Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (68 page)

“Mitchum and Shirley liked each other very much, that was obvious,” said Robert Wise. “They kidded each other and it was pretty spicy kidding, pretty ribald. I had to have a closed set for a while; I was kind of embarrassed over what they were saying to each other. I can’t cite you chapter and verse of what it was, but it was pretty dicey [e.g., Wise, rehearsing the actors in a scene: Bob,
can I see the end bit again?/Mitchum: You mean just the pink part?]. . . . Maybe they
were
having an affair. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. But I had a difficult time getting them settled down to do a scene.”

Jerome Siegel, Wise’s assistant director, had a better view of what was developing between
Seesaw’s
stars, dealing with them away from the set and first thing in the morning each day of the production. “It wasn’t an obvious thing by any means,” said Siegel. “They were very subtle about it. You never saw anything where you could be sure there was a romance going on. But it didn’t surprise me when I did hear about it.

“They were both very happy, fun, relaxed together. They kept the set relaxed, no tension. They were both very down-to-earth people—well, not down-to-earth, they were pretty unusual characters actually, but they acted like regular people, not big stars. Mitchum in particular was very warm, just one of the boys, a great guy. He liked to have his secretary bring in a bunch of stuff for lunch, and he’d invite the guys to sit around and shoot the breeze and eat lunch with him. No entourage, no yes-men. And surprisingly, the drinks were all Cokes and tea, no hard liquor at all.”

Malachy McCourt, the Irish roustabout, raconteur, and actor, met Mitchum at breakfast time, not lunch, and had a different experience regarding the star’s liquid intake. Playing a bit part in a party scene, McCourt mentioned to Mitchum that they had a mutual friend in Richard Harris. “Of course, once I said I was a friend of Harris’s he just assumed that I was of the drinking fraternity . . . and he was quite correct in that assumption.”

Mitchum invited McCourt to his dressing room one morning and brought forth products from the homeland, bottles of Guinness and Irish whiskey. “We had a long talk as we sampled these refreshments, and I found him to be a highly intelligent man, very well read. Had a good sense of irony, didn’t take himself seriously. He had this tough facade but there was a softness within it all. Our conversation touched on many things and he spoke very eloquently of Ireland, he had a feeling for Irish mysticism, for the Celtic twilight. I found him to be a very bright man who had become a bit lost in his stardom, a man who thought he ought to be doing something else besides standing before the camera for a living.”

The pair were eventually joined by Frank Sinatra, in the vicinity shooting
The Manchurian Candidate.
“He was just popping in to say hello, that sort of thing. They were very chummy, a very easy relationship there. And Mitchum sat him down and poured him two large beakers, one with Guinness and one with the Irish whiskey. Sinatra gulped with dismay, drinking at that time in the morning, but he bravely downed a very good portion of both, and then made
his farewell. He was still a very thin man, Sinatra, and I’m sure it was hitting him harder than it hit Mitchum or myself. But at that hour of the morning it was a bit much even for me, to be quite honest!”

The assistants came calling—Mitchum wanted on the set.

“Fuck off,” he told them.

“But Mr. Mitchum, Mr. Wise is ready for you. . . . “

“Fuck off.”

Glasses were filled, Mitchum gathered McCourt round. “’Sing “The Bold Fenian Man” for me!’ saith this grand actor, and together we sang.”

Whatever the qualities were that had made
Two for the Seesaw
a hit on Broadway, they did not appear to have been replicated in the film adaptation. And as Mirisch’s
Son of The Apartment,
it lacked the wit and bite, the romanticism and ineffable weltschmerz of Wilder’s masterpiece, or anything close to it. Mitchum had delivered a perfectly good and often touching portrayal of the depressed, square Middle American who cannot in the end cope with the unconventional. But as he had suspected he would, Mitchum brought to this homely role certain inappropriate physical and stylistic qualities, not to mention distracting biographical baggage, that were bound to make the customers uncomfortable. From the critics he received some of his worst and most contemptuous notices since the RKO days, as if the part of Jerry Ryan had been taken on not by a seasoned and acclaimed dramatic actor but by one of the cast from the Bowery Boys series.

