Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  chapter sixteen

  Big Sleep

  IN 1978, THE MITCHUMS moved out of Los Angeles for the last time. They sold the house in Bel Air, sold the horse ranch in Atascadero, and purchased a two-bedroom, single-story with pool and Pacific view in the wealthy Santa Barbara community of Montecito a hundred miles to the north. It was a beautiful and pristine part of the world. The town was a mandated architectural imitation of a Mediterranean resort, and Montecito was considered lovely Santa Barbara’s most attractive and exclusive enclave. It was an area where the abundance of old money, under the liberating influence of California sea and sunshine, could loosen its collar a bit, an area just formal and snooty enough for new money to feel like old if it so desired. “Dorothy wanted to take him away from the guys he knew, anybody that would take him out and get him schnockered,” said an associate, speaking of the Mitchums’ sudden and final exit from LA. “And I think she wanted to become a society matron.” If this was the case, then one of these goals, anyway, was more or less achieved. Beverley Jackson, Santa Barbara’s well-connected society columnist, who befriended the Mitchums, recalled, “There was a very definite social scene in Montecito in those days, and they became accepted into it. They rather quickly became part of the inner social crowd around here. Dorothy went on some of the better charity boards, and though Bob hated being paraded around, if it was a very good cause Dorothy would drag him and he’d sure do his duty. They were asked to a lot of charity functions; and they really did their part and it was appreciated. I mean, they were taken in as members of Burnham Wood Country Club who’d never taken in a movie star before. . . . “

  They were not to be entirely among new acquaintances. There was a small, growing colony of Hollywood expats, some of them old friends of the Mitchums, like Mandeville Canyon neighbors Richard Widmark and Olive Carey, widow of Harry Carey, Sr., who became a beloved den mother in the area, hosting down-home gatherings at her little place on the property of a well-to-do friend, Irma Kellogg, presiding like an affable Hawaiian queen in her big muumuus with a hibiscus behind one ear. “There was a little group of us that lived within a few blocks of each other in the village at that time,” said Jack Elam. “In those days, even the biggest name movie star was not much more than a poor bum in Montecito. That’s the town where the real money was. So nobody really paid much attention to any of those guys. There was Stu Whitman—he lived across the road from Bob, built a house on a vacant four-acre lot—and I lived down the street, and John Ireland lived another few blocks away. Dick Widmark lived at the other end, but he was in Connecticut a lot of the time. Jane Russell, she was married to a guy named John Peoples by then, and she lived down on the beach a few minutes away, moved off to Sedona, Arizona, then moved back. And it was a quiet little area. We’d all run into each other. There were a couple of restaurants, a cafe in the village, Cafe del Sol. You went there for coffee in the morning, and you’d usually run into Mitchum or Ireland, or Widmark would wander by; you’d sit and chew the fat a little. There were no tourists around, and the locals didn’t even look at any of the movie folk. They didn’t give a shit.”

  With a new house to be gotten out of, Mitchum went back to work. The period of uninterrupted acclaim and great roles—a three-picture parlay that began with Eddie Coyle and culminated in the actor’s brilliant, defining performance as Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely—did not continue. Faye Dunaway had lobbied hard to have him cast as the world-weary television executive opposite her in Network and had finally convinced writer-producer Paddy Chayefsky, but director Sidney Lumet resisted—Mitchum wasn’t sufficiently urban, he was trouble, whatever, he didn’t want him—and the part went to William Holden. Instead o£Network, Mitchum’s follow-up to Farewell would be Midway, a cheesy replay of the World War II battle in the Pacific (in ear-busting Sensurround) in which he portrayed Adm. “Bull” Halsey. For thirty years Mitchum had spoken of the day when he could become like Claude Rains or Lionel Barrymore, nabbing those tasty, scene-stealing supporting roles that were well paid and required only ten days’ work. Hell, they didn’t even have to be tasty. Midway became the movie that replaced The Last Time I Saw Archie as his publicly declared all-time favorite: the whole job was done in a single day, horizontally, in a hospital bed.

