Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (41 page)

McQuigg: If he resists there’s a city ordinance against expectorating on the public pavement.

Officer Johnson: That includes expectorating
broken teeth,
sir?

McQuigg: Oh yes, that’s very unsanitary.

Some of the right-of-center contributions by W. R. Burnett went even further in this vein—for example, having the cops kicking and wiping their feet on Scanlon’s dead body—but these were not included for fear of censorship.

The Racket
was shot quickly, in thirty-two days in April and May of 1951, and a seriously ailing John Cromwell left it at that. Hughes and Burnett then cooked up a few new scenes—a violent chase and gun battle—and a framing device with a crusading crime commissioner (Hughes belatedly remembering to tie into those Kevauver Committee headlines). These were directed early in June by Nicholas Ray, Mitchum doing this work just days after he finished wrecking the
His Kind of Woman
set.

Ray did such an efficient job that he was handed another ignoble task, directing retakes and new material for
Macao.
These took up most of July and a
few days in August. In the time since von Sternberg had been removed from the studio, Sam Bischoff and his minions had made such a botch of dismantling and reediting the unsatisfactory director’s cut that Mitchum claimed his character would come through a door and run into himself on the other side. The revised script pages were considered so hopeless and unplayable that Ray and Jane Russell drafted Mitchum to take a whack at it. “Jane and Nick came up to me with a big legal pad and several pencils and said, ‘Write it!’ So I got in the dressing room in the morning . . . they got a secretary to type it up . . . and we’d shoot it in the afternoon.” Exactly how much he contributed to the released film is difficult to say—the Ray-directed scenes add up to about one-third of the release cut—but there seems some agreement that the amusing scene with Russell wielding an electric fan and spraying the room with pillow feathers (”What are we, delegates to a peace conferance!”) is the work of screenwriter Mitchum.

Gloria Grahame, in the process of divorcing Nick Ray when she heard he was reshooting and reediting
Macao,
cracked, “If you can cut me out of the picture entirely I won’t ask for any alimony.” (In fact, she would have to appear in some of the new scenes, these directed by yet another overseer—Mel Ferrer.)

To Mitchum it was a season of deja vu, returning to one unfinished project after another, traipsing from set to set, climbing into the costumes and parts he thought he had discarded months before. At any given time he had three pictures in various states of incompletion. Hughes had movies piling up all over the place, movies being rewritten, reedited, movies just lying on the floor somewhere, some of them two years or more out of production. It was a helluva way to run a railroad, Mitchum thought, but as long as his paychecks cleared, it was really none of his business. Doing the public a favor, keeping some of those things out of the theaters, he figured.

O
NE
M
INUTE TO
Z
ERO
was Mitchum’s first war picture since
G.I. Joe,
but genre and a noisy soundtrack were about all it had in common with Wellman’s masterwork. A tale of the then-current Korean “conflict,” it was action-packed, jingoistic propaganda, notable mainly for the unprecedented use of gory combat footage (e.g., charred corpses) and a grotesque and miserably self-justifying sequence (apparently based on fact) in which Mitchum’s Colonel Janowski orders the murder by shelling of innocent refugees, including old people and small children, because there are Communist soldiers hiding among them. Slackly directed by veteran Tay Garnett, the film suffered as well from poor writing, terrible comedy relief, and a dull romance.

It didn’t help that the production had fallen into disarray from the beginning. Exteriors were to be filmed in the rugged country surrounding Camp Carson army base ten miles outside Colorado Springs, Colorado. When the company arrived in late summer, the area was experiencing unseasonably bad weather. In September it snowed for days on end. Costar Claudette Colbert was struck down with pneumonia and a 104-degree fever, stayed under doctor’s care for a week, and then flew home. Actor William Talman became afflicted with the same ailment, while director Garnett was hospitalized with influenza. Actor Charles McGraw stepped into a hole and broke his ankle, and crew members housed in Anderson tents at the base came under attack by rattlesnakes. After weeks of futile negotiations with Joan Crawford, Colbert was replaced with Ann Blyth, and the script had to be revised to accommodate the considerably younger actress. RKO sent writer Andrew Solt to the location,
where he would hole up with Garnett every night, then type out new scenes hours before they were due to be filmed. All the delays necessitated the company remaining in Colorado for an additional month, by which time the weather had long turned seasonably bad, with snow and hailstorms, and leaves having to be wired to trees to match the shots taken in summer. John Mitchum, now billing himself as John Mallory, had nabbed a small part in the film as an artillery officer. He was supposed to stay with the company for less than a week, but the weather problems and various screwups conspired to keep him on the payroll for nearly two months.