“Intellectual snobs,” Mitchum called them, and went home with the leading lady.

While their other in-production romances had faded away with the wrap party, Mitchum’s and MacLaine’s affair, much as she had anticipated, grew only stronger after the filming concluded, their pleasure in each other’s company an irresistible force. They began seeing each other regularly, for days and weeks at a time. With his spouse in Maryland and hers in Japan, they had the rest of the world to themselves. MacLaine became Mitchum’s partner in wanderlust and they journeyed off to favorite cities and far-off places. Paris. London. New York. New Orleans. They were happy, wealthy hoboes, bumming around the world, MacLaine following Mitchum’s lead, having “no sense of time or purpose.” In Manhattan they went to jazz clubs, hung out with Dave Brubeck and other Mitchum acquaintances, Robert discoursing on musical esoterica,
playing hipster professor to MacLaine’s doting student. In Louisiana they scored absinthe and buckets of oysters and gorged till they were seeing stars. They moved into an old barge on a secluded estuary in bayou country. Mitchum could make himself at home anywhere. Soon they were holding court with the locals, filling their cups, and trading tall tales.

Mitchum delighted in her lithe twenty-eight-year-old dancer’s body and a face he told her was “treacherously beautiful. . . like some enchanted goblins.” She was bright, funny, spirited. Her days as the Sinatra Rat Pack’s mascot had made her a sturdy drinking buddy and as unshockable as a Brooklyn stevedore, but she could be earnest and sensitive and had a burgeoning, ambitious intellectual curiosity.

Mitchum, to MacLaine, was a mysterious and fascinating creature, with his hidden depths and contradictions, variously cynical, poetic, coarse, romantic. She loved his stories and his rich, recondite, and often surreal verbiage, though many a time she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

He was hard to understand in many ways. Once, in a farmhouse they rented outside Paris, he watched her taking a bath and tears began welling in his eyes; he told her he was crying because she looked so beautiful. The same man, she knew, was quite capable of outbursts of rage and violence. On one occasion he went after a driver who had cut him off on the road, ramming into him again and again for miles, grinning, eyes afire. MacLaine looked at him beside her and could only chillingly see the killer he had brought to life in
The Night of the Hunter.

The two of them were together when President Kennedy was shot, and they sat side by side in front of the television, day and night, watching the news unfold. It didn’t matter what you did with your life, Mitchum whispered after hours of silence, staring at Kennedy’s coffin, there were always bastards out there waiting to grind you down.

When family or professional obligations took them in different directions, they might not see each other for months but remained in touch with long, intimate phone calls. His words would often haunt her, MacLaine remembered. They would visit each other’s sets, and insiders’ tongues wagged, though the affair would not be hinted at in the columns until much later. “I remember I was playing golf early one morning with Max Perkins, who was director of publicity for Warner Brothers,” said showbiz reporter James Bacon. “And Max got a call from the head security guard at the studio, said Mitchum was in his dressing room with Shirley MacLaine and he was drunker than hell and making all kinds of noise, and everything else was going on in there. This is about seven, eight o’clock in the morning and they’d been there all night. So Perkins
called Jack Warner and asked him what they should do. And Jack Warner said, ‘Hell, if she keeps him in his dressing room we at least know where to find him. Tell the guard to make sure they have enough
ice.
‘”

Mitchum and MacLaine would work together again, briefly, in
What a Way to Go!
the grandiose Comden-Green satire in which Shirley was to play a sweet small-town girl who weds and buries a series of millionaires, each husband played, briefly, by a major male star—Paul Newman, Dean Martin, Dick Van Dyke, Gene Kelly, and Mitchum, who took on the role of Rod Anderson, a jet-set industrialist.

The director was J. Lee Thompson. “We were setting up
What a Way,
and Shirley and I were in New York to meet with Darryl Zanuck. We were there about a week and Bob Mitchum arrived, and we would all go out to dinner together every night. So I knew the situation. They weren’t broadcasting the fact. Well, they were both married. Shirley would never refer to Robert as anything other than a good friend. But they were having great fun together and were great fun to be around. And I think they were probably very much in love with each other.

