Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  It wasn’t so easy, really. “He was not happy to be there,” said Jean (not her real name), a therapeutic nurse at the center. “And he made it quite clear. One time we were getting him into the swimming pool with the other patients and he didn’t want to go. So he peed into the pool in front of everyone.”

  “He said it was awful,” an associate remembered. “He had a very hard time in the detox area, just cleaning it out of his system. . . . He hated it.”

  To the inquiring press Mitchum would reveal only indifference. “I stayed there until they were through with me,” he said. “I don’t know if it ‘worked.’ I don’t understand that.” Perhaps it had helped to “modify” his behavior a little. “I don’t fall down so much.” Anyway, he said, it was his wife’s idea the whole thing; he’d done it for her.

  A friend came to meet him on the day he was released from the center. They headed home by way of Los Angeles. Mitchum asked to stop at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. He went to the bar, put a ten-dollar bill down, and ordered a double scotch. The bartender poured it out. Mitchum threw it back, slid the ten over, said, “Fuck ‘em all,” and went back to the car, and they drove to Montecito.

  He continued working. Now, well past retirement age, there was not so much talk about retiring. It was a different tune these days. What am I gonna do, he would say to associates, “stay home and roll my socks?” He did guest shots in theatrical features and leads in made-for-TV movies. Some great work, too: he was chilling, fascinating in Killer in the Family, playing Gary Tyson, a real-life kind of Pa Barker (or perhaps a Papa Max Cady) leading his brood on a crime spree through the Southwest. Rare for a network production, the ABC movie was uncompromisingly brutal, the scenes of violence like hammer blows to the head. It was the last entry in the actor’s remarkable rogues’ gallery. There was a final teaming of Mitchum with Deborah Kerr for an HBO cable movie filmed in Britain, Reunion at Fairborough, bittersweet tale of an old American ex-bomber pilot returning to his wartime haunt in England, finding a lost love and an unexpected granddaughter. The two had remained, in that showbusiness extended family way, warm but not close friends through the years. Deborah occasionally penned a note to him, always addressing it, “Dear Mr. Allison. . . .” In the cable movie, Kerr and Mitchum still had a certain ineffable rapport, but the evidence of time’s levy since Allison was saddening.

  A movie for CBS broadcast, Promises to Keep, also dealt with an old man stirring up the past. This time it was a possibly terminally ill ranch foreman who travels to California to look up the family he’d run out on three decades ago. Ex-wife and adult son are bitter but—as in the HBO movie—the old man sparks up a relationship with a young grandchild. It was the sort of touchy-feely, troubled-family drama television had come to specialize in. There was a casting gimmick: father, son, and grandson would be played by real-life equivalents in Robert, Chris, and a new addition to the performing dynasty, Chris’s eighteen-year-old son, now called Bentley, a broad-faced blond with earrings and a Farrah Fawcett hairdo. To make the movie even more personal, they were going to shoot the thing in Bob’s backyard, in and around the town of Santa Barbara.

  It had been Chris’s project. For two years he had been “developing” the script, and it had gone through a purported two dozen revisions. In the end, though, it was not the rather superficial teleplay but the “Mitchum clan” gimmick that sold the project to CBS. Perhaps, the network thought, audiences would be titillated by the intimations of a blending of fiction and real life in the story of distant, frustrated father-son relations. And perhaps they would be onto something. For a sequence showing the characters looking through a family album with snapshots of the fictional father and son in earlier, happier days, Chris claimed the only appropriate photos they could find of real-life father and son had been staged, taken by press and publicity photographers back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. “I thought, God, did we only get affection because there was a camera crew there?”

  The press coverage told a story more poignant than the one being filmed. In putting the movie together, Chris admitted to the New York Times, he had hoped to make his father proud of him. “Whether he is or not, God knows; he’ll never tell me. Until we did this picture together I never had any evidence he knew what I did for a living. We never discussed the fact that I was an actor. My father has never expressed an opinion one way or another about my doing anything. . . . My father didn’t say to me nine times a day, like I do to my kids, ‘I love you.’ “

  Reporters pressed for the warm and fuzzy angle, generations bouncing on each other’s knee, sharing tales of the good times together, but it wasn’t easy. The senior Mitchum did not do warm and fuzzy. He preferred hanging out with the crew, flirting with passing females (to a well-endowed production assistant in a souvenir Grand Canyon T-shirt he cracked, “Shouldn’t that say Grand Teton?”). When pressed to comment on the enterprise they were presently shooting, Mitchum said, “I figured it provided my son with employment and his son with employment. It’s cheaper than paying their room and board. . . . I don’t have to watch it; that doesn’t come with the contract.”

