reach for the stars

Wonderful girl. Either I’m gonna kill her or I’m beginning to like her.

Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum were a magical team.  The actress likened their work together to a perfect doubles pair at tennis.  Getting to know him in those first days on Tobago while filming Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, as they sat on the “soft pink sand.” Kerr recalled finding herself “listening to an extremely sensitive, poetic, extraordinarily interesting man…a perceptive, amusing person with a great gift for telling a story, and possessed of a completely unexpected vast fund of knowledge…Bob was at all times patient, concerned, and completely professional, always in good humor, and always ready to make a joke when things became trying.”  Laura Nightingale, a wardrobe girl on the film, described Mitchum’s great sensitivity toward his costar to journalist Lloyd Shearer: Sensing that her feet were hurting from the sharp rocks she’d been standing on, “He just kneeled down, unlaced her white sneakers, removed them and massaged her feet.  It was lovely and compassionate the way he did it….Then he put her sneakers back on and said kind of brusquely to hide his tenderness, ‘Gotta keep you alive for the next scene.’  Then he walked away.  Deborah was so touched she cried.”

Deborah became Bob’s great platonic love. He would speak of her ever after as his all-time favorite actress and the “only leading lady I didn’t go to bed with” — an exaggeration in any case, but meant somehow as a compliment.  When they met he had been expecting a prim Englishwoman like the rather frosty ladies she often played on screen, but Kerr turned out to be one of the boys.  She was a rare delight, warm, wise, earthy.  One time she was rowing a raft in open water during the tortoise-chasing scene, John Huston constantly shouting, “Faster! Row faster!”  The wooden oars split in half in her hands, and Kerr, in her damp nun’s habit, screamed in fury, “Is that fucking fast enough?  Mitchum, floating nearby, swallowed a gallon of saltwater laughing. 

One day, an inspector from the Catholic Legion of Decency arrived on set as Huston was preparing a scene between Mitchum and Kerr. Huston greeted the priest and then called for “Action.”  Director and crew were deadpan as Bob and Deborah spoke their lines, then moved closer together, Mitchum sliding his hand under nun Kerr’s breasts while she cupped his buttocks and they began to kiss with open-mouthed abandon.  The Legion of Decency man’s eyes widened, he grasped at his heart and screamed, “What is going on there?!”  “No talking, Father,” said Huston. “Dammit, now you’ve gone and ruined a perfectly good take.” 

—Excerpt from Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don’t Care