Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (83 page)

In the evening, in town, Mitchum is drinking tall glasses of
pastis
with droplets of water. He sits at a cafe and ruminates sullenly to a reporter, William Hall: “I’m trapped. It’s an economic expedient, nothing more. I’ve no pride in my films. I don’t like being a movie star. I don’t like being owned. . . .” Later, the mood lightens, he scats to an appreciative audience. How he taught Gina Lollobrigida a new diet, “isometric farting.” Tells about the time he was at Eleanor Roosevelt’s joint and was trying on one of her nightgowns when Noel Coward comes in and starts kissing him on the hand and then FDR’s old lady walks in on them. Someone asks where he’s stashed his own wife. Mitchum says, “She’s here somewhere. I’m expecting her to show up at some embarrassing moment—like when I’m in bed with a cop. . . . “

He can’t sleep. Actor Cliff Gorman, in the hotel room below, hears Mitchum moving about all night. Preminger has scheduled two scenes to be shot at dawn: Mitchum, Cliff Gorman, and others scaling a wall, and a fight scene between Mitchum and French-Arab actor Amidou. A production assistant comes for him at 4
A.M.
It is still pitch-dark when Mitchum arrives at the set. He enters the big catering tent where some members of the company are having coffee or breakfast. He shouts that he should not have been called so early and that a half hour had been wasted going to the wrong location. After getting no satisfactory response from the film’s associate producer, Mitchum goes over to the big wooden pole in the center of the catering tent and in his best Samson imitation attempts to pull it down. The members of the crew go on drinking their coffee, thinking that if they ignore him, there is a chance the tent will not come down on their heads. Mitchum storms out, growling that he would make them pay for this, that Preminger would have to do fifty takes for every shot in the picture.

Outside, Mitchum spots Preminger supervising the preparation of the tracks for the camera.

Mitchum screams, with mocking accent, “Vy haff you gotten me out here at this fucking hour of ze night, Otto?”

“Bob, you have been drinking with the Corsicans,” says Preminger.

“Yeah, that’s what they got here. Ship in some Jews and I’ll drink with them.”

“You were drinking yesterday when we tried to film. It cannot go on like this.”

“Just what are you trying to tell me, Otto?”

“. . . cannot go on . . .”

“You’re giving me my walking papers? Okay, let’s shake hands and I’ll be on my way, pal.”

“I don’t want to shake hands,” Preminger says. “There is nothing to shake hands about.”

“Right,” Mitchum says. “That’s it then. Bon voyage, buddy.”

Mitchum turns around and heads back to his car and driver. On the ride back to the hotel he leans his head against the young female chauffeur, closes his eyes, and begins to snore.

At the hotel, Mitchum announces that he’s been fired. He wakes Dorothy and tells her to start packing. The producer’s camp claims that Mitchum wasn’t fired, he quit. With insurers to think about, it would be costly to take the blame. Preminger is furious, convincing himself that Mitchum has been the source of his problems all along, even the ones before he hired him. Later in the morning there is a tense scene in the production office as Mitchum demands his first-class tickets home. A telephone is thrown around. Preminger has someone call the police.

“Fuck Preminger and the boat he sailed in on,” says Mitchum. “The
Exodus!
”

Gershuny reports a conversation that evening between Mitchum and Israeli actor Josef Shiloah. Mitchum grabs Shiloah’s hand. He says, “Kill me, brother.
Kill me!”
Mitchum is very sorry about what has happened. “If you are sorry,” the Israeli says, “you must call Preminger because he is older.” Mitchum says, “You Jew bastard, you stick with him.” Shiloah says no, it is the right thing to do. Mitchum calls Preminger, but Preminger doesn’t take the call. Shiloah says, “And I know is not a great star leaving. No! This is man with pain. He hurt to leave.”

Mitchum and his wife board a flight to Madrid that night. No one from the
Rosebud
company sees them off.

Within days Preminger hires Peter O’Toole, who has not worked much for several years. Victor Buono calls Bob with the news. “That,” says Mitchum, “is like replacing Ray Charles with Helen Keller.”

