For an author who has been dead since 1961 and, more to the point, whose muse went south in 1934, Dashiell Hammett had quite a year in 1999. Knopf published “Nightmare Town,” a collection of his long-neglected shorter works, edited by Kirby McCauley, Martin H. Greenberg and Ed Gorman. And a handsome, compact volume from the Library of America, “Dashiell Hammett: Complete Novels,” marked the return to hardcover of the five full-length fictions that forged his reputation — “Red Harvest,” “The Dain Curse,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Glass Key” and “The Thin Man.”
These two recent literary helpings of Hammett serve as notice to some and a reminder to others that there was a time when he was more famous for his fiction than for being Lillian Hellman’s sparring partner and literary guru. They also suggest that his creative flow seems to have stemmed at the tail end of 1930. Earlier that year, he had completed the novel “The Glass Key.” He also had begun a new manuscript, “The Thin Man,” that he would eventually discard in favor of a very different sort of mystery with that same title. As he wrote to a friend, “My publisher and I agreed that it might be wise to postpone the publication of ‘The Glass Key’ … So — having plenty of time — I put [the] 65 ["Thin Man"] pages aside and went to Hollywood for a year. One thing and/or another intervening after that, I didn’t return to work on the story until a couple of years had passed — and then I found it easier … to start anew.”
The “one thing and/or another” included the sale of “The Maltese Falcon” to Warner Bros., the signing of a contract with Paramount and, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel ballroom on Nov. 22, 1930, a chance encounter with a script reader named Lillian Hellman that would radically change the remaining three decades of his life.
The short stories and novels written prior to 1931 are the works of an inventive, disciplined, dedicated author. The relatively little creative writing that he managed between 1931 and 1934, while certainly publishable and in most cases entertaining, didn’t quite compare with what had come before.
Take the novels. The first four, the ones that set the pattern for the hard-boiled mystery, that intrigued (and probably influenced) such disparate writers as Andri Gide, Ernest Hemingway and William Gibson, that led an imprisoned Chester Himes from a life of crime into a life of crime fiction, seem pretty much undamaged by time. Six decades of other writers and filmmakers pecking at the bones of their plots have robbed them of some of their originality. But the tough, unsentimental, realistic style that prompted Raymond Chandler to label Hammett “the ace performer” is still very much alive and well on their pages.
“The Maltese Falcon,” with its famous protagonist, Sam Spade, and a cast of unforgettable rogues and liars, remains the author’s masterwork, one of this country’s few genuine classic detective novels. (Not long ago, members of the Mystery Writers of America voted it the greatest crime book written by an American.) But its fame should not be allowed to cast too large a shadow over the other books.
Hammett’s first two novels, “Red Harvest” and “The Dain Curse,” are remarkable in their own right — smartly plotted, visceral entertainments, moved along at a feverish pace by the lean and dramatic first-person narrative of their hero. That would be the fat and 40 Continental Op, an otherwise nameless troubleshooter for the Continental Detective Agency of San Francisco (said by Hammett to be based on Jimmy Wright, his mentor during his formative years as a Pinkerton investigator).
In “Harvest,” the Op tries to restore order in a corrupt mining town in the Northwest that has been taken over by racketeers brought in to keep the mineworkers in line. It’s a fictionalized account of the battles in Butte and Anaconda, Mont., between striking miners and the detectives and thugs hired by the mine owners to force the men back to work. The book has been the basis, uncredited, for three motion pictures, Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” and the largely ignored 1996 Bruce Willis film “Last Man Standing,” which was set in approximately the same period as the novel.
Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci tried for decades to translate the book into film without success. Perhaps this was because, as was told to me by his co-screenwriter, Marilyn Golden, they had changed the novel’s warring gangsters into strikebreaking Pinkertons and union organizers. They were convinced Hammett would have approved, even though he’d chosen to disguise the opponents in the novel.
Both “Harvest” and “Curse” had their origins in the pulp detective magazine Black Mask, where each originally appeared as a quartet of linked novelettes. “Curse,” in which the Op must save an addled young woman from an obsessed murderer, still shows its hinges, but makes up for it with some of the author’s sparest prose and most striking imagery. It also presents a surprisingly dimensional portrait of the Op.
“The Glass Key,” set in a fictional version of Baltimore, where Hammett grew up, focuses on Nick Beaumont, a shrewd and resourceful advisor to and best friend of a powerful city boss named Madvig. When the big guy falls hard for socialite Janet Henry, Beaumont, to prove that she isn’t worthy of his pal, seduces her and then apparently falls in love with her himself. What makes the novel both frustrating and fascinating is the author’s “what you see is what you get” presentation. While Hammett is careful to resolve the power struggle between Madvig and the crime boss, Shad, and to clear up the whodunit element, he offers little insight into what’s going on in Beaumont’s head. Is he really in love with Janet? Is he merely using her to better his own lot? Is he in love with Madvig?
