Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (50 page)

Despite the audiences’ indifference and the tepid enthusiasm of reviewers at the time, the film would go on to achieve classic status, eventually, decades later, showing up in critics’ polls of the greatest movies of all time. Francois Truffaut, in the pages of
Cahiers du Cinema,
wrote of
The Night of the Hunter,
“It makes us fall in love again with an experimental cinema that truly experiments, and a cinema of discovery that, in fact,
discovers.
”

Charles Laughton was done with film directing, but he would remain a Mitchum enthusiast for his remaining years, speaking of him warmly to a reporter just months before his death in 1962: “He is a literate, gracious, kind man with wonderful manners and he speaks beautifully—when he wants to . . . Bob is one of the best actors in the world . . . a great talent. He’d make the best Macbeth of any actor living.”

Stanley Kramer was Hollywood’s most distinguished independent producer, with a string of box office and/or critical hits that included
Champion, Home
of the Brave, The Men, The Wild One,
and
High Noon.
At a time of Red scares, blacklists, and avenging superpatriots, when Hollywood seemed to be covering its head and running in fear from subjects concerned with American social problems and matters of conscience, Kramer made them his specialty. A high-minded liberal humanist, Kramer’s productions were predominantly dramatic explorations of timely and controversial topics such as race, the handicapped, delinquent youth. Even his Gary Cooper-starring horse opera,
High Noon,
was a blatant if metaphoric attack on McCarthyism. Kramer ignored the truism that Western Union, not Hollywood, was the place that delivered messages, but his pictures were tough, dynamic dramas, and he always kept an eye on the box office. An excellent overseer with a keen instinct for fresh talent (Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando, Carl Foreman), Kramer nonetheless longed to move into the auteur’s chair. And now the time had come. For his directorial debut he chose to make a film out of Morton Thompson’s popular novel about doctors and the nurses and patients who loved them,
Not as a Stranger.

While Kramer had made his reputation with small, high-fiber, low-budget films using new or little-known performers, he decided to launch his directing career with a two-million-dollar all-star—Robert Mitchum, Olivia DeHavil-land, Frank Sinatra, recent Oscar winner Broderick Crawford—extravaganza derived from 1954’s thickest and most melodramatic best-seller—948 pages of C sections, stitches, and sex. Not that it was a project without a socially relevant subtext. The Thompson novel had provoked readers with its scathing expose of the medical industry, and Kramer declared that his film was likewise going to pull no punches in depicting the private lives of the “men in white.”

Hard to fathom now, with the novel so long unread and forgotten, but
Not as a Stranger
would top the best-seller lists for two years running, and the prospect of its adaptation to film was cause for much excitement and speculation across America. Like the debate over who would play Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind,
readers and media folk pondered the proper actor for the role of Dr. Lucas Marsh, the “brilliant physician who must learn to be a human being.” It became apparent after the casting choice was made that there was at least one person whom readers did
not
want for the role, and that person was Robert Mitchum. Columnists reported hearing from “thousands” of readers deploring the casting and printed some of the more outraged letters. “What in the name of heaven have they done to that sensitive part that a burly, crude lead such as Mitchum would even be considered?” went one irate missive. And another: “I found Lucas Marsh a quietly intriguing and intelligent
man; he is the kind of man I married. Lew Ayres or Cornel Wilde could do the part justice. How shocked and distressed I was when I read they had chosen Robert Mitchum of all people to play this nice fellow!” On the face of it, the novel’s driven, neurotic Dr. Marsh did seem better suited for—well, if Cornel Wilde was not available, someone along the lines of a Brando or Montgomery Clift, and not the king of apathy and cool; but Stanley Kramer saw Mitchum’s powerful, unemotional presence in his vision of Dr. Marsh and he stuck to his choice despite the outcry.

Kramer put his trusted and estimable team of Edward and Edna Anhalt to work on a script (author Morton Thompson, briefly consulted, died, an apparent suicide, while the movie was in production) and they began transforming the nearly one thousand pages in the book to a manageable if still unusually long 173-page script. The Anhalts updated the story from the 1920s and lopped off hundreds of pages about Lucas’s Dickensian childhood. In advance of filming, and in pursuit of a detailed realism for the medical scenes, Kramer hired a team of technical advisers—doctors, surgeons, and registered nurses—to watch over the production and the performers and keep all hospital procedures scrupulously authentic. In further pursuit of this goal he arranged with several area hospitals to allow himself, Ed Anhalt, Mitchum, and several others to observe a variety of actual operations and to follow some doctors on their daily rounds.

