Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (29 page)

Mitchum translated this into layman’s terms when he got home: “He said I should tell you all to go shit in your hats.”

Bob had not heard the last of Paul Behrmann. In February 1949, the agent and manager went on trial charged with grand theft. A Burbank housewife by the name of Wanda S. Schoemann had accused him of swindling her out often thousand dollars, supposedly to be invested in one of his clients, Anne Nichols, author of the play
Abie’s Irish Rose.
Nichols denied any knowledge of the loan. Behrmann’s lawyers subpoenaed several showbiz personages who were supposed to vouch for his honesty. Prosecutors countered this by sub-poenaeing Robert and Dorothy Mitchum to give testimony against their former associate. Behrmann didn’t take this move lightly, vowing vengeance.

“It’s a subpoena, man,” Mitchum said. “How does he think I’m gonna avoid that?”

Behrmann told Bob’s assistant, Richard Ellis, the assistant claimed, that he knew Dorothy Mitchum had volunteered negative information. “He said that if Mrs. Mitchum didn’t stop making trouble for him, he would do something violent. He said he would do away with her.”

Mitchum testified. The whole mess with the missing money and the embarrassing business of Mitchum’s twenty-dollar allowance was reported in the papers. It made the tough guy actor look like something of a chump. Behrmann was found guilty. The prosecutor publicly thanked Mr. Mitchum for strengthening their case and helping to send the con man to San Quentin. “We couldn’t have done it without him,” the papers quoted him. “And thank you,” Mitchum grumbled, “and the horse you rode in on.”

He began receiving threatening messages. Dorothy was terrified. She didn’t know the half of it. But, hell, what she did know was enough.

It was all, Mrs. Mitchum decided, more than enough: the drinking, the smoking, the coming home at dawn or not coming home at all, the lowlifes and freaks her husband cultivated, the bimbos ever ready to drop to their knees for him, and finally the business manager who took all their money and then threatened them! This is what their life had become? Robbed of their savings and their lives threatened? If this was movie stardom, they could keep it. “Bob has gone Hollywood,” Dorothy said to friends, and she wanted to go someplace else. One morning she told her husband she was taking the kids and getting away from the picture business. They would head back East and stay with her folks in Delaware. Ignoring any larger implications in her decision, Bob agreed it was a good idea for them all to get out of town, give the business with Behrmann and all that some time to cool down. He was on a layoff now, nothing to keep him in California.

They left town in April, crossed the country, got to Delaware, and moved in with the Spences of Camden. Dorothy’s relatives and old friends came to visit. People she barely knew came to visit, too, rubberneckers wanting a peep at the famous movie actor in their midst. “Dot, can you ask Bob is Greer Garson just as sweet in person as she is in the pictures?” And “Wasn’t it hard watching Bob kissing all them good looking actresses?” All Dorothy wanted was to forget that Hollywood even existed. The Maple Dell Country Club, the
prestige
club in those parts, threw a party in Bob’s honor. He went over to have a look. Everyone was in their best bib and tucker, ready to drool over the local boy made good. Mitchum’s old classmate Margaret Smith, now O’Connor, a member in good standing at Maple Dell, saw him arrive, saw him go. “He
looked around, said, ‘They didn’t think I was good enough for this place when I lived here,’ and he left. Haha! He didn’t put on the dog or anything, you understand; he just told it like it was. I give him credit for that. Turned and walked out on his own party!”

Restless after weeks in the sticks, Mitchum took his wife to New York for some high life. She went shopping; he found other things to do. They had been in Manhattan for a few days when Bob picked up a call from David O. Selznick. The coowner of the actor’s contract was in New York on business.

“Bob,” Selznick said, “I just found out you were in town, too. You should have called me.”

“Uh? Well . . . sorry about that,” Mitchum said.

The actor and producer had met only briefly in the past. Mitchum, at the time he signed his first contract, had wondered why David wanted a piece of him. All Selznick’s pictures seemed perfect for Joseph Cotten.

“I’m not your kind of actor,” Mitchum told him.

“Oh yes, yes you are my kind of actor,” Selznick said. But in the four years of their contractual association, D.O.S. had never done anything with Mitchum but loan him out—at great profit—to other producers and studios. Once, due to scheduling problems, he even got to collect top dollar for letting RKO have use of their own boy. He was currently negotiating his loan to something called Trinity Film Corp. for something called
If This Be My Harvest.
To Mitchum it sounded like a good title for a Joseph Cotten picture. But now at last Selznick had a production of his own with a part in it for Mitchum. It was an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House,
to costar David’s inamorata Jennifer Jones, from a commissioned screenplay by a young Ingmar Bergman.