The Op, a thorough professional whose main interest is in getting the job done, offers us some evidence of self-analysis. (“I’ve got horny skin over what’s left of my soul.”) Spade discards his cool objectivity to tell us that he’s not the sort of guy who’ll play the sap for anyone. Beaumont steadfastly refuses to give us a clue as to what he’s thinking. Maybe his thoughts have been beaten out of him. Rarely has a protagonist been subject to so many blows to the head. (This point is amusingly made in “Miller’s Crossing,” the Coen brothers film unofficially based on “Key” in which Gabriel Byrne gets slugged every 10 or 15 minutes. Official movie adaptations in 1935 and 1942 featured, respectively, George Raft and Alan Ladd, two exemplars of the minimalist school of performing arts; they were ideal as the enigmatic Beaumont, with the Ladd version being a little better than average, thanks to a script by another hard-boiled master, Jonathan Latimer.)
The remarkable thing is that the book works so beautifully, no matter how you choose to interpret Beaumont’s motives. Hammett considered it his best novel and others have agreed, including authors Somerset Maugham, Ellery Queen, Julian Symons and Rex Stout.
The Library of America collection clearly shows “The Thin Man” to be Hammett’s weakest novel. Thanks to “Nightmare Town” — among its pleasures is the author’s discarded early draft, which editor McCauley has retitled “The First Thin Man” — we can see precisely the effect that the movie money and booze and, yes, Hellman, had on his writing. The manuscript he began and put aside in 1930 (resurrected by Francis Ford Coppola’s City magazine in a 1975 issue devoted to Hammett) has little in common with the published novel. “Some of the incidents in this original version I later used in ‘After the Thin Man,’ a motion picture sequel,” Hammett wrote about the earlier start. “But, except for that and for the use of the characters’ names Guild and Wynant (both recurring in the final version) this unfinished manuscript has a clear claim to virginity.”
The original protagonist is private detective John Guild, a tanned, blue-eyed, steely brother to Spade and the Op. Though neither of those tough guys could be called sentimental, Guild lacks even their touch of the romantic. The guy is all work. His quarry is a missing scientist, the slim jim of the title, who has apparently murdered his secretary in a small community near San Francisco called Hell Bend. The 10 chapters have an economy of words and a purity of style that clearly identify their author. It is, however, Hammett’s Black Mask style, strongly influenced by his experience as a Pinkerton Op.
By the time he returned to the project, he was a changed man — a financial and literary success and an accepted member of an intellectual crowd of novelists and screenwriters that included William Faulkner, Ben Hecht and Dorothy Parker. Feeling it was time to move on to a different kind of book, he discarded the tight, hard-boiled West Coast thriller in favor of a more “sophisticated” Manhattan sort of novel — a mystery-comedy of manners in which a witty and wealthy young bicoastal couple, Nick and Nora Charles, interrupt their Christmastime partying in the big city to solve a murder or two.
In the past, Hammett had used his experiences as a detective to fuel his fiction. Now he was relying on his present lifestyle. He told Hellman she was the basis for Nora. It doesn’t take a master’s in lit to figure out his inspiration for Nick, an alcoholic ex-detective who has opted for an indolent life over a meaningful occupation.
“The Thin Man” isn’t a disaster by any means. The dialogue has wit. Nick and Nora, at least on the surface, are charming and good company. The story moves along nicely. By most standards, it would be considered a prime example of a bracing whodunit. But it isn’t in the same league with Hammett’s other, meticulously crafted books. Alfred Knopf, his publisher, may have known this. He tried to inflate sales with a full-page ad in the New York Times, calling attention to the novel’s then-daring use of the word “erection.” He needn’t have bothered. “The Thin Man” was a hit. Still, in an interview in 1957, Hammett said that he had always found the novel boring. It was probably his most financially rewarding work, spinning off into six much-beloved motion pictures (in which William Powell and Myrna Loy had such wonderful chemistry it was easy to overlook the shallowness of their lives), a long-running radio program, a television series and, in 1992, a Broadway musical.
All of Hammett’s novels have been in print for decades, though primarily in paperback. His upwards of 70 shorter pieces have had a spottier history. He preferred it that way, considering them products of an earlier, pulpier time in his career. In the mid-1940s, however, author and editor Ellery Queen (the pseudonym used by cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay) talked him into freeing a handful of the short stories for a limited-run trade paperback edition. Its success led to a second collection, then a third, until a total of nine Queen-edited collections were published. Regardless of their popularity, Hammett was adamant that the stories never appear in hardcover or mass-market editions.
