Last week the baleful word marijuana* was on every Hollywood tongue. The most self-conscious city of a self-conscious nation was in for a first-rate scandal, and it hated and feared every whisper of it.
Shortly after midnight, two detectives, who had been listening outside a rudely furnished three-room shack in Laurel Canyon, just back of Hollywood, fumbled at the kitchen door. Dancer Vickie Evans, hearing them, opened it from the inside. In the living room with the hostess, a pert blonde movie starlet named Lila Leeds, and Robin Ford, a scared real-estate man, the cops found big, sleepy-eyed Cinemactor Robert Mitchum. The handsome $3,000-a-week screen hero hastily tried to get rid of a cigarette that turned out to be marijuana. A detective found other "reefers" on Mitchum, Ford and Miss Leeds.
That was the story the arresting officers told popeyed reporters when they hauled the quartet to the Los Angeles county jail. A star of the first magnitude and an idol of organized bobby-soxers who call themselves the "Bob Mitchum Droolettes," the 31-year-old actor talked his head off in a mixture of remorse and forced humor:
"Well, this is the bitter end of everything—my career, my home, my marriage. Sure, I've been smoking marijuana since I was a kid. I guess I always knew I'd get caught. My [estranged] wife and kids are on their way out here now. The stage was set for a big reconciliation. Ha! With that temper of hers, she'll turn right around and head back East . . . How does marijuana affect you? Well, try it yourself some time . . ."
The Menace. Later in the day, all Hollywood began to share Mitchum's hang over. The press all over the U.S. was screaming "dope" scandal and hinting broadly that more sensations were to come. Clearly, a serious industrial crisis was in the making. The problem was much bigger than salvaging a valuable property named Mitchum, who had been nursed to stardom since he clicked with moviegoers in G.I. Joe. It was even bigger than protecting some $5,000,000 riding on three unreleased Mitchum films.
The industry's tight-lipped leaders began to remind each other that Hollywood's laboriously contrived self-portrait was once again in danger of looking like a comic strip—and an ugly one. For years, the world's best pressagents have been plugging the theme that Hollywood is a typical American town, a wholesome little community populated by "just folks": a lot of them better-than-average-looking, to be sure, but hardworking, sober, law-abiding, family-loving. This picture of the town, while true as far as it goes, glosses over the fact that under the klieg-lit, high-pressure, high-paid strains peculiar to Hollywood, some of its supertense citizens sometimes volatilize and take to drink, adultery or dope. The movie industry, beset last week on every side by box-office woes, heckling from Washington and quotas from Britain, trembled to think that the old bogey of Hollywood's marrow-bone wickedness might be revived.