Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

ROBERT
MITCHUM

Also by Lee Server

Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures
(1987)

Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines: 1896-1953
(1993)

Sam Fuller: Film Is a Battleground
(1994)

Over My Dead Body. The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945-1955
(1994)

Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo
(1999)

•   •   •

As Editor

The Big Book of Noir
(with Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg) (1998)

“
Baby, I Dont’ Care
”

LEE SERVER

St. Martin’s Griffin
New York

ROBERT MITCHUM:
“
BABY, I DON’T CARE.
” Copyright © 2001 by Lee Server. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Server, Lee.

Robert Mitchum : “baby, I don’t care” / by Lee Server.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Filmography: p. 563.

ISBN0-312-26206-X (hc)

ISBN 0-312-28543-4 (pbk)

1. Mitchum, Robert. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—

United States—Biography. I. Title.

PN2287.M648 S47 2001

791.43’028’092—dc21

10  9  8  7  6  5

for
E
LIZABETH
S
ERVER
and
T
ERRI
H
ARDIN

Introduction

Part One

  1. The Ferret-Faced Kid

  2. Boxcar to the Promised Land

Part Two

  3. In a Dead Man’s Hat

  4. The Man with the Immoral Face

  5. The Snakes Are Loose

  6. Occupation: Former Actor

  7. Phantom Years

  8. Our Horseshit Salesman

Part Three

  9. The Story of Right Hand/Left Hand

10. Foreign Intrigue

11. Gorilla Pictures

12. The Smirnoff Method

Part Four

13. Poet with an Ax

14. Baby, I Don’t Care

15. . . . I Used to Be Handsome

Part Five

16. Big Sleep

17. Guys Like Me Last Forever

Sources

Filmography

Acknowledgments

Index

Jeez, it just struck me
—
wouldn’t it be fun to be a real movie
star and get to act like one? A round for the house, waiter!”
Get shitfaced snockered. Wow! Just like Robert Mitchum.
That’d be somethin, friends
—
that’d be something else.

—
ACTOR
P
ETER
B
OYLE

•  •  •

Warring, boy! Warring together! Left hand and right hand!
Hate and love! Good and Evil! But wait. Hot dog! Old
Devils a-losin
 . . .
He’s aslippin, boy!

—D
AVIS
G
RUBB
,
T
HE
N
IGHT OF THE
H
UNTER

What do you want, my life story? I told everything I
know to the Los Angeles Police Department.

H
E LIKED TO CALL
himself the oldest whore in town. Just show me that Hollywood green, he would say, I’ll play anything: midgets, Chinese washerwomen. An ideal role? Dad, you got to be kidding. Maybe Camille: lie on a couch and cough for twenty reels. Making movies was an economic expedient; pride didn’t enter into it. Never forget, he would say, one of the biggest stars in the world was Rin Tin Tin, and she was a four-legged bitch. There were those who enjoyed the attention, Robert Mitchum understood. If they weren’t movie stars they would be languishing in custody for exposing themselves in the park. He selected his jobs according to the number of days off. Made a hundred and twenty pictures altogether, forty of them in the same raincoat. Maybe it was a hundred and twenty-five. Hard to keep count. He’d seen very few of the things himself. They didn’t pay you to watch ’em. And it was always a pain in the ass to find parking.

Robert Mitchum came from Bridgeport, Connecticut, a town that once elected P. T. Barnum as mayor, and he made his mark in Hollywood, California, the place—a reporter once wrote—he hated with all the venom of someone who owed it everything he had. He was raised in an atmosphere of dislocation and unconventionality, in a family of de facto gypsies uprooted by loss and lack of wherewithal, a kind of test case for the national upheaval to come. The Great Depression further shaped him, a teenager wandering through a landscape of despair and violence. On the road he tangled with cops
and grifters, saw corpses and hungry children, grew up before his time. He toured the country by thumb and freight train. He was a hobo, a bum, signature epithets to which he pridefully clung long after he had hopped his last freight. He liked to say, maybe even believed, through all the years of fame and riches, the mansions and sports cars, the dinners with kings and presidents, that he was only here “between trains.”

