Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Everybody else had the Claude Rains roles this time. James Stewart as Sternwood, the rich, wheelchair-bound old man with the errant daughters, flew in from Los Angeles for a few days to shoot his two scenes. Though just seventy years old now, the great movie star appeared much older. “The picture was all about corpses,” Mitchum told Donald Dewey, “but Jimmy looked deader than any of them.” Stewart had a hearing and possible memory impairment and kept fumbling on one of his lines. “Every time he’d flub it, he’d look at me and apologize to me like he’d just committed some kind of atrocious crime. Damned embarrassing, I’ll tell you. What the hell is Jimmy Stewart apologizing to me about?”

  Joan Collins, playing the sexy, scheming bookshop clerk, Agnes, thought Mitchum one of the greatest actors she had ever worked with, but was initially terrified of being bruised or broken by him during their on-camera tussle. “He had to wrestle with me on the floor, fling me across the room onto a sofa, grab my hair, then throw me over his knee and spank me really hard while I wriggled around trying to dodge his slaps.” Mitchum did all the action as required, but Collins found the whole thing a remarkably gentle and bruise-free experience. “Honey, I’m an actor,” he told her afterwards, “and I know how to play rough. I’ve been doin’ this stuff for about a hundred years so I’m not about to hurt an actress in a scene, ‘specially not in this piece of crap.”

  The great casting coup for the British Big Sleep, besides Mitchum’s return to the role, was Richard Boone playing triggerman Lash Canino. Boone’s Olympian charisma turned the small part into the most compelling villain Mitchum had gone up against since Robert Ryan—or Jane Greer. “In the evening Bob tended to drink,” said Winner, “and, bless him, Dick Boone drank a bit.” In fact, Boone, like Mitchum, was considered a world-class imbiber; and on the night they were to film their last violent encounter, both were feeling no pain. Staggering about the set and blasting away at each other, the two old pros had a high old time of it. Winner: “I did say, during the final shoot-out, ‘This is like The Gunfight at Alcoholics Anonymous.” I mean, that was being a little cruel, but they were a bit stoked up there. But they were fine.”

  Mitchum and Sarah Miles—in the Lauren Bacall role—were happily reunited for the production. They had remained chums through the years, fostering continued speculation about their relationship; and as Miles’s marriage to Robert Bolt had come undone, she would admit to having again been tempted by the American’s sexual allure. But nothing came of it. Miles valued Mitchum’s friendship all the more when he became one of only three showbiz acquaintances to immediately defend her during a horrible, scandalous crisis she had endured a few years earlier. Miles had somehow gotten entangled in a bizarre relationship with a TIME magazine reporter, David Whiting, who had seduced her and then managed to make himself a permanent fixture in her life. Although he was clearly unstable and beat her violently numerous times, Miles was incapable of doing whatever it took to get away from the man. Violently jealous, he bestowed beatings on several of her costars and friends as well—including Mitchum. The actor had arrived in London for a visit and left a message for Miles to call him. Mitchum had just concluded the purchase of some marijuana from a local connection and was closing the door to his flat when Whiting arrived in a maniacal fury, knocking Mitchum to the floor. “I caught his eye and there was death perching right in the corner of it,” Mitchum told her. He clung to the floor in a ball while Whiting kicked him again and again, then grabbed his newly purchased pot stash and fled. It was the only time, Mitchum said, he had ever refused to fight back when attacked. “No way, man! Never fight when you see death in the eye.”

  Whiting followed Miles to the American West where she was shooting a film, and one night—after he had given her another beating, and she had revealed as much to costar Burt Reynolds and others—Whiting was found dead on her bathroom floor under mysterious circumstances. Miles felt that many of those close to her, including family members, believed she was complicit in the man’s death—his murder no less—and Mitchum was among the shockingly few to offer support and prove a stalwart friend.

