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CRAZY MIXED-UP KIDS?
But the last thing I was prepared for was a man who used to be a highbrow poet. I was therefore understandably surprised when he told me that Charles Laughton had been trying to persuade him to come to England to appear in the stage productions of Macbeth and Richard III.
"When I turned down the idea," said Mitchum, "he railed and fumed and called me a lazy so-and-so. But I couldn't afford to do it. I have to work in films to keep abreast of tax-demands. Besides, what would I have got out of it?"
I suggested: "The glory."
"Oh," he said, "it's a little late for that. And Charles is probably right. I am lazy."
Then came shock No. 2, when asking Mitchum about his background. Replied the man who has become the apotheosis of the monosyllabic, semi-illiterate American he-man for whom bullets have always spoken more eloquently than words:
"I was a child-poet. Later I became a very abstract writer and the darling of the ladies' literary teas. My stuff became so abstract I couldn't understand it myself. Everybody had an interpretation of what I was writing — except me."
So Mitchum quit highbrow poetry for lowbrow movies. It was a transition from Horace to Hopalong Cassidy, via jobs in factories and boot shops. His friends today include people like John Steinbeck and . . . truck-drivers. "Steinbeck," he says, digressing into literary criticism, "has become a little chi-chi now. But I still prefer him to Hemingway."
This was unexpected talk coming from Mitchum. Unfairly, one had hardly expected him to be capable of reading.
When he has hit the headlines in the past it has not been on account of some erudite assessment of contem
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