Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (59 page)

Mitchum cowrote two songs for the film, “The Whippoorwill” and a title theme, “The Ballad of Thunder Road.” With the latter he had no luck fitting the lyrics to a piece of music that worked until his mother tried the words against an old Norwegian dancing tune she knew, sort of a polka. Eureka. Mitchum recorded a version of “The Ballad” for Capitol, which in September rose to number sixty-two on the pop-rock charts.

The legion from Hollywood descended on Asheville in the autumn of 1957. Mitchum took over the Governor’s Suite at the local hotel, and
Thunder Road
people filled every other room in the place and a motel and a few boardinghouses as well. Locations were scouted and chosen all over town and on the roads and mountains outside of Asheville and over in nearby Transylvania County. Extras and all bit parts were cast from among the local population, including high school students, businessmen, and local celebrity Farmer Russ, a popular radio disc jockey who would play the laughing lout in the nightclub sequence. Al Dowtin took Mitchum next door from the ABC to Hoyle’s Office Supply Store, a former car dealership that had its own parking garage, and they made an arrangement with owner Red Hoyle to use the garage and part of his outdoor parking lot and to build an office set in the back. “He came in and he said, ‘We’d like to film a movin’ picture in your parking area,’ Red Hoyle remembered, “and I said fine, OK. And they made it into a body shop back there and filmed things and jumping out of the window and so on.” The Hoyle building became
Thunder Road’s
improvised studio for a number of interiors and exterior scenes. The store remained open and people would come in to buy their pencils and stationery while Mitchum and the others walked in and out making the picture. “He was a fine fellow, Robert Mitchum,” said Red Hoyle. “He treated me fine. They were there for some weeks and he brought a lot of people to the store ‘cause he would come on in when he took a break, and walk around, sit down on the office furniture and say hello to people, so forth and so on. And people came around, two, three hundred women there all the time. Those ladies would come up and see him shoot scenes. I thought they were coming to see me, but they really came to see him.”

The film company settled into Asheville, Mitchum telling them all to mingle, make themselves part of the scenery. It was the locals who had trouble acting natural as they gathered in crowds for hours at a time watching the filming or froze in place, slack-jawed, watching Mitchum and Keely Smith cruising down the main street in an open convertible. At night the movie stars were often to be found at the nearby nightspot, The Sky Club, located inside an actual castle built by an eccentric rich man. “They were all up there all the time,” said Mickey Hoyle, Red’s son. “That was a private club, the only place you
could get drinks by the glass. Everywhere else you had to brown bag it. They shot part of the movie in there, too.”

When word spread that Mitchum was living in Asheville, he was paid a visit by a committee of Indian tribesmen from Lane, South Carolina. Relatives, it turned out, from Mitchum’s paternal grandmother’s side of the family. Mitchum embraced them warmly and staked them all to a night’s entertainment. “They were among the most frightening people I’d ever met,” he said. “They were pure blooded Blackfoot, wild-looking men who, if you gave ‘em too many drinks, would tear down the motel.”

Very soon it became apparent that Arthur Ripley would not be making
Thunder Road
in anything like four days. The working atmosphere was extremely relaxed, the script vestigial. Bossman Mitchum ran a loose ship, to say the least, and the shooting schedule became a meaningless affectation. Gene Barry, playing Treasury agent Troy Barrett, arrived at the location for an expected three-week stay. “But I got there and—it was a nice little town, Asheville—I found they were making it up as they went along. Arthur Ripley was an elderly man, very intelligent, very articulate, knew camera angles, all the technical aspect. But he was very slow. And Jim Phillips, a nice guy, clean-cut looking young man, was constantly writing new scenes, taking advantage of whatever local color they found, and some of the people there were very colorful. And my three weeks were up and Jim Phillips would say to me, ‘Don’t go, I’ve written a great scene for you.’ And my three weeks came and went and they kept me for another six weeks. And my wife would call and say, ‘When are you coming home?’ And I said, ‘Don’t complain, they’re enlarging my role!’”

“Hell, yes, Jim got behind in the writing,” said Al Dowtin. “Jim, he liked to drink a little beer, and I guess most all of us do a little bit, occasionally. And he had a hard time keeping ahead of what they were going to shoot and coming up with a script. He did all his writing in his hotel room. But anyway, he was a real nice guy. And I don’t think Mitchum minded waiting for the pages, he was having such a good time.”