  Mitchum had his own small scandals to engender during the course of The Big Sleep’s production, consorting with a luscious young Londoner, to the delight of Fleet Street’s strenuous tabloids. “There was a whole thing in the paper about it,” Michael Winner recalled. “I had interviewed a girl that afternoon because we had to do a book cover with some nudes on it, to be seen within the movie. And we took the photos ourselves. The girl was a nude model, and she came to see me to be a nude model for this. It was a one-hour modeling assignment, probably fifteen dollars. And by absolute, amazing coincidence I met Mitchum in the lobby of a theater that evening—he was seeing John Mills in a Terrence Rattigan play—and he turned up with this girl. And he hadn’t met her through me. How he met her, I don’t know. It was strange. There she was going to the theater with him. And this girl says, ‘Hello.’ She was perfectly pleasant. And she was his girlfriend, I think, during his stay. She sold her story to the English press, so I’m not telling a tale out of school. And then they all had a fight with some other girl outside his apartment. That was also in the papers here. Some other woman who was following him around, and they had a fight outside the apartment. I said, ‘Bob, I hope it wasn’t inside because we’ll do you for the damage, you know!’”

  Mitchum and Winner remained pals in the years ahead. “Well, Bob was two people, really. When he had a drink or two he was the mumbling raconteur or, if he had had enough, quite a rowdy fellow. But most of the time he was a very quiet person, read a great deal, read poetry, important books. He used to write poetry, rather proudly. I knew this chap very well. He was a very intellectual person. The great amount of time that I saw him he was very quiet, very sober, very dedicated. He was almost like the head of a midwestern university. And he wasn’t doing this to impress me. Why should he? Ha ha—I went to Cambridge, you know!”

  Winner would have been the first—well, perhaps not the first—to acknowledge that his Big Sleep did not surpass the achievement of the Bogart classic of the ‘40s. But the new one was jolly good fun, a spirited go at the material, and here and there, particularly in several ripely acted characterizations—by Boone, Collins, the always delightful Oliver Reed as a reptilian mobster—it actually was the superior of the revered Hawks version. However, many reviewers could not get beyond Winner’s transatlantic relocation and desecrating contemporaneity. How things had changed in the few years since Dick Richards had thought to make Farewell, My Lovely into a period piece. Now every weatherman turned television movie critic was a Raymond Chandler purist.

  . . .

  Playwright John Guare had written an original scenario that was to be directed by his French friend Louis Malle. It was called Atlantic City, and it was the story of a seedy, aged hood in the New Jersey gambling resort who finds a last shot at riches and romance. Guare and Malle had thought of several actors for the part of the nostalgic old criminal, but when Robert Mitchum’s name came up a light went off. “We both said, ‘Of course!’” Guare recalled. “We thought he would be terrific. His age, his aura, the whole connection to film noir. It seemed perfect. We sent him the script, and Louis went out to California to see him. Mitchum met him at the door. Louis took one look and saw immediately that Mitchum had had a face-lift. There was not a wrinkle in sight. And he was quite open about it. He said yes, he had just had it done. He had read the script we sent him, he said he was very happy to be asked to do the part, but, he said, ‘I’m only playing forty-five now.’ Forty-five years old, in other words. And that was that. We got Burt Lancaster instead.” Lancaster’s performance in the role brought him critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination, among other honors.

  Mitchum closed out the decade with two more jobs of work. Breakthrough, filmed in Austria, was a modest sequel to Peckinpah’s WWII epic, Cross of Iron, with Mitchum as an American officer. Top billing went to Richard Burton, playing the German hero Sergeant Steiner. Burton’s g
lamour was sadly depleted by now, and he looked like a bloated, strung-out tortoise inside his great steel army helmet. Agency was a Canadian thriller shot in Toronto in the winter of 1978—79, with Lee Majors as a funky adman foiling a plot to control public policy through subliminal messages, the plot hatched by evil, brilliant senior advertising executive Mitchum.

  “He’s a total outcast,” the producer Robert Lantos gushed to a reporter. “Outside the Hollywood system. He has no agent, probably the only major star who doesn’t, and you deal directly with him.”

  Mitchum pocketed five hundred thousand dollars for a dramatic but supporting part. Asked by the reporter if he ever got excited about any of his films, Mitchum responded with what was described as a “very long pause.”

