Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (79 page)

His sister Julie believed Robert’s generosity was simply not known to a lot of people because he wanted it that way. “He did all kinds of goodies for all kinds of people. But he didn’t do it for the credit. He never wanted to leave any fingerprints.”

“I think he was very aware that many people who came in touch or wanted to get close to him were trying to get something out of him,” said Reni San-toni. “And so he was always a little sceptical. If you wanted to spend time with him, and I count myself among them, you had to have no other reason than to have laughs and be together with this very interesting guy. You did not go to Mitchum and say, ‘Gee, I’ve got this good script I want you to see; you think you might—’ No, you never hustled him or that was the end. And I would never think of asking him for anything; I would never want to muddy the waters like that. But if you respected that, then you saw that he gave openly and generously.”

In addition to supplementing the incomes of his children when requested and offering the occasional boost to his brother and sisters and members of their families (brother John would write of Bob’s paying for John’s daughter’s medical bills on one occasion and other generosities through the years), Mitchum paid for pleasant upkeep for his mother and stepfather for most of their lives. His family’s involvement with the Baha’i organization was also supported by Mitchum, according to a family friend: “Their whole group, if they wanted to take a missionary trip or something, they would schlep the mother and Bob would pay for all of them.” While his wife did much work for high-profile charities like the SHARE organization that involved celebrity participation and publicized events, Mitchum preferred to remain the barroom philanthropist, helping out old pals and the sorts of characters who didn’t rate much in the way of Hollywood benefit dinners. His friend George Fargo, for example, a professional extra, was frequently in need; and Mitchum would often drive to the supermarket, buy eighty or a hundred bucks’ worth of groceries, and drop it off at Fargo’s with a bag of weed from his tree, giving the man sustenance for weeks at a time. Mitchum received many letters from prisoners through the years, some with desperate tales of having been abused by the justice system, railroaded into prison and such, and many times he would make at least the gesture of sending a check or recommending a lawyer and sometimes more. “Prisoners would write him or even call him,” said Toni Cosentino, his manager and a friend for many years. “They figured, he’d been in the joint, he was a tough guy, not a namby-pamby movie star. He was constantly
sending stuff to prison. People in prison just sort of had his heart, I don’t know why. We all say, sure, that guy didn’t really do it, but he gave everybody the benefit of the doubt. And just because other people said it was irrefutable evidence, he wouldn’t take that as gospel.”

“He called once, he was in town and he had some friends coming in,” Reni Santoni recalled. “And his usual ‘source’ was not to be found, so he called me and I checked and this one guy I knew was around. So I told Mitchum, and we agreed on a time. He did kind of slip in the fact that he hoped there weren’t going to be a bunch of people at this guy’s place. So I called up this guy and told him who it was coming over to make a purchase and we wanted it low key. He said, ‘That’s cool.’ So Mitchum picks me up in his little Porsche; we zip over to this guy’s apartment in Hollywood. We go to this guy’s apartment and there’s two guys sitting there on the couch. And I think, ‘Oh, shit.’ Mitchum’s very cool, he doesn’t let on he’s uptight or anything. He nods to the guys. One stares right at him and he can’t contain himself. He gets up from the couch, runs over, he says, ‘Hey, man, I had to stay to meet you!’ And Mitchum starts looking at the floor, he’s kind of embarrassed, he’s not looking to sign any autogaphs. And the guy says, ‘Man, you sent us that stuff, that gym equipment, those exercise bikes,’ and he mentions some penal institution in northern California. ‘Man, we didn’t have shit in that place. When that stuff showed up it was like Christmas! I’ve got to thank you for myself and eighty other individuals. Shit, man, I always knew I’d meet you one day and thank you; I didn’t know it would be here—while you were scoring!’ And he pumped his hand, and Mitchum’s all embarrassed. We did our business and got out of there. But that’s the kind of cool things he did, just because he thought: those guys didn’t have anything.”

On March 16, 1970, Robert and Dorothy celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary.

“He asked me what he should get her for an anniversary present,” said James Bacon. “I said, A Purple Heart!’”

People marveled at Dorothy’s aplomb, her self-control. It could not have been easy being married to “a masturbation image,” as Robert said she had called him. How often—at parties, social events, visiting on locations—must she have been been made to feel like an inconvenience, an intrusion, while the women—men, too—waited for Robert’s undivided attention. Some didn’t even bother to wait. Once at some party in London, Rex Harrison’s soused wife, Rachel Roberts, had crawled on hands and knees across the floor to
Mitchum—as Dorothy stood there beside him, no doubt aghast—and tried to pull his fly open with her teeth.