In the 1940s, the bum became a movie actor, first an unshaven bad guy, soon a hero, of a sort. He had a different, curious presence on screen, nothing like it before. The big, muscular physique pegged him for tough guys and outdoor parts, cowboys and soldiers. But the attitude (wry, ambivalent), the style (indolent, soft-spoken), had none of the usual vitality and aggression of the standard-issue male star. He smoldered, had that opiated, heavy-lidded look, had an almost feminine languor, moved only as much as necessary and then with a measured, sinuous grace. He seemed to withdraw from the camera where others would try to attack it. But maybe this was some kind of trick because you found yourself watching him much more closely, afraid you would miss something, a gesture, a mumbled line, a ruffled eyebrow. His acting belonged to no school, no real tradition. He formed his screen characters from a mental storehouse of observational and experiential data and a musical approach to pace and intonation and the spatial relationship of performer to camera. His aura of brooding bemusement and simmering violence found a perfect home in the thriving—yet unnamed—genre of shadows and cynicism and ambiguity now called film noir.
Out of the Past. Crossfire. His Kind of Woman. Angel Face.
He became the movies’ outside man, without roots or ties, beyond the bounds of polite society, ever suspicious to the upholders of the law. He made other types of pictures, too, respectable productions, classics fit for the academy, but most of his jobs would be on the cinematic equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks: action movies, movies with fistfights and bullet wounds, movies about disreputable men and sultry, suspect females. Many years he labored at RKO for the man he called the Phantom, Howard Hughes, and Hughes’s idea of production values was a girl in a tight sweater. “Gorilla pictures,” Mitchum called them. “I’ve never done a movie with guns,” a nervous actress said to him on her first day. Mitchum said, “I’ve never done one without.”

In the 1950s, he abandoned the dying studio system for a more congenial independence. Widescreen and color and exotic locations were the thing now. The movies became a “magic carpet” for a guy with a terminal case of wanderlust.
The ex-hobo and would-be soldier-of-fortune took the grand tour at producers’ expense, paid daydreams that had him sailing on the Caribbean, grappling with Swedish starlets in Paris, smuggling moonshine through the Smokey Mountains, winning revolutions in Old Mexico. He picked his own pictures now, sometimes produced them.
Bandido! Cape Fear. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Night of the Hunter. The Sundowners. Thunder Road.
He made wonderful entertainments and singular masterpieces and hack jobs of an astonishing banality. Critics had a love-hate relationship with the star, more often hate, calling him a sleepwalker, just going through the motions, when awake. Distinguished associates, Charles Laughton, John Huston, disagreed, thinking him one of the best actors the movies had ever known, perhaps even the best, a man who ought to have done Shakespeare’s tragedies—with his power and brilliance he could have been the era’s greatest Lear or Macbeth. Mitchum, finding self-promotion lacking in cool, came down on the side of the critics. “I have two acting styles,” he liked to say. “With and without a horse.”

Most Hollywood stars were to some degree exponents of a personality-based method in which acting was
being,
the characters predominantly animated by the individual actor’s own personality and perspective (if any). With Mitchum, self-image and screen image seemed to bleed together with a particular compatibility. Personal experience and philosophical viewpoint were the life-giving forces behind those characterizations of disillusion, detachment, disdain for authority and convention, behind the hooded, haunted gaze of somebody who had seen things at their worst and knew there was more of the same on its way. The matching of real and reel would come to seem remarkably seamless at times, news reports and film reviews almost interchangeable in their delineations of a brawling, womanizing tough guy, ever at odds with the powers that be, on-screen and off-screen a succession of fistfights, felonies, jail cells, beautiful dames. Art left off and life began, or the other way around, some jazz like that. Hollywood’s Bad Boy, the press called him. Lurid headlines charted an unusual lifestyle: “M
ITCHUM IN
B
RAWL
—G.I. H
OSPITALIZED
,” “B
ARE
S
TARLET
P
UTS
M
ITCHUM IN
D
OGHOUSE
,” “N
ARCOTIC
A
RREST
S
MASHES
F
ILM
C
AREER
,” “B
OB
M
ITCHUM
D
UE IN
C
OURT ON
F
LEE
R
AP
,” “3 T
EENAGE
G
IRLS
T
ELL
P
OLICE
: R
OBERT
M
ITCHUM
H
IT
U
S
,” “R
OBERT
M
ITCHUM, THE
N
UDE
W
HO
C
AME TO
D
INNER
.” In 1948, a drug scandal and subsequent prison term should have finished him in pictures, would have been the finish of another, holier actor, but with Mitchum, the shock, the aftereffects among the ticket buyers—the “great unwashed” he called them—were ultimately softened by prior expectation.