Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “Everyone could see how sick he was,” said Victoria Tennant, who had come to be a great admirer and good pal of the actor. “But he kept working. He was the only actor the Yugoslavs recognized, and when he looked like he was going to drop, they were still after him for autographs.”

  The food Mitchum would recall as nothing but nightmarish variants of porridge. The thirty-five-million-dollar production was spending fifty bucks on catering, he said. Standard fare was a soup of barley and rainwater thick enough to plant a telephone pole in. On special occasions, he said, it would also contain a greasy hunk of congealed red mystery meat. After several weeks, the company’s Zagreb hotel became infested with a group of three dozen roistering Russian conventioneers who had apparently not bathed since the revolution. The group were omnipresent in the lobby, dining room, and elevators and gave off such a collective reek that some of the Winds people took to carrying face towels from their rooms to cover their mouths and nostrils against the nauseating smell. Mitchum and Jan-Michael Vincent had gone up in the elevator with a half-dozen of the reeking Russkies. “After we got out,” Vincent recalled, “Mitchum held the door, whipped out a tube of Crazy Glue, and began squirting great quantities of it up one side of the elevator door and down the other. Then he waved good-bye to them and they nodded appreciatively, thinking he had fixed something. We learned later that it had taken the hotel servicemen six hours to get those Russians out of that elevator.”

  Mitchum was in Zagreb for two months, most of it, he would say, spent falling on his ass in the snow while trying to reach an outhouse. After one particularly debilitating day’s shoot, he received a phone call from Bo Derek, who had wanted him to play her father in Tarzan, the Ape Man, shooting in sunny Sri Lanka and the Seychelles. Nearly in tears, he whimpered to Victoria Tennant that he could at that moment be headed for a warm beach somewhere to play with busty Bo. “Yes, and here you are with a freezing flat-chested English girl,” said a possibly unsympathetic Tennant, “in the middle of fucking Yugoslavia.”

  At last Mitchum was given a break to go home and recuperate while the others labored on. A doctor told him he had been working all this time with a solid case of pneumonia. When he returned to Yugoslavia he brought with him crates of fresh California fruit to bestow on the grateful company. More weeks in Zagreb; then at last they moved on to more congenial locations in Italy, Austria, and England. Mitchum would be given periodic vacations throughout the year, but they never seemed long enough to recover. Despite the vast-sounding budget and a twelve-month shoot, they were, after all, trying to make the equivalent of nine feature films in that time. For all its opulence, The Winds of War still ended up being shot like any other television production, with corners cut wherever possible and speed always of the essence. They worked six days a week, late into the evening almost every night. The shooting schedule was so efficiently planned that they were forever filming sequences that were wildly out of continuity with the previous one and the next, requiring Mitchum to change constantly in and out of nearly one hundred different costumes and two dozen pairs of shoes, none worn long enough to be broken in (”My toes are still braided”). Just trying to find where they were in the script, shifting the pages, say, from Scene 19 to Scene 643 in the massive screenplay, could give you a double hernia. Mitchum had not had to work so fast on a picture since those seven-day wonders at Monogram. Throughout, he complained like a foulmouthed Job, but ABC publicist James Butler thought it was in large part an act and that he was having “a good time with his hard times.” Butler observed in the journal he kept that when no one was around to be entertained, the “other” Mitchum came out. “He is singing softly to himself much of the endless time between scenes. Country songs, usually. His voice is warm, low, spirited . . . it makes him enormously human and enormously likable.”

  Month after month, ferocious Dan Curtis never let up, keeping things on schedule, never intimidated by logistics that might have vanquished General Eisenhower. “He had shortened the lives of his players an aggregate total of two hundred and fifty years,” said Mitchum. One day, while filming a marching batallion, Curtis reeled back, clutching his chest. Someone shouted, “Dan Curtis is having a heart attack!” Said Mitchum, “I have never seen so many smiles at one time in my life.”

  “Bob,” said the director, “likes to kid.”

