Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (74 page)

“Andy really knew how to handle physical things,” said Terry Morse, assistant director on
The Way West.
“Well, he was about six foot seven himself, so nothing really intimidated him. A great, great guy. And for all the difficulties, he kept it right on schedule. We had a month in Eugene and two months in Bend. No interiors, studio stuff, to speak of at all.”

Though they had both appeared in
The List of Adrian Messenger,
this was the first time Mitchum and Kirk Douglas had worked together since
Out of the Past.
Douglas’s great success since then had, it seemed, done nothing to mellow his drive or competitiveness. “Kirk was arrogant and rude to everybody,” said Terry Morse. “That’s the kind of guy he was, and nobody really liked Kirk. He wanted everything his way. He was not a pleasant person to be around.”

“My introduction to Kirk Douglas on that picture,” said Harry Carey, Jr., “was while I was sitting in a chair, reading a paper. And Douglas comes over and jerks it out of my hand, says, ‘That’s my paper!’ That’s how he introduced himself. Later, we got to where we could just about say good morning to each other. But he was really full of it. A real pain in the neck. He tried to take over the thing at some point. Widmark got furious at it, very agitated. He screamed, ‘You’re not directing this goddamn movie!’ Really raised hell with Douglas. But Bob just laughed at it.”

“It was very dumb of him to try and provoke a confrontation with me,” Mitchum told Dick Lochte. “So many guys wear their balls in their pockets. Tightening their guts, shouting ‘Look at me, I’m a wrestling champion.’ As far as Douglas is concerned, all I have to do is whack him one between the horns and it’d be all over. And he knows it.”

“Well, somebody like Kirk Douglas and somebody like Mitchum, they were poles apart in personality,” said Andrew McLaglen. “Bob was an easygoing guy, and Kirk was more volatile. But there was never a feud. I felt within myself that Kirk probably wasn’t one of Bob’s favorite guys, but you’d never know it. Bob wasn’t the kind of guy that goes spouting off with that kind of stuff.”

Mitchum was so laid-back during much of the filming that—while shooting scenes along the banks of the river—he would actually pick up his fishing pole and cast a line into the water—
between takes.

“Sometimes,” said Morse, “he would get so concentrating on the fishing that he would walk away from the set, start moving along downstream. All of a sudden we’d be ready for him and he’d just disappeared. We had to assign a production assistant to keep an eye on him when he started wandering off down the river. He loved to fish. He was a great guy. You know, his brother, John, came along for that one, had a small part. They got along great, and Bob took care of his younger brother.”

“You never saw Bob at night,” Jack Elam said. “The rest of us usually got together, most of us staying at the same motel, and we had cookouts and dinners, and John would be there every night playing his guitar. But Bob stayed by himself most of the time.

“We worked so hard on
The Way West,
it was a shame it got such mixed reviews and kind of died somewhere on the vine. At the time we were shooting it, we really thought we were making a damn good picture.”

“The funniest thing I remember from that one,” said Dobe Carey, “was one morning in the woods outside Eugene. It was about seven o’clock in the morning and Bob stumbles over to the set. It’s a real cold morning and he’s got an army fatigue jacket pulled up around his ears. His hair’s a mess. He’s got on dark glasses, and he’s not even sure where he is yet. And this guy runs up in his face, yelling, ‘Bob, I want you to meet the only lady sheriff in the state of Oregon!’ And he pushes forth this fat little lady in her sheriff’s uniform. And Bob takes a long pause to look at this woman, and he says, ‘Glad to know you, Sheriff. Tell me something, do you know anyplace around here where a guy can go to get laid?’ And oh God, they were both shocked. The woman couldn’t believe her ears. And they both ran off. But, you know, it wasn’t a good idea to bother Bob that early in the morning.”

Despite some well-staged action, epic images, and beautiful photography,
The Way West
was not a success, hamstrung by the soap operatic plot and melodramatic overkill. As for the film’s remarkable star trio, for all of Douglas’s dynamic histrionics and fine work by Richard Widmark, the consensus was that Mitchum (wearing buckskins and a shaggy wig he said made him look like “Gravel Gertie”) walked away with the picture in a typically underplayed yet strong and moving performance as the old trail scout gradually losing his vision. Though he seems to have assumed it by happenstance, Mitchum’s role was a custom fit, one more lonely, stoic outsider turning his back on civilization by the fade-out.

