Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (45 page)

A few weeks before shooting was to begin, Mitchum got a copy of the script. He sat down and tried to read it, but every few pages, he said, he found himself going back to the front to look at the names credited with writing the thing. He was sure they must all be the producer’s grandchildren. The hero was some kind of chickenshit fighter who had killed a guy in the ring and was very sensitive about it. In the movies the fighters were always sensitive, and people were always trying to pay them to take a fall and they were never interested in that kind of thing. He had known a lot of boxers in his time, Mitchum reflected, and he had never known one like that. Sometimes a fall was the best thing for everybody concerned. You got tired, you stuck your chin out, took ten, and settled down for a little rest. Why not get paid for it? He went to a story conference with director Rudolph Mate, producer Edmund Grainger, and their associates. Grainger, said Mitchum, liked to analyze the structure and meaning of the screenplay and was fond of big words like
regenerated
and
catalyst
when explaining why one character did this and another did something else and how it all tied together with a pink ribbon. The others would listen, said Bob, wait until it sounded like the guy had come to the end of a sentence, and then nod with enthusiasm.

“Give us your thoughts on the script, Bob?” someone said and Mitchum started flipping through the pages, offering his own insights.”Here’s a new twist, the heavy smiles all the time. . . . Now this is a real moll . . . she can’t have babies or nothin’ . . .”

“Yes, but,” said the producer, “she’s regenerated in the catalyst!”

Sydney Boehm, an ex-crime reporter, was called in to do a rewrite.

If the script was stricly B-unit stuff, the studio’s big “comeback” picture would at least be given the veneer of a superior production, with color (a first for Mitchum at RKO), exotic location shooting, and most exciting of all . . .
3-D.
The invention with which Hollywood hoped to counterattack television, 3-D was a stereoscopic process supposedly offering audiences an illusion of lifelike depth, though it was quickly perceived as a gimmick best utilized for special-effects
sequences and for throwing things at the camera. Howard Hughes, who had already experimented with three-dimensional effects in the way he had costumed Jane Russell, Janet Leigh, and Jean Simmons, was immediately intrigued by the process.

Cast opposite Mitchum as the “moll” was thirty-two-year-old Linda Darnell. A frequent Hughes bedmate for many years (he had once offered to “buy” her from her husband, cinematographer Pev Marley), she had come to RKO after more than a dozen years at Fox. Hughes had great respect for her talented curves and believed they would make a fitting subject for his studio’s first use of the 3-D camera (though Darnell, feeling overweight, would end up refusing to wear the revealing dresses of Hughes’s imagining and spent most of the film in a conservative dark suit). The villain of the piece, a ferocious mob hit man, would be played by Jack Palance, the fascinating and often disturbingly intense Elia Kazan discovery who had been in Hollywood for three years, alternating between eccentric leading man parts and great scene-stealing heavies. He would give Mitchum one of his rare opportunities to do cinematic battle with a bad guy his own size and strength.

On April 11 the
Second Chance
company flew to Mexico City and from there continued by car and bus to the scenic colonial town of Taxco. So many scenes had been dropped or rearranged for filming on their return to Los Angeles that what they did shoot amounted to a week’s worth of the stars running back and forth across the cobblestone streets and coming in and out of an assortment of doorways. Mate attempted only one elaborate sequence, Bob’s big boxing match, filmed at the Plaza de Toros in Cuernavaca, with locals filling the seats and cheering the all-day match between Mitchum and a young former boxer named Abel Fernandez. Hour after hour the pair bobbed and weaved under the killing Mexican sun, while Mate and his crew strove to maintain the precision focus required for 3-D filming. Inevitably, as the wearying fake fight continued, some of the blows the two exchanged landed with unintended impact. “I got knocked out three times,” Mitchum recalled. “Cut!” Rudy Mate would shout. “Bob, it is in the script, you are supposed to win the match!” The star’s agony would be mostly in vain because problems with the extras staring into the lens and the erratic lighting conditions meant that the fight would have to be at least partly restaged back in Hollywood.

Dorothy had agreed to accompany Robert on the trip, and he had tried to stay out of trouble for the entire week. But sometimes trouble found you. The RKO publicists had arranged for Mitchum and Palance to attend a charity dinner for Boys Town in Mexico City on the Saturday before their departure. Mitchum was brought up on the podium to hand over a (studio-supplied)
check for five thousand dollars. An American college boy got into an altercation with the actor en route to the toilets and ended up sprawled across a table. There were shouts and curses, and it looked like the boy’s friends wanted to stage a second assault. As photographers jockeyed for a good angle, the RKO publicists decided it was time to get the celebrities out of there.