  The Last Tycoon was more to the Claude Rains standard, ten days and a small but showy, carefully written part as a Louis B. Mayer—style movie mogul. Tycoon was a prestigious Sam Spiegel production based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel about brilliant, troubled Monroe Stahr, a production head in ‘30s Hollywood based on Irving Thalberg. The screenplay was by English playwright Harold Pinter, and Spiegel’s On the Waterfront collaborator Elia Kazan had been hired to direct. The large cast was a mix of New and Old Hollywood: Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Boulting, Theresa Russell, and Anjelica Huston mixing it up with actual veterans of the golden-age studio system, Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, and John Carradine. Off the set the players seemed to divide into generational camps, with the old-timers to be found kibbitzing together on the sidelines, swapping rollicking stories about the old days. Kazan devoted most of his efforts to DeNiro, whose complex Actors’ Studio-trained approach to a role required high maintenance, and to newcomer Boulting—a Spiegel “discovery”—who simply needed all the help she could get. Mitchum respected DeNiro’s talent, but he joined some of the others in their eye-rolling reaction to the New Yorker’s all-consuming immersion in his role, his walking around in costume and character off camera as well as on. During lunch break DeNiro would often remain sitting in his office set, ruminating on the character he played. One afternoon Mitchum and Milland came back to the set after the break, and one or the other had finished a funny story and they both burst into hearty laughter. Suddenly the prop Venetian blinds inside the office set shot open and the pair looked over to see DeNiro fiercely staring at the two of them having a great time. Mitchum whispered, “I hope Kid Monroe there doesn’t dock our pay.”

  Milland would occasionally become miffed at the lack of attention Kazan showed to him in contrast to his work with DeNiro (”Ray gave everybody with hair a hard time,” said Mitchum). He would run back to the other veterans irate with tidbits of the director’s latest intriguing suggestions to his young star. For instance, wanting to give the character an air of distracted thoughtfulness, as if Monroe Stahr’s brilliant mind was forever in two places at once, Kazan—Milland relayed—had told DeNiro to always be thinking about something entirely different while speaking his lines.

  “Shit,” said Mitchum, “I’ve been doing that for years!”

  . . .

  “It was a grim picture, and DeNiro felt the need to be quite somber,” said assistant director Ron Wright. “We started using the term grim up to mean we had to get in the mood for the scenes. Well, when Mitchum got there, that blew apart. He was joking and he had a lot of fun. Not that he was disrespectful of Kazan or DeNiro. There was a very good mutual respect. And I think, actually, he raised Kazan’s spirits. It was a relief to Kazan, working with the old-timers, the guys who didn’t have to go off and go get their shit together before they could come to the set, or while they’re on the set and everyone standing around waiting for them. Kazan brightened up because he didn’t have to create an environment for Mitchum and Milland and these old pros, who could do just as good a job, but all they needed was to come in, say the words, and not trip over the furniture.

  “Mitchum was fabulous. He kept the crew happy; he’d send his secretary downtown to bring back authentic Mexican food for everybody. He was a doll. He was also very good with helping some of the newer people, like Teresa Russell, who was called Teresa Pope then—Mitchum called herTessy Poop.” Playing Mitchum’s daughter, Russell found it difficult to give out a convincingly startled laugh as required in one scene. After several aborted takes, Mitchum planted himself in front of the actress and when the camera turned he dropped his pants and raised his bare ass at her. Russell’s reaction can be se
en in the finished film.

  Pinter’s script was thoughtful but moribund. However, Sam Spiegel loved Pinter and had a lingering resentment of Kazan, whose authority had diminished since the Waterfront days. Spiegel seemed determined to keep Kazan in his place. The director was not permitted to change so much as a comma in the screenplay without a long conference call to England. (Not even the physical dimensions of the document could be altered; all copies of the script were made in the larger British format of Pinter’s original.) No auteurist alchemy saved the day—the deadly script became the lifeless film. Even more of a disappointment than Ryan’s Daughter, The Last Tycoon had been anticipated as the prestige film release of the year until its first screening. There were extraordinary moments scattered throughout, but most of it played like a picnic at a cemetery.