“Frank Sinatra was supposed to be in the film. Each of the stars was getting a certain salary, and it was quite a lot for two weeks’ work, but Sinatra suddenly wanted about three times that amount and the producers decided they wouldn’t pay it. And so we moved on. I would have liked Gregory Peck to do it, but he turned it down or was doing something else. And I suggested Bob, and Shirley was consulted, and of course she liked that idea.”

Mitchum’s segment in
What a Way to Go!
had an odd, coincidentally metaphoric resonance for those in the know. His celebrity tycoon character is seen to lead a glamorous, globe-trotting existence with sexy Shirley MacLaine in tow, while secretly longing to return to his overalls, jug of corn liquor, and favorite moo cow back on the rustic farm of his dreams (which, after he mistakenly tries to milk a bull’s testicles, is the scene of his sudden, violent death).

For three years Mitchum lived in a floating captain’s paradise, drifting shift-lessly from spouse to sweetheart and back again. He returned to the farm periodically, and Dorothy and the kids still joined him on location trips, coming to Hawaii while he filmed
Rampage
(a restfully enjoyable final entry in the dying Great White Hunter genre, with Jungle Bob tracking a mythical leopard-tiger. It was, said the star, “a lot of dancing girls, banjo playing, and bull”) and keeping house in England during the shooting of
Man in the Middle.
Dorothy knew all about Shirley. She could count on old “friends” from Hollywood to
keep her up to date on her husband’s transgressions. It was another passing fling, she must have thought, but
Two for the Seesaw
came and went and MacLaine did not go with it. The gossip continued. Things appeared very tense as Mrs. Mitchum had to to confront the idea that her husband might finally have found someone else. There were reports of public feuding, of Dorothy arriving at the
Rampage
producer’s party with some male friends and then departing in a fury the instant Robert arrived. Tongues waggled about a New Year’s party at Romanoff’s, Dorothy attending teary-eyed, and no sign of her husband. Hollywood hands wondered if they were finally seeing the disintegration of one of the town’s longest-lived and supposedly indestructible marriages. Dorothy no doubt wondered the same thing.

She might have taken solace from the fact that Shirley MacLaine had no clearer idea of where it was all heading. Getting Bob to consider the future was like trying to catch a handful of air. For all their intimate time together, he remained in many ways as elusive and ultimately unknowable a character as when she had first determined to make him “a project.” Peel away one layer, MacLaine found, and there was another enigmatic surface underneath. Sometimes it just seemed as if there was no
there
there. She believed that he had not a single strongly held personal opinion, was “emotionally committed” to nothing. “He had no desires,” she wrote, “not in relation to food, an evening out, or an evening in. His attitude toward lovemaking was the same. He never took the initiative. He enjoyed it certainly, he was sweet and tender, but I never really knew what he wanted. Anything was OK.”

His refusal to articulate his feelings on subjects about which MacLaine was contrastingly voluble made for increasingly explosive encounters. Once, in a hotel room in New York, she became so angry that she dragged him to his feet and out the door and shoved him onto the floor in the hallway. She paused before slamming the door shut, waiting for his response.

Mitchum, in the hall, on the floor, said only, “I’ll tell him when he comes
in.

At times MacLaine’s frustration with Mitchum would grow so great that she would daydream—shocking herself—of committing some very violent act on him, something terrible, whatever it might take to stir the man from the world of indifference in which he seemed to be living. She would decide to be done with him and then find herself drifting back. They would make plans to meet somewhere in the world and Mitchum wouldn’t show, no explanation. That was the end! No more. And then he would track her down somewhere, they
would find the old harmony, and the affair would bloom again. Friends told MacLaine that she was drawn to difficult men, and she began to wonder if the key to the relationship wasn’t somehow all tied up with conflicts in her past and with another difficult, distant man she had tried to love. In grappling with Robert, two decades older, MacLaine wondered, was she trying to resolve issues she had had with her father? Mitchum’s opinion on this theory would remain unrecorded.

Til tell him when he comes in.

One evening MacLaine showed up at John Mitchum’s door—according to John in his memoir—with a half-gallon of vodka in one hand and her high-heeled shoes in the other.