Driving himself up to Oregon, he had heard an obscure country and western record on an obscure country and western radio station somewhere beyond Bakersfield. The song was called “Little Old Wine Drinker Me,” and it spoke to him. Later in the year he hooked up with Fred Foster, president and creative head at Monument Records, and traveled to Nashville, Tennessee (with some supplementary work in Hollywood), to record an album of easygoing pop and country pop tunes, some new, some old, including “Wine Drinker,” “Sunny,” “Wheels (Keep A-Rollin’),” and two of Mitchum’s own compositions, “Ballad of Thunder Road” and “Whippoorwill.”

With jaunty, bleary, and on- and off-key vocal stylings like some hybrid of
Dean Martin and Keith Richards, the record conveyed the ambience of something improvised at a truckstop roadhouse around four in the morning. The album, called
That Man Robert Mitchum
 . . .
Sings,
was released with a striking cover photograph (and no type), a close-up of Bob in a pink shirt and a tousled, modified Beatle hairdo, and on the back were exuberant liner notes by Johnny Mercer. “I don’t suppose Bob Mitchum is the greatest singer in the world,” Mercer began, with candor, “but he is one of the greatest guys in the world. . . . The same carefree attractiveness that you find in his acting, you will find in this Monument album. . . . What some would call a ‘maverick,’ and that’s how he is about how he sings . . . just as he always has been about his career and what people thought of him. His beat is impeccable, only a shade behind Bobby Darin, and if a note is too high for him, what the hell—he can act his way through it. I think the quality of his singing will surprise you. . . . If I sound like a ‘fag,’ sue me.”

Released as a single in May 1967, Mitchum’s “Little Old Wine Drinker Me” broke the pop charts and for several weeks was the number one country and western record in various markets across the country. Dino would later record the tune and have a major success with it, but Mitchum’s 45 remained the preferred choice of jukeboxes throughout the Southwest for many years to come. Despite the record’s good showing, Mitchum made no follow-up to
That Man.

Back in Los Angeles after seven years, wanting to make an appropriately impressive return to their old stomping ground, Dorothy had taken a lease on a spectacular manor house on Rockingham in Brentwood that had been the home of Cole Porter for twenty-three years. “Comfortable, dreary, and expensive,” Mitchum called it. Trina, now a stunning-looking teenager, was enrolled at the tony Westlake School for Girls. His beloved quarter horses were scattered, stabled at an assortment of California locales—”a couple of ‘em in rooms at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” he said. Eventually they would be brought together again at a small ranch—seventy-six acres—he purchased in rural Atascadero, a couple of hundred miles from town.

After the Mitchums’ years of relative isolation in Maryland, there was a comforting feeling of coming home, being accepted back into the fold by the town’s extended showbiz family. Bob could even be persuaded to put on a jacket and tie and attend an occasional party and public gathering. They met up with old acquaintances they hadn’t seen in ages. Of course, some of these had been avoided with good cause. At a reception given by Henry Fonda for
his daughter, Jane, and her husband, Roger Vadim, Mitchum and Wild Bill Wellman found themselves in the same room for the first time since the ugliness at San Rafael. “I went there with my father because my mother was ill that night,” said Wellman’s son William. “There was a ton of people at the party. At some point in the evening Mitchum arrived and worked his way to the end of the crowded hallway and came into my father’s view. They’d had that feud on since the time he had fired Bob on
Blood Alley.
Dad was much older then and pretty tame, but he’d had a few beers and he was still capable of getting out of hand. Mitchum didn’t see us. He was standing there smoking a cigarette and holding a drink. My father spotted him and started practically running at him. And I thought,
My God, he’s going to hit Mitchum!
And I’m rushing through the crowd trying to catch him and protect my father. And when Mitchum saw him coming at him, he spilled his drink he was so startled, you know, about to get hit by this old man. And Dad grabbed him around the shoulders and hugged him, and Mitchum hugged him back, and the next thing they’re grinning and sitting down and talking for the longest time.”

