ‘What the hell do you know? I’ve been there.’ And I thought, OK, you been there for a couple of weeks; you’re the expert. But I knew damn well he hadn’t been in a uniform or had to do any fighting. But what the hell; it was all drink talk. Like I said, we’d all had a few by then.”

  Burt Kennedy was talented and good-natured, and the film was efficiently made, but Mitchum was heard grumbling and grousing throughout. “How in hell did I get into this picture anyway? I kept reading in the papers that I was going to do it, but when they sent me the script I just tossed it on the heap with the rest of them. But somehow, one Monday morning, here I was. How in hell do these things happen to a man?”

  A complicated setup on a moving train caused difficulties. Everyone stood around, waiting for the engine to work. Mitchum said, “Why don’t we quit and try something else? Like another movie. . . . “

  With the exception of a brief role in a decidedly untraditional film many years later, Young Billy Young and The Good Guys and the Bad Guys were to be Mitchum’s final Westerns. It was the genre in which he had done his first work in the movies and his first work as a star and the genre in which he had worked often enough to become identified as one of its A picture icons, with Cooper and Wayne. Nearly one-third of the eighty-five features he had appeared in by the close of the ‘60s had been Westerns. Most of these had been “the same goddamn role” no doubt, but a few had been much more than that; and some of those cowboy pictures were among the best, certainly the most unusual, the genre had ever produced. Ironically, even though a number of the most popular and talked-about films in the last year of the decade would be “hoss oprys,” even as the form was being reinvented and given new life in Europe, the Western’s days were numbered. In Hollywood the studios disdained the opportunity to make run-of-the-mill, old-fashioned cowboy movies like Young Billy Young—not enough profit potential, not enough pizzazz. The new Western prototypes were the easy rider and the midnight cowboy, a driftin’ drug dealer and a Texas/Times Square male prostitute. In a few years the genre that had been a mainstay of American movies for most of the century would become a thing of the past.

  Didn’t bother Mitchum one way or the other. He was taking himself out of it now. Fed up, bored to tears. His back was broken; his ass was sore. The joke books these producers sent him were worse than ever. Let somebody else make faces at the gawk box. He had four or five million in the bank, fellas, or maybe it was six, and the time had come to saddle up and ride off into the sunset with the other old farts.

  chapter fifteen

  . . . I Used to Be Handsome

  RETIREMENT WAS THE THING. He sat in meditation in his den that winter and into the new year, or made the two-hundred-mile drive to the ranch at Atascadero and let his mind look ahead as he drove, plotting what he would do—and all that he would not do—in the glorious, indolent future that lay before him. He thought about buying a ranch in New Mexico, a place he’d checked out near Santa Fe, build his quarter horse stock there, and maybe a winter place in the Bahamas. He wanted to get a boat, become a yachtsman like Duke Wayne, maybe a nice eighty-foot yacht, and cruise in warm waters, big game fishing.

  The scripts and the phone calls continued to come into his production office. He was thinking of closing the place down. What did he need it for? Reva wouldn’t be happy about that. Have to cut back her duties. Concentrate on answering the fan mail or something. One of the scripts she had tried to get him to read came in from MGM by way of London. Robert Bolt original, to be directed by David Lean.

  “Send it back.”

  “But. . . it’s David Lean! Doctor Zhivago. Lawrence of Arabia. Bridge on the River Kwai. They want you for the lead.”

  He looked it over. Ryan’s Daughter. Very pretty. Lyrical even. He remembered hearing about how long Lean took to make each one of his pictures. Nine years or somethin’. And you had to do the whole thing on a camel.

  “Reva, honey, NFL” No further interest.

  Then, some weeks later, Bolt got him on the phone. They talked, Bolt flattering, charmingly obsequious. Mitchum said Lean took a long time, didn’t he? Bolt told him, ah yes, normally, but this was no Doctor Zhivago. This was an intimate little romantic drama and they would be in and out in two shakes. And besides, they were going to finagle the schedule so Mitchum could take off weeks at a time now and again. And so on. Kept talking it up. He couldn’t get rid of the guy.

  “Well, it’s a nice offer but. . . just can’t. . . . I have made other arrangements. I’m planning to kill myself.”

  “Planning what? Sorry, bad connection.”

  “I’m planning suicide.”

  There was a long pause on the other end. Maybe he’d hung up. Mitchum considered putting the phone down. Then Bolt said, “Yes, I quite understand. . . . But, well, if you would just do this wretched little film of ours first and then do yourself in, we’d be very happy to stand the expenses of your burial.”