After his death in 1961 (from a combination of lung cancer, emphysema and heart disease), according to his wishes Hellman was appointed executor of his estate. Though she guarded her real or imagined memory of him with an unwavering possessiveness that became the bane of would-be biographers, she was not averse to putting his pulp fiction back into print. As Joan Mellen notes in her hefty, fact-filled 1996 joint biography, “Hellman and Hammett” (Harper Collins), the playwright had a financial as well as a romantic interest in Dash’s past. She had purchased the rights to much of his literary work from the estate. Mellen devotes pages and pages to the methods she employed to secure the copyrights, often acting in apparent opposition to the dictates of Hammett’s will, which stated that only a quarter of his assets was to go to her. An additional 25 percent was to go to his adopted daughter, Mary, and 50 percent to his biological daughter, Jo. Mellen quotes Hellman as saying, “I bought the estate. I’ll leave them something when I die.”
In 1966, she edited the first hardcover collection of Hammett stories, “The Big Knockover.” It consisted of nine of the best Continental Op novelettes and “Tulip,” a rather painful beginning to a stalled autobiographical novel. In 1974, she granted Random House permission to bring out a second volume, “The Continental Op,” edited by literary historian and Columbia University professor Stephen Marcus (who also provided a chronology and notes for the Library of America collection). Together, the two books put 16 of the Op stories back into print. That barely scratched the surface of the material Queen had unearthed, as editor McCauley came to realize five years ago.
“It took me about a year to get around to discovering that the agency that handled the novels wasn’t the same one that handled the stories,” he told me recently. “They gave me a tentative OK to put the collection together, and that took another year. Then there was the time spent by the lawyers at Random House and the lawyers for the estate. It wasn’t that unusual a situation. I’m a literary agent myself, and I know you run into these complications with estates. There are always a lot of people that have to be consulted.”
Though McCauley wouldn’t say so, this one was probably a little more complicated than most. Mellen’s biography states that Hellman’s will arranged for her own literary executors to make all decisions concerning “the use, disposition, retention and control of the works of Dashiell Hammett, both published and unpublished.” In other words, everything pertaining to his estate has to flow through her estate.
“Once the book started to fall together,” McCauley says, “it went very quickly.” He and co-editors Greenberg and Gorman settled on 20 tales, more than in the two previous collections combined, that cover a comprehensive, 11-year span. Again, the earlier work outshines the post-1930 stories.
The former are represented by seven diamond-hard Continental Op capers and a few other gems. “Ruffian’s Wife” is told from the point of view of a sensitive woman married to a swaggering adventurer who clearly doesn’t understand her. “The Second-Story Angel,” an O. Henry-like short story, has an ending that manages not only to surprise, but to do so in a way that mocks romance and satirizes pulp writers.
The comparatively fewer selections from the ’30s, written primarily for slick magazine money, are typified by three Sam Spade stories — “A Man Called Spade,” “They Can Only Hang You Once” and “Too Many Have Lived” — all of which lack the painstaking care and technique that Hammett brought to his pulp work. “Hang” does have the distinction of a terrific opening line: “Sam Spade said: ‘My name is Ronald Ames.’” Past that, it is an inferior reworking of the Continental Op short, “Night Shots,” which, purposefully or not, is also part of this collection.
What “Complete Novels” and “Nightmare Town” do not do, and what no amount of literary truffle hounding or biographical interpretation has been able to accomplish, is to solve definitively the mystery of Hammett’s 27-year-long writer’s block. Whodunit? Whydunit? And what in the world could he have been thinking and/or drinking that night in 1930 when he fell under Hellman’s spell?
| When Harold Robbins’ heart stopped beating yesterday in Palm Springs, Calif., he was 81. For nearly 50 of those years, from the publication of “Never Love A Stranger” in 1948 to this year’s “Tycoon,” he was a phenomenally successful author. Before Dominick Dunne and Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins, before even Jacqueline Susann, Robbins had proven himself the master of the roman ` clef bestseller. His chronicles of the sexual and financial peccadilloes of the rich and the restless and the often clunky films made from them earned him a fortune he did his best to spend emulating the extravagant lifestyles of his characters.
I interviewed him several times over the years. (I also was fortunate enough to attend some of his outlandishly lavish press parties, including the infamous dinner at one of L.A.’s better restaurants where a horned devil chased a nymph, both starkers, onto the long table and ravished her while the dessert was being served.) Our last meeting took place a little more than two decades ago at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, his usual choice of venue. The Pocket edition of his novel “Descent From Xanadu” was then at the top of the paperback charts. He’d entered into a new long-term agreement with 20th Century Fox involving all of his unproduced works (including “Xanadu”) and whatever new ones he might think up. And he had just turned in the manuscript for “The Storyteller,” which he proudly proclaimed “the most autobiographical of all my books.”
Still, he wasn’t exactly blissful. He was only three years past a debilitating stroke. He’d recently fallen and hurt his hip. And the strength of the dollar had cut deeply into his international sales profits. “No matter what any writer will tell you,” he said solemnly, “we write because of the money. If there was no money, we’d do something else.”
On top of that, Michael Korda, his editor at Simon & Schuster, had been displeased with the new manuscript. “Michael is a good editor, but he’s a little too structured for me,” Robbins said. “He likes everything to go into a slot. Also, he’s nervous. He says he’s never read anything like this new one since Henry Miller. He says, ‘Are you sure you’re writing this with a typewriter or your prick?’ He says, ‘This is the dirtiest book I’ve ever read.’ ‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ I told him. ‘Enjoy it.’”