  Valerie Perrine played the film’s statuesque love interest—Lee’s. She told Mitchum, “I’ve never been in a picture with guns.” Mitchum told her, “I’ve never been in one without.”

  . . .

  He started the new decade with an even worse movie, if that were possible: Nightkill. It was a James M. Cainish tale of a homicidal wife, with Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith starring as the murderess and Mitchum as a mysterious private eye on her trail. It was a gorilla picture all the way. So poor were the film’s prospects that Avco-Embassy decided to sell it directly to television, and NBC promoted its December broadcast as the world premiere of a made-for-TV movie rather than as the world premiere of a not-good-enough-for-theaters movie.

  Ironically, it was during this period—on December, 8, 1980—as his career seemed to have returned to the B picture murk whence it began, that Mitchum was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Los Angeles Film Critics association. He was the fifth recipient of the honor, following Allan Dwan, King Vidor, Orson Welles, and John Huston. “I would like to thank you all,” said Mitchum, “for picking my name out of a hat.”

  Later that same month, his twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Trina, wed a California musician and composer named Scott Richardson. Trina had gone through a period as an aspiring writer, then as a burgeoning photographer. Now she was said to be interested in movie production work. Brothers Chris and James were still plugging away at their father’s business. After more than twenty years as an actor, Jim had never broken through to the big time and was reduced to working in mostly out-of-the-mainstream movies. Sometimes he tried to make his own breaks and got involved on the production side. One underfunded project called King of the Mountain fell apart after shooting began in New Mexico, and, according to John Mitchum, Robert had had to pay off bill collectors to the tune of eleven thousand dollars. Jim’s most recent credits were unknown quantities called Blackout and Toxic Monster. “I wish I could tell you that Jim is a famous surgeon or even a box boy in the supermarket,” his father uncharitably said to a reporter. “But I can’t. He curses the stars and wonders why he wasn’t singled out for eternal glory.”

  Chris, who drifted into acting when nothing else worked out, had gotten a number of jobs through sympathetic associates of his father’s, Howard Hawks and John Wayne. An agent then found him a role in a film made in Spain, a thriller called The Summertime Killer. It would not get much play in the States, but the picture was a sizable hit throughout Europe, and its success led to other jobs there and in Asia, mostly in action and horror movies. Usually, he would say jokingly, he played a smiling, renegade CIA agent who kills hundreds of people. He went where the work was and moved the family to Spain for three years. In Hollywood they couldn’t even spell it, but the name Chris Mitchum on a marquee meant good box office in Algeciras or Manila. In 1980, he returned to the United States hoping to try his luck again in Hollywood. “From 1980 to 1982, I didn’t work at all,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “That was one of the many times I bottomed out.” It was rough, he said. He’d had an established price for his services in Europe, and in California no one wanted to pay it.

  John Mitchum had continued to work in the business. He was a busy journeyman character actor with dozens of credits by now, his most prominent job to date the role of Det. Frank Di Georgio, supporting Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and two sequels. He seemed content with the career he had found for himself and was well liked by people in the business. His personal life, though, had for many years been beset by tragedy. Years before, his wife, Nancy, had been diagnosed with malignant exophthalmos, or Graves’ disease. Bone surgery on her face had left her in a condition that made it difficult to keep her eyes from falling out of their sockets. She suffered for a decade with complications from the disease and then, in 1976, died from terminal, undiagnosed cancer. John was married for a third time, brieftly and unhappily, and then once more, happily, to a stage actress named Bonnie Duff, brother Bob serving as best man at the outdoor ceremony.

  The 1977 ABC broadcast of a multipart adaptation of Alex Haley’s best-selling book Roots had met with enormous acclaim and an unprecedented viewership. It would prove to be the model for a new television format, the blockbuster miniseries—lengthy, sprawling, melodramatic pop literature transformed into lengthy, sprawling, et cetera, TV programming.

