Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  “It was all dismissed by different lawyers,” said Reva. “It all remained, I guess you’d call it, a void. Everybody just forgot everything, and everything was dismissed. And we never went further with anything. It was never a settlement or . . . anything. You go your way and I’ll go my way is sort of how things came to a final decision. And that was the end of our association.”

  Mitchum appeared at the fifty-fifth annual Academy Awards presentation, paired off with Sigourney Weaver. There was the usual badinage, which Mitchum delivered with typical insouciance. The normally witty Weaver was reduced to the Margaret Dumont square’s role on this occasion.

  Sigourney: I’m so honored tonight to be here with Mr. Mitchum and present the award for Best Supporting Actress.

  Mitchum: Is that what we’re doing? (audience laughs) All right, we’ll keep it shorter than Winds of War.

  Winner Jessica Lange loped onstage for her prize, Mitchum offering a quite formal handshake.

  Mitchum agreed to fill in for Burt Lancaster, after the actor underwent an emergency heart bypass operation, in a second Cannon Films production, Maria’s Lovers, starring Nastassja Kinski, John Savage, and Keith Carradine. The film was set among a mostly Slavic community in rural Pennsylvania just after World War II, the story of a returning GI whose psychological problems render him impotent only with his new bride, Maria, who reluctantly finds romance elsewhere. Mitchum’s role was that of the ex-soldier’s lusty but dying immigrant father. Marias Lovers was to be the first American-based work by the brilliant Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky. The son of well-known Russian poets (his father the composer of the Soviet national anthem), Konchalovsky had for many years written scripts for Andrei Tarkovsky before directing the acclaimed Siberiade, a prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival. “I left Russia in 1979 and I was for three years unemployed, couldn’t put anything together,” Konchalovsky recalled. “When I came to Hollywood no one knew me, basically, except for Kinski. She was just coming up as star and she asked me if I would do something with her. I had this script, which I had planned to make in Europe with Adjani. Kinski was hot, so I got some clout, and finally Menahem Golan said, ‘Set the story in America and we will do it.’ But I thought it would not be right in truly American society, these characters, too emotional, so I put it in a Yugoslav enclave. We shot in Pennsylvania, Brownsville and other small town, near where Cimino shot Deer Hunter.

  “Mitchum came aboard, Golan brought him in, and I found him wonderful person. Very intimidating at the beginning. You say, ‘How are you, Mr. Mitchum?’ He says, ‘Worse!’ I think of him like Rachmaninoff, great Russian composer, very introverted in front of others, but when he accepts you as friend he is opening up. And I knew much about him, what was inside him, because I had had romance with Shirley MacLaine two years before and she told me about Mitchum quite a lot. She said he was very much a rebel, very left, his views were extreme left. She told me how he saw himself. That he was ‘poet with an ax.’ And this was beautiful metaphor of the person. I understood completely. It meant a very tender person who can be very cruel and relentless with his poetic substance. And at the second of our meetings, I decided to use this. I said, ‘You are a poet with an ax.’ And his eye had a flicker and he smiled. That was the beginning of good relationship.

  “His humor was very dry, required close attention, especially for a foreigner. His humor was like a stone in the water, a few words, boom, boom, and everyone’s supposed to laugh. It was a wonderful kind of American personality. He was like a wild animal. Reminded me of a lion. Always alone with himself, independent of everything. And to tame wild animal, director should be careful, and friendly. He can bite, he can claw you. And I pushed him further sometimes. I said, ‘I want you to do more.’ And once I wanted him to cry. He didn’t want to, but he said, ‘OK.’ And we did a second take. ‘But Robert, you should cry here.’ And he says, ‘What the hell do you want? There’s a tear in my eye!’ It was very Irish cry, one tear, but he’s supposed to be playing Yugoslav with a fountain of tears! But I couldn’t make him do any more. It was beautiful, anyway.

