A new Robert Mitchum biography just came out from St.Martin’s Press, sensibly subtitled Baby I Don’t Care, and if anyone spots a used copy in my store before I do we’ll sell it to them, but it’s unlikely that we’ll soon have a used copy unless it’s from a reviewer. And at $32.50 list I may well buy it new myself.

According to Amazon it’s 608 pages and by an author, Lee Silver, who seems more than appropriate. On books and writing, he previously wrote a title each on the pulps of the 30’s and the garish paperbacks of the 50’s, and one entitled Screenwriter. In film he also has a couple of things on the shadows and lines of film noir, something promising called Asian Pop Cinema and a study of the smashingly dark director Sam Fuller. There also exist a book each on lions, tigers and sharks, assuming it’s the same Lee Silver. Stylish violence and threat all around, and at 608 pages from St. Martin’s I’ll bet the Mitchum volume has a good index.

Its existence may explain why today I find only one copy on-line of John Mitchum’s 1989 paperback Them Ornery Mitchum Boys, the Adventures of Robert and John Mitchum, and that copy may only be available because the book dealer misspelled the title. ("The" instead of "Them" - sometimes it’s the little words that get screwed up.) It’s $13.50 plus $3 postage from New Mexico, very cheap for this title which Creatures At Large Press put out in an excellently constructed sewn paperback as its trade edition at $11.95 twelve years ago, partially remaindered through the now defunct Western Books of San Francisco a year or so later. I just wish I’d bought more copies then, because it truly is wonderful.

About a month ago one could find a few on www.addall.com, most running about $20 plus varying shipping charges. But Black Oak Books, the excellent academic operation in Berkeley, listed one at $8.50 plus their usual $6.50 shipping. The book price was very low because it’s not their kind of thing. That shipping cost is a little daunting, but it does cover 2500 miles (that Robert and John had to cross in the 30’s by hopping trains) and still left the total at a bargain $15. So I ordered it to replace my lent out copy, and am very glad I did.

For John Mitchum, a self effacing and very efficient character actor, has hundreds of wonderfully frank memories of his own career and of his older brother’s staggering self-hating success, and recounts earthy gossip by and about the hundreds of actors, stuntmen and other crew-people they both worked with. Among other things, you’ll find out that John played Clint Eastwood’s partner in the first two Dirty Harry movies and was killed in the opening sequence of the third one, The Enforcer. You’ll also get a photo of "Hal Grist, posing with one of his all-important Honey Wagons" - big, low trucks whose back end is entirely divided into "large, departmentalized portable toilets."

It’s a very earthy book, filled with photos and after-hours anecdotes, and has an excellent index. Look up Forrest Tucker, the 6’ 4" Irish vaudevillian who broke into films in 1940 but is best known as Sergeant O’Rourke in the 60’s TV show F Troop, and you’ll find that he was so well endowed that he called his member "The Chief" and could sink a golf putt with it. (Enquiring minds want to know, but thankfully only his face appears in the photos.)

Look up John Wayne, and among other things you’ll find that he and John Mitchum collaborated in the ‘70’s on the record album and book America, Why I love Her. Wayne sang and recited the lyrics the younger Mitchum wrote. Look up Frank Sinatra, and you’ll find that he sent the older Mitchum annual cards for years that read "Happy Mother’s Day. You Mother!"

You’ll also get a lot of boxing stories and marijuana references, not limited to Robert’s 1948 bust and resulting two months jail time. Asked his profession at the arraignment, he answered "former actor" (look at the photo of his nihilistic smirk in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon sometime), but Howard Hughes bought his contract for RKO and a house for his wife Dorothy, solidifying the actor’s career, and Robert Mitchum worked steadily until his death in 1997, a month before he would have turned 80.

The jail time didn’t hurt his popularity and his marriage lasted from 1940 until his death, but his own attitude got ever more ironical. Still, he didn’t do too badly for a guy whose half -Blackfoot father died, crushed between boxcar couplings in the railroad strike of 1919, when the son was just eighteen months old (and seven months before John was prematurely born). The "double-tough" father lasted 45 minutes until his pregnant wife arrived, expiring in her arms.

And she raised his three children: the oldest, Annette, was less than five years old when the mother was widowed. The children’s maternal grandfather helped some, particularly in the toughening aspects. "He was a huge man, nearly two hundred sixty pounds, very little of it having a sense of humor." A sometimes brutal Norwegian ship captain, he was in his twenties exonerated of shipwreck cannibalism for lack of witnesses, "hale and hearty" and alone after nearly a month adrift. But his sisters were singers in the Norwegian opera and he himself had a "true and clear" voice, and his three grandchildren all were musical.

John Mitchum’s hodgepodge of course doesn’t go past 1989 and Robert claimed he never read it, though he did with John sign the boxed hardcover edition, limited to 200 copies and priced at $40 at the time. (There’s one on-line at $150 right now, which seems the low going price: there were two or three a month ago at $150-200.)

Robert Mitchum also helped promote the book with his brother, but only somewhat. I remember them appearing together on Pat Sajak’s short lived talk show, causing the exasperated Sajak to state that, yes, they were indeed "ornery". But the book, titled rightly, is very rewarding in its own boozy, amiable way. The index makes it work and the sewing holds it together. Its physical quality was too good to sell many copies new, so it’s now a scarce and very desirable used book. If you see it, look at it.

Feedback and questions are more than welcome at mike@mcintyreandmoore.com.