Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care (6 page)

On a morning in 1932, fourteen-year-old Robert Mitchum hopped aboard a freight train heading south.

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Mitchum would on occasion absurdly claim to have been voted Felton’s class valedictorian (and his equally trouble-making pal Manuel Barque honored as salutatorian!)—and say that he had set fire to the school instead and left town the day before graduation, a case of wishful daydreaming, though some journalists have printed the claim as fact. In 1976 the Felton school board, hoping to have the now-famous film star appear at their bicentennial celebration, wrote to him in Los Angeles and offered as enticement the high school diploma he had never earned. Mitchum did not return to Felton, but the diploma was forwarded to him nonetheless.

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The house on Logan Street where Robert spent his early childhood had been sold for three thousand dollars, all of it going to unpaid levies and the mortgage company. The family that purchased the place found it in very poor condition and without a furnace or water heater. The rooms contained items abandoned by the Mitchums—pieces of furniture, a oiuja board, and numerous sketches and paintings by Ann and others that a surviving member of the new owner’s family described as “very lovely.”

T
HERE WERE TIMES, HE
would remember, lying on his back on an open flat-car on a warm summer night and staring at the stars overhead, when he would feel blissfully happy and free. And then there were the other times. Evenings with the cold wind whipping through his bones. Staring out from an open boxcar through the windows of passing houses, imagining he saw the families inside gathered together at the dinner table or huddled around a Christmas tree, times when he would be filled with loneliness and trying not to cry. One time he was riding a reefer, a refrigerator car, into Idaho Falls in the dead of winter. What he was doing in that part of the world he couldn’t say, had probably hopped the wrong freight or something. It was ten below zero outside. Shivering, teeth chattering. Nothing to eat for twenty-four hours except a can of unthawed peaches found trackside. He had an old newspaper and stuffed the pages inside his pants for warmth. A hobo crouching nearby had started a little campfire in the car. A spark touched the newspaper sticking out of the leg of Robert’s pants and it went up in flames. He awoke with his legs on fire. The hobo helped him tear his burning pants off. It was the only pair he had, too. When you were standing with no pants on under a streetlamp in Idaho in the middle of winter, trying to find some frozen clothes to steal off a clothesline and then trying to thaw them out in a depot campfire without burning those up, too—well, Mitchum liked to say, after that things could only get better.

In the beginning he wandered the country with no timetable, many times with no destination clearly in mind, just enjoying the ride and the view provided by a “sidecar Pullman,” the thrill of finding himself in places he had previously
known only in pictures, in books. Chicago. The Big Santee. The Mississippi. The Blue Ridge Mountains. Down in the Carolinas to see the land his father had come from. The real hoboes—a term meant to describe only those migrants who traveled in search of work—called people like Robert “scenery bums,” young punks who rode the trains just looking for adventure. Some of those job-seeking hoboes knew the schedules and destinations of the freights in a given territory better than a damn conductor, but scenery bums like Bob often didn’t care where a train was going. There was a special excitement in hopping a freight to an unknown destination, leaving it up to fate. Would tomorrow drop you in New Orleans or West Virginia? Every month or so he would make his way to an appointed place where his mother would be able to write to him, care of the general post office. Often as not his mother had sent him something, a clean shirt, money, a tin of candies. Sometimes, out of nowhere, he would be sitting on the steps outside the post office and he would read her note and start tearing up. He was far from home and only fourteen years old, no matter how much he tried to deny it.

The denizens of the road, of the rails, were a kind of society unto themselves, with their own customs, their own laws and lingo. Mitchum relished becoming part of this world of outsiders. These were his people, he liked to say, the ones who didn’t fit in. In the hobo jungles, the improvised transient centers that grew up around the jumping-off points on the tracks, he would sit around the campfires and the garbage can grills and listen like a disciple to the huddled veterans telling their tales of brushes with death on the trains, violent run-ins with some notorious railroad bull, and other adventures, some bloodcurdling and some hilarious, Robert listening to the tales while he ate from his tin cup of beans or mulligan stew procured for a few pennies’ donation or by chipping in a couple of scavenged vegetables. Some of those guys were amazing storytellers and could hold a crowd in their palm as they wove a wild tale that was half memory and half nonsense; they could make the crowd roar with laughter at a funny windup or leave them blubbering if it was a sad story and had anything to do with a mother or a devoted dog.

