Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care Read online

  ROBERT

  MITCHUM

  Also by Lee Server

  Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures (1987)

  Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines: 1896-1953 (1993)

  Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground (1994)

  Over My Dead Body. The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945-1955 (1994)

  Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo (1999)

  • • •

  As Editor

  The Big Book of Noir (with Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg) (1998)

  ROBERT

  MITCHUM

  “Baby, I Dont’ Care”

  LEE SERVER

  St. Martin’s Griffin New York

  ROBERT MITCHUM: “BABY, I DON’T CARE.” Copyright © 2001 by Lee Server. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Server, Lee.

  Robert Mitchum : “baby, I don’t care” / by Lee Server.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Filmography: p. 563.

  ISBN0-312-26206-X (hc)

  ISBN 0-312-28543-4 (pbk)

  1. Mitchum, Robert. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—

  United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.M648 S47 2001

  791.43’028’092—dc21

  [B]

  00-045960

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  for

  ELIZABETH SERVER

  and

  TERRI HARDIN

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One

  1. The Ferret-Faced Kid

  2. Boxcar to the Promised Land

  Part Two

  3. In a Dead Man’s Hat

  4. The Man with the Immoral Face

  5. The Snakes Are Loose

  6. Occupation: Former Actor

  7. Phantom Years

  8. Our Horseshit Salesman

  Part Three

  9. The Story of Right Hand/Left Hand

  10. Foreign Intrigue

  11. Gorilla Pictures

  12. The Smirnoff Method

  Part Four

  13. Poet with an Ax

  14. Baby, I Don’t Care

  15. . . . I Used to Be Handsome

  Part Five

  16. Big Sleep

  17. Guys Like Me Last Forever

  Sources

  Filmography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Jeez, it just struck me—wouldn’t it be fun to be a real movie

  star and get to act like one? A round for the house, waiter!”

  Get shitfaced snockered. Wow! Just like Robert Mitchum.

  That’d be somethin, friends—that’d be something else.

  —ACTOR PETER BOYLE

  • • •

  Warring, boy! Warring together! Left hand and right hand!

  Hate and love! Good and Evil! But wait. Hot dog! Old

  Devils a-losin . . . He’s aslippin, boy!

  —DAVIS GRUBB, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

  Introduction

  What do you want, my life story? I told everything I

  know to the Los Angeles Police Department.

  HE LIKED TO CALL himself the oldest whore in town. Just show me that Hollywood green, he would say, I’ll play anything: midgets, Chinese washerwomen. An ideal role? Dad, you got to be kidding. Maybe Camille: lie on a couch and cough for twenty reels. Making movies was an economic expedient; pride didn’t enter into it. Never forget, he would say, one of the biggest stars in the world was Rin Tin Tin, and she was a four-legged bitch. There were those who enjoyed the attention, Robert Mitchum understood. If they weren’t movie stars they would be languishing in custody for exposing themselves in the park. He selected his jobs according to the number of days off. Made a hundred and twenty pictures altogether, forty of them in the same raincoat. Maybe it was a hundred and twenty-five. Hard to keep count. He’d seen very few of the things himself. They didn’t pay you to watch ’em. And it was always a pain in the ass to find parking.

  Robert Mitchum came from Bridgeport, Connecticut, a town that once elected P. T. Barnum as mayor, and he made his mark in Hollywood, California, the place—a reporter once wrote—he hated with all the venom of someone who owed it everything he had. He was raised in an atmosphere of dislocation and unconventionality, in a family of de facto gypsies uprooted by loss and lack of wherewithal, a kind of test case for the national upheaval to come. The Great Depression further shaped him, a teenager wandering through a landscape of despair and violence. On the road he tangled with cops and grifters, saw corpses and hungry children, grew up before his time. He toured the country by thumb and freight train. He was a hobo, a bum, signature epithets to which he pridefully clung long after he had hopped his last freight. He liked to say, maybe even believed, through all the years of fame and riches, the mansions and sports cars, the dinners with kings and presidents, that he was only here “between trains.”