Bob and Dorothy, Jack Palance, and the rest of the
Second Chance
group were taken to a popular nightclub on the Reforma, where they were joined by a party of Mexican film people, including Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez, the well-known actor-director (a seminal figure in the Mexican cinema but perhaps best remembered for his portrayal of the evil warlord Mapache in Peck-inpah’s
The Wild Bunch).
They had barely gotten to their table when a drunken stranger—as it turned out, a member of the military elite—came over to meet the Hollywood
estrellas.

Jack Palance recalled the night: “I’d had a couple of drinks at a party and because of the altitude I was feeling pretty awful. Mexico City is eight thousand feet above sea level. Mitchum and I had already escaped one near brawl, so we went to a club somewhere and as we came in a big Mexican general got up and embraced Bob. He tried to do the same with me but I wasn’t feeling like it, so I pushed him away. And he fell, right there on the floor. Well, you know what a general is in Mexico? God—right? The next thing you know he’d drawn a gun on me. . . .”

Emilio Fernandez rushed in to halt the conflict, a dubious choice for peacemaker as he was notorious for his hot temper and was rumored to have shot a number of people, including a movie critic who had offended him with a bad review. Sure enough, things heated up again, with Fernandez shouting, “Fucking Mexicans!” and pulling out a pistol. “I’m getting the ladies out of here,” said Mitchum and rushed for the exit. One of the general’s men fired what sounded like a machine gun. Palance picked up a table and hurled it at him.

“Suddenly,” said Jack, “there was this big drama going on.”

People dropped under tables in screaming confusion while shots zinged back and forth across the room. As El Indio continued firing, giving him cover, Palance made his way out through the kitchen and escaped. By then Mitchum and company were safely inside their limousine and heading across town.

The “general,” it turned out, was the big cheese in federal security and had a nasty reputation for unwarranted arrests, torturing suspects, that sort of thing. Jack Palance was put under wraps until someone could locate the offended officer and RKO could write out a large check for another charitable donation. Palance told reporter Roderick Mann, “Of course, when I got back to the States, I found old Mitchum had taken all the credit for my rescue.”

•  •  •

With everyone safely returned to Los Angeles, filming continued on the studio lot. The climactic scenes, conceived for maximum stereoscopic thrills, took place on a cable car suspended between two mountain peaks in the story’s imaginary Andean locale. When the car stalls at the midway point, Mitchum is elected to swing from a rope to the nearest ledge and scramble for help. He returns with a rescue team and confronts killer Palance. The pair slug it out as the last threads of cable snap from the dangling car.

Palance was an idiosyncratic method actor known to lose himself in his characters, a risky pattern for one who enacted so much on-screen mayhem. “He would go back behind the set and work himself up to a real state,” said Reva Frederick. “Huffing and puffing. It was odd.” A stuntman warned Mitchum that Jack was planning to give him a hard time in the cable car fist-fight and to keep his guard up. The two rehearsed their moves, but once they began battling their way in and out and on top of the set it was difficult to stick to the script. Palance gave him a hard one in the head. Mitchum’s ears were ringing and he lost his footing for a moment, then, sure the punch had been intentional, moved back in with a fury, slugging the other actor in the gut. Palance let out a growl and vomited across Mitchum’s shoulder.

Second Chance
opened to good business and moderately positive reviews. Critics were distracted by the ocular assault of the 3-D effects, not by the story, which seemed even more threadbare on the screen than it had on paper. For RKO’s vaunted big picture of the year, the film was sloppy and cheap. The location trip to Mexico had provided little more than some raw-looking, second-unit-type footage. The rest was a cramped, operetta-style soundstage South America, the cable car climax a cheesy mix of obvious toy miniatures and back projection. Even the music sounded subpar, like the generic library cues used by Poverty Row studios for their three-day Westerns. But “the great unwashed,” as Mitchum referred to his loyal fans, seemed to enjoy it. What the hell. The film was as effortlessly watchable and as easily forgotten as a gaily colored dream. Mitchum performed his empathetic tough guy characterization with a refined minimalism. Given nothing to do, he did it to perfection.