It was an education. Every day he had to learn something new to survive. He learned how to catch and cook a squirrel, how to tell directions from the stars at night, how to repair socks, how to fight a man coming at you with a length of chain. He had long been a rather emancipated boy, and the road made him even more grown-up before his time. He had already, at fourteen, developed a taste for alcohol and its effects, sneaking off with many a bottle of
his grandmother’s fruit wines back at the farm, but liquor was scarce on the road. Sometimes, in a jungle or in a boxcar with some other bums, a bottle of moonshine made the rounds, but it usually cost you. There was, however, another substance available to down-and-outers on the road looking for a buzz, and it was free for the taking. Marijuana grew wild in many parts of the country and was often found in great thriving clumps along the railroad tracks. “Back then it was the poor man’s whiskey,” Mitchum said. Those who knew what they were looking for could weed it out and stuff their pockets full before hopping a freight. You rolled it in a page of newspaper and lit it up. It was a pleasant way to get through a long ride, sometimes having to sit all night in pitch-black darkness and in cold. Robert liked it maybe even more than booze. He liked the way it seemed to slow things down, allowed the mind to wrestle with a thought at greater leisure, to ponder more deeply. He liked the way it made a joke heard sound funnier and a girl look prettier. It relaxed you, it felt good, it was sexually stimulating. He couldn’t believe the Lucky Strike people hadn’t already cornered the market on the stuff. As he traveled the country he became a connoisseur of the weed, came to know its botanical history, its strengths and strains. After much practice, he claimed to be able to taste the regional characteristics in any sampling—Georgia hemp from Louisiana shitweed from California Red, and so on—at a single toke, blindfolded. In later years, he would collect seeds of the best stuff he found, and he would find a place in the yard or driveway where he lived and raise his own crop.

He always liked to stay ahead a few dollars, but sometimes he found himself down to his last nickel, and sometimes he found himself without a cent to his name. He would roll into a new town, hungry, and hope to find a breadline with a free meal; or he would roam a neighborhood and knock on back doors and ask if they could spare some food, usually offering to do chores in exchange. If a man was home, he usually found something for you to do, like chop some firewood or wash his car; if it was just the housewife, she seldom asked for anything but that you complimented her cooking, which he always did. In some places the bums who came before you left coded chalk marks or scratches on the curb or the fence post telling you which houses were generous and which ones to avoid at all cost. Sometimes he panhandled on the streets, but that was likely to bring on the fuzz anywhere but in the big cities. Sometimes when he was really starving and had no place to go, he would turn himself in to the local police station, say he was making his way back home and had no place to sleep. If they had any sympathy, the cops would put you in a
cell overnight, give you some of their grub, and in the morning make you sweep up the jailhouse for your keep.

He took jobs when they presented themselves. He was a dishwasher in Ohio, a fruit picker in Georgia, a ditchdigger someplace else. He always said he was older than he was when asked, and nobody ever asked for any proof. In Pennsylvania he landed in an old coal town in the hills and was taken in by a sweet, middle-aged widow lady. She gave him a room and food and told him she would find some good honest work for him and sent him to the local coal mine where her brother gave him a job. “I went down into the pit with a sledge hammer,” Mitchum recalled, “and took one look around that cramped hole and almost went out of my mind. Claustrophobia. The only thing that kept me down there was a 250 pound Polish foreman who waved a twenty pound hammer at my head and said, ‘You no quit!’ So I no quit. But I was so sick I couldn’t eat. . . . At night I’d just stand around on the street and watch the miners making passes at the girls. I lasted long enough to pay the lady who was so nice to me and then I cut out again.”