“You have to come over here and discuss this, Bob,” said Selznick on the phone. “This is going to be quite a challenging role for you.”

“Sure, all right. I can drop by a little later.”

“I’m at the Hampshire House and I’ll see you at three.”

Bob decided to write Dorothy a little note telling her where he had gone, and he did this task in the hotel bar over a couple of drinks. Later, making his way to the street, he ran straight into an RKO acquaintance, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. There were two rounds of double scotches before Mitchum could tear himself away and resume his journey to the Hampshire House where, in the lobby, as he would tell it, he ran straight into another acquaintance, Barney Ross, the well-known boxer and morphine addict. Some drinks later, quite shitfaced and very late for his appointment, Mitchum found his way to the elevator and rode up thirty floors to David Selznick’s suite. The producer had turned the place into Selznick International, East, with a receptionist
and a lineup of publicists and writers waiting to see him. From an improvised meeting room David came hurrying out, greeted Mitchum heartily, and offered him a drink, which Mitchum claimed he tried to turn down but Selznick, running back to conclude his meeting, insisted. So Mitchum told Selznick’s girl he would have a double scotch and water. Somehow, some undetermined number of drinks later, Mitchum found himself in Selznick’s improvised office with Selznick sitting across from him and talking, talking—lecturing, really, the genius to the idiot boy, thought Bob. As Selznick raved on and the drunken Mitchum tried in vain to fathom what he was saying, the actor found himself overcome with an aching, uncomfortable sensation he could not quite locate. Selznick went on and on, a nagging drone in the background.
A fantastic step up for a person like you, Bob. . . . I don’t know if you’re familiar with Henrik . . . of course George Cukor would be marvelous . . . and fennifer said . . . and then when I made
Gone With the Wind . . . Mitchum could not listen, pulling off his trenchcoat and twisting in his chair, finally, almost too late, realizing that what he was experiencing was a simple, overwhelming need to urinate. Unable to interrupt Selznick’s self-absorbed chatter and reaching a point of unavoidable physical consequence, a moment away from sitting there in his seat and filling his pants with liquid, Mitchum remembered looking up at the chattering mogul one more time and then awkwardly tearing open his fly, twisting himself off the side of the chair, and pissing a hard, steady stream onto the Hampshire House carpet.

Selznick stopped talking.

Mitchum slowly raised himself up from the side of the chair, crushing the raincoat over his splattered trousers, thanked the speechless producer for his time, realized it was best to leave it at that, and staggered out.

He was due to begin work on a new picture at the end of May. Dorothy refused to return with him. They argued. Bob pleaded. Dorothy was adamant. She wanted . . . she didn’t know what. For him to quit the movies? To divorce him? All she could really say for certain was that she was not ready to go back to Hollywood, not today, and not tomorrow.

Bob headed west, alone.

Even as Mitchum was traveling across the country, negotiations were being finalized for the secret sale of RKO to Howard R. Hughes, the beginning of what would come to be known as the most bizarre chapter in the history of the
Hollywood studios. For a price of $8.8 million, Hughes would purchase 929,000 shares of RKO stock from Floyd Odium. Odium was a businessman, not a picture maker, and had never been seduced by the creative or hedonistic pleasures of the film industry. And lately business had been problematic. Profits had shrunk since the end of the war, costs had nearly doubled, in Great Britain and other countries they were now imposing stiff taxation on imported American features, the U.S. government was demanding that the studios divest themselves of their theater chains, unions were increasingly troublesome, congressional committees were labeling RKO a hotbed of Red subversion, and Floyd Odium’s arthritis was driving him crazy. It was time to take the money and run.

Hughes had been a colorful presence in Hollywood since the tail end of the silent era. A young millionaire bored with his inherited Texas tool company, he’d migrated to Los Angeles, where the quality of the women in the movie colony encouraged him to become a producer. In the late ‘20s and early ‘30s Hughes made a number of successful and critically acclaimed films—
The Front Page, The Racket, Scarface
—strong, attention-grabbing entertainments that made brilliant use of some of the great talents of the day, including Howard Hawks, Lewis Milestone, Paul Muni, and Ben Hecht. Hughes even ventured into directing with the World War I aviation epic
Hell’s Angels,
feeble in its down-to-earth scenes but intensely exciting in the air. He then gave up moviemaking for nearly a decade, though he kept his hand in, so to speak, by dating an unending series of silver screen goddesses, including Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and Bette Davis. As a test pilot during this period, his daring and record-breaking flights made him second only to Amelia Earhart as the country’s most publicized aviator.