Actor Jerry Hardin, playing one of the moonshine drivers, had been at a summer stock theater in Virginia when Mitchum passed through town and hired him for
Thunder Road,
his first film. “Mitchum,” he said, “was the most laid-back man that I had ever seen. The business of acting was very casual with him. The thing that was of primary importance was his relationship with the company. He loved to party and practical jokes were de rigeur. One night he got ahold of about six dozen baby chicks and put them into one guy’s room—I think he was the stunt driver. And then everybody waited for the man to stumble home after having a good deal of liquor. And the man came and the
chicks were everywhere and so were their droppings, and the guy was floundering and flopping about—this story lived on the set for weeks afterward.

“Mitchum represented to me the most extraordinary physical specimen. He partied all night sometimes, and he would come to the set, they put a little bit of makeup under his eyes, and he would work the whole day. You never could see it on the film. Absolutely astonishing. His conquests were a legend, all kinds of wild tales flying around. Women were coming from all over to pay attention to Mitchum, and Mitchum was, how shall I say, paying attention to them—until his wife showed up. There was talk about him making love with nearly every woman in North Carolina. I don’t know how much of that was accurate, but he was clearly popular.”

“Oh my, yes,” said one Asheville resident, confirming this conclusion. “He was quite a ladies’ man.”

“There was one morning, after a very full weekend,” a member of the company recalled, “and Mitchum was on the set, very abashed, and he was telling how he had partied so hard that the whole weekend had become a blank. His wife had just gotten into town, he said, but he had somehow lost track of her; and dawn came and he was confused, his head hurt, and he saw that he was in bed with some woman. And Mitchum thought, ‘Oh shit! Where am I? My wife’s in town; I can’t get caught doing this again!’ So he got out of bed very quietly, he could barely open his eyes, and he put his clothes on and climbed out of the window and ran away out of there and down an alley without looking back. He wandered around and made his way to the set and passed out. When he woke up and the crew were getting ready, he noticed that he didn’t have his wristwatch. . . . He had forgotten his wristwatch in the woman’s bedroom, and it was an expensive watch, a gift from his wife, had his name inscribed, a little message and everything. And he said, ‘Oh, Jesus, I don’t even know where I was, and I left my goddamn watch there. My goose is cooked.’ And he was agonizing about this all morning, trying to remember where he was last night and who the woman was. And about midmorning his wife came to the set. And she said, ‘Bob, I noticed you forgot your watch on the bedstand this morning; I brought it over.’ He was so drunk he didn’t even know he was in bed with his own wife and had snuck out of his own room. I don’t know if the story is correct, but it has a definite ring of truth to it from what was going on there, and
he’s
the one told me the story.”

As if to forestall the same charges of nepotism he often leveled at the Hollywood establishment, Mitchum made sure not to play favorites with his sixteen-year-old
son. “He’s had no formal training,” said the father, “so I raised hell with him on the set whenever he goofed or got self-conscious in front of the cameras. I was much rougher on him than on any actors I’ve ever worked with.” With the rest of the
Thunder Road
company, Mitchum was both a benevolent and a creative producer. For many segments of the film he was codirector as well. Ripley at times restricted himself to the technical and visual details of filming while Mitchum would casually take over with the actors. Mitchum was particularly good at coaching all the film’s nonprofessional bit players.

Along with everything else the cast and crew were soaking up, Mitch encouraged them to ingest the film’s background and subject matter, to get involved. “Mitchum went to considerable lengths to expose us to the inner workings of the whiskey-running business,” said Jerry Hardin. “He had guys talking to us who had driven the cars, and there were Drug and Alcohol people around telling their stories. A good deal of effort was put into wising us up to what was going on, so we knew what everything looked like and felt like. It was very important to Mitchum as we made this film that everyone felt like they were part of the atmosphere.”

