Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

by Lee Server

  Part of a package deal put together by the ICM agency, he went to South Africa to make a sexy mystery called Woman of Desire, starring a frequently naked Bo Derek. Jeff Fahey and Steven Bauer were the rival males, with lots of teeth and clenching eyebrows. Mitchum played a lawyer who acted more like a detective, stoically tracking down the facts after Fahey is accused of murder. Mitchum was seventy-five and creaking, but director Robert Ginty was a fellow actor and an admirer and presented Mitchum beautifully. He looked cool. He could still play that tough private investigator part like no one else. His underplaying and reality brought the melodrama back to earth whenever he was on-screen. “He was an old man,” said Ginty, “but the whole sense of presence and charisma, the whole aura was still very much intact. He had that unique rhythm he gave to a scene, the way he said the lines, the way he moved. The same off camera. There was nothing uncomfortable or self-conscious about him. I would say he was the most comfortable guy in his body that I ever met in the movie business. No affectation, no curious behavior. Very casual. He got along with everybody, talked to anybody. He had found his niche in life. He loved the world of the set. The cameraderie, the adventure. He would come to the set when he wasn’t working, just to hang out. Just liked being part of it. He said he couldn’t retire. Didn’t have the money. He’d lost most of it in various bad deals, and lots of people depended on him. But I think there was also that mind-set with some old pros, like with some musicians, they got to keep in the game; if they stop playing, they’ll die.”

  They filmed in Capetown and Johannesburg. Because of the developing social crisis—the imploding of apartheid—it was considered dangerous to venture far from the hotels and foolhardy to go out at night. The Californians looked wide-eyed as the local whites, even young girls, showed off the firearms they carried for protection. Mitchum came to the set each day or sat at the bar talking to people—the crew, tourists, the barmen. Mitchum was very fond of Bo Derek, but the two liked to goad each other about one’s bad and one’s terribly good habits. She scolded him for his smoking, and Mitchum mocked her health food and exercise regimen. “Don’t you want to die of somethin?” he asked.

  The mostly South African technical crew were not up to Hollywood standards (”It looked like a carpet commercial,” Mitchum scoffed). The film also suffered from an imposed bogusness. As a practical measure, to forestall controversy, the producers had decided to use the Capetown and Jo’burg locations as an abstract setting—passing them off as someplace else—America, the Caribbean, Ruritania. It gave the whole thing an anonymity, an unfixed dimension. Woman of Desire skipped the theaters and went straight to home video and cable TV.

  He purchased a property in Paradise Valley, Arizona, near Scottsdale. A nice spread, a place to go in the winter, a place to keep a few horses. Jim was often there. Some people got the idea the place was his.

  In the summer of 1993, Mitchum signed on to play old man Clanton in Tombstone, a new telling of the Wyatt Earp story. His back gave out on him the first day in the saddle, and he had to quit. The doctor sent him home. Writer-director Kevin Jarre was distraught—Mitchum was a totem for this attempted revival of the grand scale Western. Rather than recast, he retired the role. Mitchum would come back to read the film’s voice-over introduction. More than ever the voice seemed to have a value all its own. Ask George Bush. Though it was nurtured in Connecticut and Delaware, it had come to sound like the voice of the West, of frontier values, masculine values, the sound of when men were Men. In a time of quiche and oat bran, Mitchum with his basso grumble was the natural spokesman for the American Beef Council, the voice of big, strong, artery-clogged America. Beef! It’s what’s for dinner!” It became his most identifiable line, his “Top of the world, Ma.”

  Bruce Weber, a noted commercial photographer, had made two films, documentaries, Broken Noses and Let’s Get Lost, the latter a brilliant study of beatific, junkie jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Weber was a connoisseur of cool and a chronicler of sultry masculine images, and Robert Mitchum was an all-time favorite icon. He showed him a tape of the Baker documentary, and Mitchum was impressed. He agreed to talk on camera for a similar sort of project. There was no money involved. Just for fun. A new audience to hear some old stories. They shot in Montecito and down in LA, in hotel rooms, bars. Weber found lush fashion models, leggy, pouty young things to drape around the star. Weber delighted in Mitchum’s reaction to each new female on the scene, “his appreciation of all kinds of women: his sheer joy of looking them up and down, smiling, and just wondering.” He loved Mitchum’s old records and set up new recording sessions that he would shoot for the documentary. They went into a studio and Bob warbled some of his favorites: “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” He sang duets with Dr. John and Marianne Faithfull—he found the aging, smoky-voiced, blonde chanteuse very appealing. Weber would keep calling, every time he was in Los Angeles, to see if Bob was free for some more fun. It went on for years.