I asked him why he’d left his first publisher, Alfred Knopf. “Ah, Alfred,” he said, smiling. “He gave me my name, you know. It was ‘Harold Rubin,’ but he didn’t think ‘Rubin’ looked right on a book cover, typographically. I didn’t leave Alfred. He left me. We were having lunch at the University Club in New York and he asked me to come up to New Hampshire and spend the weekend skiing. I told him he was a little old for that sort of thing. ‘You’ll break your leg,’ I said. And he did. And that was the end of my relationship with Knopf.”
I wondered where he got his ideas for his books. “I came to L.A. in 1937. Started out as a shipping clerk at Universal. Met a lot of people. My books are based on people I’ve met. You remember some people. You remember things about them. I knew Howard Hughes, spent a fair amount of time with him. But I’m not writing biographies. Both DeLorean and Lee Iaccoca thought they were the (automobile manufacturer) in ‘The Betsy.’ (Entertainment executive) Jim Aubrey thought he was the guy in ‘The Inheritors.’ Grace Metalious (author of ‘Peyton Place’) was a model for ‘The Lonely Lady,’ but she was just part of it. The other part was a real girl out here who I knew. An actress and a writer. She still lives here, married, has a child. She was very what we would call today ERA-ish.
“When ‘The Adventurers’ was published, Howard Hughes sent a security guy by to pick up a copy. He told me, ‘The boss wants to see if you did as well by (playboy Porforio) Rubirosa as you did by him.’ These were the larger-than-life people of the time. And there were a lot of them. The airplane manufacturer in ‘The Carpetbaggers’ was Bill Lear, not Howard Hughes, by the way.
“My problem is that it’s impossible to write about the film industry of today. You have nothing but blank faces out here. You can say what you want about Jack Warner or Harry Cohn or Louis Mayer, but they were characters you remembered. Every time I meet Barry Diller he has to tell me who he is, because I can’t remember him.”
He found the movies made from his books even less memorable. “Most of them I don’t recognize. They don’t use the book. Maybe that’s the way it should be, I don’t know. I liked Steve (McQueen) in ‘Nevada Smith,’ George (Peppard) in ‘The Carpetbaggers.’ I didn’t believe Carole (Baker) for one second.
“There was one movie where they really screwed it up but good. The director’s wife was fucking the leading man, which is how he got the job. Had a 17-inch cock, probably. Maybe I should have used him in some book. But they shouldn’t have used him in that movie.”
Did he have any happy Hollywood memories? He thought for a few beats, then grinned. “Screwing Cary Grant. Grant’s a real cheapskate. When I was at Universal, I made a deal with him. He would get 10 percent of the gross on his next movie, 90 percent of the profit and own the negative after 10 years, 100 percent. He thought it was the greatest deal ever.
“The only cash up front would be $100,000. And he was getting a million, even at that time. I had to explain all this to the fucking board of directors. They kept telling me that the studio wasn’t going to make any money out of it, that we were giving it away. Pissing out our money. I was furious. I went back to my office and sent out for water pistols. Then went back to the meeting. ‘You said I was pissing out the money. Here it is.’ I gave ‘em some squirts and walked out. Everybody thought I was gonna get fired.
“The movie made a fuckin’ fortune. Nobody paid attention to the fact that I kept the distribution rights and the remake rights and subsidiary rights at Universal forever. As they say, ‘Whoever gets the money first, keeps it.’ And that’s the distributor. All that Cary Grant got was statements.”
I asked which of his contemporaries he read. “I don’t. It’s too hard trying to figure out what’s worth reading and what isn’t. I pick up a book and find out it’s one I wrote years ago. I started to read Mario (Puzo)’s ‘The Sicilian’ and I couldn’t get into it. Basically because Mario doesn’t know anything about the Sicilians. I had to get him introduced to Sicilians in Italy through my wife Grace’s people. He was afraid to go there at first. I told him just to tell ‘em that he wrote ‘The Godfather.’
“I knew Jim Farrell and Ford Maddox Ford. I read a lot of their stuff. In the ’30s there was a different kind of literature. The so-called literary thing was very intellectual and lefty. Sometimes the story was fucked up by the politics. Dos Passos was one of my favorites. I reread the ‘USA’ trilogy before I wrote ‘Memories of Another Day,’ as much for research as anything else.”
Pocket had just put up a billboard above Spago Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard touting “Xanadu.” Its tag line was “The Harold Robbins legend continues.” I asked him what he thought of it. “I’m right up there with Julio Iglesias,” he said. “We’re all manufactured. Maybe I should cut a record with Diana Ross.” He shook his round, balding head in wonder. “What the hell are they talking about, legend? I’m just a guy trying to make a buck and stay alive.”