  In the 1940s, the bum became a movie actor, first an unshaven bad guy, soon a hero, of a sort. He had a different, curious presence on screen, nothing like it before. The big, muscular physique pegged him for tough guys and outdoor parts, cowboys and soldiers. But the attitude (wry, ambivalent), the style (indolent, soft-spoken), had none of the usual vitality and aggression of the standard-issue male star. He smoldered, had that opiated, heavy-lidded look, had an almost feminine languor, moved only as much as necessary and then with a measured, sinuous grace. He seemed to withdraw from the camera where others would try to attack it. But maybe this was some kind of trick because you found yourself watching him much more closely, afraid you would miss something, a gesture, a mumbled line, a ruffled eyebrow. His acting belonged to no school, no real tradition. He formed his screen characters from a mental storehouse of observational and experiential data and a musical approach to pace and intonation and the spatial relationship of performer to camera. His aura of brooding bemusement and simmering violence found a perfect home in the thriving—yet unnamed—genre of shadows and cynicism and ambiguity now called film noir. Out of the Past. Crossfire. His Kind of Woman. Angel Face. He became the movies’ outside man, without roots or ties, beyond the bounds of polite society, ever suspicious to the upholders of the law. He made other types of pictures, too, respectable productions, classics fit for the academy, but most of his jobs would be on the cinematic equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks: action movies, movies with fistfights and bullet wounds, movies about disreputable men and sultry, suspect females. Many years he labored at RKO for the man he called the Phantom, Howard Hughes, and Hughes’s idea of production values was a girl in a tight sweater. “Gorilla pictures,” Mitchum called them. “I’ve never done a movie with guns,” a nervous actress said to him on her first day. Mitchum said, “I’ve never done one without.”

  In the 1950s, he abandoned the dying studio system for a more congenial independence. Widescreen and color and exotic locations were the thing now. The movies became a “magic carpet” for a guy with a terminal case of wanderlust. The ex-hobo and would-be soldier-of-fortune took the grand tour at producers’ expense, paid daydreams that had him sailing on the Caribbean, grappling with Swedish starlets in Paris, smuggling moonshine through the Smokey Mountains, winning revolutions in Old Mexico. He picked his own pictures now, sometim
es produced them. Bandido! Cape Fear. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Night of the Hunter. The Sundowners. Thunder Road. He made wonderful entertainments and singular masterpieces and hack jobs of an astonishing banality. Critics had a love-hate relationship with the star, more often hate, calling him a sleepwalker, just going through the motions, when awake. Distinguished associates, Charles Laughton, John Huston, disagreed, thinking him one of the best actors the movies had ever known, perhaps even the best, a man who ought to have done Shakespeare’s tragedies—with his power and brilliance he could have been the era’s greatest Lear or Macbeth. Mitchum, finding self-promotion lacking in cool, came down on the side of the critics. “I have two acting styles,” he liked to say. “With and without a horse.”

  Most Hollywood stars were to some degree exponents of a personality-based method in which acting was being, the characters predominantly animated by the individual actor’s own personality and perspective (if any). With Mitchum, self-image and screen image seemed to bleed together with a particular compatibility. Personal experience and philosophical viewpoint were the life-giving forces behind those characterizations of disillusion, detachment, disdain for authority and convention, behind the hooded, haunted gaze of somebody who had seen things at their worst and knew there was more of the same on its way. The matching of real and reel would come to seem remarkably seamless at times, news reports and film reviews almost interchangeable in their delineations of a brawling, womanizing tough guy, ever at odds with the powers that be, on-screen and off-screen a succession of fistfights, felonies, jail cells, beautiful dames. Art left off and life began, or the other way around, some jazz like that. Hollywood’s Bad Boy, the press called him. Lurid headlines charted an unusual lifestyle: “MITCHUM IN BRAWL—G.I. HOSPITALIZED,” “BARE STARLET PUTS MITCHUM IN DOGHOUSE,” “NARCOTIC ARREST SMASHES FILM CAREER,” “BOB MITCHUM DUE IN COURT ON FLEE RAP,” “3 TEENAGE GIRLS TELL POLICE: ROBERT MITCHUM HIT US,” “ROBERT MITCHUM, THE NUDE WHO CAME TO DINNER.” In 1948, a drug scandal and subsequent prison term should have finished him in pictures, would have been the finish of another, holier actor, but with Mitchum, the shock, the aftereffects among the ticket buyers—the “great unwashed” he called them—were ultimately softened by prior expectation.