  His lungs were shot. After nearly seventy years of treating them like an open-hearth furnace, the toll was now coming due. The doctors said emphysema. The lung tissues were torn, rotted away. The elasticity required to let them do their job was no longer present. Respiration—breathing—was going to become increasingly difficult and painful. He was told to quit smoking immediately. An artificial respirator and tanks of oxygen were ordered. Mitchum lit up another unfiltered Pall Mall and went on home.

  They kept it a secret for a while. He was afraid it would end any chance of another job. And he didn’t want the pity. And it was nobody’s damn business. Finally, one of the tabloids printed an item. Mitchum was on oxygen, suffering from a fatal disease. “I didn’t know about it,” said Toni Cosentino. “I got a call from some paper asking me to confirm that Mitchum was ill, was on oxygen. I said, ‘No way. Absolutely not.’ But I called his brother. I said, ‘Do you know anything about this?’ He says, ‘Emphysema. It’s bad. He’s got a couple of years.’ I started crying and crying. When I talked to Bob I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He just took it very lightly, like it was nothing. I asked what about the oxygen. He said, ‘I only need it to breathe.’”

  He was offered a picture to be filmed in Europe. The Sunset Boys it was called, then Waiting for Sunset. A comedy tinged with nostalgia and sorrow, about old buddies, Americans and Europeans, fulfilling a pact, a series of difficult and sometimes outlandish last requests that take them to various locales from Germany to Norway. The project had a varied set of backers, from national film boards in Norway and Denmark to the Paul Mitchell salons and hair-care magnate John Paul Dejoria. “Alan Oberholzer came to me and we started this company called Yellow Cottage Productions, with the idea of doing something really good and really big,” Dejoria recalled. “We had this fabulous script, and I had a couple of friends in the movie industry—Cliff Robertson was a real buddy, and Mitchum I had met, but it was his agent, Jack Gilardi, who was a very good friend. I drove up to Santa Barbara with Alan and had lunch with Robert at the Biltmore Hotel. A real cool old hotel, a class act. And we had lunch at the tables outside. They came for the drink order and Robert said, ‘I’il have the usual.’ So I said, ‘I’il have whatever Robert’s having.’ Well, the usual, unbeknownst to me, was a huge vodka, straight up. I had no idea I would be getting this much booze! I started sipping it. And while I’m sipping away, Robert’s done and orders another. And I knew that he had been ailing. Not on his death bed, but ailing. He spoke of his illness a little bit. And I couldn’t keep myself from saying, ‘Robert, you told me you’d been a little off and you’re trying to get better. Should you be drinking so much? It can’t be helping any’ And Robert’s answer to me was, ‘Look, I live a certain life. And nothing, no medical doctor, no priest, nobody is going to interfere with that.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to change what I like to do just to add on another three or five months or a year.’ And he smiled and he seemed just totally confident in his conviction. And I thought, Wow, now that’s a man. No c
ompromises. Good for him.”

  Robert and Dorothy and Bob Stephens (the stuntman and actor who had taken on some of the jobs once fulfilled by Tim Wallace, who had passed away) flew to Oslo. Mitchum was tremendously jet-lagged on arrival, and when a female reporter sneaked onto the aircraft when it landed and began questioning him, he was tremendously pissed off. They were met by members of the production company, including Leidulv Risan, a top name in Norwegian film and television, who would be directing Sunset. A press conference had been arranged only hours after the plane landed. Mitchum sat with Cliff Robertson and their costars, Sweden’s Erland Josephson and Norway’s Espen Skjonberg. Mitchum felt like nodding off, but nearly all the questions were for him. “It was like no one else existed,” Leidulv Risan recalled. “The Norwegian press, all the film critics, just looked at Mitchum like it was a visit from God himself.”

