Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1956)

The Richest Bum in Town (Continued from page 59) “Foreign Intrigue,” “Bandido,” and “Fire Down Below.” He has scarcely taken a month off, let alone a year, and he is now busy making his hundred-and-tenth motion picture. Why does Bob work so hard? “I believe in restitution,” he says. “You’ve got to put back what you take out.” But it’s more than work alone that distinguishes a man from a bum, it’s pride — and Bob Mitchum is one of the proudest men in Hollywood. He has never been in debt, “But,” he adds hastily, “there was one time I went in hock to Howard Hughes. But that was paid back a long time ago.” And yet Bob, in spite of a record that any other man would be proud of, keeps calling himself a bum. He doesn’t tell you ivhy he does this. In fact, he rarely stops to explain his remarks or even to answer direct questions. He simply thinks out loud, letting flow what he calls his “stream of consciousness.” He often talks like a truckdriver and swears like a trooper. He acts the cynic, the tough businessman, the jaded playboy. However, in spite of all his experience as an actor, it’s an unconvincing performance that fools no one. For Bob Mitchum is a painfully articulate man who has not only lived harder than most men, but fought harder for understanding, searched harder for the truth. And if he calls himself a bum, it’s to sidetrack you from calling him something worse. For the truth is. Bob is a poet, and nowadays “them’s fightin’ words, son.” The notion that anyone as big as Bob — or as rugged — might also be a poet sounds ridiculous. But Bob was hailed as “the finest young poet” of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the hometown paper used to publish his works. The first was called, “A Chreestmus Pome,” but a later effort, written when Bob had finally learned to spell, was to prove prophetic: “I seek adventure and I find too much. Oh, if I were only rich, I’d not be in this terrible ‘dutch’ — I’d not be in this ditch.” In retrospect, it sounds funny, but it was serious when Bob wrote it. This was no youngster, dramatizing himself with pen and paper. The ditch was probably on the side of the road somewhere, far from home. The terrible “dutch” could well have been one of those awful jams a boy gets into when he’s bumming around the country, broke and hungry, and it seems he’s had enough adventure to last a lifetime. Except that the next day or the next time he has a full meal in his belly, he’s ready to start out again. There can never be enough adventure. Before he was twenty-one. Bob had traveled in all forty-eight states. He never finished high school, but he got a thorough education riding the rods, living in hobo camps, and dodging the yard bulls in railroad yards. It was good experience for his writing. Even today, he refers to the time he was in a Georgia chain gang — his only crime being that he was broke. But even then he was not a bum asking for handouts. He worked — in stores, filling stations, amusement piers. He took jobs as a farmhand, beach boy, truckdriver, stevedore, bouncer, housepainter, steel worker, track layer, cement mixer, day laborer, quarryman, dancer, p and contact man for an astrologer. He was even a boxer once but soon gave it up. “I never want to hurt anyone.” Eventually, acting proved to be his best bet. Bob had joined the Long Beach Theatre Guild, a little theatre his sister was interested in. And although he was writing some scripts for CBS, occasionally he also worked “in front” — meaning in front of the microphone. An agent, hearing him in a radio version of Gorki’s “Lower Depths,” and noting his physique, told Bob to look him up if he ever wanted to go into pictures. Bob wasn’t interested. On March 16, 1940, he had married Dorothy, the girl he had been going steady with ever since he was sixteen. If he was to be a family man, he would need a more stable line of work than movies could offer. And by the time the first baby was on the way. Bob was working at Lockheed. After a year at the airplane factory, however, a doctor advised him to quit. “I was on the night shift and never got any sleep,” Bob explains. “I thought I was going blind.” His family suggested that ' he try films “since he was in Hollywood anyway.” Remembering the agent who had once offered to help. Bob went to him and broke into pictures doing bit parts. “It was a wonderful experience because I made a number of friends in the business among writers, directors and producers.” Bob always jumped at the chance of meeting new people. “There were a couple of directors who would fit me in anywhere. Sometimes there was nothing left to play but an old Chinese laundryman, and I’d take it. I got to play everything but midgets and women.” It was valuable experience for a character actor, which is what Bob considered himself. But then