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If ever there was a biography to delight and wallow in, this is him. Within the first page and a half Mitchum’s father has killed a man in a place called Hellhole Swamp and his Norwegian Sailor Grandfather is dodging rumours of having eaten his whole crew. Mitchum is a totally Mitchum type character from the time he’s about four years old, and spends the next 600 pages shitting in teachers hats, riding depression era boxcars, escaping chain gangs, joining dog-napping gangs, writing songs for cross dressing cabaret acts, punching out cops, blowing saxophones, infuriating Kirk Douglas, hating Australians, writing lauded poetry, doing time, drinking endless bottles of vodka, smoking endless ‘pakalolos’, shagging starlets, golden showering Ava Gardner, playing with his kids, gruntling his long understanding wife Dorothy, wearing trench coats and busting out them acting skillz one eyebrow at a time, all with an air of bemused insouciance that makes him seem so damn cooooooooooool. It’s just bursting with delicious stories, but here’s a few I can’t help sharing with you right now…
Here he is living in Hells Kitchen at 12 y.o.
Here he is riding the boxcars out west with his little bro at 15…
And here he is on the set of some doctor movie with Sinatra in the mid 50’s…
While reading this book it may strike you as unfair that you can’t be as cool as Mitchum, but you can take some concession in the fact that you have real friends and an ability to express your emotions, both of which Bob had bugger all. Which kind of makes him seem even cooler…
Server’s view of him certainly isn’t fawning and uncritical, but through the testimony of all and sundry he comes across as a total legend of a dude, and you can’t help but clap and think ‘bravo on a life well lived’ at the end of it….
The writing is real snappy too. I love this summation of Howard Hughes’ time running RKO…
Order that sucker from your local book shop or do like I did and git it from the liiiiiiiiiiiiibrary…
http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au
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This sounds like EXACTLY the book I'm looking for. I love all that John Steinbeck / Cormac McCarthy era action and this is it! Real live! Nice.
ReplyDeleteAh, somebody actually commented on one of these things! and ages ago. I had not seen. Good on yer amber...
ReplyDelete