“The only way to get rid of people is to out-drink them.”
Known for playing sleepy-eyed antiheroes that made him the defining star of film noir. It was once said Robert Mitchum had “an immoral face,” and indeed he grew up a troublemaker. He rode boxcars across the country as a teen, and as young man served time on a Georgia chain gang for vagrancy. Moving to Long Beach, California, in 1936 Mitchum landed bit parts in Westerns and B-movies, and finally gained notice with a supporting role in 30 Seconds Over Tokyo (1944). Mitchum earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor—the only nomination of his career—for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) but was drafted into the army shortly after the film’s completion. He returned to acting after an eight-month enlistment, kicking off his film noir period that included, among others: Undercurrent (1946), Pursued (1947), Crossfire (1947), and Out of the Past (1947)—the last considered one of the genre’s best. Mitchum spent six weeks on a prison farm after an arrest for marijuana possession in 1948, but the ensuing publicity—Life published a pictorial with him in a prison uniform—had no negative impact on his popularity. His chilling performances as a duplicitous preacher in The Night of the Hunter (1955) and vengeful ex-con in Cape Fear (1962) are among the most memorable of his career. Final roles included narrating 1990 Western Tombstone and minor parts in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake (1991) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995).
IT IS REALLY A SIMPLE RULE, you drink a lot, you piss a lot. Robert Mitchum, Mitch to pals, drank a lot. He also fought a lot and screwed a lot. He also pissed a lot.
The title of Lee Server’s wonderful biography, Baby, I Don’t Care (taken from a line in Mitchum’s noir masterpiece Out of the Past) is a perfect encapsulation of the star’s utter and complete indifference to his own career. When asked about his celebrity status, Mitch would point out that Rin Tin Tin, one of the biggest stars in the world, was really just a four-legged bitch. Before McQueen, Marvin, or Eastwood, Mitchum was the original bad-boy outsider and one of the coolest cats Hollywood has ever known.
Mitchum was two when his father was crushed to death while working in a trainyard. By fourteen, he had already left home and was riding the rails himself. It was the Great Depression and the young teenager was jumping freight cars and sleeping in hobo jungles. Before reaching Hollywood, Mitchum’s resume would include stints as a dishwasher in the Midwest, a fruit picker down South, and a coalminer in Pennsylvania. Patches of marijuana grew wild along the train tracks—”poor man’s whiskey,” Mitchum would call it—and he developed a fondness for it that lasted a lifetime. These were tough times. Mitchum recalls riding a refrigerator car near Idaho Falls. It was winter, ice cold outside, and all the teenager had eaten in the last twenty-four hours were frozen peaches. Having stuffed newspaper up his pant legs to keep him warm, he was sleeping when a hobo’s campfire sparked to his cuffs, setting his legs ablaze and burning his only pair of trousers. As Server points out, “When you are standing with no pants under a streetlamp in Idaho in the middle of winter, trying to find some frozen clothes to steal off a clothesline,” there is nowhere to go but up.
None of this, by the way, is an excuse for all the pissing that Server describes later. It’s just a little context, before jump-cutting from the boy to the man—1948, Mitchum at thirty-one years old and very much a star. He and his wife Dorothy were visiting New York City when he received a call from David O. Selznick, the producer of Gone with the Wind and, along with RKO, the co-owner of Mitchum’s contract. Selznick was adapting Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and had a role to discuss. Mitchum was to come to the Hampshire House at 3 p.m. And so, in typical Mitchum fashion, he found the nearest bar and had a couple of drinks. Then heading off down the street, he bumped into screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and the two popped into another bar for a few more drinks. Finally making it to the Hampshire House, he ran into a friend in the lobby and together they had a few more still. By the time Mitchum rolled into Selznick’s suite, he was very loaded. Selznick hustled out past receptionists, publicists, and writers to meet one of his stable’s finest thoroughbreds. He offered the actor yet another drink and Mitch, perhaps unwisely, opted for a double scotch and water. It was then, locked in a chair in a hotel room, listening to the great producer play the great producer—Selznick pitching on and on—that Mitchum realized he had to relieve himself. But there was no stopping Selznick’s endless enthusiasm for the brilliant Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, even more so when paired with an A-list director and an A-list star—blah, blah, blah. While Mitchum, feeling his bladder extend and extend some more, at last and to Selznick’s astonishment—unzipped his fly, leaned to one side, and much like a thoroughbred, hit the Hampshire House carpet with a strong cord of urine. Then Mitchum stood up, thanked the producer, and wobbled off. Suffice to say, he didn’t get the part.
