(Photo: Robert Mitchum by Kate Gabrielle and a letter thatI received from the author and philosopher Colin Wilson in 1990.)
Some walk like they own the place /Whilst others creep in fear/ Try if you can to walk like a man /You’ve got to walk like a panther tonight’
Or so said, Jarvis Cocker, and, indeed, he really could have been talking about the great uncaged beast that was Robert Charles Durman Mitchum.
Big Bob, certainly prowled though many films like he ‘owned the place’ although, in typically self-deprecating fashion, he said this: “People say I have an interesting walk. Hell, I’m just trying to hold my gut in.”
For most of his life Mitchum was also uncaged. After being expelled from High School, he travelled throughout the country on railroad cars, taking a number of jobs including a ditch-digger and a professional boxer. He experienced many adventures during his years as one of the Depression era’s “wild boys of the road.”
However, in Georgia he was arrested for vagrancy and put on…
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