Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Richards worked on the script with David Zelag Goodman, leaving out relatively little from the novel but adding scenes, adding characters like Marlowe’s newspaper vendor sidekick, the burned out jazzman, and his half-black son, underscoring the story’s place in time with references to the war, to Joe DiMaggio, and slipping in various other bits of filigree that blended smoothly with Chandler’s original text; switching the novel’s sanitarium sequence to a more provocative brothel setting, giving the movie a chance to have some contemporary touches, a bit of sex and nudity in consideration of the box office. It was decided that there would be no studio work in the film. All locations, interiors and exteriors, were vintage properties, found mostly in the old neighborhoods, downtown, Hollywood, Echo Park, the old Wilshire shopping district. Some of the homes and buildings they would film in looked as if they hadn’t changed so much as a light bulb since Ray Chandler rolled his first page into an Underwood. A shipboard sequence was to be shot with cast and crew crammed into a stateroom on the luxury liner Queen Mary, now a tourist hotel docked in Long Beach. Production designer Dean Tavoularis would recreate the period with authentic materials, enough ‘40s-era furnishings, evocative advertisements, peeling, sun-faded wallpaper, neon signage, and assorted gewgaws to fill all of LA’s antiques and thrift stores, with enough left over for an entire East Hollywood flophouse or two. Cinematographer John Alonzo—interestingly, he had also filmed Chinatown, though in a completely different style—made a pact with director Richards that they would shoot everything as it would have been done in the ‘40s—no zooms, no Steadicams, no helicopter shots, no “Raindrops Keep Fallin’” musical interludes.

  The wardrobe included many well-worn items off the racks of Western Costume. Marlowe’s dark, pin-striped suit was one of a kind, no backup if anything happened to it. Originally made for Victor Mature at Fox, circa 1940, it still had Matures name sewn inside. Richards loved it. Mitchum hated it.

  “I won’t wear this fucking thing in the picture,” Mitchum said.

  “Bob, it fits you,” Richards said. “A little alteration. I love this suit!”

  Mitchum said, “I’m not wearing this old fucking thing. . . . Victor Matures farted it all up!”

  He wore it. It became a running joke. “Every time he wanted to give me a hard time,” said Dick Richards, “he’d bring up the suit. Only thing he wore throughout the film, never changes, one suit. He’d say to me, ‘You son of a bitch, you got me wearing a farted-up suit, you cheap son of a bitch! It smells bad. . . . I’m in Victor Mature’s old farted-up suit, goddamn it!’”

  The role of femme fatale Velma went to Briton Charlotte Rampling, fresh from wearing Nazi cap, suspenders, and not much else in the controversial The Night Porter. She would be styled for maximum slinkiness, made to resemble—and sound like—a jaded version of ‘40s-era Lauren Bacall. Moose Malloy, violent, lovelorn hulk in search of his lost Velma, would be played by a newcomer, a towering ex-boxer named Jack O’Halloran. Dick Richards had remembered him from a fight at the Garden in New York. O’Halloran was boxing George Foreman. “This was my memory: a gruesome guy fighting Foreman; he’s hanging in there, a tough guy. I had pretty good seats, and the guy was bleeding everywhere. Kastner and his group of producers had somebody—he was seven feet tall, but he wasn’t tough. I found this guy O’Halloran, and I paid for his airfare to come to California. Let Mitchum meet both guys. That’s all I had to do. Jack and Mitchum hit it off. O’Halloran was a street-fighting kid from Philadelphia, claimed all sorts of things in his background. Talked tough, looked tough, and he was tough. You’d be afraid to meet this guy anywhere. The other guy looked soft. Mitchum said to me, ‘Are you thinking the same way I am?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Mitchum told Kastner to get O’Halloran or he wasn’t doing the picture. He was that kind of guy. He meant it.”