“I said to Bob, ‘I’d like to know more about what these agents do,’” Gene Barry recalled. “And so he arranged it for me to go with some of the real guys on a raid into the hills. And this group of tough-looking guys came up to the hotel, said, ‘OK, we’re here.’ And first they gave me a pair of boots to wear. Then they shoved a gun in my hand. I said, ‘What’s this for?’ They said, ‘You may have to protect yourself where we’re going.’ And we drove around the back roads up above Hendersonville, and then we went into the woods on foot. And then we came charging into this still someone had built there in the woods. But the moonshiners had been tipped off and got away with their goods. Somebody told them we were coming. It was very clannish around there. Or maybe Mitchum tipped them, you never know!”

There
were
those who wondered just exactly which side Mitchum was on in the struggle between white lightning and the law. At some point during the shooting, two Alcohol Tax people Mitchum had spoken to in Washington came down to see how things were going. They came to the set and observed the shooting of several scenes, and it began to occur to them that their friend Bob was not playing a Treasury agent after all but was portraying a criminal whiskey driver. “Here’s what happened, and I don’t know how you ought to handle it,” said a man on the scene who would prefer to go unnamed. “They came down and saw what the picture was about. And they saw how Bob was
outsmarting the Alcohol Tax agent and making the agents look kind of like the whiskey runner was a little bit smarter person. Well, I mean this was purely fictional, but they didn’t quite like that. And they didn’t know what to do, so they sort of pulled out of cooperating, just backed away from the whole thing and went back to Washington.”

The cars that were used in the film had been obtained at no little effort. Production manager John E. Burch was sent combing the hills for the sixteen-year-old Mercurys and other hopped-up moonshiner transporters. “Here was old Dan with a pocket full of Hollywood green,” said Mitchum on the matter. “Everytime we found what we needed, we also found one of the local mountain boys had just bought it.” Eventually, though, a souped-up fleet was put together for the would-be bootleggers. “Everything we drove was an authentic whiskey-running car they had gotten from sources,” said Jerry Hardin. “There was nothing faked. We were running around town with these hot engines everywhere. Mitchum was fascinated by the cars. And he was very proud of what the car he was driving could do, how it could outrun the police. Mitchum was really into it, like he’d become one of these whiskey runners. He was in the center of this world and really enjoying it.”

While all the actors in the chase scenes were required to do some highspeed runs through the town and up and down the wooded highway, the difficult and dangerous stuff was left to an amazing stunt driver named Carey Loftin (the man with the baby chicks in his room). A Hollywood legend, Loftin had been driving—and crashing—high-speed vehicles in the movies for decades (and would continue to do so for another forty years). Loftin’s dexterity at the wheel was extraordinary. It was believed that his vision was literally superhuman—he could see through fog, for example. “What would be a blur to you or me,” said his widow, “was crystal clear to Carey. So it was like everything moved slower for him and gave him more time to adjust to it. His reactions were so fast that he could catch a flying bug between two fingers just putting his hand up—just two fingers.”

Loftin arrived in Asheville direct from doubling Marlon Brando on a motorcycle in
The Young Lions.
His hair was still bleached blond for that picture, and Mitchum made a great show of taking him down to the local women’s beauty parlor and having it darkened while townspeople looked in through the window.

A flamboyant, fun-loving character, Loftin enjoyed dazzling people with his legendary gifts. For
Thunder Road’s
big stunt—Luke Doolin driving to his death, the car rolling over repeatedly and crashing into an electric station—Carey went up to the cameraman and asked him for his “mark.”

“What?”

“Where do you want the car to come to a stop?”

The car was supposed to flip over out of control and spin till it got to the jerry-rigged electric station. The cameraman wasn’t thinking in such precise terms, but he shrugged and pointed to a spot on the ground. Carey took a last puff on a cigarette and tossed it on the spot. He got in the car, drove down the road and turned around, waited for the signal, then moved. The car screeched, skidded, flipped over again and again, and shuddered to a stop. Loftin climbed out, everyone applauded; they moved over to the front of the upside-down car and saw Carey’s cigarette butt lying dead center below the front fender.

“Carey and Bob had a good time down there,” said Mrs. Loftin. “He said they got stoned on some real moonshine liquor from the mountains, the kind in a jug, and you slung it over your shoulder and passed it back and forth. And they were seeing who could outdrink who, and they were very bleary-eyed at the end of it.”