  It had begun as an adaptation of Madame Bovary for Bolt’s wife, Sarah Miles. Perhaps, he hoped, his Lawrence and Zhivago collaborator, Lean, would be interested in directing it. Lean said no, but something sp
arked when he read the script. What about an original, based on the Flaubert, same premise but new characters, settings? Lean had become world famous and enormously wealthy on account of his series of “thinking man’s spectaculars”; but he had a prickly sensitivity to criticism and he had been stung by the talk that these big-hit superproductions were not as good as the good old lean Lean pictures like Brief Encounter, those simple, tasteful, and touching dramas with a human-sized canvas. Bolt’s Bovary put things in motion for what Lean began calling a “little gem” of a story about romantic young Rosy Ryan, her marriage to a dull schoolteacher, Charles O’Shaughnessy, and her torrid love affair with a dashing, wounded, English military officer, the whole set in the Irish hinterlands at the time of the “troubles.” The role of the husband, an inspiring romantic as Rosy’s teacher but a dud as her sex partner, was offered to Paul Scofield, a superbly right casting choice, and he turned it down. Lean’s producer wanted a little-known Anthony Hopkins to take the part. MGM and Lean wanted a big movie star, a heavyweight to evenly stand up beside Marlon Brando, the actor who had been offered the part of the military man. His choice of Mitchum for the retiring schoolmaster and inept lover was considered odd in the extreme, but Lean had come up with a theory that a “dull” character had to be played by an actor with an opposite personality or the audience would go to sleep. Still, his people argued, Mitchum was too opposite. Producer Anthony Havelock-Allan told the director that no audience was going to believe Mitchum would allow somebody to screw his wife and not do anything about it: “He’s not that kind of man. . . . He’s a tough guy, a reactor, and a violent one at that.” Lean stuck to his theory, and Mitchum was persuaded to come out of retirement for a payment of $870,000. Meanwhile, Brando was practicing walking around with an arm tied up so as to resemble the wounded, one-armed character in the script. He didn’t like the look of it. Bolt said they would change it to a missing leg. Brando presumably hopped around and didn’t like the look of that either. They were ready to change it to a sore foot. But Brando dropped out and was replaced by another American, young Christopher Jones, who David Lean had heard was shaping up to be the new James Dean. The rest of the cast was filled with top character players from the British cinema, Trevor Howard, John Mills, Leo McKern.

  Locations were found at the far reaches of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry on the western end of Ireland. It was a landscape of rocky cliffs and long, sandy beaches and a pounding, merciless Atlantic. There a complete interior and exterior village set was built, forty-three different structures, most of solid stone. The new village was given the name Kirrary. Life in Dingle and environs was happily disrupted as the locals took lucrative advantage of the arriving film company’s need for lodging, food, and alcohol (the latter available from some thirty pubs in the immediate vicinity; you could even buy a drink in the shoe store, according to actor Leo McKern).

  Bags packed for Ireland, Mitchum took a few questions from the press, the usual surreal little playlet. . .

  Reporter: What’s the Lean film about?

  Mitchum: (taking a sip of his double Ramos Fizz) I don’t know what it’s about.

  Reporter: What part do you play?

  Mitchum: A husband. A yoke carrier. If it had been made long ago—who was the actor who played the perfect husband, the one who was always married to Joan Fontaine?—well, that’s who would have played it.

  Reporter: What’s the character?

  Mitchum: (eyes widening) I just told you! A Jewish woman during the troubles. A husband who shows up whenever the call sheet calls him.

  . . .

  In February 1969, Mitchum flew to Germany, taking possession of a new white Targa at the Porsche factory in Stuttgart, then drove and ferried his way to Ireland. Arriving in Dingle, presenting a red rose to Sarah Miles (and reminding her that they had originally been meant to work together on Mister Moses), Mitchum was assigned to the tiny, whitewashed Hotel Milltown (the name, oddly, of a prescription narcotic in the states). The entire Hotel Mill-town, all eleven rooms, was his. At one end of the hall was a bathtub and at the other, the toilet. The telephone at the front desk remained in service during his residency, and there would be the occasional call from people hoping to reserve a room. In the dark days of boredom to come, Mitchum was known to answer the phone himself and chat, take reservations, sometimes concluding by telling the caller, “By the way, you do know we’re under new management? Yes, it’s a nudist joint now.”

  Filming began with a sequence involving Trevor Howard and John Mills in a tiny fishing boat. The seas were wild that day, and the locals warned Lean not to send the actors out there. He ignored them, the boat was overturned, and Mills was knocked unconscious and nearly drowned. “He was very game,” Lean said appreciatively. On another occasion it was Leo McKern’s turn to be almost lost at sea. McKern had a signal to make if he was in danger. He made the signal. Lean refused to let the wet-suited divers run into the shot until he had what he needed. McKern was finally dragged out, but his glass eye was lost to Davy Jones.