  If they wanted enthusiasm, they were going to have to hire somebody else’s dad.

  “He just won’t open up,” Chris said. “But I know my father loves me.” Two weeks after an article on “Three Generations of Mitchums” appeared in People magazine, Christopher fired off a letter to the editor decrying the “inaccurate and out-of-context quotes,” creating “the image of a family of isolated individuals living in awe and fear of a patriarch. . . . [0]ur family remains as close as a family can be. My father’s 46-year marriage should tell you something of the truth.” Was it counterpropaganda or self-delusion? The fact was that separate stories and quotes quite similar in nature to the People piece appeared within days of each other in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

  Promises to Keep received withering reviews. Critics called it “mawkish,” “predictable,” “trite,” and “dull.”

  . . .

  The performing Mitchums kept coming. Chris’s beautiful twenty-year-old daughter, Carrie, was now acting. Robert went to see her perform in a play at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In the course of the drama Carrie removed her top. “Nice to see you with your clothes on,” Mitchum told her backstage. She would hear that he had complimented her performance to other people. “But he told me nothing,” she said. Soon she would find a degree of success acting on a daytime TV soap opera called The Bold and the Beautiful.

  In April 1986, Mitchum was the honored guest at the Cognac Film Fest du Policier—a recently established festival devoted to the thriller, the gangster picture, le film noir. Mitchum had long been popular among cinephiles in France, a favorite of the intellectuals—Mitchum, un vrai existentialiste. The crowds were ecstatic. As the applause simmered down Mitchum told them, “You’d think I found a cure for cancer.” The translator missed something, and the papers said: “Robert Mitchum has found a cure for cancer.”

  Five years after their triumphant broadcast of The Winds of War, ABC announced the start of production on a sequel. War and Remembrance, from Herman Wouk’s own finale to the saga of Pug Henry and company, would be an even costlier, longer, and more ambitious miniseries—the narrative covering all of World War II from just after Pearl Harbor to the Axis defeat. Dan Curtis returned to the helm and began gathering his cast. Victoria Tennant, Polly Bergen, David Dukes, and many others reprised their roles from the earlier miniseries. Ali MacGraw, who had been in her early forties and playing twenty-nine at the time of Winds, was replaced as Natalie Jastrow Henry by Jane Seymour. John Gielgud took the role of Aaron Jastrow from a dying John Houseman. Hart Bochner replaced Jan-Michael Vincent as Byron Henry. As for Victor “Pug” Henry . . . critics had attacked the sixty-five-year-old Robert Mitchum with an ageist glee back in 1983. And now the actor was a septuagenarian. What would those critics have to say about a seventy-year-old—who, Curtis couldn’t deny, was starting to look every
day of it—a seventy-year-old winning World War II and in his spare time romancing the lovely young Ms. Tennant? Other names were considered: James Coburn, George C. Scott. In the end, Curtis just couldn’t see the point—whatever they would gain in fewer wrinkles, in greater physical energy, they would be losing in stature, in audience identification, in mighty presence. It was like they used to say in those corny old movie trailers: Robert Mitchum is Pug Henry.

  Mitchum met with Herman Wouk for a kind of refresher course in their shared creation. The key to it all, Wouk told the actor, was the man’s sense of loyalty, of patriotism, keeping sight of the greater good (never mind about the adulterous affair with Pamela Tudsbury; even Eisenhower had a bit on the side). For Mitchum, the filming, especially by comparison with the awful memories of Yugoslavia on the other one, was relatively stress free. They shot in Hawaii; in Bremerton, Washington; in D.C.; Mobile, Alabama; and Pensacola, Florida. In consideration of Mitchum’s age and health, his scenes were carefully scheduled, giving him a hiatus before each major location change. Kind of fun, Mitchum thought. Plenty of variety, new faces every day. You stand around in front of the camera, and one day they march in FDR and the next day you’re working with Harry Truman or Eisenhower.