Robert Mitchum, who died on July 1 at the age of 79, was too much for
this, the All-Things-In-Moderation Generation. He did what he wanted to
do when he wanted to do it. He lived hard. He played hard. He drank.
He smoked (emphysema and lung cancer finally did him in). One of his
last professional tasks was to remind us that we’re carnivores and that
Brussels sprouts are NOT what’s for dinner.
Mitchum was the genuine article — the Hollywood tough guy as
hard-boiled as the heroes he played. He’d walked the walk, a runaway who
hit the rails as “a thin, ferret-faced kid” of 14 and who, two years
later, wound up on a chain gang in Georgia. He was a drifter, a boxer,
a shoe salesman and even a poet. He wrote a play optioned by the
Theater Guild and an oratorio that Orson Welles produced and directed in
the Hollywood Bowl in 1938.
And, eventually, he became an actor. In the course of a long, full
career, he created a unique and extremely popular on-screen image.
Somehow he managed to be both cool and reckless, heroic and vaguely
sinister, laconic to the point of inertia, yet still a man of action.
And above all, he was tough. Today’s movie tough guys don’t even come
close. Well, maybe Michael Madsen, but first he’ll have to stop cutting
cops’ ears off. As for the others, next to Mitchum, Eastwood looks
perplexed. Nolte seems punch-drunk. De Niro, Pacino and Keitel are kids
playing grown-up. And as for Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger, can
you imagine Mitchum wearing a Planet Hollywood T-shirt?
Speaking of which, his off-screen persona was pretty unusual, too. He was
a celebrity who didn’t give a damn about celebrity, who didn’t give a
damn about image, who didn’t give a damn, period.
Twenty years ago, I was fortunate enough to observe all this firsthand.
A short chat about his then-current movie turned into a four-hour,
vodka-soaked afternoon in his office on Sunset Boulevard. Most of it
wound up on tape. Four hours of conversation with a guy who spoke like
Raymond Chandler wrote. It was Q&A overkill for a commissioned piece
of less than 1,000 words. But who was to complain? Not I.
One of the Los Angeles TV stations, in presenting the news of the
actor’s death, recalled his comment after being released from prison in
1948 for “conspiring to possess marijuana.” Asked by a reporter what
the 60 days incarceration had been like, Mitchum answered, “Like
Palm Springs without the riff-raff.” That started me wondering what
might be on those tapes, long unused and forgotten.
As it turned out, a lot of it was boozy nonsense, but there were a few
of his career memories worth recalling. Like his fractious relationship with director
Josef von Sternberg during the making of “Macao.” “Things got so bad on that one, I would
have no more of it. But the crew said, ‘If you don’t work, we don’t
work,’ so I agreed to come back. I got drunk in a bar on Monday night,
slept under the table, got to work by 10 the next morning, an hour
late. Joe was standing on his box — he was like a 4-feet-8er –
and he was hollering at Tommy Gomez about something inconsequential. I
wandered in and asked, ‘To whom should I apologize?’ ‘Don’t be silly,’
Joe said, ‘We’re delighted by your presence.’
“He was autocratic toward the crew, really belaboring people. I’d tell
them, ‘Let’s quit. Fuck him and the boat that brought him. Let’s go
home.’ And Joe would go, ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ like it was all a big joke. He’d
be nice to ‘em when I was there and when I was away, not so nice. What
was I gonna do, bat him around? He only came up to here.”
On the rodeo film “The Lusty Men”: “(Producers) Jerry Wald and Norman
Krasna — one or the other — would call me at the office and ask for
ideas. So I gave them one — a modern Western. They reached into a
drawer and came up with a title. They had titles to fit just about any
type of movie. They were quite a team. One would walk up and down and
cry while the other sat down to talk to you. Then they’d reverse. I
always thought that the producer was The Producer. I didn’t know I was
makin’ more money than they were and that if I sneak-talked to the boss
(Howard Hughes), they’d be out. I didn’t know that, no shit. So Howard
called me one day and said, ‘Bob, for God’s sake tell me you don’t want
to do this picture so I can get this son-of-a-bitch Wald off my back.’
But I told him I wanted to do the picture. He asked, ‘Is the script that
good?’ I told him we didn’t even have a script, but we’d whip one up.
And I wanted Nick Ray to direct it.
“The next day Wald called me to tell me in hushed tones that ‘Howard’s
OK’d the story and guess who we have as director? Nick Ray.’ Then he
hired Niven Busch and the guy who wrote ‘They Shoot Horses,’ Horace
McCoy, to do the writing. They were at opposite ends of the lot and they
kept passing each other by. Finally they passed each other and went
right out the gate. Nick and I , both stoned, worked out the script.
“So we get the picture finished and Wald had insisted on this ending
that was impossible. We snuck into the editing room, made off with the
end sequence and burned it. The production number was still active, so
we went out and shot another ending, bang-bang-bang, like that. And
Jerry Wald traveled to colleges around the county lecturing on the art
of filmmaking.”