  He scoffed at this shallow public persona, the hell-raiser, the lout, the outlaw, even as he supplied new tales of anarchy, fresh outbursts of iconoclasm to every cub reporter in line for an interview. In fact, the popular image revealed only the surface of a more complicated, mostly hidden reality, leaving unexamined the man Mitchum’s contradictions and unpredictabilities, his secret selves—Mitchum the poet, the autodidact, the lyric philosopher, the left-wing firebrand, far-right crank, depressed loner, harried husband. A man of many parts, few people ever saw or claimed to know how all the pieces came together, not even those who knew him best. “My family is baffled. My close acquaintances—that’s four people—keep asking me where I am, who I am. . . .

  “No. . . . Oh, no,” said a long-time professional confidante, “you’ll never understand that. I don’t know that anyone ever did.”

  He was a movie star for more than half a century, staying at the job longer than almost anybody, career ebbing and flowing, counted out more than once and then coming back big as ever. El Dorado. Ryan’s Daughter. The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Farewell, My Lovely. The Winds of War. The colossal presence, the often brilliant performances, were delivered, as always, without visible fuss. It was a job of work, movie acting, he always said, like plumbing or fixing a car, only with more makeup. His celestial place in the scheme of things cinematic became all the more apparent as the golden age talent pool faded into the sunset. “He’s the only Gary Cooper still alive,” said the Winds producer. People knew what it meant. They didn’t make ’em like that anymore. Mitchum was one of a kind and the last of the breed. His stature, his legend, grew even as the jobs he took became unworthy and threadbare. “You don’t get to do better,” he liked to say, “you only get to do more.” Shambling into his seventies, he remained, whatever the crummy project, the movies’ supreme outsider, great sad-eyed adventurer, bitterly funny pessimist.

  Reporter: “Mr. Mitchum, do you think you will become a cult hero, say, in the 1990s, like Bogart in the 1960s?”

  Mitchum: “What year is it now, Jack?”

  In an era when movie actors cried like schoolgirls if you gave them an award or whined to caring talk-show hostesses if they took too many drugs, Mitchum’s mythic presence, an image of beatific stoicism, grace under fire, wry unflappability in the face of life’s ever-threatening absurdities, looked all the more majestic and ineffably cool. In the end, when the doctors came and tried to tell him how he had to live his life so as not to die, they found the patient would not cooperate but had bought into the myth himself, as if it were real.

  chapter one

  The Ferret-Faced Kid

  HIS FATHER WAS A tough son of a bitch, he would say proudly.

  The blood of early Scots-Irish settlers and American Indians ran in the veins of James Thomas Mitchum. He hailed from the town of Lane in eastern South Carolina, a small, slim young man with a lean, handsome face and sly, expressive dark eyes. People who knew him remembered a man of much charm and humor, physically strong out of all proportion to his slender frame. He liked a good fight. His fierceness was legendary among those who gathered together to pass around a bottle. The wildness that came with the drinking, people ascribed, as per the prejudicial thinking of the time, to his Indian heritage. Indians, even half-breeds, everybody knew, were drawn to liquor even though the stuff made them lose their minds. Only a fool would challenge Jimmy Mitchum to a fight, but there were always fools to be found in the backcountry of South Carolina as in every other part of the world. When he was seventeen—the first son would speak of this—he was said to have killed a man in a brawl in a place called Hellhole Swamp.