  Mitchum was a good soldier, the ultimate pro, Curtis called him, though when the director’s attention turned away, and Bob considered himself abandoned “to the wolves,” he would slip away to a pub and get drunk. “Then,” said Mitchum, “he’d have to spend a day finding me.”

  Shooting was completed a year and one week after it began, with the filming of the attack on Pearl Harbor, staged at Port Heuneme, California, on December 7 to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the actual event. Curtis shot it with typical efficiency, in one afternoon, using eight cameras, two takes. One of the ABC people gloated, “It took Tora, Tora, Tora three months to do the same action!” Mitchum shrugged: “It took the Japanese fifteen minutes.”

  It had been a long, long job. Mitchum calculated that in the end, with the amount of time he had put in, his $1.25 million salary had worked out to about $2.40 an hour. “I could have done better picking potatoes.”

  With his virginity now taken, and no feature film offer imminent, Mitchum accepted another job in television. His Santa Barbara neighbor Mel Ferrer was producing and had tossed the script on his driveway next to the morning paper. It was a straight, old-fashioned private detective mystery with an awful title, So Little Cause for Caroline. They soon changed it to something just as bad: One Shoe Makes It Murder. They shot it in the spring. The schedules were crazy, dawn to bedtime, everyone running around under pressure. OK, that’s it for television, he said. It was a sloppy and sleepy B picture, but Mitchum and costar Angie Dickinson made it something more than watchable—the senior citizen and the old broad were sexier together than most of the “hot” young couples Hollywood was offering.

  Jason Miller’s play That Championship Season had been an off and then on Broadway sensation, winning the Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. It concerned the twenty-fifth anniversary get-together of an old high school basketball coach and his four former stars, that long ago “championship season” still the defining moment of their lives. In a time before delineations of American machismo and jock culture had become commonplace, Miller’s work was found incisive and shocking with its dramatically charged exploration of the characters’ emotional lives and the raw, obscenity-filled dialogue reflecting their casual racism and misogyny. There had been plans to make a film of the play since its first season on the stage, but they had come to nothing. In the late ‘70s, a director (William Friedkin) and a full cast (including Nick Nolte and George C. Scott as the coach) had been assembled, but this, too, fell apart. Miller himself bought back the screen rights and went peddling the property again, attaching himself as writer-director. Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, two Israelis who had founded Cannon Films, were launching themselves as a Hollywood presence, bankrolling a slew of genre schlock films with stars like Stallone and Bronson while keeping an eye out for a few more distinguished projects as well. Jason Miller’s prizewinner filled the bill.

  A cast was assembled—Bruce Dern, Martin Sheen, Stacy Keach, and Paul Sorvino (a survivor from the original Broadway cast) as the forty-something former teammates. William Holden had agreed to play their once and forever coach but had cracked his skull open in a drunken fall and died, his body not found for days. Mitchum was offered the part and accepted. Filming began in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in July 1982, the writer having “opened up” his play to include two reels of street scenes, parades, crowds, an elephant, with extra work and bit parts for nearly the whole town, including Jason Miller’s parents. There was a real sense of elation among the four younger actors, all of them convinced Miller had written them the best roles of their lives. “I’ve wanted to do this play since I saw it on Broadway,” said K
each. “I’m so excited about the work that’s been happening I’m getting superstitious. We’re all pushing and challenging each other, just like on a team. . . .” Mitchum, of course, managed to contain his girlish delight. Had he seen the play? someone asked. “No. I don’t go to movies or plays. I’ve seen only one movie in ten years. I was ankle-deep in popcorn and pot.” As for his fellow performers, their enthusiasm and, in some cases, their competitiveness seemed at times a tad hard for him to take. “They walk back and forth and hyperventilate,” he said. “This is like working with an English company; all these guys talk about is acting. I’m from the school where all we talked about was overtime and screwing.”

  “When I met him I was in awe of him,” said Paul Sorvino. “And I think you’re only in awe of someone who is mysterious, whom you can’t read easily. In fact, we used that awe, all of us, in the movie.”