  “It was very common for Kerouac’s generation, to feel the need to be an intellectual and at the same time a maverick, a tough guy. It is a pattern for a certain type of intellectual—drinking, fighting. Mitchum would start to drink during the second part of the day. And there were some times he had troubles. He went to the bar. I remember that he had a brawl there with some guys. Some confrontation. When he got drunk he could get—not mean, but sordid. Sordid. Once he fell and broke a rib. He said, ‘I cannot shoot today; I broke a rib.’ And he was in a lot of pain. I said, ‘OK, we’ll do it tomorrow. But please, no more of this!’

  “He had, I think, a soft spot for Nastassja Kinski. She told me that he came once to her trailer, knocked the door and opened it, gave her little ivory elephant. Ivory elephant is an object of happiness. And she was so pleased. He gave it and walked away. I think romantically she excited him very much. But she was having a love affair with another actor, Vince Spano, and she had a baby from that. But I think that was reason why Mitchum never put the make on her.

  “It was a very, very hot summer and it was very tough for him to work. He had terrible asthma or something in the lungs. But he never let it stop him. He was extremely professional and strong. The last day of shooting we had a drink after dinner. He looked at me and said, ‘Andrei, I know I’ll be seeing your name a lot. You’re going to do well.’ He said it like a blessing. It was nice to hear. I brought the movie to Santa Barbara. He watched, very proud, very happy. And he said after, ‘You know, I like this film.’ Said it very strange, like he was amazed. And he looked at me with a different attitude, with a new tenderness. It was our last meeting.”

  Another birthday. Sixty-six goddamn years old. Some days he hurt all over—back, chest, knees. He was going to call the stuntman’s guild and ask for a pension. All those slips, dead falls, jumps, bashes in the eye from punch-drunk fighters. He had cataracts in his eyes. The doctor saw tears in his lungs. The long, deep, unending smoker’s cough was becoming as common as breathing these days. That was his greatest acting trick of the moment, doing the lines without coughing up his insides.

  In October he received another tribute. Life Achievement Award of the American Theatre Arts. Who? He’d never heard of the fucking thing. But he put on his tuxedo and dropped by to check it out. The dinner cochairmen, Frank Sinatra and John Huston, couldn’t make it. Frank sent a telegram, addressed to “Mother Mitchum”: “It is a long overdue tribute. No one is more worthy.” Huston spoke on a short piece of videotape: “The rest of us marvel at the extent of your contribution, its richness and its variety.” Mitchum was given a framed letter from President Reagan: “Your career is outstanding. . . . Nancy and I were both glued to the TV set wondering what Pug Henry’s next move would be.” The president couldn’t make it either. But Hal Linden and Paul Williams were there. Someone gave the honoree a computer portrait of himself in Winds ofWar. That was going to look good right next to his Hoppy Serves a Writ poster. The president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce got up and announced that one day in the near future Mitchum was going to have his name imprinted on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. Mitchum said, “I thought it was already there.”

  He did one more for Golan-Globus at Cannon. This one they had set up to make back in the homeland, shooting in Tel Aviv and in the Occupied West Bank. It was a real lead this time, the title role: The Ambassador. Somehow or other the boys had managed to squeeze a tension-in-the-Middle East story out of an Elmore Leonard novel they owned, a novel that took place in Detroit. Mitchum’s guy was an activist diplomat with a plan to bring the warring factions together even as he tries to handle a blackmail scheme involving inflagrante footage of his wife and an Arab lover. Ellen Burstyn would play his straying wife, and Rock Hudson—just out of the hospital for a heart operation—took the supporting role of the ambassador’s friend and problem solver. The film put Mitchum back together wit
h J. Lee Thompson, director of Cape Fear. Thompson had done a string of forgettable shoot-’em-ups in recent years, but this was a piece of material he liked, felt strongly about. A good, timely, important subject and a strong cast. The actors performed well. Mitchum made perfectly vivid and authentic-seeming the ambassador’s peculiar combination of empathy and bullheadedness; and Burstyn was typically excellent, with some suprisingly sexy activities for the fifty-three-year-old actress, including a brief and perfectly creditable nude scene (”She liked doing it,” Thompson recalled, “was all for it!”). There was a sense of excitement for some of the imported personnel, doing the story right where such things were actually happening. They were based in Tel Aviv, but there was much location shooting on the West Bank. At times there were whispered fears of terrorist attacks, and armed patrols were assigned to watch over them.