  No prestige, real or anticipated, was attached to Matilda, a whimsy about a boxing kangaroo. Playing a Damon Runyon-Paul Gallico type of colorful sportswriter encouraging Elliott Gould as a boxing promoter, Mitchum’s participation was brief. Though producer Al Ruddy had originally intended to use a real kangaroo for the boxing and other scenes, the animal proved lazy and scary and wasted miles of film, so he was replaced by an actor in a kangaroo suit named Gary Morgan. “They tried a few others for the part,” said Morgan, “but I was the only one made that suit come alive.” It was an imperfect creation, heavy, awkward—Morgan spent most of the production gasping for air, falling unconscious, and getting bloodied and knocked out by the real heavyweight boxers he went up against. “Yep, the same thing happened to me in my boxing scenes,” Mitchum told him, consolingly, “but I don’t remember wearing all that padding.”

  “Mitchum was great, such a cool guy,” said Morgan. “The funny thing I remember, the first day we’re on location working at Harrah’s in Reno and they threw a kind of PR party at the hotel. It was one of these goodwill things, so the hotel executives and their wives could ogle the Hollywood stars up close. Everyone looked at it as a kind of an inconvenience, and no one expected Mitchum to even show up for this thing. But instead Mitchum was there early, sitting at the bar, holding court, entertaining everybody, and even after everybody left, Mitchum was still there until the bartender said, ‘Last call,’ and Mitchum says, ‘Thank you very much,’ and went to bed. But he was just a real cool guy, very nice to me, and we did all sorts of crazy promos for the movie, the Tonight Show and everything—I remember sitting with him there just before he went on the show with Johnny Carson, and an aid brought him a large tumbler glass of straight whiskey; and he just drank it down in a couple of gulps like a big glass of water. And I was always in the kangaroo suit hopping around with him and he’d just treat me like his kangaroo sidekick, didn’t faze him in the least. And if somebody said, ‘Who’s this?’ he’d say, ‘Why, under that kangaroo hide beats the heart of Gary Morgan.’ I just adored him. And he told stories nonstop, for every occasion. Somebody’d mention Angie Dickinson, for instance, and he’d tell about the time he was making some Western with Angie and they’re sitting around on the location in their camp chairs waiting for the crew to get ready. And some cute girl slips over to Mitchum and says, ‘Oh my, Bob Mitchum . . . I’d just really love to give you a blow job!’ And he says, ‘Well, that’s a great offer, honey, but I see they’re right now calling me back to work.’ And according to Bob, he says to the girl, ‘Well, gee, Angie’s not doing anything, why don’t you ask her?’

  “That picture, Matilda, got scathing reviews, and I think it was because the press packet tried to pretend we used a real kangaroo in the thing. Then when the press saw the picture, it was like, ‘What, are you kidding?’ It pissed the critics off. So the reviews were like, ‘Fuck you!’

  “Anyway. . . Robert Mitchum? You couldn’t get me to say anything but salt of the earth. I ran into him several years later. Lots of times, you’re a little guy working with big stars, next time they see you they look right through you, don’t have the time of day. Mitchum? I gave him a wave, it’s years later; he grabbed me like I was a little brother, like it was old home week. . . . What a real cool guy he was.”

  After turning down the lead in The French Connection years before, largely because of a distaste for the role of a drug-busting hero, Mitchum now signed on to play an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in a far less promising project, The Amsterdam Kill. The film belonged to Hong Kong’s Raymond Chow and Golden Harvest Productions and was to be directed by Robert Clouse, the American who had called the shots on Bruce Lee’s most successful vehicle, Enter the Dragon. Shooting roamed from London to Amsterdam to Hong Kong, and Mitchum seemed to enjoy himself nowhere. He was sixty years old, and Clouse—who Mitchum said was deaf and had never before directed anyone without a black belt in karate—had him doing all his own stunts. “Look, if my knee goes, it’s a three-month lunch,” he told Clouse, to not much avail. His performance included jumping into the questionable, murky liquid that flowed in a Dutch canal. “They’re filthy,” he told Roderick Mann, “all those houseboats spewing out their garbage. And there I am, up to my neck in it . . . Can you see Elizabeth Taylor or Cary Grant in a canal? Or Victor Mature? Out of the question. He wouldn’t even get on a horse unless it was bolted to the ground. But me, with my shining heart, in I go . . .” The company agreed to pay for his tetanus shot though, he claimed, not for a typhoid antidote as the sweating it induced might hold up production. He felt no more sanguine about his Amsterdam hotel and refused to shoot a scene on the front steps that he believed had been arranged as a blatant promotional payback to the owners of the place. “Me, who turned down $250,000 just to wash my hair on TV! No way, I said, you’ll get me to plug this dump.” And then there was the omnipresence, said the star, of dog shit, huge mounds of it lining the curbs: “They must have dogs six feet tall here.”

