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Going in Profile. In 1946, Mitchum came into style. "After the war, suddenly there was this thing for ugly heroes," he says, "so I started going around in profile." Since then, the Mitchum legend has suggested that 5 Card Stud would be an apt title for his autobiography. By reputation, he can hold his liquor better than Dean Martin, and has had as many boudoir invitations as Frank Sinatra. Yet he has remained married to his first wife for 28 years. Though worth at least $5,000,000, he lives in a comparatively modest, four-bedroom, ivy-covered house in Bel Air Estates. He owns two cars, a Chrysler for him, one for her—just like any other successful, harried commuter. When The Way West was on location in Oregon, his costars, Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas, rented houses in Christmas Valley. Mitchum bunked with the wranglers.
The star bit has never exerted much appeal. "I'd rather write than act," he insists. "Always have." One night years ago, between drinks he blurted a poem to a girl:
Trouble lies in pools along the barren road I've taken.
Sightless windows stare the empty street.
No love beckons me save that which I've forsaken,
The anguish of my solitude is sweet.
Astonished by the break in his usual four-letter rhetoric, she asked: "Who wrote that?" "I did," confessed Mitchum. "When I was 15. I was Bridgeport's answer to Nathalia Crane."* For once he was not swaggering. He once wrote an oratorio for a Jewish-refugee-benefit show produced and directed by Orson Welles. He wrote a short story, Thunder Road, and got it turned into a film co-starring his son Jim. He also composed two original songs for the picture.
To Mitchum, acting is strictly journeyman stuff. "I just fall in and fall out," he claims. Not everyone is conned by his nonchalant, sleepy-eyed depreciations. "He's so good," says Deborah Kerr, "that acting is like shelling peas. That's partly because his role is so often the same. He used to describe it as being beaten to death by gorillas. He seems slapdash, but he plumbs the depths of each character."
Love and Hate. That depth was apparent in The Night of the Hunter, in which he came close to playing himself, in the role of an itinerant, self-educated backwoods preacher with the word LOVE tattooed on one hand and HATE on the other. Charles Laughton, who directed him in the picture, called Mitchum "one of the best actors in the world." The potential at least is there, and occasionally the taste. Mitchum pridefully insists that he will not make a picture merely for the money. He refused $500,000 to do Town Without Pity. When United Artists upped the offer to $750,000, Mitchum halted the negotiations by telling the studio how bad the script was.