Nearly sixty years old and fired for inappropriate behavior, drunk and disorderly, that was the way people were telling it. Nearly ready for Social Security and still Hollywood’s reigning bad boy. Mitchum, back home, shrugged it off. Preminger was having one of his fits and the actor called his bluff, that was all. Then came
Jackpot.
He was entirely innocent this time. The picture, with Richard Burton costarring, was supposed to start rolling in Europe later that
year. Mitchum said he wasn’t leaving home till the check cleared his American bank. He called their bluff, too. The check never cleared, and while Burton—too drunk to know if he’d been paid or not—sat in his hotel room waiting to be carried to the set, the producers abandoned the production. But all some people in the business heard was that Mitchum was connected with another big mess. One careless mention in the press even suggested that he had been replaced on the picture, fired because of a poor performance. “He just wasn’t coming across,” said
Women’s Wear Daily.
Did they mean across the Atlantic? Anyway, Mitchum was under a cloud. It was a funny time to start working on the last great film of his career.

Elliott Kastner had dreamed of making a movie from one of Raymond Chandler’s private eye novels long before he ever started producing pictures. Raymond Chandler: the great bard of hard-boiled literature, whose tales of crime and detection in Southern California were both violent, convoluted mystery stories and poetic ruminations on the human condition, told in the voice of Chandler’s ruefully wisecracking, philosophical, tough guy hero, knight errant of LA’s mean streets, Philip Marlowe. Early on, the various screen rights had been unaffordable or slipped through his hands and went to other people. Kastner had settled for a Chandler pretender, Ross MacDonald, buying
The Moving Target
and making
Harper,
with Paul Newman as a smirking excuse for detective Lew Archer. By 1973, with many hits to his credit, the producer could make his dream come true. There was one major Chandler book un-filmed,
The Long Goodbye.
Kastner wanted to do it right. He hired Leigh Brackett for the script—she had done
The Big Sleep
for Bogart back in the ‘40s. And to play Philip Marlowe, Kastner wanted Robert Mitchum. United Artists said no. They wanted to go with somebody more
happening and
imposed that ace contemporary star Elliott Gould. Direction was entrusted to another
now
personage, Robert Altman, who proceeded to make a smug kind of antiChandler movie, with a stoned-looking, hippie-student-protester Philip Marlowe. It was a disaster, barely making it into a few theaters. But Kastner kept the faith. Two years later he was ready to make another Chandler, having purchased the rights to
Farewell, My Lovely
from the current owners. This time he got the man he wanted for the role of Raymond Chandler’s urban knight.

To direct, Kastner and his team of producers hired Dick Richards, a former photographer for
Look
and
Life
magazines, a maker of television commercials, and now a feature film director with two pictures under his belt,
The Culpepper Cattle Company,
a Western, and
Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins,
a seriocomic
road picture, both of them unusual and often striking works. It was a time of many new, young directors in Hollywood, and Richards was by no means the least interesting. His first inspired decision was to make
Farewell, My Lovely
a period piece. Kastner had never considered anything but a contemporary setting for the production, like The
Long Goodbye,
like
Marlowe
with James Garner as the detective, like every other Chandler adaptation. The continuing value of the Marlowe stories was supposed to be all in the plot, the characters, the wisecracking dialogue. It took a certain sensibility in 1975 to begin to see works like the novels of Raymond Chandler or the ‘40s film noir as talismanic items from a mythic pop cultural past. Kastner agreed to Richards’s choice, not out of any great interest in the poetic possibilities of an evocation of archaic forms and character types but in acknowledgment of the success of recent “historical” movies, the recreations of the ‘30s and ‘40s in such popular films as
The Godfather, Chinatown,
Bertolucci’s voluptuous
The Conformist
set in Fascist Italy. For Dick Richards, though, the idea of returning this Philip Marlowe movie to the time of the novel’s original writing and the heyday of the private eye movie was more than an attempt to ape
Chinatowns
success or to parade some quaint old automobiles and retro-chic pinstriped suits and fedoras across the screen. Richards’s film would be as much elegy as detective story. From the opening shot of a weary (fedoraed and pinstriped) Robert Mitchum bathed in the soft glow of red neon, and the opening line—”This past spring was the first that I’d felt tired and realized I was growing old”—
Farewell, My Lovely
was to be a consciously mythopoetic work, tribute to the shadow-haunted melodramas of the past and to a man who was among the last surviving links to that lost golden age, a movie star who had indeed grown old and done it on camera before our very eyes.

