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

Fast told reporter Bill Davidson. “I went downtown and picked him up at a center the city ran for boys on the bum. He lived with us during that winter. My father gave him a job operating a punch press at the factory he owned. Bob hated it and he soon got fired. I remember he used to infuriate my father, a conservative gentleman, because he’d come downstairs wearing shoes but no socks. The temperature might be below zero, but Bob was on a kick then where he didn’t like socks and just wouldn’t wear them.”
    He moved on in the spring, eager to see his girl. By this time Dorothy had left her parents’ home and was living in Philadelphia, had a job as a secretary in an insurance company. She was no kid anymore but an alluring young woman, wearing sophisticated frocks, hair prettily coiffed in the big citybeauty parlor. Robert had to scare off a few potential suitors now. He told her she had to hold on, trust him, they would get married one day soon when he’d made his fortune or something.
    “Stick with me, kid,” he said, “and you’ll be farting through silk.”
    Robert returned to the West Coast, back to the life of a beach rat. He slept at the Wisconsin Street house or at Elmer Jones’s digs or wherever a night’s adventure landed him. When the wanderlust took hold again he would pick up and leave, be gone for a few weeks or months at a time. He reenlisted with the CCC and worked in the forests outside Chino, California. He won some amateur boxing matches on fight nights at the camp. With the might of his shoulders and heavy hands, victory came easily enough most times—one good shot and the other guy went flying and out for the count. For a couple of months he followed the semipro boxing circuit around central Cal and Nevada, picking up twenty-five dollars or so in prize money each time he knocked someone on his ass. He had a forty-six-inch chest and a beautiful sloping right hook, and promoters wondered if they might be looking at a new star. Robert enjoyed himself and didn’t get a scratch until one night he was matched against a fierce middleweight with arms so long that when he leaned back his elbows touched the ground. The man slapped him with an unexpected left and Mitchum’s head spun around.
    “Did I hurt you, baby?” the man said.
    Robert, breathing through his mouth, said, “Yes.”
    The man laughed, said, “That’s what we’re here for.”
    The next punch sent Mitchum down in a cloud of blood. The bridge of his nose brutally broken in two places and the lens of an eye damaged, Robert promptly retired from the ring.
    At Long Beach and other ports along the California coast, he worked occasionally as a stevedore, loading and unloading the liners and freighters that steamed in from around the world. The longshoremen were among the most politicized of American labor groups, with tough left-wing union leaders in a perpetual war with the employers. Robert attended meetings and listened to fire-and-brimstone speeches by guest revolutionaries. He was not much of a joiner, but he had seen enough injustice and capitalist opportunism in his travels to listen with sympathy to these political preachers, and for a time in this period he considered his own politics to be “conditional communist.” He would sometimes even claim to have been a card-carrying CP member and to have written a few speeches for some of the “rabble-rousers.” These experiencescontributed to a stage play he would write some years later concerning the well-known (and much hated) Harry Bridges, an Australian emigre union leader and Communist whom U.S. authorities fought long and hard to expel.
Fellow Traveler
satirically dramatized Bridges’s deportation by steamship and his imagined fate, castaway on a South Pacific island, organizing a tribe of cannibals.
    There was a local theater group in Long Beach called the Players Guild, a privately funded community endeavor dedicated to bringing the city an annual series of