Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care

Author:Lee Server [Server, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Actor, Biography & Autobiography, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Film & Video, Movie Star, Nonfiction, Performing Arts, Retail
ISBN: 9780312285432
Google: PfZJxlOdjg4C
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2002-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Bob’s brother, John, remarried, was back in Los Angeles and working regularly these days as a journeyman actor in the movies. Not long after news of the lawsuit hit the papers, he was making a picture called Man in the Vault with William Campbell. One evening they were shooting some scenes in Art Link-letter’s bowling alley in West Hollywood and an off-duty deputy from the sheriff’s department was providing security. The deputy struck up a conversation with John Mitchum and invited the actor to come over to his place for a drink when they were done shooting. Mitchum dropped by as he said he would. The cop had impressively luxurious digs and a new Cadillac in the driveway. The drinks flowed, and the deputy started talking to him about Robert, feeling him out, making cracks. “That brother of yours probably acts like a real big shot, huh? Everybody’s got to kiss his ass, I bet. . . .”

Long story short, it turned out the deputy knew some people willing to pay real big bucks if John was able to get them some evidence proving his brother wasn’t such an upstanding citizen. John told him he would think about it. Next morning he went to Jerry Giesler’s office and repeated all he had heard. “Those Confidential bastards!” Giesler cried. He came up with an idea: John should pretend to accept the offer and try to find out what they were plotting. And so did Brother John become an undercover agent in Jerry Giesler’s counterintel plot to beat the Confidential boys at their own game. John began meeting with the deputy, stringing him along with fake glimpses of Robert’s dirty laundry and promises of something big to come. It went on like that for a while, with nobody getting much in the way of evidence against anybody.

One day the sheriff’s deputy waylaid John on the street and told him his people were through waiting. He made John get into the gold Cadillac, drove him across town, and took him into a ground-floor apartment in a luxury apartment building in Beverly Hills, the offices, it would turn out, of Hollywood Research Inc., command central for Confidential’s fact-gathering and surveillance agents. The place was filled with big, tough-looking guys, and some of them looked like they were packing heat. There were desks around the apartment topped with phones and recording and listening devices and files and photographs. John was taken over to the head tough guy and recognized him—it was Fred Otash, a notorious ex-LA cop turned private eye, Hollywood fixer, problem solver, leg breaker, a big mean Lebanese, looked like Joe McCarthy with muscles.

“Where the fuck’s that story you’re supposed to deliver?” Otash screamed.

John wrote of the moment, “I looked over at Otash’s silent, glowering gunmen with the bulgy jackets. It was confession time. ‘I tried. God knows I tried.’ My voice was trembling and I started to cry. ‘But he’s my brother and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.’”

Otash screwed his face into a meaty mass of disgust.

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