Waiting for a Poisoned Peanut

"Every two or three years, I knock off for a while," drawls Robert Mitchurn. "That way I'm constantly the new girl in the whorehouse." By that bizarre standard, this has been the bordello's busy season. This summer, three of Mitchum's features are on the circuit. In Anzio, a 1944 comic-strip war picture that happened to be filmed in 1967, he plays a hard-nosed, softhearted war correspondent. In 5 Card Stud, he is a murderous preacher who totes a pistol in a hollowed-out Bible. Villa Rides!, a Mexican western, displays Mitchum as an aviator of fortune who pilots a biplane for the bandoleros.

All three films do nothing to disturb the widespread image of Mitchum as a handsome side of beef, a kind of swaggering, heavy-lidded Victor Mature. That may be the public's view of Mitchum, but Hollywood knows better. At 51, after 64 pictures, Mitchum is still a star to contend with. More than that, he is one of the most respected professionals in the business, a no-nonsense actor who is never late on the set and knows his lines cold. Directors, writers and other stars admire the force and the surprising nuances he can bring to even the tackiest one-dimensional role. Just about the only one who continually puts Mitchum down is Mitchum himself. In Arizona, on the set of his new film, Who Rides with Kane, he derided his familiar part (a vengeful hired gun) in an interview with TIME Correspondent Tim Tyler.

"Every time the same role," complained Mitchum. "I'm wearing the same damn hat and the same damn boots I wore in 5 Card Stud." The money--he will earn $200,000 in salary, plus 27% of the gross--and the attendant fame are so many pebbles in his boots, he insists. "The Man takes the money in taxes. I live in a cage. Some day somebody's going to feed me a poisoned peanut."

Sticky Label. Like a drunken cowpoke shooting up the town, Mitchum likes to spatter his remarks through a boozy haze. Sometimes he misses. Sometimes he hits. But he never runs out of ammunition. A new script? "I just look at the contract and see how many days off I get." His favorite picture? "I don't go to the movies." Acting schools? "I suppose it keeps them off the streets." The Method? "Today every fruit figures he must be an actor. So he gets a diploma from Lee Strasberg. But how many have you heard of?" Movie fans? "There are the peekers and the doers." The implication is clear. Almost everyone else peeks. Mitchum does.

Surprisingly, the label sticks. Mitchum has been doing for a long time. The son of a Bridgeport, Conn., railroad switchman, he kicked around as a deck hand, a coal miner and a CCC ditch digger, and even turned professional boxer for 27 fights. In his final match, an opponent inadvertently made Mitchum a star. "That guy had my nose over to one side," he recalls, "gave me a scar on my left eye, had me all messed up, so I quit." The slightly dented face helped him win a job as a light heavy in a Hopalong Cassidy picture. He soon rose to a major role in The Story of G.I. Joe and won an Oscar nomination. Characteristically, he refused to show up for the ceremonies. There have been no other nominations for him.

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.

Few stars could get away with Mitchurn's approach to moviemaking, and few want to. "I've still got the same attitude I had when I started," he likes to boast. "I haven't changed anything but my underwear." Therein lies his personal color--and his professional drabness. Is there still a chance for him to unveil his talent? "That would require a lot more exposure of himself," says Actress Polly Bergen. "And he's not sure that he likes what's inside him, which is a shame." Not to Mitchum. Rich, languid, self-hating, self-loving, he can make a claim shared by only a handful of Hollywood veterans. In a town where fashions in faces change with the tides, he has survived. For Mitchum, that seems to be enough.

*A poetess of the '20s, who began writing verse at the age of nine.

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