American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  Clint then did two more blink-and-you-miss-him roles, one in Pevney’s 1956 star vehicle for granite-faced Jeff Chandler, Away All Boats (Pevney was incensed at having been forced this time by the studio to use Clint, who is barely visible in the film—in one scene he calls for a “medic”), and a bit-bit in Charles Haas’s Star in the Dust (1956), a western starring Agar. “They made a lot of cheapies in those days, a lot of B pictures,” Clint later recalled. “I’d always play the young lieutenant or the lab technician who came in and said, ‘He went that way,’ or ‘This happened,’ or ‘Doctor, here are the X-rays,’ and he’d say, ‘Get lost, kid,’ I’d go out, and that would be the end of it.”

  Over the course of eighteen months, Clint received good reports that had resulted in an increased salary of $125 a week. But on October 23, 1955, he was unexpectedly and unceremoniously let go by Universal because, the executives said, he just didn’t have the right look. They especially objected to his teeth and a rather prominently protruding Adam’s apple. Janssen was also let go, because of his receding hairline and distracting facial tics (which would serve him well in his portrayal of Richard Kimble on the 1960s classic TV series The Fugitive). The studio also released a young Brando look-alike who, unfortunately, they felt couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, or control his real rage and channel it effectively onto the screen, an unknown by the name of Burt Reynolds.

  After their dismissals, Reynolds and Clint went out to the parking lot together and found that Burt’s name on his reserved space was already being stenciled over for western TV series up-and-comer Clu Gulager. Clint’s was still there. “Don’t worry,” Burt said to Clint. “I may learn to act someday, but you’ll never get rid of that Adam’s apple.”

  Clint was not prepared for this unexpected turn of events. He had been sure he had a future at Universal, so sure that he and Maggie moved to better quarters. The Villa Sands, at 4040 Arch Drive, just off Ventura Boulevard, was close enough to the studio that Clint could walk to work on a slow day. The one-bedroom apartment offered a communal pool for its tenants to share; at $125 a month, a relatively expensive rental for California in the 1950s. Clint had heard about it through a couple of his UTS classmates who lived there, young starlets-in-the-making Gia Scala and Lili Kardell.

  Soon after Clint moved in, Bill Thompkins came down from Seattle and took an efficiency in the complex, as did Bob Daley, who’d moved to L.A. via Chicago, Texas, and California and was currently working at Universal’s budget department dealing with production schedules and costs. Daley and Clint had met before, at the studio, but now, as neighbors, became friends and joined the Villa Sands–Universal youthful associate social scene, where no one was over twenty-eight, everyone was good-looking, loose, and into jazz that played all day, thanks to a phonograph someone had rigged at one end of the pool.

  Needing work, Clint went back to day jobs, mostly digging swimming pools and other such work, all of it off the books so he could collect unemployment. He auditioned for the other studios, using a scene from Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story, which he had practiced at UTS, playing the part that Kirk Douglas had done in the film version.

  For Clint, neither a sentimentalist nor an especially high achiever at this point, that might have been it for him and the movies, had it not been for the incessant drive of Arthur Lubin, who remained steadfast in his belief that he could do for Clint Eastwood what director Douglas Sirk had done for Rock Hudson. Eight of Sirk’s biggest 1950s films had featured Hudson, beginning when the actor was still an unknown contract player as the romantic lead opposite Piper Laurie in Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952). By the time they had made their last movie together, The Tarnished Angels (1958), Hudson was a major Hollywood star.*

  Lubin, who did not have the success or the talent of Sirk, admired him less for his movies than for his relationship (whatever it might have been) with Hudson. Lubin believed that he too could become an important director working with the right actor, and that Clint was that actor. Likely Lubin’s attraction to Clint had as much to do with his being gay as with his opinion of Clint’s abilities. Homosexuality was not unusual in Hollywood. (Both Hudson and Sirk were gay, although there is no evidence that they were ever actually involved.) But in the simplest terms Lubin wanted to continue his professional association with Clint (who had shown no signs of being anything but a raging heterosexual) as a way to remain relevant in his life while making both of them stars.