Mitchum, Sinatra, and Crawford attended a hospital theater autopsy similar to one staged for the first scene in the film. Seated among a small group of hovering medical students, they watched as a pathologist ripped the sheet off a corpse, inserted a scalpel, and opened the body from throat to pubis. Broderick Crawford immediately got up and headed for the exit.

“Where you going?” Sinatra asked.

Crawford said,
“Malibu!”

At the Veteran’s Hospital in Los Angeles, Mitchum, DeHavilland, Kramer, and Anhalt, all in full surgical costume, stoically observed a number of operations—an appendectomy, a gastrectomy, the removal of a tumor from the spinal cord. “Everybody was surprised and, if you ask me, disgusted that none of us got sick,” said Mitchum. As one surgeon stood poised to make his first incision, he told Bob and Olivia, “If you faint, I’d appreciate it if you faint backward.” This line and a number of incidents the group observed went straight into the screenplay. Kramer and Mitchum watched an operation on a man with a gangrenous intestine. When the patient was wheeled into the operating
room, the surgeon told him, “These two people here”—Mitchum and Kramer—”are observing your operation for a movie they are making.”

“Oh?” said the man on the operating table. “What’s the movie?”

“Not as a Stranger,”
said the surgeon, through his surgical mask.

“Oh, I read that. Who’s playing Dr. Lucas?”

“Robert Mitchum.”

“Robert Mitchum? You got to be kidding. . . .”

Paying no heed to such critics, Mitchum stayed the course Kramer had prescribed. Technical adviser Dr. Morton Maxwell worked closely with the actor, answering his many questions and teaching him the mechanics of the profession, giving him instruments to practice with at night—on Dorothy or the kids, presumably. Morton said he was “astonished at the speed with which Bob Mitchum learned to percuss a chest wall, tie sutures, and handle surgical clamps. . . . Bob learned in hours what it required medical students weeks to master.”

But Mitchum and his colleagues were not quite ready to take the Hippocratic Oath, as they proved soon after the hospital training period ended and filming of
Not as a Stranger
began. Kramer had unwittingly loaded the picture with a number of Hollywood’s most ferocious drinkers. “Mitchum, Sinatra, Brod Crawford, Lee Marvin—every one a teetotaller!” said Ed Anhalt, gleefully recalling the well-lubricated cast. “Myron McCormick? Broadway actor played the anesthesiologist in the picture? He’d fall asleep during a take, wake up screaming, and fall off the set! I’m very fond of Stanley, but he was a good boy, didn’t drink, and . . . Stanley had no idea what he was getting into with this mob.”

“It wasn’t a cast so much as a brewery,” said Robert Mitchum. The tippling would begin early, and by late afternoon the sets at the California Studios would become a full-blown bacchanal. Fights, with fists and food, erupted at a moment’s notice. One day the gang toppled a trailer. On another occasion they broke through the side of a dressing room. Telephones were ripped from the walls. It reminded Stanley Kramer of that picture he had produced about the motorcycle gang taking over the town, only that time the gang was working from a script and he could count on a happy ending.

One day Broderick Crawford went berserk. The scrawny but fearless Frank Sinatra enjoyed needling the huge, powerful Crawford, likening the actor to the retarded character, Lenny, in
Of Mice and Men.
“He could be mean, Sinatra,” said Anhalt. “Why he was so mean to Brod, I don’t know. And you didn’t want to make Brod lose his temper if you had any sense.” Crawford—Mitchum called him “the Crawdad”—took all the needling he
could stand one day and attacked Sinatra, holding him down, tearing off his hairpiece, and . . .
eating
it. Someone screamed, “My God, Crawford’s eaten Sinatra’s wig!”

“Mitchum tried to pull them apart,” said Anhalt. “He liked Brod, and he liked Sinatra, too. And like the Good Samaritan he ended up getting socked for his troubles. And Sinatra took off, disappeared, having instigated the whole thing. So Mitchum’s fighting with Brod, and Brod throws him through the window onto the balcony outside. Mitchum was big and strong, but Brod was even bigger.”

