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 Before Brando, James Dean, Elvis or Eastwood, there was Robert Mitchum, the inventor of big-screen cool. But "the cool" was real; Mitchum wasn’t acting. He was a real-life tough guy with a prison record to prove it.
Mitchum’s powerful screen presence and simmering violence, combined with an existential detachment, created a new style in acting. His amazing aura is reflected in his films, including Pursued (1947), Book on the Moon (1948), Out of the Past (1947), Night of the Hunter (1955), Cape Fear (1961), Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and That Championship Season (1982).
Mitchum was a brawler and a bad boy, so much so that the tough guy image on screen held no comparison to the real-life Mitchum who led an alcohol and drug-fueled life of headlined scandals—he got busted for smoking pot when most Americans had no clue what it was. Mitchum’s shocking statements, affairs with glamorous co-stars such as Ava Gardner and Shirley MacLaine and his violent run-ins with police, producers and relatives are the stuff of legends. Mitchum, the ex-Depression hobo and chain gang member, became one of Hollywood’s greatest actors.
It’s about time that Robert Mitchum is getting the attention he deserves with Lee Server’s Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don’t Care" (St. Martin’s Press, 2001). This is the book that those who appreciated Mitchum’s film and real-life persona have been waiting for. Server’s bio of Mitchum is well researched, highly entertaining and revealing. Great stuff. Take, for example, Mitchum’s experience with Loretta Young on the set of Rachel and the Stranger (1948):
The film for which RKO had sought Loretta Young was called Tall Dark Stranger, the title eventually changed to Rachel and theStranger to accentuate the presence of Ms. Young, then enjoying the biggest success of her long career as Katie in The Farmer’s Daughter (she would win the Best Actress Oscar for it). Based on stories by Howard Fast and scripted by Waldo Salt, Rachel and theStranger was a pastoral love story with dollops of comedy and adventure, set on the Pennsylvania frontier of the 1800s. Davey, a dour, widowed farmer, takes a spunky bondwoman as his wife to do chores and care for his young son. Ill-treated by her husband, Rachel is drawn to his friend Jim Fairways, a dashing and seductive backwoods hunter. Jealousy and an Indian attack spur Davey’s romantic feelings, and he and Rachel decide to live happily ever after, while Jim returns to his life of adventure.
Obeying no discernible logic, RKO had once again chosen to cast its own hot property in a supporting part. Mitchum as Fairways would be billed third after Young and William Holden. Holden, the fair-haired boy-next-door in a number of prewar movies, had returned from several years in the armed service looking considerably more mature and ready for the tougher, more cynical parts that would define his career. But Sunset Boulevard was still in the future, and Holden’s postwar comeback vehicles, Blaze of Noon and Dear Ruth, would hardly seem to put him in a superior position beside RKO’s biggest male star. But what the hell, Mitchum decided. If they didn’t know what to do with their investment, it wasn’t his lookout. With three thousand coming in every week, he went along without complaint, looking at the bright side—it was a change of pace for him, a good-natured role, and a chance to sing (vocalizing "Londonderry Air" in the tension-filled atmosphere of Pursued hardly counted as a musical showcase). Something new, and at the same time another variation on the established Mitchum persona, the Fairways character was described in the film as "a walking man with an itch in his heels"—rootless outsider, adventurer. He would have at least the opening sequence to himself, begun with the credits still fading, an unhurried walk in the forest, strumming a guitar and crooning in a pleasant if tenuous voice one of Roy Webb and Waldo Salt’s ersatz folk tunes—"O-he, O-hi, O-ho." It was the first of six originals written for him to sing in the film. That was more songs than Crosby did in an average musical.
Norman Foster was directing. A callow actor in the talkie era, when he was known as Mr. Claudette Colbert due to his wife’s greater success, he turned to directing in the ‘30s, mostly Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan pictures until an association with Orson Welles set him off in unexpected directions. He had only recently returned from making films in Mexico. Mitchum rolled his eyes when he heard that Foster—married now to actress Sally Blane—was Loretta Young’s brother-in-law, but the director showed no inordinate signs of favoritism or indulgence and was amiable and amenable to all concerned.
Only four years older than Mitchum, Loretta Young had been a movie star for two decades. She had a steely capacity for self-preservation and, like Marlene Dietrich and a few other savvy veterans, cultivated a technician’s knowledge of lights, lenses, and camera angles so as to better maintain her celluloid allure. Mitchum would watch with amusement as she calibrated her head movements just before the camera rolled, making the infinitesimal adjustments that would let the light fall on her face with enchanting perfection.
"I’m afraid I threw you a little into the shadow then," she said guilefully after a take.
"Honey, I don’t give a damn," he told her, or said he did.
In August the Rachel company left Hollywood for a six-week stay in Oregon, filming exteriors in the woods of Fox Hollow and along the Mackenzie River near Eugene. The principal actors and foster were assigned houses rented from the locals. Mitchum’s had a scenic view of the chilled Mackenzie. Provoked by locals and sportsmen gushing over the river’s bounty, he took up fishing in his off-hours. Grabbing a rod, a book, and a bagful of beers, he would amble off by himself for the entire day or until somebody came to retrieve him, a habit he would continue at future locations on many another film when an unspoiled waterway was at hand.
Though they would call themselves friends in the years ahead, and Mitchum would speak approvingly of Holden as a man and as an actor, the two stars seemed in the beginning to be far from compatible. Holden was prone to melancholy and bouts of debilitating self-doubt. He was a heavy drinker but a lonely one, more likely to hide away with a bottle than to hoist a few with some comrades. In Oregon, Mitchum’s self-assurance and flamboyance only increased Holden’s funk. Loretta Young, among others, observed his plunge into insecurity on the days when Bob was on the set.
"Why are you so nervous?" she said to him. "You have the lead role. He doesn’t get the girl, you do."
"I don’t know what you mean," said Holden.
"You know what I’m talking about. Bob Mitchum has gotten under your skin."
"You’re crazy," said Holden, but his discomfort continued to show.
Loretta Young could be a pious and preachy character, Mitchum found. One morning following a dinner part she had thrown at her rented home, she cornered her costars and confronted them about their previous night’s imbibing. After berating them for drinking nearly two bottles of whiskey, she declared that they were both going to be big stars for years to come and if they turned into drunks they would never get to enjoy it.
An obsequious Holden mumbled that she was probably right.
Mitchum momentarily raised an eyelid. "Are you finished, Mother Superior?"
A devout Catholic, Young frowned on unseemly behavior of all kinds and particularly disapproved the use of bad language in the workplace. It was generally understood that there was to be no swearing by anyone within miles of Loretta’s delicate ears, a tall order considering that in the movie business even the child actors cursed like sailors. To enforce this edict, Loretta instituted her infamous "curse box," requiring an immediate donation (to be forwarded to one of her Catholic charities) by anyone on the set uttering a forbidden epithet. This provoked one of the most durable of Mitchum anecdotes. In the pithiest version of the story, an assistant explained to Bob how the curse box worked, with its sliding scale of penalties.
"It’s fifty cents for ‘hell,’ a dollar for a ‘damn,’ a dollar-fifty for ‘shit’—"
"What I want to know is," said Mitchum, in a voice that could be heard throughout Oregon, "what does Miss Young charge for a ‘fuck’?"
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