In the mid-’50s, Mitchum drew critical raves for his performance as the
homicidal self-styled preacher in “Night of the Hunter.” “That was a
lovely exercise. But they worked on it for five months after I was
finished and Charles (director Charles Laughton) put in a lot of shots
of owls and pussycats. Said he thought I was too horrific and he didn’t
want people dragging their children off the streets when I passed by.
The character was too strong for him, but that was what he asked me for
to begin with. So he tried to undercut it with root beer floats and
lacy laundry.”
The bootlegger epic “Thunder Road,” which Mitchum’s company produced,
and for which he sang the title song, “could have been a great film.
That’s my fault. I didn’t realize I owned it. Honestly. It was popular.
You can’t believe how popular. I’m sorry it wasn’t better.”
When the producers of the original “Cape Fear” first tried to hire him,
“I told them I’d prefer if they got someone else. Unfortunately, I’d
demonstrated that I knew more about the behavior of the functional
criminal that anyone else they could get. So no mother way would they
try someone else. Then, after I agreed, the story was drawn through a
suck hole. You know, given the Hollywood treatment. There had to be a
heavy and a hero. So they made a hero out of a crooked lawyer who had
committed God knows how many trifling felonies.”
Director Howard Hawks phoned to offer him the role opposite John Wayne
in the western “El Dorado.” “‘What’s the story?’ I asked. (A deep-voiced
impression of Hawks) ‘No story, Bob. It’s just character.’ I said
‘Swell.’ Hawks is a consummate all-around writer-director, but he has a
habit of standing there on the set, staring out into space. ‘Don’t bug
him,’ people say, ‘he’s writing in his head.’ I kept tabs on him one day
and caught him checking his watch to see if it was time to break.”
Kirk Douglas was one of the producers of “The Way West,” a movie that led to this reminiscence: “I told them I’d play the scout, so they
got Dick Widmark for the other part, the one who had all the dialogue
with Kirk. I was off in the distance, giving it that hand over the
eyebrow, looking for redskins, right? Gave me plenty of time for trout
fishin’ and foolin’ around. Kirk was sort of runnin’ the company, which
was all right with me. Except that one day I’m going around goosin’ the
grips and trying to head down to shore when I hear a voice saying,
‘There’ll be no levity in this company.’ A big lecture. I wondered to
myself, who’s putting up with this shit? I turned around and Kirk was
smiling. I went back and continued my way down the rocks and I hear
Kirk giving out with another tirade. I turn around and he’s smiling
again. A month or two later, I was talking with some guys and I said,
‘Who’s the asshole in the company who was putting up with all that
bullshit of Kirk’s?’ And they answered, ‘He was talking to you.’
“Life’s tough for Kirk. One of his kids was giving him some lip one
time and he drew back his fist and told the boy, ‘If you weren’t a
promising young actor, I’d … ‘ Well, hell, he makes his own problems.
‘No levity on the set.’ Right.”
While making “Ryan’s Daughter” with director David Lean, Mitchum and character actor Trevor Howard
became drinking buddies of a sort. “Strange guy, Trevor. The first day
I met him, he hit me in the head. Whap! Then he said, ‘You sweet thing’
and he kissed me. Then: Whap! again. We closed a few pubs. Hell of a
workout.
“Lean was convinced that nobody could be a sincere ack-tor and fool
around on the set like I did. So he shouted, ‘Roll them,’ or whatever
they say over there, ‘Ack-shun.’ And I did this pretty tender scene in
one take. Lean was decimated. Had tears in his eyes. ‘I cahn’t tell
you how luv-ly that was,’ he said. I shrugged and said, ‘You don’t think
it was too Jewish?’ What did he expect at those prices?”
Mitchum always got “those prices” in those days. “Somebody says, ‘We
really want you to do this script.’ And I say, ‘I’d need an awful lot
of money in front to do that one.’ And that never seems to be a
problem. The less I like the script, the higher my price. And they
pay. They may pay in yen, but they pay. Not that I’m a complete whore,
understand. There are movies I won’t do for any amount. I turned down
‘Patton’ and I turned down ‘Dirty Harry.’ Movies that piss on the
world. If I’ve got $5 in my pocket, I don’t need to make money that
fucking way, daddy.”
I remember him sitting on a sofa, big, rawboned, Philip Marlowe come to
life, saying, “I’ve been called a cynic, which I surely can’t deny
because I am a cynical-style girl. I happen to believe a certain amount
of cynicism is inherent in the beast. But there’s a little romanticism
in there, too. And more than a little hedonism. You can use this to sum
it all up: I know what I’m doing is bullshit. But I’ve got to admit,
it’s also a pretty good ride.”
Mitchum kept riding almost to the end. He once said that he drank as a
preparation for death. “When that great day comes, I will be completely
inured to it. It will be just one more hangover.”
I hope it worked for him.