  John Ireland, Mitchum’s pal of more than thirty years—shared memories of shared starlets, reefers under the table at Lucey’s, and all that—was cast as Detective Lieutenant Nulty. And for the tiny role of Velma’s respectable elderly husband Judge Grayle, they hired a man better known for his writing than his acting, brilliant, accursed author of The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway, Jim Thompson. One of Farewell’s producers, Jerry Bick, was friendly with the novelist and sometime screenwriter, knew that he could use some money, and recommended him for the small part. Richards was familiar with Thompson’s work and agreed to meet with the man. “I thought he was very sick. I felt he would be OK, but he was sick, gravely ill. But I wanted that kind of person for the part. And he was wonderful. Soft-spoken, quiet man. Very nice man, the kind, in those days, you would have said, here was a gentleman.” Thompson and Mitchum, it turned out, had some history. Back in 1949, in his last days as a rewrite man with the Los Angeles Mirror, before being canned for drunkenness, Thompson had gone over to the court house, been among the crowd of reporters covering the actor’s sentencing to prison.

  “We had a couple of people that the director cast and we didn’t know whether they were going to make it through the day,” Mitchum said. “It is sort of a museum piece. All the subjects are all worn out—I certainly am.”

  Things began inauspiciously with a protest by the Screen Extras Guild. The company had hoped to save some money by using nonguild extras. “They may have been right about this, I don’t know,” said Dick Richards. “We were on a limited budget. Whatever, they were striking outside our location for not using them. Screaming, dogs barking. We couldn’t record sound. They let us know they were going to do it every day, which I thought was not only illegal but not very nice. The producer had taken it upon himself to fight them. But Mitchum was very pro-union. He said he was not going to be in a movie where they didn’t use proper extras. He let me know it immediately, in no uncertain terms. He was not proceeding until everything was straightened out. So that was it. They got it all straightened out the next day, and that was that.” Mitchum was for the little guy, said Richards, and Mitchum hated the big guys, the producers. And Farewell, My Lovely had enough producers for half a dozen pictures. “He called them ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ One producer, I won’t name names, Mitchum called him over. He said, ‘Hey you. Two coffees, one with cream, one with sugar.’ Pretended he was a messenger. ‘That’s how you treat these guys,’ he said, ‘these dummies.’”

  “Bob was a very liberal guy,” said Henry Lange, assistant director on Farewell, My Lovely. “He had no movie star airs, he was a real guy’s guy, and the crew adored him. He would arrive on a given morning and he would talk to anybody. And he had an assistant, Reva, who came every day with something for the crew, nothing big, but something—watermelon, burritos, bags of pistachio nuts, whatever—and everybody was very grateful. Bob was the greatest guy. And he used to have lunch in his dressing room, a motor home, not like these block-long ones you have today but a little tiny motor home a family might drive to the woods for the weekend. And he would invite some of us to come have lunch. And he’d eat and tell stories. Back to the cowboy days and G.I. Joe. And he had a driver he would send out for a jug. He drank bourbon then. And he’d ask you in for a drink in the trailer. Very social, very pleasant. It was later in the day; it was never a problem.

  “At one point a couple of the producers were questioning the bill I was putting in for Bob’s liquor. And one said, ‘We don’t have to pay for this. What is this? It shouldn’t go on our tab.’ I’d been working on this show for a month and a half then, and I had gotten to know how Bob reacted pretty well. I said to the producer, ‘Well, look, here’s the deal. You’re absolutely right, and Bob will be the first to agree with you. But if you tell him you don’t want to pay this twelve-fifty or whatever it is for his whiskey, he’ll say that you’re right and he’ll say that he’s going to go right out and buy his own. There’s a place he’ll say he likes over in Long Beach or somewhere, and it will take him so long to get back to work that you’ll regret you ever mentioned it.’ So they reconsidered. Bob was of that school. He drinks. It was no secret. It
was fine, never a problem.

  “Bob had a great attitude. It was a business to him, he didn’t take it too seriously. I remember we were shooting at the Harold Lloyd estate, scene of Mitchum and Charlotte Rampling walking down the hallway. I told him he could take a break, go back to his trailer, we were going to do a point-of-view shot of Mitchum’s character looking at Charlotte as she walks ahead of him. We shot it and I go back to get him to do the reverse shot. I say, ‘OK, we can use you, we’re going to—’ And he says, ‘I know, I know, now we shoot her asshole’s point-of-view of me.” That was Mitchum—he could really zero in on the absurd aspects of what he was doing. I mean, the way he felt, he knew he wasn’t curing cancer on this job.”

  . . .