Due to RKO’s ever-increasing deficits and its stockholders’ constant scrutiny, Howard Hughes no longer had the luxury of turning down high-priced offers for his biggest star’s services. Mitchum was thus loaned to 20th Century-Fox
to costar with that studio’s latest and greatest asset, and an old acquaintance of Bob’s, Jim Dougherty’s former teenage girlfriend, Norma Jean Baker. After seven years of wiggling at the periphery of the movie business, Marilyn Monroe had at last achieved fame if not fortune, and with her appearances in
Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire,
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
had become the most exciting and talked-about movie star of the day. (Nevertheless, Mitchum’s representatives waged a successful battle for their client to be given top billing in all studio advertising and publicity.)
River of No Return
was to be a superspectacular aimed—like
Second Chance
but with considerably better prospects—at separating TV-addicted audiences from their living rooms. It would be produced not with the sideshow gimmickry of 3-D but in Fox’s own revolutionary technical process, anamorphic wide-screen Cinemascope, with multitrack stereo sound, color, awesome locations in the Canadian Rockies, marauding Indians, white-water rapids, and Marilyn Monroe squeezed into revealing dancehall-floozie mufti and skintight blue jeans.

Actually,
River of No Return
was a cheap B Western that had just growed like Topsy. Fox originally planned to shoot it in a couple of weeks on the wild Snake River in Idaho. Paul Helmick, scheduled to be the assistant director and unit manager on that picture, had scouted the locations. “It was going to be a small thing,” Helmick recalled. “About twenty-five people, cast and crew sleeping in tents and eating at the campfire. All of a sudden Zanuck decided it was going to be a big picture with Marilyn and Mitchum, and Otto Preminger was going to direct. I thought that meant I was off the picture because I had done one with Otto before and that did
not
work out. So I thought the minute he was assigned I was out, which was fine with me because I did not care much for Otto. But I was very much in. So now we had to rethink where the picture could be made, now it was a matter of finding locations where you could have a good hotel, food and lodging for a hundred, hundred-and-twenty-five people, an airport not too far away, good communications, and so on.”

New ultrascenic locales were chosen at Jasper and Banff Springs near Lake Louise in western Canada and comfortable accommodations secured at the stately old Banff Springs Hotel. There was still snow on the mountains and some of the roads had been clear for only a matter of weeks when members of the company began arriving in June, making preparations for the complicated and dangerous river rafting sequences that were the film’s primary raison d’etre. A special train brought the cast and Preminger the eighty miles west from Calgary to Banff, a publicized event that brought out curious ogling Canadians all along the route.

A sweet but often intransigent personality even among sympathetic collaborators,
Marilyn did not react well to Preminger’s patented screaming-Prussian act. “Otto,” said Paul Helmick, “was a complete pain in the ass. Vicious, impatient, very crude to people, especially to women.” Filming had barely begun when Monroe and the director stopped speaking to each other. “Not a word. It was the biggest mismatch I’d ever seen,” said Paul Helmick. “They absolutely detested each other.” The telephone lines to Los Angeles sizzled, with each camp complaining about the other’s bad behavior, and Fox telling them both to shut up. The
Angel Face
contretemps forgotten, Preminger turned to Mitchum for help; and Bob would become the single tenuous line of communication between Monroe and the director.

A major source of unpleasantness, and not just to Preminger, was the presence of Monroe’s drama coach—really her surrogate mother—Natasha Lytess. “Horrible woman,” said Reva Frederick. “And smelly. If only someone had taken her out and given her a bath.” Otto dismissed Lytess as an annoying phony from the get-go—”She was passing herself off as a Russian, for reasons of her own, but she was in fact German”—but Marilyn had an absolute Trilbylike devotion to the woman and her professional advice. Lytess would sit at the sidelines during filming, conferring with the actress before a take, overriding the director’s instructions, signaling Marilyn to demand another take or to refuse to do another one, depending on whether the coach was satisfied with the first. Her most damning influence on Monroe’s performance was an insistence on every syllable of every line being enunciated distinctly, advice the actress followed to an absurd degree. Marilyn, said Preminger, “rehearsed her lines with such grave ar-tic-yew-lay-shun that her violent lip movements made it impossible to photograph her.” To Mitchum, holding her in his arms for a shot, she looked like she was doing an imitation of a fish. He slapped her on the ass—which he found was also undulating uncontrollably—and snapped, “Stop the nonsense! Let’s play it like human beings.” He managed, said Preminger, “to startle her and she dropped, at least for the moment, her Lytess mannerisms.”