Another story, another producer—this more than five years after the Hampshire House incident. Mitchum was filming Charles Laughton’s dark directorial triumph, The Night of the Hunter. By the end of production, the picture was way over budget and relationships were strained. In part, this was due to Mitchum’s drinking and drugging. There had been times when Laughton had been unable to shoot the star’s scenes. To the producer Paul Gregory, despite Mitchum’s charm, the star had begun to resemble the frightening preacher he was playing—love tattooed across one set of knuckles, hate the other. During one of the finals days of shooting, Mitchum showed up bombed, his face swollen, his eyes red, yet still insisting he could act. Laughton phoned Gregory, who raced over to the location in his Cadillac convertible to try to handle the situation. Already at the end of his rope and not interested in sugarcoating, Gregory let loose on Mitchum. The producer argued that the star was in no shape to perform. It was then, as Gregory would tell Server, that Mitchum unzipped his fly and pulled out his penis. The door of the Cadillac was open and Gregory stepped back as Mitchum moved behind it. Gregory assumed this was out of modesty. But suddenly, that strong cord of urine began to rain down on the driver’s seat, where the producer had just been sitting, creating a puddle. Mitchum zipped back up. As with Selznick, he wobbled off.
Before McQueen, Marvin, or Eastwood—Mitchum was the original bad-boy outsider, the first sleepyeyed hipster, and one of the coolest cats Hollywood has ever known.
There were other incidents, of course. In France, the press asked Mitchum if he knew any French. “Cognac,” Mitchum responded. Then later, he took a leak in the street, apparently right under a sign which read, in French, DO NOT PISS IN THE DOORWAY. In Ireland, trapped for months in Dingle for Ryan’s Daughter, Mitchum had little to do but drink with costar Trevor Howard (by all accounts a first-rate inebriate) and horse around with leading lady Sarah Miles. Miles, curiously, was a practitioner of urine therapy, and accordingly drank her own urine. But that had little to do with Mitchum’s behavior. One day, he was stranded in mud for over an hour waiting for the legendary—and legendarily tyrannical—British director David Lean to finish another scene. Mitchum held off until the next time he was sure cameras were rolling, then once again, he unzipped and let loose.
It is a simple rule—you drink a lot, you piss a lot—and clearly, one of the few that Mitchum followed.
ROBERT MITCHUM WAS by and large a vodka man. He would hide it around the set—in tall glasses, neat, so that it looked like water. He liked smoking joints, too, some said up to eight a day. But in the morning it was bourbon. Mitchum’s hangover cure, discovered in his personal guest file at the Beverly Hills Hotel, was bourbon and orange juice blended with honey and egg. It hovers somewhere between a hangover cure and an eye-opener, embracing the stay-drunk philosophy. It actually tastes better than it sounds, but then, it sounds awful.
When producer Stanley Kramer decided the time had come for him to take a seat in the director’s chair, he went big. With such hits as High Noon and The Wild One to his credit, he acquired the rights to Morton Thompson’s Not as a Stranger, a medical melodrama nearly a thousand pages in length that was one of the best-selling novels of 1954. For his cast, he assembled a collection of heavy-hitters few could match: Robert Mitchum, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Sinatra, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Charles Bickford, and Lon Chaney, Jr.
Once filming finally got underway, it was clear Kramer had little idea what he’d gotten himself into: An experience he would later describe as “ten weeks of hell.” Mitchum, Sinatra, Crawford, and Chaney were four of the most fearless drunks in the business—and they quickly proved uncontrollable. Sets and trailers were demolished. Stars tearing phones from walls. “It wasn’t a cast,” Mitchum said, “so much as a brewery.” Myron McCormick, who played Dr. Snider, would pass out during takes, wake up screaming, then tumble off the set.
And then there was the fighting. One night, after shooting had wrapped for the day, Kramer begged his cast to go home and get a decent night’s sleep, as they had an important scene scheduled for the next morning. Later, on his drive home, he passed a bar near the studio where three or four of his actors were gathered outside—two of them pummeling each other. Then there was the day Crawford, teased one too many times by Sinatra (who used to call him Lenny, after the mentally handicapped character in Of Mice and Men he’d played on Broadway), held the singer down, tore off his toupee, and proceeded to eat the damn thing. When Mitchum tried to intervene, Crawford wound up belting him and then they went at it until Crawford, his throat lousy with artificial hair, started choking and one of the medical advisors had to rush over to help him puke it up. Shooting had to be temporarily delayed while Sinatra acquired a new rug.
But yet again, Not as a Stranger was every bit the success Kramer had hoped for. It was the fifth-highest-grossing picture of the year and highest of Mitchum’s career.