  “I have wonderful memories of him from that film,” said Kate Murtagh, who played Amthor, fierce lesbian brothel owner in this version of Farewell. “He was one of the fellas. You would never know he was the star. Could have been one of the extras. Mixed with the crew and had a lot of fun with them. You don’t see that very often, believe me. I remember they were setting up for the scenes in the brothel, and Mitchum was joking with the crew. He said, ‘This is why I took this job, to work with these gorgeous women. So far all I’ve been around is you guys and your stinking armpits.’ But he was very friendly, very considerate. I remember one of the girls who were working as extras in those scenes asked him if he would mind posing with her for a photo, a keepsake. He said, ‘Why, of course.’ And then he said, ‘What about the other girls?’ And he got somebody to take pictures, and he posed with each girl and got each girl a picture. He was lovely about it, like they were doing him a favor rather than the other way around.

  “I had a scene where I had to hit him, and he hit me back. I had never been trained to do anything like this. It came his turn to punch me. I was standing in front of him, and he was seated. And I heard him say, ‘She’s a mighty brave lady to do this.’ I said, ‘I heard that. What did you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Kate, when one person’s sitting and the other’s standing, the natural thing is for the person standing to start leaning forward. I have this punch spaced out to miss you by just an inch. So if you lean forward an inch closer, I’ll hit you and break your jaw.’ So I do my line and take a deep breath and not lean any closer, and he missed me by an inch. And afterward he told me how he’d been knocked out cold doing bits like that. He told me he’d done movie fights with ex-prizefighters, and I said I guessed that was safer because they knew what they were doing. And he said, ‘No, they were the worst, because they weren’t so smart and always forgot to miss.’

  “To me he seemed a very nice, gentle man. Very sweet. I’ll give you an example. My first agent out here was Thelma White—she had been in the Ziegfeld Follies and a child star and became an agent. And I told her I would be working with Mitchum, and she remembered working with him at the very beginning of his career. So we were sitting around on the set one day and I said, ‘Oh, I forgot, I have a hello for you from someone, Thelma White. Do you remember her?’ And Mitchum’s face broke out in this beautiful sad smile and he said, ‘Oh my, Thelma White . . . She knew me . . . back when I used to be handsome.’ It was such a sweet, poetic thing to say, don’t you think?”

  Director Dick Richards, it was said, liked to change things, rework scenes, rehearse on film, and shoot it again if he thought of something better. His methods created tensions with some of the crew, which undermined Mitchum’s faith. At times Mitchum complained openly against the last-minute and after-the-last-minute changes. “Listen, Richards, you’ve got to get your act together,” he’d say. “I didn’t sign my name on the dotted line to have you change the script every five minutes. I have twelve lawyers outside in the parking lot, and they’re ready to leap on you if you make me do anything I didn’t sign for.” And yet often enough Richards’s improvisatory methods created terrific stuff, a nuanced, tactile, and spontaneous-seeming quality of real life amid all that ‘40s bric-a-brac. Mitchum’s memorable scene with Sylvia Miles as the pathetic floozie Mrs. Florian, for example, was in large part an improvisation. The song the pair sing together—”Sunday” by Jule Styne—was chosen on the spot. Mitchum knew the words. They had no permission to use the song, just shot it and hoped they could get the rights. A beautiful scene, perfectly staged—you can hear the flies buzzing, feel the dust floating in the tatty living room, Miles blending the poignance and the awfulness of the aged vaudevillian, Mitchum observant, gently insidious—an entirely convincing demonstration of a detective’s particular fact-gathering and people-burrowing skills in action. Indeed, throughout the film, in comparison with Bogart’s glamorous, always self-assured Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Mitchum’s characterization, in addition to its other unique qualities, was altogether the more believable for the role of a twenty-five-bucks-a-day-and-expenses Hollywood Boulevard private eye.*