  It was not a particularly happy production. “Rock Hudson was not in a good way,” said Thompson. “It was a bad, small part, and it hadn’t been cast before we began shooting. And then Menachem told me he was fetching Rock. It was a good move for the production; he was still quite a well-known name. But I felt terrible; it was such a nothing part. I tried to improve it a little. And he came and he obviously did it just for the money, and he couldn’t wait to get away. I don’t think that Mitchum cared for him, or he for Mitchum. And Rock was smoking away. Had just had quadruple bypass, and he just started up smoking again right in the hospital. He thought it was a good distraction. Poor Rock, he was not in a good way.

  “And Bob, I’m afraid, his drinking by this time was a problem. It now started in the morning. There were amusing moments. He had a scene in bed with Ellen, supposedly at night, and they were both supposed to be sipping from drinks. And Ellen got his glass by mistake when she did the scene and found out that it had the real stuff in it. And she did not approve of drinking during the shooting, so it was quite a scene. She would get very angry at him, and he just looked like a small boy who was caught with his fingers in the jam. She was full of admiration for him as an actor, and she was a wonderful person, but she had a thing about drinking on the set. And this happened again, and she would smell it on his breath. . . . I had to cool her down on many occasions.

  “He made a valiant attempt to stop during the shooting of The Ambassador. He would go days without even touching it. He was fighting it, and it was a fierce struggle for him. I had a sympathy. I could sympathize with what he was going through. Being an alcoholic myself, which I was, I could understand what was happening. It was quite painful to see. He made a valiant effort. I think he had come to a realization that it was finally getting the better of him.”

  Journalist Bart Mills talked to Mitchum and observed him at work on a number of productions in this period. “To me, beyond the inevitable depredations of age, he was now just sleepwalking through life. Going through the motions of living. Whether it was because he was a slave to alcohol or something deeper within him I can’t say, but there was a huge impression of nihilism, of a near constant despair. He never voiced it except in the usual quotes, putting down the movie business, saying he was just in it for the money, hated working, all the usual stuff. But it ran deeper, I think. I just couldn’t imagine living the way he did the last decade I saw him.”

  “Later on there, I think the work began to bore him,” said Reni Santoni. “He knew he could do it and better than nearly anybody, and there was no challenge, no satisfaction perhaps. He made people intimidated, a lot of them who worked with him then. No one wanted to come up to the legend. He got it right on one take, and unless something had physically gone wrong, no one wanted to bother him to reshoot something. The directors didn’t want to provoke him, I guess. And he liked it that way, but at the same time he felt like he was left out of something. He felt bad that no one wanted to try and direct him, and he’d see the interaction with other actors, and he’d say to me, ‘I’d like to have some of that shit working for me, too.’ And yet he was ambivalent. He knew he was cutting himself off and he did it anyway. He was doing this movie and the star, the actress, came up to him and asked him for some advice, a problem she was having about acting, about the process. And he said to me, ‘You know, I knew how to help her. I had the answer, but I didn’t give it to her. I didn’t feel like it.’ And he felt bad about it. Strange story.”

  Santoni’s long friendship with Mitchum began to fade at this time. “Getting loaded together had been certainly a factor in our relationship. I stopped drinking in ‘79. And once it was clear that we didn’t get together to get loaded anymore, you know, there was an element missing. It was like the third member of a trio was missing. He never commented on it. I never felt that he was uncomfortable. When he came over he would bring his own bottle. It was ‘82—‘83 we drifted apart. Looking back I can see that my stopping drinking was a factor.”

