'I liked it in jail'

Lee Server's exhaustive new biography of Robert Mitchum casts new light on the actor's arrest on a drugs charge in 1948. This is an exclusive extract

Robert Mitchum - then a promising young actor with an Oscar nomination under his belt - was arrested for marijuana possession in August 1948. It would have killed his career, but for the intervention of RKO studio chief Howard Hughes, who immediately assembled a powerful team to defend him. Mitchum was caught in a raid on a house in Laurel Canyon, as he partied with actress Lila Leeds, dancer Vicki Evans, and bartender-turned-real estate agent Robin Ford.

Mitchum cursed softly and released the burning stub. Robin Ford was sitting motionless, staring fixedly at the opposite wall, as if thinking he might go unnoticed. His only movement was to take the joint from his mouth and flick it under the couch. One of the policemen - Detective Sergeant Alva Barr - came up, retrieved it, then scooped up what Mitchum had dropped. He crumpled the tips and then placed them in the breast pocket of his jacket. Picking up the Philip Morris pack on the coffee table, he examined the contents.

He looked at Mitchum and said, "These are yours?" Mitchum said, "No, they're not mine." Barr said, "Don't give me any business and we'll get along fine." The other officer - Detective JB McKinnon - closed a pair of handcuffs on Robin Ford's wrists. Mitchum then offered up his own cigarette.

Barr stepped over to where Lila [Leeds] sat and took one partly burned cigarette out of her hand. It had red lipstick around the tip. He told her to empty her bath-robe pocket, and she took out something wrapped in a page of the Herald Express. The cop unwrapped it and found what appeared to be three more hand- rolled marijuana cigarettes and eight Benzedrine tablets.

He told them they were all under arrest and then picked up Lila's phone and called headquarters. Vicki Evans said, "It's just like the movies."

Reporters and photographers were already gathered outside both stations, alerted to the celebrity dope arrest. Ford and Mitchum entered past a gauntlet of flashbulbs and barked questions. One photographer snapped Bob with his features contorted; in the printed photo he was barely recognisable. The picture wrote its own caption: "A MAN IN THE GRIP OF DEMON DRUGS." Inside the station Mitchum and Ford were booked. Name, age, address, identifying marks. When the policeman asked Mitchum his occupation, he replied, wittily: "Former actor."

It was the middle of the night when a Howard Hughes flack got word of the Mitchum arrest. He put a call through to his boss and imparted the news. Hughes took it calmly - his anger was reserved for Commies and intransigent females.

"Well, who do we pay to kill this thing?" Hughes asked. In Hollywood, everything from rape to hit-and-run homicides could have been hushed up if you knew the procedure. But it was too late for that; there would be headlines. The press already had the story. In a few hours there would be headlines. Howard said, "Let's get him out of jail, keep him from talking, and for Pete's sake will somebody call [RKO lawyer] Jerry Giesler."

Arraignment was set for September 21, when Mitchum and his three playmates returned to the courtroom. Lila and Vicki offered the judge a demure vision of femininity. "Both blonde women," wrote one investigative journalist, "have muted their chemically gold hair to lesser shades of brilliance." Evans dressed in black, and Leeds in a tailored, cream-coloured Roz Russell-style suit that tried hard - but failed miserably - to conceal her curvaceous figure. The proceedings were cut-and-dried. Judge Ambrose ordered their return on the 30th, at which time he would hear their pleas of guilt or innocence.

Rumpled, balding, charismatic friend to the press Jerry Giesler had kept a relatively low profile in these first weeks. Columnists anxious to convey some of the lawyer's legendarily colourful courtroom behaviour were not rewarded until the September 30 appearance before the judge, when the attorney floridly demanded that all charges be dropped as unconstitutional due to the fact that the indictment "was not returned in clear English". The section charging Mitchum and the others with "possession and conspiracy to possess flowering tops and leaves of India hemp (Cannabis Sativa)," said Giesler, "might as well have been written in Japanese or hieroglyphics!" He quoted state law to the effect that all indictments must be drawn in pure and simple English so that defendants might clearly understand the accusation. Giesler said that "hemp" to his knowledge was used to make rope, and he comically stumbled over the pronunciation of the word cannabis, provoking laughter from the onlookers. He then left them in stitches by declaring that the only Latin he knew was Xavier Cugat. From Judge Nye came word that the trial would begin on November 21.

Howard Hughes, RKO, and David Selznick had observed the developments in the Mitchum prosecution like ambivalent caregivers attending an infectious patient. To look after the boy and risk catching something, or throw a sheet on him and dump him in an alleyway - that was the question. Any overt attempt to help the actor or influence the case became ammunition for the DA's office and the Hollywood-and Hughes-bashers who floated rumours that the mogul were "pulling political strings" to subvert the law and let Mitchum get away with it. Hughes and Selznick both issued official "hands-off" statements regarding the actor's defence.

