“He would arrive for work in the morning and say, ‘What are the lyrics?’ That’s what he called his lines, his dialogue. He hadn’t gotten around to looking at the script yet, he’d say. ‘Somebody give me the lyrics.’ And I thought that was the secret to doing the lines like he did them. You don’t learn them in advance. ‘I’ll go in each morning and I’ll learn them in makeup.’ Oh, dear, was I wrong. I was stumbling over my first line. And he knew the script backward and forward. It was part of his act…’What are my lyrics?'”
Jane Greer (quoted in Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care”)