What kept them together? There were the standard-issue suggestions: love, habit, security. There were the cynical speculations: “The worst job in Hollywood is to be an ex-Mrs. Movie Star,” said one showbiz veteran who knew both of them. “All of a sudden you’re nobody. Even your own kids won’t answer your calls!” Another: “Wife and family, that was Bob’s safety net. When another woman tried to hold on to him he’d just say, ‘I’d love to see you more frequently, but my wife wouldn’t approve.’ Or, ‘You better ask Dorothy.’”

“She was his constant, his honing signal,” said Reni Santoni, a frequent visitor to the Bel Air household. “Whatever crazy shit he got into anywhere in the world, he knew there was always one place he could still go where he would be welcome and where he didn’t have to play the movie star. They were like Nick and Nora Charles together for a while. She was a handsome woman, very low key, sharp wit. And she wasn’t any shrinking violet. She wasn’t the kind to slip in from the kitchen and say, ‘Can I get you gentlemen something?’ She’d sit there with the guys as long as she wanted to. And she was always quite generous and very cool.”

“Dottie sometimes says she hoped I would evolve,” Mitchum reflected, “whatever that means. No way. People who’ve known me a long time tell her I was a bum when she married me, I’m a bum now, and I’ll be a bum when I go.”

For most of that year he drifted.

He would get in the Porsche and drive. He would roll into towns, try a few old phone numbers, stir up a drinking buddy or a friendly female, drive on. When he wanted to “get lost,” he told people, he would put up at some nowhere motel for a time, take out his teeth, go unrecognized. “It gives me,” he would say, “the temporary illusion that I’m real.”

He went to Mexico for a while. Tourists spotted him on the beach at Mazatlan. You could see him lying on a lounge chair in the sun, sipping from a bottle of tequila, with a comely Mexican chick rubbing coconut oil on his chest and shooing away the riffraff. An American on vacation down there got close enough to ask him what he was doing. Mitchum opened one eye and said he was getting in shape for his next picture,
The Life ofSabu.

He visited his mother and sister near Scottsdale, Arizona. Mother now lived with sister Julie and her jewelry executive husband, Elliott Sater. Bob’s
stepfather, the Major, was in his nineties by this time, completely deaf and ailing, consigned to a nearby rest home. He could still kick up his heels on a good day, still had a twinkle in his eye, and Julie and Mother were with him as often as possible.

The quarter horses took up some time, pleasantly spent. Mitchum kept between thirty and thirty-five animals on his seventy-six-acre ranch. He had raised at least one real champion: Don Guerro. Mitchum and trainer Earl Holmes and jockey Ronnie Banks ran the horse in the California derbies in the early ‘70s and won the Bay Meadows and Gold State stake races. Don Guerro was considered an “anxious colt,” with a rare quirk, bursting from the starting gate like a streak of lightning but so fast and hard he caused the ground to break, tripping himself. The horse either won by a mile or he fell flat on his face at the gate. Pundits called him “the Stumbling Senor.” After being written off by the handicappers, a four-year-old Don Guerro had a spectacular, unexpected win at the third running of the prestigious Champion of Champions race at Los Alamitos. With this glorious comeback, he was retired to stud. Mitchum could ask no more for himself.

People kept trying to get him back to work. The scripts came in. Reva would read them, make her recommendations. He would tell her to send them back. One day he got a call from Orson Welles. Orson said he wanted to direct him in a movie, and they had to get together at once. Robert thought this one at least was good for a lunch. Orson wanted to go to some French restaurant that cost about a hundred bucks a plate, plus wine. Orson didn’t have enough in the bank for hot dogs at Pink’s, so Mitchum was buying, so Mitchum told him they would go to the Polo Lounge. The waiter asked them if they were having any cocktails. Orson said he had stopped drinking all hard liquor. Mitchum ordered a large scotch, and Welles said he would have one, too, then drank up both at a swallow. He told the waiter, “Bring two more of those . . . and Mr. Mitchum would like another as well.” Welles told him about the movie project, a spy story set in a French whorehouse, and he slipped Shakespeare and Hearst into it somewhere. It couldn’t miss.