  The work for once was easy on the knees, Mitchum could say that much, requiring nothing more physical than the tossing of an imaginary basketball. But the part, this “pivotal blowhard” as he called him, took some finessing. Too much of the dialogue still smelled of “the boards,” of theatricality. “He felt some passages in the screenplay were redundant,” Miller told Donald Chase, “And he felt there were places where he could have a quicker attack on a line. . . . Since I hadn’t in fact reduced the play’s rhetoric as I wanted to, I followed his suggestions when I thought they applied.” Miller’s frequent use of sports references in the script and in his direction seemed to go over Mitchum’s head. The actor confessed to knowing no more about basketball than he did about tennis. “I never saw a game in my life. Jason would take me aside and say, ‘This is it, Bob, the last quarter.’ I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”

  There were times when the lines didn’t come easily—rare for Mitchum, still ordinarily “Charley One Take” (per Dan Curtis) even after all these years. One important speech, a rallying lecture invoking the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, eluded him time after time as the camera rolled. He would get so far, then feel it all come apart in his mouth, and he’d shake his head, cursing. It helped very little to have the film’s financier, Golan, standing nearby in dismay. “Every time he says, ‘Shit!’ ” Golan joked, “it costs me five thousand dollars.”

  The crowds that gathered on the Scranton streets and outside the houses and sets to watch the filming offered an object lesson in the difference between movie actors and movie legends. Keach, Dern, and the rest were glanced at by the Scranton citizenry with distant recognition or vague looks of interest. Mitchum, though, wandering into view, created an instant physical and verbal response, a chorus of whispers, bodies suddenly shifting forward, necks craning, at times the gawkers literally chanting his name while the old lion made his way, throwing them a smile or a wave or grumbling, “Oh, fuck,” depending on the time of day.

  Production concluded in California, at Zoetrope Studios in Los Angeles, where Robert’s sixty-fifth birthday was celebrated with an on-set party and the appearance of a well-proportioned stripper with the birthday cake. Photos captured the fun, everyone crowded around, big gleeful grins, the stripper with her chest hovering before Mitchum, and on the face of the birthday boy a look of complete indifference.

  . . .

  The dynamism and contained intensity of Miller’s play, a kind of macho group therapy session, did not survive its transfer to film. Broken up into an assortment of medium shots, it became just so much horseplay and shouting. As the coach, Mitchum looked wrong, too handsome, too stylish, badly in need of a pair of Archie Bunker trousers and an Eddie Coyle haircut, and he exuded a rakish, world-weary spirit equally inappropriate to the role of a fusty, Teddy Roosevelt-quoting old-timer who felt his life had been well spent yelling at high school boys. Under the proper circumstances Mitchum could easily have nailed the alien character—the evidence was there in Coyle, Preacher Powell, even Charles Shaughnessy—but neophyte director Miller didn’t seem to know how to let him do it.

  With that Tony and Pulitzer attached to Miller’s work, Cannon dreamed that their Championship Season might be award worthy, too, and from the start of production treated the film to a major publicity campaign, bringing a number of reporters and photographers to the Scranton and Los Angeles sets, resulting in respectful coverage in many national publications, including a lengthy prerelease write-up in Newsweek magazine. Closer to the film’s premiere, they also successfully fostered the “buzz” that Mitchum’s performance was a strong candidate for the next Best Actor Oscar. In addition to their own efforts, Cannon happily piggybacked on ABC’s massive efforts for Mitchum’s other upcoming appearance in The Winds of War, now scheduled for a staggering eighteen hours of prime time in February 1983.

  The film’s world premiere and press party occurred on December 8. Mitchum had seemed docile and cooperative while on location in Pennsylvania and on the LA soundstage. The man who came to Manhattan for the Championship festivities was another fellow altogether.

  Mitchum arrived from Montecito with Dorothy in tow. He was bored, drunk, belligerent, ill, coughing up a lung after every puff on his Pall Malls. He had been drinking for . . . no one could guess how long, how many days and nights. When the publicists reconnoitered with their star in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria and saw what condition and mood he was in, they rushed to cancel a battery of press interviews and hoped—prayed to God—that he would get a bit of rest and be in proper condition for the premiere and party that night.