  At his first sight of Mitchum, bulging in his costume and standing beside one of the more diminutive English actors, Lean reacted like he was looking at King Kong. Surely no one had told him Bob was so bloody large! And the period suit and derby hat that had been prepared for him to wear made him look like Charlie Chaplin, or a giant ape version of Chaplin anyway. Lean felt unsure of his approach to Mitchum and not quite happy with the performance he was getting. Mitchum’s casual attitude and sarcastic jokes left him unsettled. Mitchum would do his usual playing around up to the last moment before a take and then effortlessly go into character. Mitchum acted like the whole enterprise was no more important than one of his silly Westerns. At the end of one dramatic, emotional scene, Lean called, “Cut,” and Mitchum said blandly, “How was that? Too Jewish?”

  When, finally, Lean hit upon a scene that met with his satisfaction, and feeling he had at last found the key to getting what he wanted from Robert, he began shooting the previous scenes over again. Mitchum joked that they were going to spend the ten-million-dollar budget on rehearsals. He was also offended. He told Sarah Miles that if Lean hadn’t liked his fucking performance the first time he should have been a fucking man and said so.

  After ten days of shooting, they were seven days behind schedule.

  The relationship between the star and the hawk-faced, neurotically obsessive English director would ebb and flow, mostly ebb. The imperious Lean was used to having his actors bow and scrape before him, but Mitchum mostly just laughed or gave him the middle finger. For weeks at a time they would barely speak to each other, communicating tart messages via Mrs. Bolt, who did her best to encourage a truce. At other times, Mitchum took a merely bemused or mocking stance toward Lean, who struck him as rather humorless and comically starchy, uptight.

  The wedding night lovemaking scene between Rosie and Charles—her underwhelming, disillusioning, first experience of sex with a man—turned into an unending goof for Mitchum and an embarrassing nightmare for David Lean. The director awkwardly coached the action with the most careful terminology while Mitchum sprawled informally in the bed in his nightshirt, groping Sarah Miles in her nightshirt and behaving like a jaded porn star.

  “You lift up the . . . the nighties,” said Lean. “And then you . . . you have intercourse . . . and then you . . . you . . . “

  “Shoot my wad?” said Mitchum.

  “Uh . . . yes . . . you climax . . . abruptly . . . and then withdraw.”

  “What style of this intercourse should we have, David?” Mitchum asked.

  “What . . . style?”

  “How about she climbs up on top and straddles me?”

  “Good God, the girl’s supposed to be a virgin!”

  They went for a take. Mitchum wrestled with the long, heavy nightie. “What a task it turned out to be,” Sarah Miles wrote in her autobiography. “On and on, he hauls away at great lengths of material. ‘Cheat both nighties up a little,’ said David impatientl
y. Mitchum pulled mine up. ‘All the way up to your cunt?’ he whispered in my ear. . . .” Mitchum mimed the act then fell away with an erection.

  He said, “Careful, honey, or you’ll crease my nightie.”

  Fastidious Lean called for another take. Mitchum’s hands encircled Sarah’s “lower cheeks” as she wrestled with an unavoidable sense of excitement. “He was a mixer all right.” Miles found herself very drawn to Mitchum and spent much time in his “caravan,” causing considerable gossip. There was a widespread belief that the two stars were “doing it,” Miles herself admitted, though she heartily denied the act had ever occurred and found such speculation terribly tacky.

  Miles and Bolt threw a big party at the manor house they were renting at the other side of Dingle Bay. Word had spread and security was nil, so there were a number of gate-crashers. Two of these, a man and a woman, surly and drunken visitors from Dublin, encircled Mitchum as he sat downing a beaker of whiskey and demanded he get up to settle a bet—was the woman’s strapping husband taller than the big film star? Mitchum reluctantly obliged. The man, pleased to be an inch taller, began feigning blows at the actor’s face. Sarah Miles came over to break it up and was shoved aside by the man’s horrid wife. The man swung; Mitchum swung back. The man lunged forward and raked his thumbnail across Mitchum’s eye as if to slice it in half.

  Mitchum screamed and reeled back, covering the bleeding orb. The Dublin couple hightailed it. One hand covering his injured eye, Mitchum lurched outside and stumbled to his Porsche, coming out with a gleaming hunting knife upraised. Roaring, “I’ll get you motherfuckers!” he rushed back into the house. Mitchum crashed from one splendid Georgian room to the next, one hand clutching the dagger, the other covering his bloodied eye, as startled, shrieking party guests jumped out of his way. It looked like a scene out of a Hammer horror movie with Christopher Lee.