Hughes did not want to lose Mitchum's services if he could help it. He was a big Robert Mitchum fan. Since taking over RKO, Hughes had privately fixated on Mitchum as a kind of fantasy alter ego. He spent many a predawn hour in his personal screening room watching the actor's pictures, particularly Out of the Past, studying the clinches of Bob and Jane Greer with feverish interest. Hughes's position in life would seem to have placed him beyond envy or hero worship; but to the scrawny, hard-of-hearing, whiny-voiced and paranoid Texan who felt compelled to offer money, fame, wedding rings, or threats to desired females, Mitchum's brawn, bourbon voice, imperturbable cool and natural allure to women represented his ideal masculine image. (Hughes biographer Charles Higham posited the millionaire as an active bisexual; for what it's worth, both Mitchum and Hughes's second favourite male star, Victor Mature, had certain physical characteristics in common with Howard's favorite female type - dark eyes, thick hair, and a big chest.)

The trial began. The defence attorneys spoke. On the charge of conspiracy to possess marijuana, their clients would offer no defence and agreed to waive a jury trial and have their cases decided upon a reading of the testimony by the arresting officers given before the county grand jury. As Giesler had pre-arranged, the other charge, of possession, was held in abeyance.

Mitchum sat calmly for the 60 minutes it took Judge Nye to return with a guilty verdict for each of the three defendants. Nye set a court date of February 9 for probation hearing and sentencing.

On Wednesday, February 9, the crowd outside the courthouse began gathering at dawn. Inside the packed eighth-floor courtroom of judge Clement Nye, counsels Giesler and Grant Cooper completed the final legal fine-tuning before the punishments could be pronounced. Due to a more recent legal dispute, the sentencing of Robin Ford had been postponed, and the would-be realtor currently languished in a jail cell without bail. (The new charges against him would ultimately be dismissed). Judge Nye asked if all concerned parties had read the reports prepared by the probation department. Mitchum's concluded that the individual was "psychologically ill-equipped for his sudden rise to fame".

Nye sentenced Mitchum and Leeds to a year in the county jail. He then suspended the sentence and placed the pair on probation for a period of two years, 60 days of that to be experienced in the confines of the county jail.

Mitchum exchanged his suit for jail-issue denim blues, though he was allowed under jail rules to keep his own footgear, an expensive pair of brown Cordovans. And he exchanged his old identity for a new one: prisoner 91234. From the concessionaire he brought four quarts of milk and two cartons of cigarettes. No supplies from outside sources were permitted. The chief jailer explained some more rules. Other than his attorneys, he was allowed two visitors per week. All correspondence going in or out had to be scrutinised and censored. Breakfast was at 6.30pm, soup at 10am, dinner at 3pm, lights out at 9pm. The prisoner was given a cup and spoon, which he was required to keep clean.

At dawn they woke him, gave him a mop and bucket, and told him to clean up. He was finishing up when they let in some reporters and photographers. It was arranged by...somebody.

In the mess hall, slurping his soup, he had a conversation with the tank trusty. "Be careful," the man said. The word was that somebody wanted to set him up, rack him up in the joint. "They wanted to make me for the whole deuce," Mitchum would remember. "They didn't want to be wrong. I didn't know which side of the fuzz it was... Man, they can do anything they want - you know, charge you with some minor infraction of the rules and you end up doin' two big ones in Quentin. No fuckin' way. I couldn't hack that."

Worrying about Mitchum's state of mind, Howard Hughes decided to go up to Castaic himself and give the boy a pep talk. Hughes had a liaison arranged with the sheriff to allow a special weekday visit and to let him meet with Mitchum in a private room without any guards listening or looking at them. He and Perry Leiber rode up to Castaic in Howard's old sedan. Hughes was wearing a particularly old and sloppy outfit, faded khakis, a stained shirt, his cracked old aviator jacket, and torn sneakers. The captain in charge, under orders from the sheriff, came out to greet the scruffy visitor and offered Hughes the use of his own office for the meeting with Mitchum. Seeing the multiethnic mix of prisoners working on the grounds, the phobic and racist Hughes requested that no prisoners be allowed anywhere near the office while he was still there.

Hughes and Mitchum sat on either side of the desk in the captain's office. "Bob, I just came up here to reassure you that RKO is with you 100%. And I want to ask you if there is anything that I or the studio can do for you under the circumstances?" Mitchum said, "I need $50,000 to pay off my legal fees and to buy a decent house for my family." "I'll see to it." It would be a loan, at 5% interest.

Then Hughes handed over the gift he had brought for the actor, a brown paper sack filled with vitamins.

The final week went by without incident. After breakfast on Wednesday, March 30, Mitchum was released from custody. Reporters were waiting. "I've been happy in jail," he told them, tailoring his opinions for public consumption. "Nobody envied me. Nobody wanted anything from me. Nobody wanted my bars or the bowl of pudding they shoved at me through the slot. I did my work and they let me alone." He had developed a new taste for privacy. "I'm through with my so-called pals. I'll see only my wife, my two children, and a couple of close friends. Parties? I'd stand out like a monster at a party. I'm typed a character and I guess I'll have to bear that the rest of my life."

Mitchum was going back to work as soon as possible, he told the group. "I've got to. I'm broke...And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm heading for home."

Extracted from Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care by Lee Server, published by Faber and Faber at £20 on October 22.