  No such luck.

  Passing the clamoring photographers outside the movie theater, he sneered and admonished, “Am I a monkey? Are you going to throw peanuts at me? Isn’t that what you do to monkeys, throw peanuts at them?”

  The premiere party was at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, where the free seafood crepes and chocolate truffles had lured the likes of Pat Lawford, Gloria Steinem, Arlene Dahl, and Norman Mailer among a hundred or so others, with nearly as many select reporters and photogs allowed in to gape at their glamour and hearty appetites. Mitchum, clutching a scotch, wandered along the press gauntlet, tossing profane epithets, sticking his tongue out as the flashes lit. “Everybody is pushing me. Grabbing me,” he complained. “Sticking their fingers in my face. Turn this way or this way. Everybody wants something.” A girl of about fifteen years, in attendance with her parents, slipped up to ask for an autograph. “I loved your movie,” she told him. “I thought you were wonderful.” Mitchum grabbed the girl and twisted her arm up behind her back, then flung her back from where she had come. “I thought it was just a joke,” she told an observing reporter. “He hurt me, but I didn’t know what to say.”

  Flacks hovered nervously, smiling at the hooded eyes behind Mitchum’s large, tinted glasses, telling him he was doing just fine, most cooperative. A publicist with an overdeveloped sense of sarcasm remarked that, after all, he’d been expecting Mitchum to do something really “wild,” like break a chair over someone’s head. “Is that what you want? You want me to break chairs?” said Mitchum. A female reporter from the Chicago Tribune was standing among them, seeing all that had occurred and thinking of that psycho preacher in—what was the damn movie with the fist tattoos of Hate and Love?—and suddenly he grabbed her, his thick hand thrusting inside the top of her blouse and taking hold of her breast. “I’ll break every fucking chair in the joint!” Mitchum hissed. The reporter remembered turning color, shocked, but trying to “play it light,” telling him, “Well, I’ve got the lead to my story.” Mitchum’s hand slid from the breast and grabbed her arm and twisted it backward—hard.

  “You want a lead?” he said. “You want me to humiliate you? You want me to destroy you right here? I can put you on the floor! I’ll break your arm!”

  “You’re hurting me,” the woman cried. “What did I do?”

  “You want ambulances here? Is that the story you want to write? I’ll give you that—gladly.”

  A group of celebrities wandered up. Mitchum greeted them, slipping his arm arou
nd the shoulder of the woman reporter, now near tears.

  “Gently . . .”

  “Hell, I’m always gentle,” Mitchum said.

  Mitchum, Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen, and Jason Miller were herded together for a group shot. The photographers moved in close, two rows. There were no freelancers, none of the wilder breed of paparazzi, just top assigned photographers from magazines and newspapers, Newsweek, AP, the Daily News. One of these was Yvonne Hemsey, a young woman on assignment for TIME. She had met Mitchum and the rest months before, in Scranton. He had been aloof but pleasant, cooperative. She had been in awe of him that day, very polite, and he had done whatever she had asked. That night at the Armory she heard from one of the flacks that Mitchum was acting a bit “edgy,” but she went up to him with pleasant memories of the Scranton visit and said hello. “You photographers,” he told her, “you’re all royal pains in the ass,” and walked away. Now she had moved up in the group of men and one or two women positioning for the group pose. Someone came up with a basketball for the guys to hold, a prop, tie-in to the movie, The Coach and His Boys. Now Mitchum had the basketball in his hands.

  “I was in the middle, wide-angle lens, four, five feet in front of him. Mitchum took the ball and threw it in my face. Straight at me. I’m not looking. I’m focusing to take a picture. Didn’t expect it. I’ve got the camera, my glasses, right against my eye. I was stunned. The ball broke my glasses. The flash cut my skin. Everybody was shocked. I just remember shock. The photography all stopped. I don’t remember if they moved him right away or what. Fellow photographers came around to make sure I was OK. And I remember the one that came over was Martin Sheen to see if I was all right. No one knew what to say, it was so off the wall.