The Academy Award—winning Crawford began choking on the fake hair he had ingested. Someone ran in with technical adviser Dr. Maxwell, and they attempted to make Crawford vomit the hair clump up. Anhalt said, “I don’t know whether they were trying to save him or save the hairpiece, because it was the only one they had. Anyway, it was mangled and they couldn’t use it, so filming had to be postponed for I don’t know how long, until Sinatra could be fitted for a new toup.”

At the end of one exhausting day—blissfully without incident—Kramer dismissed the cast with a polite request: “Tomorrow morning we shoot one of the most difficult scenes in the picture and I want you all clear-eyed and no hangovers.
Please
 . . . everybody promise me you’ll go straight home now and get a good night’s sleep.” They promised. Kramer stayed late working with the film editor, then wearily got into his car and headed for home. He stopped at a red light on a seedy corner not far from the La Brea studio and saw a violent commotion outside a bar. He blinked a few times before he realized what he was looking at. It was three, no, four members of his cast, one of them lying sprawled on the asphalt, two in a ferocious fistfight. The light turned green and so did Kramer, cursing to himself and laughing mirthlessly; he drove on and didn’t look back.

The refined Olivia De Havilland, hair dyed blonde and having to speak all her lines with a “yumpin yiminee” Swedish accent, was subject to practical jokes, roughhousing, and “fanny pinching” (per Kramer) on the set, yet remained a figure of calm amid all the chaos. Anhalt: “She would never react to any of it. But I would feel bad and say to her, ‘You know, they don’t mean half the things they do or say.’ She said to me, ‘I know that. They don’t bother me. I’ve been around drunks.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’”

The other woman in the cast, Gloria Grahame, making her third film appearance with Mitchum, had entered the “toilet paper under the upper lip” phase of her career. “She put tissue under her lips because someone told her a thrust upper lip was sexy!” said Stanley Kramer. “See what I had to cope
with?” After many hours of shooting, the toilet paper would begin to wad up with saliva, making her dialogue incomprehensible. When Mitchum tried to kiss her in the film’s big passionate love scene, he found flecks of wet tissue coming out of her mouth. And she smelled funny. “She’s a nut!” he told people.

Mitchum and Sinatra became instant friends. Mitchum greatly admired Sinatra’s musical artistry going in, and Sinatra found Bob’s don’t-give-a-shit manner perfectly compatible. Sinatra was a short fuse with a crazy Napoleon complex, but he was certainly fun—there was always something happening when Frank was around. Mitchum earned the entertainer’s undying admiration by passing on his recipe for a can’t-fail hangover cure. “It’s like mother’s milk,” Mitchum said. A gratified Sinatra took to calling him “Mother” from then on. For years he would send him a greeting card on Mothers’ Day.

Mitchum and Eddie Anhalt became good buddies, too. “Everybody called him Mitch. I only called him Bob, for some reason. We went out just about every night when we were making that picture. Used to go to this place on Sunset Boulevard a lot. I drank martinis. He drank vodka. Sometimes he brought along a sidekick, kind of like Sinatra’s Jilly. Big guy, looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Tim Wallace, perhaps? “Don’t remember his name. He wasn’t illiterate, but he was close. But Bob was a smart guy. And he could write. Wrote some awfully good poetry. He wanted to be a writer at one point, but he probably got a look at some writers, somebody like you or me, and thought, ‘I don’t want to turn out like that,’ so he became an actor.”

One night—it was the night of November 5, midway through filming
Not as a Stranger
—Anhalt and Mitchum were sitting at the bar in the Villa Capri. They were expecting to be joined by Sinatra and some others from the picture. Mitchum tapped the screenwriter, telling him, “Hey, look, there’s DiMaggio. He looks terrible.” Anhalt looked, agreed. Joe DiMaggio was standing a little farther down the bar and appeared morose. Mitchum said, “Do you know him?” Anhalt said no. Mitchum said, “Let’s ask him if he wants a drink.” Anhalt said, “Yeah, he might appreciate that.” They waved Joe over. Just about then Frank Sinatra and Lee Marvin showed up. Everybody had a drink. Sinatra knew DiMaggio well and got the ex-ballplayer to admit what was bothering him. Of course, everybody knew that DiMaggio’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe had gone south. DiMaggio said that Marilyn had disappeared; she was hiding from him. He needed to talk to her, and he’d been frantically trying to track her down for days. Everyone commiserated. A lot of drinks later, DiMaggio went off to the men’s room and Sinatra said, “You know, we ought
to do something for him. He really is in terrible shape. We got to help him get to Marilyn.”