Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (52 page)

All her stored up anti-Mitchum fury returning in a flash, Pilar cried, “Leave here!
This instant!
” and chased them out of the house.

An astonished John Wayne joined his wife at the front door just in time to see the couple scurrying to their car. “When my mother told him why the Mitchums had gone,” Aissa recalled, “my father was careful not to crack the thinnest smile.”

A few days after the
Blood Alley
firing, having had his sudden availability so well publicized in the press, Mitchum was offered the lead in
Man with the Gun,
the premiere producing effort of Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., and the directorial debut of Orson Welles’s former longtime right-hand man, Richard Wilson (this would be the third of four Mitchum features in a row helmed by first-timers). The others in the cast included Jan Sterling, Karen Sharpe, and Henry Hull. Following in the bootsteps of
The Gunfighter
and
High Noon, Man with the Gun
was another heavy-handed, psychologically oriented oater about glum, tortured Westerners who never get to leave their backlot towns. Mitchum’s long-faced peacemaker, Clint Tollinger, spends much screen time trying to get information about his abandoned daughter from his ex-wife, now a madame
at the local whorehouse. It was a long ride from
Hoppy Serves a Writ.
When Tollinger finds out that the girl is dead, he goes berserk and nearly burns down the town he’s been hired to protect, one of the movie’s two memorable sequences (the other: classic bad guy Leo Gordon’s amazingly mean-spirited shooting of a little boy’s puppy).

With Mitchum’s trouble-making image freshly on everyone’s mind, there was a sense of anticlimax to his display of nothing but efficient and amiable professionalism. Karen Sharpe, a young and lovely actress playing the film’s spunky ingenue role, recalled, “Jan Sterling and I would get together in the dressing room and talk about him and wonder what sort of colorful things he was going to do. But he was so
tame
on our movie. And we’d say, ‘Oh, he’s nothing like his image!’ He was such a sweetheart. And he was so wonderful to me. I was just starting out, and he took such good care to make sure I had the right angle and gave me time for my lines. So generous.” Said director Wilson, “Mitch never gave anyone a bad moment. He was never late for work, and he stuck right to his knitting. He worked very hard to bring the picture through on schedule.” Mitchum was almost too cooperative. For the saloon fire sequence, where his character was to be seen coming out with one of the villains slung over his shoulder, Mitchum refused to let them use a stunt double. Reluctantly Wilson went along, then crossed signals kept Mitchum inside the burning building too long, and by the time he came running out—carrying a stuntman—his shirt and pants were scorched and smoking, and the stuntman wasn’t feeling too good either.

Leo Gordon: “He was a first-class actor, Mitchum. First-class movie actor. We were watching him shooting a scene and somebody said, ‘He doesn’t do anything. He’s not reacting.’ I said, ‘You don’t understand what he does. The camera can pick up things that the eye can’t. Wait till you see it on the screen.’ And sure as hell there it was. I thought he was a helluva guy, just as easygoing as can be. We would sit around on the set bullshitting in those canvas-back chairs, and Mitchum loved to regale us with stories of his amorous adventures. I remember there was one he told about being down in New Orleans sometime before and how it was hotter than hell in his hotel room . . . and—he’s telling this—he’s lying naked on his bed and the phone rings. So he picks it up and hears a voice say,
‘Mistah Meetchum? I’m so-and-so, Miss New Aw-lins for nineteen-whatever, and I’m the mayuhs official welcomin’ committee, sugah, and would y’all mind if I came up and said hello?’
And Mitchum says,
’Hell no, I wouldn’t mind,
’ and so then she comes up to the room, the door’s unlocked . . . well, anyway, it went on from there and . . . I don’t suppose I better go into the details on this one, but he was quite a damn good storyteller.”

