Free Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care by Lee Server Page A

people and no smog. Long Beach was a seaport, built on offshore oil and maritime commerce; and there was a dark underbelly to the place as in any port town, with seedy dives and clip joint dance halls, a lively corps of hookers and male hustlers to service the visiting navy boys and merchant seamen, and the Chicago mob running gambling boats two miles offshore. But all anyone who lived in Long Beach in the 1930s would ever remember, looking back, was a gentle, happy town, fun and easygoing, where anybody could walk anywhere they wanted and feel safe, day or night, hot dogs were a nickel, hamburgers were a dime, and the sun never stopped shining.
    “Bob had himself a great time in Long Beach,” remembered Anthony Caruso, a teenager then, who met Robert Mitchum that summer and would remain a friend for more than sixty years to come. “He looked at that beach and the girls lying around in bathing suits, and he knew that was for him. He became a beach rat, Bob did. He was a good-looking kid, a great-looking kid. God, he had muscles and shoulders that wouldn’t stop. He walked up and down the beach and flexed his muscles. And the girls there just fell for him. I went to Long Beach Poly High and so did Bob’s brother, John, but Bob was kind of a dropout kid. He wasn’t interested in studies or sports or any of that stuff. Just a beach bum. But a great guy and a lot of fun.”
    Robert became part of a coterie of amiable lowlifes who spent their time together in the penny arcades or sprawled on the boardwalk and the sand ogling girls and making mischief. His new best friend and Long Beach mentor was a character named Elmer Ellsworth Jones, a reform school graduate, emigre from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who lived in a bachelor hovel next to the post office. “Jonesy” had extraordinary reserves of self-assurance, would challenge giants to a fight though he was small of stature, and had women coming in and out of his apartment at all hours though he was quite homely to behold.Jones and crew, John Mitchum would write, “cut a swath through the town like a thresher shark in a school of herring.” It was mostly hijinks and seduction the guys indulged in, but criminal behavior was not out of the question for some of them. When the circumstances proved irresistable, Robert recalled, he and some pals would roll drunks for their wallets.
    In the last days of summer, the family arrived from Delaware. Everyone moved into the small frame house at 314 Wisconsin Street. The place belonged to a man named Emmet Sullivan, a cousin of Ed Sullivan, the New York columnist and future television host. He was the perfect landlord for the East Coast emigrants, reluctant to press his case when the rent became overdue. They would greet him like a long lost uncle when he arrived to collect: Annette or little Carol would sing for him, the Major would recite some tale of the Boer War. Once he had nearly gotten out the door with a six-dollar down payment when Bob convinced him to let him bet it on a sure thing at the racetrack.
    Anthony Caruso visited the Mitchum brothers at Wisconsin Street. He remembered, “It was a pretty crappy place. The blankets were dirty, the beds were never made. I don’t think anybody ever slept on sheets. It was a very happy-go-lucky family. Believe me, it was very bohemian. The two boys, Bob and John, did pretty much whatever the hell they wanted to. Their mother was a strong woman, you know, really was, but she didn’t try to control either one of the boys in any way.”
    As the need arose, and if the sunshine did not prove too enticing, Robert would take whatever work became available, dishwasher, floor sweeper, truck loader. In the winter of 1935-36, he went on the road again, heading east with the ultimate goal of visiting Dorothy. After some weeks he reached Ohio and looked up an acquaintance from Long Beach, recently returned to his wealthy family in Toledo. “Bob called me one day out of the blue,” Frederick