came Ernie Pyle’s “The Story of GI Joe.” Bob was just about perfect as the battle-fatigued officer who knew the futility of war but was too busy taking care of his men to make speeches about it. The world-weary young actor could understand Lieutenant Walker’s sensitivity, his cynical disillusionment. The way he felt about war was the way Bob felt about life. And for the first time, the screen captured something of Bob Mitchum himself. But for Bob Mitchum himself, “It was a day of great embarrassment. Suddenly,” he remarks with typical self-deprecation, “I was a trueblue Harold the Hero.” His reward was stardom, and a succession of what he calls “Elmer the Excellent” roles. But Elmer the Excellent was making five thousand dollars a week. The Mitchums moved into a home in Mandeville Canyon— not a movie star’s palace, but the kind of comfortable home in which real families are raised. Bob was able to give his three children all the material things that he himself had missed as a boy. But most of all. he was free to indulge his passion for giving gifts. One time, when Dottie Mitchum flew to Dallas, Bob had a surprise birthday gift waiting for her — a brand-new car all wrapped up in cellophane. And recently, on a trip to New York, he spent hours going from shop to TAB HUNTER a problem? How can this be? Find out in the January issue of PHOTOPLAY on sole December 4 shop, trying to find just the right amethyst bracelet to go with the ring he had ; bought Dottie in Mexico. For his two sons, there was “a thousand dollars’ worth I of fishing equipment.” As for baby ij Petrine — she can have the whole world! ' Bob can’t seem to buy enough presents j for his family, which makes it appear as j if he is trying to make up for the fact I that there’s nothing he really wants him j self. He’s used to traveling light. If a i tan gabardine suit is Bob’s trademark in pictures, it’s because when he was starting out, that’s all he owned. Even today, he has only three suits. “It’s just as well,” ] he explains. “There wouldn’t be room for ' more. The only thing that’s mine in the house is a saxophone I’ve got hanging up on the wall. I only take it down on Christmas, New Year’s, and birthdays, when I play such appropriate numbers as ‘Silent Night,’ ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ and ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ Then I’ve got — well, not a desk, but one drawer of it.” ! If he was to feel crowded in his house, he was to feel even more crowded in Hollywood itself. “If only I hadn’t dropped my pencil at CBS or my wrench at Lockheed!” he’d sigh, wondering how he ever got mixed up in such a crazy business as motion pictures. He early earned himself a reputation as a “Hollywood rebel,” but he was not exactly a rebel without a cause. “I’m against everything phony,” he has railed, but he never included in that the actors before the scenes or the technicians behind them. He was referring to “executives justifying their salaries.” One of his chief complaints, for instance, was inefficiency. “I hate waste,” he insists. “I was taught to eat everything on the plate.” In spite of Bob’s outspokenness, however, executives invariably forgave him because his pictures invariably made money. And everyone else loved him. He was fun. There was never a dull moment around Bob, and he’d literally give you the shirt off his back. And yet, he insists, “I have no friends.” He considers this for a minute, then adds, “I have no enemies either, and that’s bad. “Actually,” Bob says, “I’m most at home with the grips — you know, the old-timers who have been working behind the scenes in the studios since Wallace Beery was a juvenile. They like me.” And he interrupts to show you a thousand-dollar watch. “Look,” he says, still touched, still incredulous. “Even in Europe, the grips pitched in to buy me this after we finished ‘Foreign Intrigue.’ ” But most important, to Bob, the film crews not only like him, they understand him. “They know I talk a stream of consciousness and sometimes I fall flat on my face.” But the public was to know it, too. For we live in a world where our bad — not our good — behavior makes the headlines. Several years ago, the papers had a field day with Bob, not caring whether they hurt him, his family, or his career. Bob made no excuses, but quietly went about living it down. He understood that a star has to accept headlines as “just one more of the joys of success.” But oh, what a terrible “dutch”! “If I were only rich,” the finest young poet of Bridgeport had once cried out. Now he was. Only, something was wrong. And five thousand dollars a week was not the answer to life. The trouble was that success had come too easily, and so it had no meaning. Bob blames it on the accident of his physique. But he also had a personality that intrigued the public so Hollywood used him as “a commodity,”