Though they had known each other forever, it was during this period, after their pleasant months together on
El Dorado,
that Mitchum and John Wayne became—for a time—pals, roistering around town together—though never, of course, within sight of Mrs. Wayne
(that Blood Alley
–era feud remained alive). Mitchum was ever amused at the way Duke played his role in life to the hilt, wearing four-inch lifts to make his six-foot-four-inch frame still more impressive—gave him that funny walk, Mitchum said—having his car roof raised so he could comfortably keep his Stetson in place while driving. Once Mitchum came to Wayne’s production office and listened to him screaming at his staff, knocking chairs over in a seemingly volcanic fury. Then, slamming his office door shut, he grinned from ear to ear and pulled out a jug. “You gotta keep ‘em
Wayne-conscious,”
he said. Despite his posture as a scold of young libertines, Wayne enjoyed getting smashed and, according to Mitchum, wasn’t as square as he might appear. When a young actor and pot-smoking buddy asked, out of curiosity, whether John Wayne would ever get high when they were together, Mitchum told him, “Duke will do anything. He’ll do it all.”

“They were pretty funny together,” said Paul Helmick. “I remember one time there was a big party to welcome Barbra Streisand to Hollywood. It was held outdoors at Ray Stark’s house. I was invited because I was going to be the production manager on the picture
Funny Girl.
It was the elite of Hollywood there. And who shows up stumbling around in the garden but Mitchum and Wayne. Just the two of them, no women or nothing, crashing this party. I said, ‘What the hell are you two doing here? This is a formal thing; they don’t want
a bunch of cowboys here!’ They said, ‘We want to meet Barbra!’ And Wayne said, ‘How’d you ever get mixed up with a nice outfit like this?’ And I told him, ‘I only do cowboy pictures if I can’t get on a good musical. . . .’”

One of the Mitchums’ new neighbors on Rockingham was the fabulous shock-haired comedienne, Phyllis Diller. “They were darling people,” Diller recalled. “And he . . .
uh!
The voice, God, just the voice, the body, the attitude, what a guy! Exuded that maleness. And such a character. He would sit and regale us with stories. And he was so proud that he had been jailed thirty-seven times—it was his badge of honor!

“He was a world-class drinker, God, yes, we had that in common!
Ha!
He did as he pleased at all times. One evening after I had restored this lovely, beautiful old home of mine, I gave a big ‘all-star’ party. Very grand. A hundred and fifty sit-down dinner. And at every place setting was a large goblet of water with a large goldfish swimming in it. I thought it was amusing, and if they wanted they could take their fish home in a little compartment, a party favor. Mitchum sat down, picked up the glass, and drank it, fish and all! They were often guests in my home because I was crazy about both, absolutely nuts about them. And Robert was nuts about my chili. Well, and properly so! It’s a hundred-year-old recipe, and it’s the world’s greatest chili. And when I had a buffet, there would be all sorts of lovely things, lobster and shrimp and huge roasts, and Robert would just fill up a bowl with chili and lick it clean.

“Dorothy was a darling person. Straight on. A good mother, a fine friend, no BS, just a nice person. You could feel very comfortable with her. A friend. No game playing. And she had her work cut out with that husband of hers. She’d tell me what a bother it was he was so untrue. But he would declare temporary insanity, and she would always forgive him. I tried to talk her into a divorce. I did!
A-haa!We
were away on a trip, a mutual friend, Lady Sassoon, her annual ball in the Bahamas. Both in the same guest house. And we were talking about him. You know, we were away from home, what are we going to talk about—men! Look, he would get out of her sight, he’d be surrounded by these beautiful young sluts—I mean starlets—that can’t wait to jump into bed, they’re throwing it in his face, and he couldn’t resist. ‘Temporary insanity,’ he called it. I think the word is
horny.
And she was angry at him. And I told her there was only one thing to do,
divorce him!
I had had just enough to drink to tell the truth, to be brutally honest with her. She would have
none
of it. It was a lifelong affair, she said. They loved each other. It went back to the beginning; they’d been in love since they were kids. . . . Thank God I didn’t marry
my
high school sweetheart. . . an ugly little rat! But I’m getting off the subject. . . .

After twelve months—”when the rent came due,” said Bob—they decided to leave the manor house on Rockingham. He had never cared for the place; it felt like old Cole Porter was turning over in his grave every time you belched or brought a muddy boot indoors.

They planned to rent something in town until an appropriate house could be purchased. That was all going to be Dottie’s bailiwick. Mitchum told Reva to get him the hell out of town quick. He signed for two pictures shooting back-to-back in Europe.