  They went straight to work the next day, shooting in Oslo for a week. Robert had written to his cousin that he and Dorothy were coming to Norway. There was a reunion in the town of Tonsberg, and nearly two dozen relatives showed up from all over Norway. “He came back and he spoke very proudly of his Norwegian heritage,” said Risan. “Very proud memories of his grandfather, a fisherman, a sailor. He talked about how this was supposed to have been a helluva man. But, you know, he also spoke several times about his Indian background, and he was quite proud of that. He said that he was so strong physically . . . that it came from his Indian blood.”

  Risan’s directions were very much in a European, theater-based style, an active, intimate relationship with the performer. On the second day of this close coaching, Mitchum turned to him stiffly and glared. “Are you . . . trying to direct me?”

  The question seemed loaded with suspicion, but Risan could see no other way of answering. “Yes.”

  Mitchum glared harder, then shrugged. “Huh . . . No one’s done that before,” he said.

  Risan wondered if he was missing something. “It’s what I’m here for,” he said.

  “Oh yeah, yeah . . . you’re right. It makes sense.”

  Risan: “He was very, very ill with emphysema. And I worried many times that he would be all right. And there was a scene where he had to do some running. And he said, ‘You want to kill me?’ I said, ‘What choice is there? You have to run in the scene.’ He said, ‘OK, as long as I have no choice.’ And thank God it went all right. But, you know, he had this illness and still he smoked so heavily, without filters, and I was told he had a drinking problem, and a couple of times he was drinking like hell, two or three times, but it was not really a problem. He threw one party, after his wife left to go back. He had a very good time.”

  Mitchum was aloof, closed off to him at first but Risan was a film scholar, knew the man’s work, and persisted with questions about Hawks and Huston and the rest until the stories began to flow and Mitchum began to open up on a personal level. “I saw that he was actually a very tender, very nice man, and quite wise. I came to realize what an extremely intelligent man he was. He had such wide knowledge, down to general classical culture. He spoke of his love of classical music, he was very much into opera, and he was like an encyclopedia on this subject. His image and what he was inside were such very different things. He said that what he really wished he could have become was a writer. He loved words and stories. He talked about the writing of Thunder Road and the way he had plotted the story, and how they had made up most of El Dorado and other films, invented the dialogue. And toward the end of shooting we had some scene where the dialogue was very bad; I was not happy. And I finally said to him, ‘Can’t you try to sharpen the lines here? I don’t think they’re very good.’ And he just right away on the set rewrote them and made it so much better. And there was only another week to go on the film, and I was very pissed with myself that I didn’t ask him to do this with every scene. It was the opposite with Cliff Robertson, who tried to write new scenes, new dialogue for himself, hundreds of pages, and I would look at it and I would have to say, ‘It’s not what I’m looking for.’ Sad to say. You see, it’s very difficult to be a director!

  “I sat with him during some nights and he was very revealing. He had some bitterness about things in his life. Disappointments in his personal life. He was pissed that he felt he had to keep working, even now when he was so very old. But, you know, he was also very funny and had a sweet nature most of the time, very joyful when he was at the bar and talking and drinking. And on the set, always singing. Once, I remember, we had a disaster with the catering. Everyone was dying for their lunch, all the actors. And the catering did not come with the food. And the line producer stepped up and gave a speech, said, ‘I can tell you for a fact that this will never happen again!’ And Mitchum starts singing: ‘It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.

  “It didn’t happen to be the best film ever made, but that wasn’t his fault. He was a wonderful, interesting man.”

  People had been after Mitchum for years to write his autobiography. An agent in New York was the last to talk to him about it. Mitchum said, fine, why not, if they could get him Jackie Kennedy for his editor. The agent got back a few days later. Mrs. Onassis would be delighted to do the book with him. Mitchum had always been her favorite movie star, she said to the startled agent, had always reminded her very much of her own father. Appointments were made for Mitchum and Jackie to meet in New York after he finished his next job. Then Onassis was diagnosed with cancer and was not going to be editing any more books, and that was that.

  . . .