In 1940, he made a directorial comeback with a notoriously sexed-up Western called
The Outlaw.
Hughes’s erotomanic approach to the staging and publicizing of
The Outlaw,
and his decade-long defense of the film against Production Code censors, defined his own outlaw status among the Hollywood hierarchy. In a business fearful of audience backlash and government interference, his urge to challenge the accepted proprieties was considered irritating and dangerous to the industry leaders who were doing quite well playing by the rules. The millionaire’s reputed anti-Semitic feelings no doubt further isolated him from the brotherhood of the mostly Jewish moguls and major independent producers. But he remained a popular and glamorous figure to many others in the film community, especially the female stars he relentlessly wooed. When Hughes crashed his experimental XF-11 aircraft on Whittier Drive in Beverly Hills and lay near death in a hospital bed,
the waiting room and hallway outside drew more big-name actresses than the Oscars.

In 1944, Hughes had attempted to create his own ministudio with writer-director Preston Sturges, but this had not worked out, and four years later he began quietly shopping for an established production company. For one thing he was in increasing need of someplace to employ his growing harem of starlets—formerly models, sales clerks, high school cheerleaders, nurses, carhops, baby-sitters, jitterbug contest winners—the young ladies with dark eyes and nice breasts he continually signed to personal contracts and kept stashed in bungalows and apartments all over Los Angeles, where they awaited their promised screen debuts.

Odium let the new owner of RKO announce the sale to the press. Hughes gave the exclusive to Bill Feeder at the
Hollywood Reporter
before hiring Feeder as his personal publicist. Hughes had assured the old regime’s Peter Rathvon and Dore Schary that things would stay essentially the same at RKO (though he’d already told Feeder, “I suspect Dore Schary’s a Commie”). But soon after taking over he began making his distinctive presence felt, canceling the studio’s high-minded projects and firing nonbabes like Barbara Bel Geddes. Schary called for a showdown. The elusive millionaire, who refused to set foot on the RKO lot, had his production head meet him at a borrowed place on the beach. A man who valued his dignity, Schary understood that his term at RKO was over as soon as he entered the unfurnished house and his boss greeted him from a side room where he was helping a woman hook up her bra.

Once Schary was out of the way, Hughes went to work retooling RKO to his own tastes and business needs. In short order, nearly half the studio personnel were pink-slipped, and work on new productions was brought to a standstill until Hughes had time to personally review scripts and personnel. Millions of dollars in pay-or-play contracts with stars and preproduction costs had to be written off. For much of that summer RKO felt like a ghost town, and even those who remained on the payroll came to work in a state of uncertainty. While Dore Schary had been a reluctant supplicant to the Hollywood Red-hunters, Hughes now appointed himself the movies’ first Witch-finder General. In addition to his private staff of business advisers and procurers, he established a secret police force to investigate and spy on RKO employees and other potential subversives as well as commercial rivals and future girlfriends. The squadron, made up mostly of ex-cops, operated, according to one of its members, very much like the FBI.

•  •  •

Robert Mitchum returned to Los Angeles to find that he had a new boss and no work. The movie he had been scheduled to begin in mid-June was canceled, and nobody could say what he was going to be doing next. He went to the studio and looked at his mail and went over to Lucey’s for lunch with anyone who still had a job. His personal assistant had mysteriously disappeared after the Behrmann trouble. He needed somebody to help him out with his correspondence and phone calls, remind him of his appointments, keep track of his scripts. There was a young woman he knew slightly, a friend of his sister Carol’s from high school. “We met at his sister’s party,” Reva Frederick recalled. “He was just a very nice, polite guy. And I never expected to go work for him. It was just supposed to be for a short part-time thing at first. And before you know it, you’re doing this and that and looking at scripts and it became a full-time job.” Reva was smart, obviously efficient, was both no-nonsense and nonjudgmental. She could get things done, but she could blend into the scenery when that was called for. Bob was a man who could easily not bother to put on his second sock, let alone care where he was supposed to be in a week’s time, so Reva quickly proved to be an invaluable asset. As Mitchum grew comfortable with her, he began to delegate to her all the parts of his life that bored or overwhelmed him. A good secretary, they said, was one who did things before the boss even knew they needed doing. In Reva’s case she would have to deal with a boss who, about so many things, didn’t want to know.