  As filming continued, the relationship between Mitchum and Richards appeared to suffer a growing deterioration (though Richards himself believed it was never less than a close and respectful collaboration). Mitchum nicknamed him “Itchy McGinnis” because of the way he was always nervously changing his mind. He mockingly fixated on Richards’s background as a photographer, said he was making the picture one frame at a time. Told reporters the man yelled, “Cut!” when he meant, “Action!” and vice versa. Most of the complaints sounded like pandering to the griping crew. Certainly, Richards’s carefully budgeted film, made under difficult, constricting conditions—with ‘70s LA ever ready to disrupt the period recreations—was a breakneck breeze compared with the ten-month tortures of Ryan’s Daughter. “Toward the end,” said Henry Lange, “Bob didn’t like Dick. He got mad at him. Part of it was because Bob and Dick just weren’t the same kind of guys. One morning, Bob’s talking to the grips and Dick comes up to him and started talking about the scene and how there are various shades of gray he would like to see if he can bring in. And Bob says, ‘You want to suck what?’ And Dick sort of walked away. Another time Bob got a gun with blanks from the prop guy, and he and Dick were having a disagreement about something, actor-director things, and Mitchum wanted to get his attention, so he drew the gun and started firing off rounds, scared the hell out of him. Only Bob would do that.

  “The classic night between Bob and Dick was the night of the Academy Awards. John Alonzo was up for the award, and we had a substitute cameraman, and it was a difficult night. We were shooting on a real boat, out at sea. It was raining terribly that night. It had taken six or seven hours just to get everything set up. Bob is supposed to pull a gun out of his trench coat. Dick had approved this trench coat months ago and Bob had kept complaining, ‘I’m a forty-two, this is a forty-six!’ Dick told him not to worry about it; it was fine. Now came the night when Mitchum is in the raincoat and he’s supposed to pull his gun out. And he’s had a few by now. And he can’t get the gun out. There’s too much coat. He’s having a hilarious time not getting the gun out. He’s acting like there’s coat all over the place. And he proceeded to torment Dick Richards shamelessly for most of the night, enjoying the fact that he was going to prove that he’d been right about the coat being too big.”

  What the hell. However the two men got through the day, they achieved something wonderful together.

  This would be Mitchum’s Ride the High Country, his True Grit, his Limelight, the autumnal work, the one that acknowledged a hero grown old, the summing up that reflected upon all that had come before. Whether Mitchum appreciated it or not, Richards had the insight to see him as something other than a nearly sixty-year-old journeyman movie actor hanging on for a few more years as a leading man, to see him as a living legend with a movie past and a cultural presence that transcended Farewell’s whodunit text. It was Richards who chose to create out of Chandler’s familiar detective story a meditative, memory-laden work and a showcase where Mitchum could achieve apotheosis. Critics were largely enthusiastic about the evocative reconstruction of the past, this homage to ‘40s melodrama (film noir still not a cliche
of the American critical lexicon), and many were close to ecstatic about the wistful, wry, haunting, iconographic presence of Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe.

  They said, as they had said previously—wrongly—about The Sundowners. Home from the Hill, and Ryan’s Daughter, that Farewell was certain to garner Mitchum a Best Actor nomination, quite possibly even the statuette itself. It was what they did, wasn’t it? Give one to the great veterans when they had made what seemed to be their career-capping, summing-up performance? But there was no award, not even a nomination.

  It really was a return to the past. The filming of Farewell, My Lovely had taken Mitchum to derelict neighborhoods he had once known, to streets he had last walked a near lifetime ago. Past midnight on Sixth and Main, a stone’s throw from the old Rescue Mission that had staked a hungry boy to a hot meal and a bed. Forty years and more had come and gone. Nothing much had changed. The winos and the drifters and the junkie hookers still roamed these streets as before. A few who could make it to their feet straggled over to check him out, gave him a toothless grin, as if recognizing an old friend. My people, Mitchum thought. He peeled off singles and five spots for each. They took the handout, and a cigarette, thanked him boisterously or mumbled incoherently, staggered away back to the shadows. An old cop watched him working. Man was way past retirement age. How long had he pounded this miserable beat on the graveyard shift? The old cop stared at him and after a while he came over, looked him up and down. He said, “So you’re back.”

  *Dick Powell’s turn at the role in 1944 was surprisingly smart but one-dimensional—the actor nailed the pulp in Chandler’s creation but not the poetry. What Chandler would have thought of Mitchum—the toughest and seediest of the Marlowes—playing his hero is not known, but the author’s personal choice for the part was Cary Grant.