In 1954, Robert Mitchum received a phone call from Charles Laughton, who was about to direct his first - and, as it transpired, only - film, The Night of the Hunter, which Pauline Kael called one of the most frightening movies ever made. "Bob," Laughton said, "I would very much like to talk to you about the leading role. He's a terrible, evil . . . shit of a man." To which Mitchum said: "Present."
The film was such a box-office disaster that it is nowadays rightly accounted a masterpiece, and Mitchum played a demented and murderous preacher, with "Love" tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and "Hate" on the other. Off-screen, his drinking and brawling brought the film $200,000 over budget, and one morning he turned up on the set with his face so bloated from drink that camerawork was impossible.
The producer, Paul Gregory, told him to go home, and the star took offence in the Mitchum manner, by unzipping himself and urinating, long and lavishly, on the front seat of Gregory's Cadillac convertible. Years later, Laughton was to describe his star as a "literate, gracious, kind man with wonderful manners". Choose one Mitchum, or, if you like, choose both. Lee Server's biography is an attempt to reconcile the two.
Mitchum, born on August 6th, 1916, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was Scots-Irish on his father's side, mixed with a smidgen of American Indian. His mother, Ann Gunderson, was Norwegian. His father died young in a horrific accident at work in a railroad yard, and young Robert became a bum, seeing America and riding in boxcars. In Georgia, he served seven days on a chain gang for vagrancy.
He went to the West Coast, became a prize-fighter, had his nose broken, retired from the ring, was lured into acting with a Long Beach theatre group and returned briefly to the east to marry his long-time sweetheart, Dorothy Spence. "Stick with me, kid," he promised her, the romantic in him coming to the surface, "and you'll be farting though silk." The marriage lasted 57 years, qualifying his wife for a major award for masochism. He found film work in seven of the Hopalong Cassidy series of B westerns. In Border Patrol, he was unbilled and his only line was "Come on, let's get out of here!", and, in Hoppy Serves a Writ, an unshaven Mitchum received ninth billing and graduated to the role of supporting heavy. He inched his way onwards and upwards by way of bit parts, and his 27th film, William A. Wellman's The Story of GI Joe, was the breakthrough, earning him an Oscar nomination.
Fame and hell-raising seemed to arrive hand-in-hand. A moralist would perhaps have deplored Mitchum's uncanny facility for learning lines, since it enabled him to smoke pot, drink and womanise the night through and then turn up on the set, word-perfect and his usual heavy-lidded self. There is no reason to doubt Laughton's assertion that beneath the hellraising persona Mitchum was a shrinking violet. He even wrote poetry, so his biographer claims, although - perhaps mercifully - no samples are given. He went to work for RKO, which was owned by Howard Hughes, whose only interest in film-making was that it enabled him to sleep with actresses. Hughes had a sheltered adulthood; in his many years as a satyr, he seemingly never learned that, in bed as well as out, movie stars saved their best performances for the camera. One of Mitchum's early films, Out of the Past, was acclaimed as a template for film noir. Crazed females - Jane Greer or Jean Simmons (in Angel Face) - either shot him or drove him over a cliff, and he seemed hardly to mind.
He was an object lesson in survival. When famously arrested during a drugs bust in the company of a starlet (Ben Hecht's definition of that breed was "any woman under 30 not actively employed in a brothel"), he gave his occupation as "former actor", but even the shrieking headlines and a 60-day sentence making cement blocks on a prison farm failed to put a dent in his career.
Perhaps the reason was that he was sui generis. A monolithic star such as a Heston or a Peck could not have survived a scandal. It would have been as if Moses or Ben Hur had been caught smoking pot, or the saintly Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird had been sniffing crack. Mitchum had no image to be shattered; he was that unlikely hybrid, character actor and star. And Howard Hughes, who was too seriously rich to be worried about films that lost money through bad publicity, went on putting his discovery into thick-ear movies. During the war, a joke went that in the event of an air raid one should go to RKO, which had not had a hit in years.
Hughes did not hold a patent on drivel. Mitchum was more than usually miscast in Two for the Seesaw, which marked the beginning of an intense three-year affair with his co-star, Shirley MacLaine. Perhaps he grew tired of her, or, when it came to calling him to heel, Dorothy Mitchum may have had one of those whistles audible only to dogs or husbands. At any rate, he came home, running.
He had two Irish experiences. While making A Terrible Beauty, he was hit in the face in Groome's Hotel by an undersized Irish thespian, who demanded an autograph and was given one signed: "Fuck you - Kirk Douglas". When Mitchum declined to retaliate, a newspaper sneered that he had been knocked out by a midget. Later, in the elephantine Ryan's Daughter - a Robert Bolt reworking of Madame Bovary - he was hilariously cast as an Irish schoolteacher afflicted by premature ejaculation. The author relates how "drunken trash from Dublin" assaulted Mitchum, the man raking his eyeball with a thumbnail.
Years passed. An elderly Mitchum went into two TV blockbuster mini-series, The Winds of War and its sequel, War and Remembrance. He was slowing down, and there were jibes that his performances consisted of pointing his suit at other actors. His behaviour worsened; this time he was raging against the dying of the light. There was a remake of Farewell, My Lovely; the trenchcoat looked good, but he was a geriatric Philip Marlowe.
Server's book is exhaustive and exhausting, scrupulously researched and written in fast, slangy, painful prose. One puts it down remembering the brawler and hellraiser, with no more than lip-service paid to the gentle, bruised soul that was supposedly within. The cheap-jack subtitle, "Baby, I Don't Care", is an invitation which this reviewer must resist. Only just.
Hugh Leonard is a playwright and novelist