  He went into the service, leaving the rural South for the first time in his life. A private in the U.S. Army, he came to be stationed in Connecticut, and it was there, in the port of New London, that the young man met a girl, a pretty, sad-faced Norwegian immigrant named Ann Harriet Gunderson. She was the daughter of a sea captain. Gustav Olaf Gunderson of Christiania, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, nearly three hundred pounds, had sailed the merciless waters of the North Atlantic and the Barents Sea far above the Arctic Circle. Among the ocean fishermen of Norway there were weird tales told about this giant, powerful man. Once, long ago, a ship he skippered had gone down in a terrible storm. The captain and four crewmen had escaped on a lifeboat, but only Gunderson was still aboard when a rescue ship found him weeks later, looking little the worse for his ordeal. A court of inquiry said that questions remained unanswered. A lurid rumor followed Gunderson—that he had survived by consuming the flesh of his own shipmates.

  The captain had a wife, Petrine, a tiny but strong-willed woman, a refined and learned mate for the tough sea rover. Without help for much of each year while Gustav roamed the world, it was Petrine who brought up their three children: son, Charles, daughters Gertrude and Ann Harriet. From the time she was a little girl, Mrs. Gunderson daydreamed of a life on the stage, and she would nurture in her kids a great appreciation of music and books and paintings, a love of art, of beautiful things. Petrine’s girls sang, played musical instruments, drew, and painted. And son, Charlie, too, built like his father and like him to become a merchant sailor, loved music and performing and as a boy hoped to grow up to be a song-and-dance man.

  Early in the new century the Gunderson family joined the great wave of European migrants crossing the ocean to America. They settled among their fellow “squareheads” in coastal Connecticut, first in New London and then in Bridgeport, a thriving manufacturing center along Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Pequonnock River, a short rail journey north of New York City. In the new homeland the Gundersons resumed a life not so different from what it had been in Norway. Papa returned to the sea, a merchant sailor, gone for weeks and
months at a time, and Petrine was left to run the house and raise the family. Young Ann Harriett knew no English when she arrived at Ellis Island, but she had a good mind and studied hard and graduated from high school with honors. One weekend, not long after graduation, she went with her sister to the annual regatta in New London, and there, in her prettiest summer dress, she met a young man. Jimmy Mitchum was handsome and funny and strong. She fell in love. It was the inescapable impulse of the genteel, intelligent Gunderson women to fall for strong, simple men. Sister Gertrude was the same—she had found her own beau, an itinerant wrestler from Quebec.

  In the spring of 1913, twenty-year-old Ann and twenty-two-year-old James were wed, and in July of the following year the couple had their first child, a girl they named Annette. The young family lived a life of no special concern. They were happy. Jimmy was a restless, vital character but without any particular ambition in life. He moved them all down to South Carolina for a time, but soon they were back in Bridgeport, living in the big East End house at 476 Logan Street. Sister Gertrude by now had married her own peripatetic scrapper, Wilfred Jean Tetreault. Her new husband had not been able to make a living as a wrestler, and he had not been able to do much else, but Gertie adored him. Jim and Bill became pals, roistering comrades in the watering holes of Connecticut. The pair had a standing challenge at every tavern—they would take on any three comers, any time, any place. Sometimes, when there were no challengers, they went ahead and found them anyway.

  On August 6, 1917, at the house in Bridgeport, Ann gave birth to her second child, a blond-haired, hazel-eyed boy. Baptized by the minister from the Newfield Methodist Church, the boy was named Robert Charles Durman Mitchum. He was a taciturn baby—unsmiling in all family photos—and with somber, torpid eyes that attracted much comment. He fell on his head as a small child, and a doctor told the mother her boy showed signs of brain damage. “You can see it in the eyes,” the doctor said. “No, that’s the way they’ve always been,” said Ann.