Mitchum and some of the cast members went on a publicity junket to New York City when
Man with the Gun
was about to open. “I went—and my mother was even with us because I was so young,” said Karen Sharpe. “It was my first trip to New York and Bob was excited for me. We were on the plane and he’d say, ‘Come here, I want to show you the Statue of Liberty,’ and I saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. It was like he didn’t want me to miss a thing. And we got off the plane, I think it was about seven in the morning, some ungodly hour, and there were lots of reporters there to meet us. And just to give them a good picture and—he was so sweet—just to make sure I got my picture in all the papers, giving me a boost, he took me up in his arms and carried me right off the plane! Oh, but when that picture got printed, my boyfriend of the time, Al Martino, got jealous; he thought there was an affair going on, and that really upset the relationship, but that’s showbiz! And Bob was just a wonderful host on that trip for the two or three days we were there. We had to go from one radio show or one newspaper interview to another, very busy, but he showed me around, really watched out for me. And so generous—he took me to Toots Shor’s, this great old hangout in Manhattan, and I remember how he told them that whenever I came in there, I was to be his guest. ‘When you’re in New York,’ he said, ‘you come here, whether or not I’m here or I’m dead and gone, it’s on me.’ That was how sweet he was. I must have been pretty naive back then, but I really couldn’t understand how he had gotten such a bad reputation. The one and only time when I thought, Hm, maybe it’s true the things they say, was when I had to do an early morning newspaper interview with Bob at his hotel. I went up there—I was staying at the Warwick; he was at the Sherry Netherland—and the reporters were there already, and, yeah, it looked like Bob had had a very big night. He was sitting in his underwear, in his shorts, giving an interview. And he was pretty hungover. And Tim was there, his bodyguard and stand-in, and Reva, and they were always together and I wasn’t sure what the relationship was; I was kind of naive about all that stuff. But Bob was sitting in his underwear and giving an interview. He may have been slightly blase—well, I never saw him very passionate about anything, don’t think he was very impressed with himself or anybody else—but he didn’t miss a beat, was up and awake and did his thing, very dependable no matter how awful he must have been feeling.”

As part of his publicity duties, Mitchum made an appearance on network television—his first ever—guest hosting CBS’s
Stage Show
variety program. Another, more intriguing TV gig was planned—Toots Shor’s acquaintance Jackie Gleason talked him into appearing on that week’s episode of
The Honeymooners
—but Mitchum left town and it didn’t happen.

•  •  •

On March 8 he made official the formation of DRM Productions (from his and Dorothy’s initials) for the purpose of creating or coproducing Robert Mitchum movies. It was good for taxes when you did it this way, and, very important, it was a lot harder to get fired when you were your own boss. And more: He really did want to start creating his own stuff. He had even begun coming to the office on Sunset and working on a couple of projected screen stories (in addition to writing new lyrics and patter for his sister Julie’s latest cabaret act). Nothing esoteric—he wasn’t about to get nutty and make art movies with his own income at stake—but he thought they could be good commercial pictures with things in them the public hadn’t seen a million times already and maybe contain a few personal elements as well. One idea, about moonshiners and fast cars in the Deep South, he had been tinkering with for years, but it still needed work.

On the heels of DRM’s announcement, Mitchum signed a long-term, five-picture deal with United Artists, the financing and distribution organization for which he had just made three films in the last eight months.

Confidential Magazine:
the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world, Tom Wolfe called it. Created by New York publisher Robert Harrison, the William Randolph Hearst of sleaze, the man who had given to America
Titter, Wink, Flirt,
and
Beauty Parade, Confidential
was the prototype for a new generation of movie magazines not dependent on studio support and eschewing regurgitated publicity-department fodder in favor of hot gossip, pillow talk, lurid disclosures of celebrities’ hidden pasts and secret sexual preferences, and, on a slow news week, pure and simple slander. In May folks picking up the new issue of
Confidential
found an article by a certain Charles Jordan, Hollywood investigative reporter. The title of the story was “Robert Mitchum, the Nude Who Came to Dinner,” and the jaunty, cryptic deck read like this: “The menu said steak. There was no mention of a stew. And one guest was not only fried—but peeled . . . It’s a pretty crazy story even for a guy who did time in a Hollywood clinic on charges of flying too high with Marijuana Airlines!”

All was explained on the pages that followed, an intimately detailed account of a party supposedly cohosted by Charles Laughton and producer Paul Gregory at Gregory’s home on Ocean Front Walk in Santa Monica. Arriving late with an anonymous female friend and three sheets to the wind, wrote Jordan,
actor Robert Mitchum proceeded to take off all his clothes, then lurched his way to the dinner table where, as Laughton and others averted their eyes, he doused his nude body with ketchup. “This is a masquerade party, isn’t it?” said the brawny star. “Well,
I’m a hamburger!”