Robert Mitchum, who died on July 1 at the age of 79, was too much for
this, the All-Things-In-Moderation Generation. He did what he wanted to
do when he wanted to do it. He lived hard. He played hard. He drank.
He smoked (emphysema and lung cancer finally did him in). One of his
last professional tasks was to remind us that we’re carnivores and that
Brussels sprouts are NOT what’s for dinner.
Mitchum was the genuine article — the Hollywood tough guy as
hard-boiled as the heroes he played. He’d walked the walk, a runaway who
hit the rails as “a thin, ferret-faced kid” of 14 and who, two years
later, wound up on a chain gang in Georgia. He was a drifter, a boxer,
a shoe salesman and even a poet. He wrote a play optioned by the
Theater Guild and an oratorio that Orson Welles produced and directed in
the Hollywood Bowl in 1938.
And, eventually, he became an actor. In the course of a long, full
career, he created a unique and extremely popular on-screen image.
Somehow he managed to be both cool and reckless, heroic and vaguely
sinister, laconic to the point of inertia, yet still a man of action.
And above all, he was tough. Today’s movie tough guys don’t even come
close. Well, maybe Michael Madsen, but first he’ll have to stop cutting
cops’ ears off. As for the others, next to Mitchum, Eastwood looks
perplexed. Nolte seems punch-drunk. De Niro, Pacino and Keitel are kids
playing grown-up. And as for Willis and Stallone and Schwarzenegger, can
you imagine Mitchum wearing a Planet Hollywood T-shirt?
Speaking of which, his off-screen persona was pretty unusual, too. He was
a celebrity who didn’t give a damn about celebrity, who didn’t give a
damn about image, who didn’t give a damn, period.
Twenty years ago, I was fortunate enough to observe all this firsthand.
A short chat about his then-current movie turned into a four-hour,
vodka-soaked afternoon in his office on Sunset Boulevard. Most of it
wound up on tape. Four hours of conversation with a guy who spoke like
Raymond Chandler wrote. It was Q&A overkill for a commissioned piece
of less than 1,000 words. But who was to complain? Not I.
One of the Los Angeles TV stations, in presenting the news of the
actor’s death, recalled his comment after being released from prison in
1948 for “conspiring to possess marijuana.” Asked by a reporter what
the 60 days incarceration had been like, Mitchum answered, “Like
Palm Springs without the riff-raff.” That started me wondering what
might be on those tapes, long unused and forgotten.
As it turned out, a lot of it was boozy nonsense, but there were a few
of his career memories worth recalling. Like his fractious relationship with director
Josef von Sternberg during the making of “Macao.” “Things got so bad on that one, I would
have no more of it. But the crew said, ‘If you don’t work, we don’t
work,’ so I agreed to come back. I got drunk in a bar on Monday night,
slept under the table, got to work by 10 the next morning, an hour
late. Joe was standing on his box — he was like a 4-feet-8er –
and he was hollering at Tommy Gomez about something inconsequential. I
wandered in and asked, ‘To whom should I apologize?’ ‘Don’t be silly,’
Joe said, ‘We’re delighted by your presence.’
“He was autocratic toward the crew, really belaboring people. I’d tell
them, ‘Let’s quit. Fuck him and the boat that brought him. Let’s go
home.’ And Joe would go, ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ like it was all a big joke. He’d
be nice to ‘em when I was there and when I was away, not so nice. What
was I gonna do, bat him around? He only came up to here.”
On the rodeo film “The Lusty Men”: “(Producers) Jerry Wald and Norman
Krasna — one or the other — would call me at the office and ask for
ideas. So I gave them one — a modern Western. They reached into a
drawer and came up with a title. They had titles to fit just about any
type of movie. They were quite a team. One would walk up and down and
cry while the other sat down to talk to you. Then they’d reverse. I
always thought that the producer was The Producer. I didn’t know I was
makin’ more money than they were and that if I sneak-talked to the boss
(Howard Hughes), they’d be out. I didn’t know that, no shit. So Howard
called me one day and said, ‘Bob, for God’s sake tell me you don’t want
to do this picture so I can get this son-of-a-bitch Wald off my back.’
But I told him I wanted to do the picture. He asked, ‘Is the script that
good?’ I told him we didn’t even have a script, but we’d whip one up.
And I wanted Nick Ray to direct it.
“The next day Wald called me to tell me in hushed tones that ‘Howard’s
OK’d the story and guess who we have as director? Nick Ray.’ Then he
hired Niven Busch and the guy who wrote ‘They Shoot Horses,’ Horace
McCoy, to do the writing. They were at opposite ends of the lot and they
kept passing each other by. Finally they passed each other and went
right out the gate. Nick and I , both stoned, worked out the script.
“So we get the picture finished and Wald had insisted on this ending
that was impossible. We snuck into the editing room, made off with the
end sequence and burned it. The production number was still active, so
we went out and shot another ending, bang-bang-bang, like that. And
Jerry Wald traveled to colleges around the county lecturing on the art
of filmmaking.”