With the filming proceeding in fits and starts, cast and crew were provided with a great deal of free time, which the majority devoted to drinking, card-playing, and skirt-chasing. Until he was asked to go elsewhere, Bob Mitchum could be found most nights at the Alamo Hotel’s Red Fox Lounge, a local hangout. Colorado Springs was 5,800 feet above sea level, and Bob soon learned the mixed delights of high-altitude boozing, where one drink hit you like two. One night word had spread of his attendance at the Red Fox, and people from all over the area, mostly females—schoolteachers, mothers, women from the air base, girls below the drinking age—crowded into the lounge, surging around Mitchum, who was way beyond plastered. Breaking free from the clawing hands of autograph seekers, he climbed onto a couch, emptied his drink, then turned his posterior to the frenzied fan club and exploded a noisome fart.

There was another nightspot in town, a black club called Duncan’s, where hot jazz bands performed. A bunch of the guys from the movie arrived for the show, filling a big table near the stage. Charlie McGraw spotted some good-looking local girls in the audience and invited them over, and John Mitchum was immediately taken with one of them, a sweet young woman named Nancy Munro. It turned out to be a momentous night for them—John fell in love, and he and Nancy became husband and wife some months down the road (after a complicated split from his current spouse, Gloria Grahame’s sister, Joy).

On November 7 Bob and RKO stock player Charles McGraw—who proved to be a compatible sidekick, a kind of mini-Mitchum who reputedly drank two cases of beer and slept four hours per day—were standing at the bar of the Red Fox in conversation with a lieutenant colonel and an off-duty military policeman, both from Camp Carson, when in through the doorway from the Alamo lobby came a private named Bernard Reynolds. According to eyewitness reports of the incident, the lieutenant colonel looked over the private and ordered him to button up his jacket.

“Reynolds said something to the colonel,” recalled Lee Haynes, the military cop who was standing beside them. “And that’s when Mitchum grabbed him.”

“I grabbed him by the lapels,” said Mitchum. “He kept yelling and swinging his arms around and I grabbed him. I asked him to behave himself, but he shook his right arm loose and swung at me. I ducked the punch and we both fell to the floor.”

Haynes said he thought that after Mitchum had shaken the soldier it was all over, and he turned away. “When I looked back, I saw Mitchum had Reynolds down on a couch and was banging his head against a table.” Some bystanders tried to pull the men apart. “They had Mitchum standing up,” said Haynes. “It was dark in there, but I saw Mitchum kick Reynolds in the head.” Another witness, George Wright, a civilian worker from the base, told police that he saw Mitchum kick Private Reynolds in the face.

It turned out Reynolds was a sometime heavyweight prizefighter who had knocked out nineteen of twenty-eight opponents and was ranked tenth in the world at that time.

“I stopped in the joint for a hot buttered rum,” Mitchum reflected, “and bang, I was right in the middle of it. I wasn’t angry. It was just a saloon hassle. I just roughed the guy up a little but that’s all.”

Reynolds was taken to the camp hospital and treated for a possible skull fracture.

“An actor is always a target for the belligerent type of guy who thinks he is tough and movie he-men are softies,” said Mitchum, in a studio press release run up the flagpole by RKO’s Phil Gersdorf. “I never start a fight, but I assure you I can always finish one if there is no other way out. This one was unavoidable and I’m sorry it happened.”

“M
ITCHUM
K
ICKED
S
OLDIER
, S
AYS
B
RAWL
W
ITNESS
” and “COL. B
OB
M
ITCHUM IN
B
AR
B
RAWL
; GI H
OSPITALIZED
” were a couple of the headlines that appeared across the country the following day. Back in Hollywood an RKO spokesman claimed that Mitchum was simply trying to protect fellow actor Charles McGraw. “Mitchum’s rough and ready,” said the spokesman, “but he’s not the vicious type.”