In the early morning of September 1, three eighteen-year-old girls came into the West Los Angeles Police Station. One girl had visible injury to her left eye in the form of a reddening of the eyeball and a slight laceration. A second girl had a visible injury on her right cheek, a fresh bruise and swelling. The girls
told the police that they had been in their car, stopped at Sunset after midnight, when a white Porsche came up beside them and through the open window they saw a man they recognized as the actor Robert Mitchum. Mitchum, they said, asked if they were interested in going with him to “smoke some shit.” The girls followed him in their car, up Benedict Canyon and into the hills, pulling up to a ranch house on a dead-end street. The three girls said there were other people inside the house, a couple and a single man at the other end of the main room, all of them smoking what smelled like pot. As the girls sat together nervously on the couch, they said, Mitchum offered them a lit marijuana cigarette, but one of the three “chickened out” and ran from the house and back to the car. Mitchum became angry, they said, yelled, “Don’t fuck me,” then struck one of the other girls on the leg and then in the eye. The two fled the house, they said, with Mitchum in pursuit, catching up with them and striking one girl on the cheek with the palm of his hand and then kicking the same girl as she tried to get into the automobile. They got the car going and drove off, leaving their host in the driveway staring after them.

At the West LA Police Station, Officers Capitain and Pedneau took one of the girls back to the Benedict house. Capitain knocked at the front door, got no answer, announced himself, and entered the house. The police report stated, “Officer Capitain located the Suspect (Mitchum) in bedroom with female/Caucasian and informed Suspect (Mitchum) that an individual fitting his description had been named in a crime report charging battery. Officer Capitain then obtained information from Suspect (Mitchum) as to his name, address, etc. Suspect (Mitchum) made no statements concerning the incident.”

No charges were filed. One of the movie magazines ran a near verbatim copy of the police report, including the names and addresses of the young women, with the headline, “3 T
EENAGE
G
IRLS
T
ELL
P
OLICE:
‘R
OBERT
M
ITCHUM
H
IT
U
S
 . . . T
RIED TO
T
URN
U
S
O
N TO
D
RUGS
.’ ” No reporters investigated the story. It was the autumn of 1970, and the press about Mitchum all concerned MGM’s fifteen-million-dollar Irish romance, the studio’s biggest picture in ages.

Ryan’s Daughter
would be released during the Christmas season of 1970. It was David Lean’s first film since the phenomenal
Zhivago,
and the media were happily buying into the notion of
Ryan’s Daughter
as a major cultural event about to be unveiled. Mitchum was brought to New York for various festivities and press gatherings anent the world premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan.
He went wherever he was asked, talked to reporters, appeared on television programs, including the long-running
Joe Franklin Show.
“He came on the air wearing these large, thick sunglasses,” Franklin remembered. “He looked like Stevie Wonder. I said, ‘Bob, why don’t you take the sunglasses off. That’s good for Ray Charles, but let the viewers see those gorgeous eyes of yours.’ He said, ‘Not at these prices.’”

MGM held numerous press screenings and trotted Mitchum in when the film ended for a brief star-gazing and Q and A session with critics and entertainment reporters. One screening was arranged specially for student journalists. Carolyn Sofia, a twenty-year-old college student writing for her campus newspaper,
The Chronicle,
was among the twenty or so in attendance. She wrote up the event in the paper and recalled it again thirty years later: “I remember him coming into the big screening room after the movie. The theater was filled with nothing but young people, everybody with long hair, bell-bottoms. And he comes in in a dark business suit, wearing shades. He was a very big presence in the room. The way I remember it is like he was standing under a spotlight, but there was no spotlight. He looked exactly like a movie star was supposed to look like. I didn’t know much about him. Had no idea about any of his past history with the law or anything. And he was supposed to answer a few questions, I guess; and he took out what looked like a lunch bag, a brown paper bag. Inside was a brick of marijuana.” Mitchum handed it off to a longhaired kid in the front row. “I was in the back, and not everyone realized what was going on at first, then everyone started to laugh and there was a sense of anticipation. He had them pass it around. Everyone was so polite they only took a very little and passed it, and I was the last person and ended up with the bag and a nice portion. No one asked for it back, so I took it and put it in my backpack and took it back to school with me. I had never used it before. That was the first time I had seen marijuana. But my pothead friends said it was great stuff. I was very popular for a couple of weeks.”