In the mid-’50s, Mitchum drew critical raves for his performance as the
homicidal self-styled preacher in “Night of the Hunter.” “That was a
lovely exercise. But they worked on it for five months after I was
finished and Charles (director Charles Laughton) put in a lot of shots
of owls and pussycats. Said he thought I was too horrific and he didn’t
want people dragging their children off the streets when I passed by.
The character was too strong for him, but that was what he asked me for
to begin with. So he tried to undercut it with root beer floats and
lacy laundry.”
The bootlegger epic “Thunder Road,” which Mitchum’s company produced,
and for which he sang the title song, “could have been a great film.
That’s my fault. I didn’t realize I owned it. Honestly. It was popular.
You can’t believe how popular. I’m sorry it wasn’t better.”
When the producers of the original “Cape Fear” first tried to hire him,
“I told them I’d prefer if they got someone else. Unfortunately, I’d
demonstrated that I knew more about the behavior of the functional
criminal that anyone else they could get. So no mother way would they
try someone else. Then, after I agreed, the story was drawn through a
suck hole. You know, given the Hollywood treatment. There had to be a
heavy and a hero. So they made a hero out of a crooked lawyer who had
committed God knows how many trifling felonies.”
Director Howard Hawks phoned to offer him the role opposite John Wayne
in the western “El Dorado.” “‘What’s the story?’ I asked. (A deep-voiced
impression of Hawks) ‘No story, Bob. It’s just character.’ I said
‘Swell.’ Hawks is a consummate all-around writer-director, but he has a
habit of standing there on the set, staring out into space. ‘Don’t bug
him,’ people say, ‘he’s writing in his head.’ I kept tabs on him one day
and caught him checking his watch to see if it was time to break.”
Kirk Douglas was one of the producers of “The Way West,” a movie that led to this reminiscence: “I told them I’d play the scout, so they
got Dick Widmark for the other part, the one who had all the dialogue
with Kirk. I was off in the distance, giving it that hand over the
eyebrow, looking for redskins, right? Gave me plenty of time for trout
fishin’ and foolin’ around. Kirk was sort of runnin’ the company, which
was all right with me. Except that one day I’m going around goosin’ the
grips and trying to head down to shore when I hear a voice saying,
‘There’ll be no levity in this company.’ A big lecture. I wondered to
myself, who’s putting up with this shit? I turned around and Kirk was
smiling. I went back and continued my way down the rocks and I hear
Kirk giving out with another tirade. I turn around and he’s smiling
again. A month or two later, I was talking with some guys and I said,
‘Who’s the asshole in the company who was putting up with all that
bullshit of Kirk’s?’ And they answered, ‘He was talking to you.’
“Life’s tough for Kirk. One of his kids was giving him some lip one
time and he drew back his fist and told the boy, ‘If you weren’t a
promising young actor, I’d … ‘ Well, hell, he makes his own problems.
‘No levity on the set.’ Right.”
While making “Ryan’s Daughter” with director David Lean, Mitchum and character actor Trevor Howard
became drinking buddies of a sort. “Strange guy, Trevor. The first day
I met him, he hit me in the head. Whap! Then he said, ‘You sweet thing’
and he kissed me. Then: Whap! again. We closed a few pubs. Hell of a
workout.
“Lean was convinced that nobody could be a sincere ack-tor and fool
around on the set like I did. So he shouted, ‘Roll them,’ or whatever
they say over there, ‘Ack-shun.’ And I did this pretty tender scene in
one take. Lean was decimated. Had tears in his eyes. ‘I cahn’t tell
you how luv-ly that was,’ he said. I shrugged and said, ‘You don’t think
it was too Jewish?’ What did he expect at those prices?”
Mitchum always got “those prices” in those days. “Somebody says, ‘We
really want you to do this script.’ And I say, ‘I’d need an awful lot
of money in front to do that one.’ And that never seems to be a
problem. The less I like the script, the higher my price. And they
pay. They may pay in yen, but they pay. Not that I’m a complete whore,
understand. There are movies I won’t do for any amount. I turned down
‘Patton’ and I turned down ‘Dirty Harry.’ Movies that piss on the
world. If I’ve got $5 in my pocket, I don’t need to make money that
fucking way, daddy.”
I remember him sitting on a sofa, big, rawboned, Philip Marlowe come to
life, saying, “I’ve been called a cynic, which I surely can’t deny
because I am a cynical-style girl. I happen to believe a certain amount
of cynicism is inherent in the beast. But there’s a little romanticism
in there, too. And more than a little hedonism. You can use this to sum
it all up: I know what I’m doing is bullshit. But I’ve got to admit,
it’s also a pretty good ride.”
Mitchum kept riding almost to the end. He once said that he drank as a
preparation for death. “When that great day comes, I will be completely
inured to it. It will be just one more hangover.”
I hope it worked for him.