He would later cop to the kicking charge, sort of. “It wasn’t the Marquess of Queensberry rules,” he said. “I brushed my foot across his head to say, ‘See, fucker, you see what I could do to you?’” (Or as he put it to another reporter,
“When you fuck with the ape, be ready to go the router)

Howard Hughes hated sharing his stars with other studios. Loan-outs generally meant huge profits (the vast difference between a star’s loan-out price and his actual salary), and if done with care and the projects became award-winning hits, say, they could greatly increase the value of these human assets.
But as the head of RKO, Hughes’s eccentric methods showed little concern for profits and even less for prestige. It is impossible to say what direction Mitchum’s career might have taken had Dore Schary and David Selznick remained in control of it, but there is evidence of some places it did not go, thanks to Hughes. He refused to respond to feelers from the Broadway producers of
A Streetcar Named Desire,
who wanted Mitchum to follow Marlon Brando in the role of Stanley Kowalski. The great Howard Hawks had hoped to work with Mitchum on one project or another for years, but the director’s feud with Hughes kept it from happening. And Columbia head Harry Cohn begged Hughes to let them have Mitchum for the role of the top kick in
From Here to Eternity,
the part that ultimately went to Burt Lancaster. “Jesus, Bob,” Howard told him in explanation, “you don’t want to be going over there with those Jews. You don’t want to be associated with those people. . . .”

A producer at RKO had once laughingly explained to Mitchum his place in the Hollywood hierarchy. “Every studio has its horseshit salesman,” he said. “And you’re ours.”

Mitchum tried never to think about the lost opportunities. Why fight City Hall. Paint his eyes on, change the leading lady, and shout, “Roll ‘em.” Did it matter which fucking picture you made? They were all just masturbation aids, something for the folks to think about when they got back home and took their pants off. “Have you ever seen a typical Mitchum fan?” he asked a reporter. “Glazed eyes . . . haven’t shaved . . .” All his movies, he would explain, were a variation on a formula he called Pounded to Death by Gorillas. Fade in on broad-shouldered Bob as a huge gorilla looms up behind and hits him on the top of the head. Boom! He crumples. Boom, boom, he keeps falling down, but he keeps getting up again. Cut to a little girl skipping through fields of daisies. As the writers didn’t have that part figured out yet, they cut back to Bob. Boom, boom, the gorilla still knocking him down. At last the ape collapses from exhaustion. The little girl comes in, says, “I know he’s around here someplace, I just know it.” Finally, she peels away the gorilla and there lies the hero. Cradling him in her arms, the girl looks straight into the camera and says, “I don’t care what you think—
I like him!”
Fade out. The End.

Restlessness still plagued him. He usually left town whenever a picture wrapped. Sometimes he would just climb into his car by himself and drive away with no destination in mind. Dorothy told a reporter, “Bob is really a bachelor at heart.” But there were great times with the family as well, long afternoons in the pool, or playing croquet, or taking the boys on long treks deep
into the wilderness. Times like he had dreamed of having with his old man when he was a kid.

Some of the crew guys at RKO—in appreciation of Bob’s loyalty to them—had helped him to construct a compact mobile camper when such things were not yet commercially manufactured. To the open bed of a Ford truck they attached a removable corrugated steel cabin containing a refrigerator, butane stove, sink, water tank, a single bed hung from chains on the ceiling, and a convertible double bed on the floor. With Tim Wallace and the boys on board, he took the camper on an inaugural journey, pursuing salmon in the rivers of Idaho, catching two massive beauties that left a choking stink in the cabin when the refrigerator broke down. They drove to Colorado in time for the
One Minute to Zero
premieres in Denver and Colorado Springs, meeting up with Dorothy for the festivities. She and the boys then departed for Delaware and a lengthy stay with her family. Bob and Tim loaded the truck with alcohol and chili beans and set off to do some spearfishing in the Arkansas backcountry. It turned out that John Mitchum was down in Little Rock finishing up the required ninety-day residence for a “quickie” divorce, a plan that was foiled when he failed to bring a corroborating witness to court. He was standing on Main Street, forlorn, when the camper—now dubbed the “Oochee-Papa-Poontang Wagon” for reasons unspecified but easily guessed at—rolled into town. He grabbed hold of Tim and rushed him to the courtroom, where Wallace gladly improvised lurid tales of John and Joy Mitchum’s incompatibility, and the divorce was granted.