The drifter’s world into which he had thrown himself was dangerous and unforgiving. An al fresco ride on a train was fraught with peril. You could easily be set on fire or have your eyes burned out by live cinders blowing back from the engine. The train might hit a steep downhill pass so fast that you would be tossed off like a rag doll, or the freight you were sitting on in a gondola could shift suddenly and slide you out into space, or sitting in an open boxcar with legs dangling out the way many kids liked to do could leave you with your limbs ripped open by a signal post or crushed by the sudden entrance into a narrow tunnel. Many people, especially the young ones, routinely fell under the wheels while trying to board a train or fell to their deaths moving between moving cars or walking a roof walk. If the train itself didn’t kill or maim you, the employees of the railroad made a try at it. There were conductors and railway bulls who took their oath of office so seriously or had such a mean streak that they would do anything they could, including murder, to keep the bums from riding. In the jungles, ‘boes were always updating each other on what yards and what trains to avoid because of tough security or a sadist wielding a monkey wrench or a hammer.

Catch a safe ride and avoid the vicious railroad workers and there were always your fellow bums to worry about. Most hoboes were ordinary decent people down on their luck, but infesting their ranks were many predators—thieves and rapists and psychos—and even the ordinary joes could turn vicious
when things became bad enough. There were people riding the rails who would stab you to death for two nickels you kept in your shoe. In the dark of a boxcar at night while people tried to sleep, there was always somebody slipping up to try and pick a pocket or steal a bindle. And if they weren’t after your goods they were trying for a feel of your privates. These things often led to a scuffle, somebody pulling a shiv and somebody else leaking blood. Once Robert saw a fight in a rolling open box that resolved itself with one man shoving the other out of the car and the guy falling splat on his head on a cement wall.

Everywhere he went, Mitchum saw terrible evidence of what desperation and hopelessness could do to human beings. Suicides were common around hobo jungles and rail yards. One time he followed a crowd to see them taking down a man who’d hung himself underneath a rail overpass. Another time a man riding in a boxcar with him slit his wrists during the night. Mitchum saw, too, the things people did to keep living: the young boys who took it up the ass for a cup of food, the man in a jungle in Kentucky prostituting his daughter for ten cents a throw, a blanket spread out on the dirt, forty or fifty men lined up, the girl no more than twelve.

As the numbers of the wandering disenfranchised increased with each year of the Depression, many communities across the country began to take measures against them. Police and sheriff’s departments and private security posses increased in number, given a mandate to make shiftless visitors unwelcome. One time Mitchum remembered coming into a depot with a trainload of hoboes and being met by a vigilante group armed with shotguns and pitchforks, making sure no one on that freight set foot in their town.

“Mother would get letters from Bob,” said Annette Mitchum. “He would tell her how he was doing, when he might be coming back their way for a visit. He would tell her where she could reach him next, and she would try to put a few dollars aside for him and send it to that town, and he could go there and get it when he arrived. And Robert had asked her to send it to him in Savannah, Georgia. He was going there to pick up his money when they arrested him.”

He came into Savannah on a freight with about seventeen other kids, as he remembered it. “I was cold and hungry. So I dropped off to get something to eat. This big fuzz grabbed me. ‘For what?’ I asked. He grinned. ‘Vagrancy. We don’t like Yankee bums around here.’” Mitchum told him he had money and he was about to pick up some more. “He just belted me with his club and ran me in . . . a dangerous and suspicious character with no visible means of support.”
It was the common charge in those days. “They were always locking you up for poverty.”

After a few days in the Savannah cooler, young Robert was marched before a magistrate to plead his case. By now, said Mitchum, they were trying to add a shoe store burglary to the charges. It looked like it would go through for awhile, a minimum of five years behind bars. But the robbery turned out to have occurred while the accused was already under lock and key. At that revelation some people in the courtroom snickered and maybe Mitchum smirked or something.

The judge said, “The vagrancy charge still goes, anyway. Seven days with the County. Take him outta here.”