Mitchum called up Jerry Geisler. Publisher Bob Harrison, editor Howard Rushmore, the managing editor, and two associate editors were slapped with a lawsuit asking one million dollars in general, exemplary, and additional damages. No one had thought to do such a thing before. It was a risky proposition for Mitchum of all people to sue an underhanded rag for such a trivial story, especially when the magazine could so easily fill an entire special double issue with more authentic and more damaging tales of his misadventures. Possibly he was bowing to family pressures. It was believed that when his son Jim had recently been eased out of a snooty private school he was attending, it was because the principal was repelled by the Mitchum reputation. (Jane Greer and Dore Schary promptly removed their own children from the school in protest.) Dorothy told a reporter, “The backwash of these sensational stories about Bob is hurting our children. Jim idolizes his dad, and the other kids keep ribbing him. He’s always getting into fights sticking up for Bob.” But the press couldn’t really take all the credit for Mitchum’s rep. That was what you called blaming the messenger. Mitchum said it was “a case of fighting for your good name. People are inclined to believe what they read in magazines.” But it was the lawsuit that spread the story, garnering him a new wave of newspaper headlines, his most peculiar yet—including “M
ITCHUM
D
ENIES
R
OLE OF
N
UDE
B
URGER
; S
UES
”—and millions who had never even heard of
Confidential
now woke up to read—and perhaps believe—an account of the magazine story Mitchum was denying.

Overnight he was hailed by his fellow movie stars as a hero, a crusader. A blow for liberty had been struck at last! Published since December 1952,
Confidential
had entered the movie capital like a festering contagion. What made it seem so threatening to so many celebrities was that the scandal rag burrowed deep within the substratum, relying on a newly tapped network of paid industry insiders to provide information, luring them—local reporters, wardrobe ladies, butlers, bartenders—to violate the Hollywood
omerta,
the code of silence that had previously protected so much bad behavior. The magazine used private detectives, people settling grudges, people telling tales out of school, people informing, naming names—it was like the HUAC witch-hunt days all over again, except that instead of Commies
Confidential was
rooting out adulterers, drunks, and scumbags.

“You know what that Mitchum
Confidential story
was?” said James Bacon,
syndicated columnist and friend of the offended party. “That was based on a story Mitchum told me, and he probably told a lot of other people. He said he was with Charles Laughton and this other guy, and of course the two of them are both fags, and they’re eating dinner and, I don’t know, they can’t take their eyes off Mitchum, I guess. So Mitchum said he opened his pants, took his cock out, laid it on the plate, and poured ketchup over it. And he says to them,
’Which one of you guys wants to eat this first?
“Now that’s the story he was telling. And I guess what happened is a reporter in Hollywood, one of them writing for
Confidential
on the quiet, anonymously, wrote this story up but it was too raunchy for the magazine and the magazine changed it around to ‘I’m a hamburger’ or whatever it was, so they could publish it. And the funny thing is, Mitchum became convinced for a while that I had written the story. We’d run into each other and he’d give me a funny look and say, ‘Hey, Jim, still writing for
Confidential?
’”

Giesler wanted no settlement or apology, only a courtroom trial and a million bucks. Believing that a jury was more than likely to side with a handsome movie actor over a sleazy scandal rag, and further believing that once they settled with or lost a lawsuit to one of their celebrity subjects they would be inundated with more of the same and be run out of business, Harrison and his crew decided to try and defeat Mitchum . . . the
Confidential
way.

Bob’s brother, John, remarried, was back in Los Angeles and working regularly these days as a journeyman actor in the movies. Not long after news of the lawsuit hit the papers, he was making a picture called
Man in the Vault
with William Campbell. One evening they were shooting some scenes in Art Link-letter’s bowling alley in West Hollywood and an off-duty deputy from the sheriff’s department was providing security. The deputy struck up a conversation with John Mitchum and invited the actor to come over to his place for a drink when they were done shooting. Mitchum dropped by as he said he would. The cop had impressively luxurious digs and a new Cadillac in the driveway. The drinks flowed, and the deputy started talking to him about Robert, feeling him out, making cracks. “That brother of yours probably acts like a real big shot, huh? Everybody’s got to kiss his ass, I bet. . . .”