  Dan Curtis’s labors were considerably more taxing. Mitchum came to have enormous respect and great affection for the unwavering, fanatical filmmaker. He drove everyone crazy, but he did his homework, slaving like a determined schoolboy, and he knew what he wanted and he got it, whatever it took. The man really could have won World War II, Mitchum thought. Complete tunnel vision. They were in Hawaii, Curtis in a motorboat shouting orders; the boat sprang a leak, started to sink under him, and the director was still waving and screaming for his damned long shot. They were on the destroyer up in Bremerton harbor, tearing out of the harbor at eighteen knots, and Curtis shouts, “Hold it! Hold it. Do it again. . . . Back it up.” Mitchum was standing near the ship’s captain. The look on the man’s face was worth his one-million-dollar salary. “It takes three miles to stop a destroyer, and Dan thinks it’s like driving a Porsche. The captain said, ‘I am going to be in my quarters, padlocked within. . . .’”

  Mitchum returned to Santa Barbara in July with a month off before finishing up, three more weeks in D.C., Florida, and Alabama. While at home he got a call from John Huston. Mitchum’s old pal, eighty-one years old now, suffered from emphysema, carried a tank of oxygen with him everywhere these days. Wheezing away into the phone, Johnny said he was about to start an acting job in Newport, Rhode Island, a picture his kid Danny was directing, Mr. North.

  “I’m not in the best of shape, kid,” Huston said. “Might need a favor. Don’t want to let the boy down. Small part. Think you could take over for me, kid, if it comes to that?”

  Mitchum knew he had to be in Washington on August 13, but he didn’t hesitate. “Pencil me in, John. But we both know you’ll do the damn thing yourself.”

  On July 28, hours before he was to start his acting job (he’d also cowritten the script), Huston had a severe attack of the lung disease and was rushed to Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts. The doctors diagnosed pneumonia. Mitchum got word that he would have to do the favor after all. He arrived in Newport days later and went to the hospital to see Huston.

  The old buccaneer looked like hell. He was tied up to a dozen tubes, his flesh purple where it had any color at all. Huston’s eyes widened, and he greeted Mitchum with a weakened version of that signature crooked, rascally grin.

  “Well, you suckered me,” said Mitchum. “I can see by the look of you ya never had any intention of doing this picture.”

  “I hoaxed you, kid, you’re right.”

  Huston had always told people that Mitchum was one of the few Hollywood stars he was really fond of, while Robert’s enchantment with Huston—not to mention his imitations of him—had been a constant since the days and nights on Tobago. It figured they got along. They were much alike, with their lifelong disdain for the presumptuous and the pretentious, their contempt for Hollywood bullshit (as long as it wasn’t their own), their shared fondness for losers and faraway places and women and liquor and for a good story about any of the same.

  They could only make small talk now. Mitchum said the nurse was worried that Huston wasn’t eating enough. There was some rude back-and-forth about the nurse and what she could try eating. Then the medical people returned, taking tests, reattaching Huston to his respirator. Out in the halls there were people hovering. One of John’s girlfriends was crying. Mitchum said he didn’t look so bad. “I’m telling you, they’ll have to drive a stake through his heart.”

  He shot the small role of a crusty old millionaire under the direction of Danny Huston. It was supposed to be a sunny comedy, but it was shot on a death watch.

  Huston died on August 28. By then Mitchum had left Rhode Island and returned to finish War and Remembrance.

  It was bigger by far than Winds—longer, more expensive, more expansive, shot in a dozen countries, and involving a total of more than forty thousand paid extras. Dan Curtis’s final cut ran a whopping thirty hours with commercials. ABC chose to further divide the Winds sequel into two sections, the first broadcast throughout November 1988 and the concluding hours the following May. For all of its repeated descents into soap opera dramatics and Saturday cliff-hanger suspense, War and Remembrance was in many ways an astonishing achievement. TV had for so long been accepted as a medium for the intimate, the anecdotal, the superficial. Curtis, Wouk, and company had reinvented the wheel with the epic size and seriousness of purpose of their prime-time endeavor. Curtis’s terrifying, apocalyptic staging of the Nazi death camp exterminations—the most explicit and detailed recreation of the Holocaust ever attempted—arguably placed War and Remembrance among the most powerful works in the history of American television. Once again, though, critics attacked Mitchum’s participation with a cruel relish—they said he was calcified, near moribund. They said, “His acting days are over.”

  Mitchum filled in for another ailing actor in the fall of 1987, this time a guy he didn’t know, Edward Woodward, the star of a CBS series called The Equalizer. While Woodward recovered from a heart attack, a two-part episode was put together featuring Mitchum as a mysterious superspy. It was a terrific appearance, Mitchum glamorous, tough, cool as hell. In another few years he would become involved with his own weekly series and it was a mess—a smart action show like this was the sort of thing he ought to have done.