  In 1980, the ABC network announced its intention of producing a thirty-five-million-dollar, sixteen-hour-long adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel The Winds of War, a thick, fictional account of world events between the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Japanese attack on the Hawaiian islands in 1941, the epic canvas centered around the globe-trotting family of U.S. Navy captain Victor “Pug” Henry. With his long-established skill as a storyteller, Wouk had written a compelling page-turner in which his primary characters—Pug, son Byron, daughter-in-law Natalie—managed to interact with every world leader from FDR to Stalin and/or experience every earth-shattering event—from Pearl Harbor to the Holocaust—of those tumultuous years. The tale had action, spectacle, suspense, adultery, heartbreak, history, and a moral lesson or two.

  To make this, the costliest of all television programs, ABC and coproducer Paramount Television handed the creative reins to Dan Curtis, whose fame rested on the 1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows and several glossy prime-time TV movies, such as his 1973 version of Dracula with Jack Palance. Curtis was a rare figure among important television producers in that he directed his own projects. With the completion of the massive screenplay by Wouk himself, the plans for a vast production took shape, with filming to be done in six countries and hundreds of locations, from Hawaii to the wilds of Yugoslavia. There were nearly three hundred speaking roles to be cast, first and foremost that of the story’s central character, the link to all the various threads in the sprawling epic. According to Wouk’s description of Captain Henry, the role might have properly belonged to someone in the age range and bulldog shape of an Ed Asner, but Curtis and ABC saw the story’s steadfast military hero and patriarch in more classical terms. The producer-director considered a long list of prominent names for the role, but after a luncheon with Robert Mitchum—granite face, tall, broad-shouldered, American as Mount Rush-more, a tough SOB with awesome presence—he knew he had found his man. Gary Nardino, the president of Paramount TV, gave him no argument. Said Nardino of Mitchum, “He’s the only Gary Cooper still alive.”

  Through the years Mitchum had had nothing much good to say about the medium of television. It had always looked like too much work, too little pay, and the end result was a load of crap. But that was . . . then. He was sixty-three years old, and maybe he had worn out his welcome in features. The big pictures these days all seemed to be aimed at half-witted teenagers anyway, and he could not easily imagine himself dressed up in gold tights like a chorus boy for one of those Star-whatever outer space adventures or sitting around chewing the fat with a retarded-looking extraterrestrial. Advisers pleaded: This is going to be the biggest thing ABC has ever done. It will be the television event of the year. And they want you to star in it!

  Dan Curtis called him for his answer.

  Mitchum said, “How long?”

  “About forty weeks.”

  “How muc
h?”

  “A million.”

  “Why not?”

  . . .

  Other principal roles went to Polly Bergen as Mrs. Pug, John Houseman as the Jewish scholar Aaron Jastrow, Briton Victoria Tennant as Pamela Tudsbury (Mitchum’s love interest), Ralph Bellamy reprising his Sunrise at Campobello turn as Franklin Roosevelt, Ali MacGraw as the impetuous Natalie, and Jan-Michael Vincent (playing Mitchum’s son for the second time) as Byron Henry, the latter two casting choices not made until long after the production had been under way. Shooting began in December, pleasantly enough, on the decks of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, filling in for the German liner Bremen, and then on the tennis court of a Hancock Park estate (where it was discovered that Mitchum, unlike Pug Henry, had never touched a racket in his life; a tennis-playing double for the star had to be found). After Christmas break they moved on to more rigorous locations in Yugoslavia, filling in for the Russian front; arrangements had been made to rent most of the Yugoslav army. Mitchum’s departure for Europe coincided with his catching a strain of Thai flu, and he arrived in Zagreb with a 104-degree temperature. For over a week, he worked while shaking and shivering with fever. The weather was indeed Russian-front cold, nearly as frigid on some of the interior sets as it was in the forest. “Every toilet within four miles was frozen,” said Mitchum. “Slivovitz kept me alive.” Once Curtis interrupted a take to ask why Mitchum’s suit appeared to be moistly shiny. The actor had sweated right through his shirt and jacket, and the sweat had beaded and frozen solid.