  “We’d had a lot of good times together,” said another longtime Mitchum pal, Dobe Carey, “but what sort of spoiled our relationship was years ago when I quit drinking. And if you didn’t drink you weren’t going to stay too close to old Bob. I had had a great time for many years, but I felt I was going to lose my wife, my family, and I stopped for good. But if you told Bob you had stopped, well, he could never understand it. One time we were all in a car, it was that big Chili Cookoff out in the desert, sponsored by the guy that brought the London Bridge over. And we were riding out there, a bunch of us, and somebody said, ‘How come you don’t drink anymore, Dobe? You used to drink pretty good.’ And Bob said, ‘Because his dad was a big movie star. He had an inferiority complex.’ And he had a whole psychological explanation for what made me drink and what made me stop. And it didn’t have anything to do with that at all. In those days, it was all part of the everyday routine with most of us, a part of living. I missed it for a long time. But they used to say back in the old AA days, if your life became unmanageable because of alcohol . . . And I guess Bob never felt that his life was unmanageable. I know that Dorothy, when we would go up to my mother’s place in Santa Barbara, she would come over and she would say, ‘Oh, I wish Bob would stop drinking.’ But maybe she was trying to make me feel better, I guess. I don’t know.”

  There were days, even weeks, when he didn’t touch a drop. He had stopped drinking a number of times, he would say to people. Stopped just like that and no one noticed. So fuck ‘em. They did notice the other times. “He would go drinking at a hotel near the house in Montecito,” said a friend. “Do his happy hour thing. The bartenders would cringe, the waiters would cringe. He would just get ill-tempered, nasty. ‘Where the fuck’s my drink? What took you so fucking long!’ This kind of thing.” People remember the sometimes vicious needling of family members, the need to get a rise out of somebody, relatives coming away in tears. There were embarrassing scenes in public—toppling over, passing out at dinner parties. Once, stepping before a gala audience and sliding to the floor unconscious. People gasped, thought he had dropped dead.

  Reni Santoni: “Dorothy once said to me . . . she knew I had stopped drinking for some time by then, . . . she said, ‘You know, we moved to Montecito for the spectacular sunsets. And now, with his drinking, we never notice them. . . .’”

  Certain exigencies in American life in the ‘80s—namely, the necessity of dealing with a growing general population of drug users and addicts—had spawned a subculture of recovery and rehabilitation. Drunks and druggers who had once been left to a circumscribed destiny of premature physical decomposition and/or imprisonment were now offered a vast new hopeful menu of medical, spiritual, and philosophical methodologies for the treatment and cure of their problems—now more often sympathetically, less judgmentally, considered “diseases,” just like German measles. This dependency-busting culture had found some of its first and most enthusiastic subscribers among wealthy and trend-conscious Californians.

  Mitchum’s increasingly unpredictable and destructive behavior finally so disturbed and frightened family members that, in May 1984, drastic measures were taken. He b
ecame the subject of an “intervention,” a fashionable new method of making the addict confront his wrongdoing face-to-face with his presumed loved ones. A sort of guerilla theater production, the participants surrounded Mitchum suddenly, forcing him to listen as one person after another read prepared statements regarding their anger, unhappiness, pain, fear. They opened old wounds and new. “They really sandbagged him,” said a friend. “He said he felt just pathetic . . . devastated by the whole thing. And then they took him to Betty Ford. It was just terribly humiliating.”

  The Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, in the desert near Palm Springs, had opened in October 1982 as a private clinic for the treatment of alcoholism and other drug dependencies. From the fact of its namesake and chief publicist—the wife of former president Gerald Ford, who had herself recovered from various addictions—and from the steady, much-publicized arrival of a series of celebrity patients in various states of duress, including Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford, the center had come to be known as the “rehab of the stars,” a glamorous spa for the famous and fucked up, and gossip columns wrote of its glittery clientele as they once had of the Mocambo and the Brown Derby.

  It wasn’t so glamorous, really. Patients were given a small room and required to make their beds in the morning and be up and out for breakfast at six, before the long day of counseling and therapy. “No hardship,” Mitchum said, as they ran through the rules. “I made my bed all through the army.” At Castaic, too, come to think of it.