  Jim Jarmusch was a New York—based, independent filmmaker of modest-budgeted, absurdist comedies about lowlifes and bohemians in various states of anomie and alienation. He had a fondness for Old Hollywood hipster and rebel figures like Nick Ray and Sam Fuller, and Robert Mitchum was a hands-down favorite. Jarmusch was about to make a new film called Dead Man, a Western, though a decidedly unusual—postmodern, the film journals would call it—Western, sprinkled with surrealist gags, mysticism, and references to poet William Blake. Johnny Depp was the film’s picaresque protagonist, wandering through an ever more inexplicable American frontier. The roaming nature of the story left room for a number of guest shots, and for the small part of Mr. Dickinson, a viciously crazy old rich man who sets a group of bounty hunters on Depp’s trail, Jarmusch went after Mitchum. The actor agreed to meet him. Mitchum had never heard of the director or seen any of his work. Jarmusch recalled, “I went and met with him and spent one of the most bizarre and amazing afternoons of my life listening to him talk when I was really supposed to be telling him the story of the film. Instead, he told me some of the wildest shit I’ve ever heard.”

  Managing at last to get in a few sentences about Dead Man, Jarmusch left the script and departed. Days later he got a call. “Mr. Mitchum would be happy to accept this role.” Like so many who had come before him, Jarmusch found Mitchum to be a fascinating and funny guy to work with. He didn’t want background or motivation, no long thing, Jarmusch remembered. “He just wants to know that he’s hitting the character the way that I want it to be and what he feels it is, and then you just take it from there.”

  One day while they were working, Jarmusch found the old actor staring into the distance. “Years ago,” Mitchum said, keeping his eyes on the Western horizon, “I saved up a million dollars from acting . . . and I spent it on a horse farm in Tucson. Now when I go down there, I look at the place and realize my whole acting career adds up to a million dollars’ worth of horseshit.”

  He did some more work. There was a cameo as movie director George Stevens in a film about James Dean’s last days on earth. Robert’s granddaughter Carrie played Dean’s girlfriend Pier Angeli.

  Better to think of Dead Man and ferocious old shotgun-wielding Dickinson as the end of the line. A scene-stealing bad guy in the Old West, just the way it had all begun, fifty-three years ago.

  . . .

  It was getting bad. He needed the respirator within reach more often. His weight was dropping. There we
re days when a walk across the living room exhausted him. Doctors came around. They tried again to make him give up the cigarettes and the liquor.

  In April 1996, he agreed to a request from the Turner Classic Movies cable channel—they wanted to sit him alongside his longtime dear friend and Montecito neighbor Jane Russell and make them chat about the good old days at RKO. Robert Osborne would be interviewing them. Osborne had gotten in Mitchum’s good graces years before when the Los Angeles critics were handing him one of those lifetime achievement awards. Osborne had been properly ironic about the thing and read some of Mitchum’s worst reviews through the years. Mitchum got a kick out of it. He and Jane flew to Atlanta—Turner headquarters—for the interview. For Osborne and the others there was a great deal of shock and despair at the sight of Robert Mitchum in very bad shape, wasted away, hooked up to his oxygen. In an Atlanta bar that night all those feelings vanished as Mitchum held court, telling uproarious stories between sips of vodka and oxygen. To Osborne’s dismay, all that ebullience was gone the next day in front of the TV cameras, as a wan and slack-jawed Mitchum sat on a couch beside a vibrant, gray-haired Jane Russell. “Either because of illness or cantankerousness, he was about as pleasant to interview that day as Attila the Hun. Ask him anything and he’d retort with one- and two-word answers. ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Don’t remember.’ Only when I’d ask about people such as Marilyn Monroe and Howard Hughes . . . would he open up. Or when the names of certain directors or actors he didn’t like would be mentioned. Then he’d talk.” Russell, smart and charming, sat like a loving sister who’d seen all of brother Bob’s mood swings a million times and paid them no mind. They broke for lunch and once again Mitchum became the delightful raconteur. Then back to the set and again he clammed up. For two hours the cameras turned—”It seemed like two years in Beirut,” said Osborne—from which forty minutes of television were extracted.