  Things proved still more unpleasant in Hong Kong. According to Robert Clouse, Mitchum was openly verbally abusive to the Golden Harvest personnel and Chinese crew. The sentiments were returned in kind. The atmosphere became so charged that Mitchum began harboring fears that the film company was planning to kill him. He had somehow convinced himself that Golden Harvest was secretly holding extra insurance policies that would pay a fortune in the event of his death during production. Clouse himself believed there was an element of dangerous vengefulness in the way members of the Chinese contingent at dinner one night plied Mitchum with what some feared was a lethal portion of a devastatingly powerful local spirit. He was carried out of the restaurant and back to his hotel but ultimately took a fall on a bathroom floor and busted two ribs.

  Once again a behind-the-scenes “making of” a documentary might have proved more entertaining than the actual confused, simple-minded feature itself.

  Mitchum returned to the role of Philip Marlowe for the second and last time in a screen adaptation of Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, already filmed marvelously twenty-some years before as a studio-bound violent comedy of manners, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Humphrey Bogart. Producer Elliott Kastner, financed by Britain’s Sir Lew Grade, offered the project to writer-director Michael Winner. Winner, a colorful, smart, and waspishly funny moviemaker, had begun his career as a social satirist chronicling the rise of “Swinging London” in several clever to brilliant films starring Oliver Reed. He then switched gears in the ‘70s to become a specialist in brisk and often lurid genre entertainments, many of them vehicles for Charles Bronson.

  Though he had written a screenplay that was in fact more faithful to the original novel than Hawks’s version, Michael Winner made the radical decision to transplant The Big Sleep to modern London. “It came about because it seemed to me the original film was so immensely well known,” said Winner, “that to ape it in any way would be ridiculous. Furthermore, Raymond Chandler was a great Anglophile, and when I read the book I thought it was quite a bit like reading Oscar Wilde. I know this man’s meant to be a famous American writer, but it’s an immensely British style of writing. So much so that when Jimmy Stewart w
as sent the script, he said, ‘I can’t play General Sternwood because he’s written as an Englishman.’ I said, ‘Jimmy, every word is Raymond Chandler’s and he’s a famous American writer.’ But Jimmy was actually being quite bright. . . . So, I thought we’d try something completely different. And I saw it very much as a gavotte, that is, a lot of people dancing around each other in a very classical way.”

  By working at his usual brisk pace and carefully arranging the schedule, Winner was able to afford Mitchum a notably starry supporting cast, including Stewart, Ryan’s Daughter mates Sarah Miles and John Mills, Oliver Reed, Joan Collins, Candy Clark, Edward Fox, and Richard Boone. “Mitchum was held in very high regard by the other actors. And I think he was an inducement for them to work in the picture. Just as when you do a picture with Marlon you know that more people will turn up. And also, I think they were all very good parts. Very sharp.” Although the film was spruced up for the ‘70s with a few flashes of nudity and an array of agressively sexy dames, the modern Marlowe remained a surprisingly chaste fellow, leading Mitchum to voice some sardonic suspicions: “Marlowe throws Candy Clark out of his bed, resists the advances of Sarah Miles, and has pictures of himself all over his apartment. I kept expecting him to open a closet and find exotic black panty hose and rhinestone shoes and jazz.”

  Installed in a flat at Arlington House on a very posh street overlooking St. James Park and coutured for the film in the finest Savile Row suitings—nothing farted up by Vic Mature this go-round—Mitchum went to work, enjoying London as he always did, though there were the usual grousings and wisecracks to reporters or any audience he could muster. They were shooting in London, he said, “because it’s the only place they can practice industrial slavery. Around eight or nine at night I’d say, ‘Isn’t it getting a little late?’ ‘Oh, weren’t you informed,’ they’d say, ‘today is an extended day?’ Turned out to be a day you worked until midnight.” Twelve hours, fourteen hours a day he claimed to be on the job. “By the time I make the report out to the Screen Actors Guild, I will own Sir Lew Grade.”