Richards worked on the script with David Zelag Goodman, leaving out relatively little from the novel but adding scenes, adding characters like Marlowe’s newspaper vendor sidekick, the burned out jazzman, and his half-black son, underscoring the story’s place in time with references to the war, to Joe DiMaggio, and slipping in various other bits of filigree that blended smoothly with Chandler’s original text; switching the novel’s sanitarium sequence to a more provocative brothel setting, giving the movie a chance to have
some
contemporary touches, a bit of sex and nudity in consideration of the box office. It was decided that there would be no studio work in the film. All locations, interiors and exteriors, were vintage properties, found mostly in the old neighborhoods, downtown, Hollywood, Echo Park, the old Wilshire shopping district. Some of the homes and buildings they would film in looked as if they hadn’t changed so much as a light bulb since Ray Chandler rolled his first page
into an Underwood. A shipboard sequence was to be shot with cast and crew crammed into a stateroom on the luxury liner
Queen Mary,
now a tourist hotel docked in Long Beach. Production designer Dean Tavoularis would recreate the period with authentic materials, enough ‘40s-era furnishings, evocative advertisements, peeling, sun-faded wallpaper, neon signage, and assorted gewgaws to fill all of LA’s antiques and thrift stores, with enough left over for an entire East Hollywood flophouse or two. Cinematographer John Alonzo—interestingly, he had also filmed
Chinatown,
though in a completely different style—made a pact with director Richards that they would shoot everything as it would have been done in the ‘40s—no zooms, no Steadicams, no helicopter shots, no “Raindrops Keep Fallin’” musical interludes.

The wardrobe included many well-worn items off the racks of Western Costume. Marlowe’s dark, pin-striped suit was one of a kind, no backup if anything happened to it. Originally made for Victor Mature at Fox, circa 1940, it still had Matures name sewn inside. Richards loved it. Mitchum hated it.

“I won’t wear this fucking thing in the picture,” Mitchum said.

“Bob, it fits you,” Richards said. “A little alteration. I love this suit!”

Mitchum said, “I’m not wearing this old fucking thing. . . . Victor Matures farted it all up!”

He wore it. It became a running joke. “Every time he wanted to give me a hard time,” said Dick Richards, “he’d bring up the suit. Only thing he wore throughout the film, never changes, one suit. He’d say to me, ‘You son of a bitch, you got me wearing a farted-up suit, you cheap son of a bitch! It smells bad. . . . I’m in Victor Mature’s old farted-up suit, goddamn it!’”

The role of femme fatale Velma went to Briton Charlotte Rampling, fresh from wearing Nazi cap, suspenders, and not much else in the controversial
The Night Porter.
She would be styled for maximum slinkiness, made to resemble—and sound like—a jaded version of ‘40s-era Lauren Bacall. Moose Malloy, violent, lovelorn hulk in search of his lost Velma, would be played by a newcomer, a towering ex-boxer named Jack O’Halloran. Dick Richards had remembered him from a fight at the Garden in New York. O’Halloran was boxing George Foreman. “This was my memory: a gruesome guy fighting Foreman; he’s hanging in there, a tough guy. I had pretty good seats, and the guy was bleeding everywhere. Kastner and his group of producers had somebody—he was seven feet tall, but he wasn’t tough. I found this guy O’Halloran, and I paid for his airfare to come to California. Let Mitchum meet both guys. That’s all I had to do. Jack and Mitchum hit it off. O’Halloran was a street-fighting kid from Philadelphia, claimed all sorts of things in his background. Talked tough, looked tough, and he was tough. You’d be afraid to
meet this guy anywhere. The other guy looked soft. Mitchum said to me, ‘Are you thinking the same way I am?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Mitchum told Kastner to get O’Halloran or he wasn’t doing the picture. He was that kind of guy. He meant it.”

John Ireland, Mitchum’s pal of more than thirty years—shared memories of shared starlets, reefers under the table at Lucey’s, and all that—was cast as Detective Lieutenant Nulty. And for the tiny role of Velma’s respectable elderly husband Judge Grayle, they hired a man better known for his writing than his acting, brilliant, accursed author of
The Killer Inside Me
and
The Getaway,
Jim Thompson. One of
Farewell’s
producers, Jerry Bick, was friendly with the novelist and sometime screenwriter, knew that he could use some money, and recommended him for the small part. Richards was familiar with Thompson’s work and agreed to meet with the man. “I thought he was very sick. I felt he would be OK, but he was sick, gravely ill. But I wanted that kind of person for the part. And he was wonderful. Soft-spoken, quiet man. Very nice man, the kind, in those days, you would have said, here was a gentleman.” Thompson and Mitchum, it turned out, had some history. Back in 1949, in his last days as a rewrite man with the
Los Angeles Mirror,
before being canned for drunkenness, Thompson had gone over to the court house, been among the crowd of reporters covering the actor’s sentencing to prison.