  Mitchum’s daughter, Trina, had a friend in Los Angeles who worked on filmed bits for Saturday Night Live, the long-running comedy program that played on NBC. An invitation was procured for Dad to guest host an upcoming installment. With some reluctance he agreed. In California, Trina and her filmmaker friend put together a piece for the occasion, Robert reunited with Jane Greer in a film noir spoof shot in black-and-white. In the second week of November 1987, Mitchum flew to New York, accompanied by Toni Cosentino of Charter Management, for the required six days of bull sessions, publicity, and rehearsals with the regular cast before the live telecast on the night of November 14.

  “Most of them were in awe of him,” said Cosentino. “Phil Hartman was just the sweetest, and the whole staff were very good to him. And he was pleasant and everything went great.”

  The writers came up with a monologue and a series of sketches that played off Mitchum’s public and cinematic personae—as the sardonic don’t-give-a-shit hack movie actor not afraid to “jeopardize that 104th movie role” and as the golden-age icon in the Out of the Past filmed short and a Farewell, My Lovely-esque skit playing with the cliche of first-person, voice-over narration. Mitchum objected to nothing they threw at him, knew exactly where the laughs were supposed to be, and had his lines down in a way none of the cue-card-reading regulars could match. He rehearsed another sketch that was cut before airtime, the setting an old folks home for stuntmen and Mitchum a doddering Hollywood roughneck who’d fallen off one chuck wagon too many. “They had h
im on a walker, all kooky in the head,” Cosentino recalled. “It was one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that was going to just lay there without a laugh. And I said, ‘You know, we’re doing this for you to look cool, why do this shit? Who the hell wants to see you in a walker?’ And they cut it out, which was the only thing I insisted on.”

  Toward the end of the rehearsal period, Mitchum asked Phil Hartman, “So when do we start getting these things on tape?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Hartman. “It’s done live. You know . . . Saturday Night. . . Live?”

  Mitchum said, “Oh . . .”

  On Saturday, a concerted effort was made to keep the host sober. “It was sort of like that movie My Favorite Year,” said Cosentino. “We just had to keep liquor away from him and it went fine. It went great. Of course, when Dorothy got there at the end of the week we had to put a stop to having fun. And then they had the wrap party afterwards. And there were people came to be in the audience just to see Bob—Victoria Tennant from Winds of War was there and others. And everyone wanted him to be at the wrap party, but Mrs. Mitchum took him back to the hotel. She didn’t want him to drink. She would be embarrassed when he would get so bombed. God forbid he would pop back a few with the Saturday Night crew.”

  Producer-writer Andrew Fenady put together a project to be shown on the USA cable network, fake Spanner, Private Eye, based on a novel called The Old Dick by L. A. Morse, a breezy, hard-boiled mystery about “the world’s oldest detective.” George Burns lobbied for the part. “He was ninety-something years old, for chrissake,” said Fenady. Fenady knew there was one perfect “old dick” and it was Robert Mitchum. Through John Mitchum, Fenady got the script to Robert. Fenady: “We talked on the phone. He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK.’ I said, ‘Should I see what your agent has to say?’ He said, ‘Agents? Hell, those guys are just mail drops.’ I said, ‘I got to make the deal with somebody.’ So he gave me the name of a guy named Mike Greenfield. Old Greeny. I knew him. So we talked. He said he thought it would be fine. He told me I ought to go over and meet him first. And he said, ‘Look, the most important thing with Mitchum is he needs to have the right cameraman if you want him to do it.’ I said, ‘Who the hell is he, Greta Garbo?’ And the agent explained this and that Mitchum needed. So I said, ‘Well, if that’s what it takes to get Mitchum, I’ll do it.’ I knew a damn good cameraman named Hector Figueroa and I asked him a favor, get me a compilation tape of his very best stuff he’d done. I got the damn thing, I found out where Mitchum was, and we met. And I said, ‘I brought a tape. I understand you have certain requirements.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d like to be paid.’ I said, ‘I understand you like to have approval of the cameraman. Have you got a tape machine I can play this—’ He said, A tape machine? What the hell are you talking about? I’m not looking at any damn tapes!’ I said, ‘But Greenfield said—’ “Greenfield must be full of shit. . . . If you like the cameraman, that’s fine with me. Tell me when to show up and I’ll do what I can. Oh, and can you find a good part for brother John in there somewhere?’ Anyway, it worked out great.”