  Meanwhile, Maggie suffered a life-threatening bout of hepatitis. Because she and Clint had no medical insurance, it hit them hard financially as well as emotionally. He continued to dig ditches for swimming pools and, thanks to Lubin’s unerring drive, landed a couple of minor TV bits—too small to actually be called parts—that helped him get by. His motorcycle abilities got him a quick shot on Highway Patrol, a vehicle for Broderick Crawford that introduced the aging Academy Award-winning actor to television viewers. Crawford, an alcoholic, had a habit of trimming his lines down to a sentence or two because he couldn’t memorize them or easily read them off cue cards. Clint had only one quick scene with him but it was enough for him to realize how excessive most dialogue really was (despite the negative reason for it in this case). And, although his part was minuscule, Clint actually received a piece of fan mail.

  He landed a bit in another series, TV Reader’s Digest, based on the popular magazine, but that was it. After Maggie’s recovery, money was so tight that she had to return quickly to her day job and take on additional part-time work doing showroom modeling of bathing suits; the long hours wreaked havoc on her feet. She also managed to find occasional TV work as living wallpaper for Jimmy Durante’s semiregular popular Sunday-night variety show.

  Meanwhile Clint’s only link to show business, Lubin, often took him to dinner when Maggie had to work late and invited him to informally join his social entourage of mostly gay companions.

  At the end of 1956, when his initial contract with Lubin was up, Clint opted to let it expire, for a reason that even Lubin could not argue with: nothing was happening in his career. Clint replaced Lubin with Irving Leonard, whom he had met during his time at Universal and who, leaving the studio, had become a business manager specializing in actors who needed help handling their finances. Leonard often found parts for his clients who didn’t have agents, including a grateful Clint. Since in Hollywood someone could be poor one day and rich the next, Leonard could sign unknowns and bank on them while also banking for them. Leonard had noticed Clint at Universal, and when the young actor approached him, Leonard took him on. Soon afterward Leonard landed a position at Gang, Tyre & Brown (later Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown), a law firm that specialized in film clients, and brought Clint along with him. Once he had settled in, Leonard hooked Clint up with Ruth and Paul Marsh, who ran a small PR firm for actors and actresses that included a fair share of wannabes.

  Lubin, meanwhile, disappointed and maybe even a little heartbroken, was determined to find a way to get Clint back, or at least to have him around. In the summer of 1956 Lubin landed his next assignment, at RKO, directing The First Traveling Saleslady and he quickly offered Clint a small part. It paid him little money but was his chance to get back into films.*

  The First Traveling Saleslady was a western comedy starring Ginger Rogers, Carol Channing, Barry Nelson, and the up-and-coming James Arness. (Arness’s friendship with John Wayne would result in his landing the starring role, after Wayne turned it down, in what would become the longest-running TV western series, Gunsmoke.) It was by far Clint’s biggest movie role to date, with a couple of comedy bits and service as a love interest for Rogers. Clint had no use for the script, had no sense of comedy, and didn’t particularly like to play “love” roles, but when Lubin told him that after seeing the daily rushes, RKO was considering offering him a player contract, he was encouraged.

  The contract never materialized, but Lubin did get another part for Clint—his fourth with Lubin—in his next film for RKO, Escapade in Japan, essentially an
adventure movie intended for children. This time Clint played a soldier named, of all things, Dumbo, who leads two young boys on a runaway trip to Japan. The film almost didn’t open because prior to its release the cash-strapped studio was sold. Ironically, Escapade eventually reached theaters through a distribution agreement with Universal. But it made little difference which studio released the film; it was a complete failure at the box office.

  With no prospects Clint, desperately in need of cash, this time took a weekend job as a sweeper at the Mode Furniture Factory in South L.A. while continuing to dig swimming pools during the week. As 1958 bled into 1959, he got an audition for The Spirit of St. Louis, the story of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 heroic solo transatlantic flight. Called in to try out, Clint was optimistic about his chances, believing he physically resembled the real Lindbergh; but when he arrived, he found himself among hundreds of Lindbergh look-alikes. The role eventually went to Jimmy Stewart, who was twice as old as Lindbergh. Nonetheless Stewart could command the lead because he was a star. That was the kind of world Hollywood was, a world built on star power, a world Clint really wasn’t a part of.

  He next landed a minor supporting role in William Wellman’s Lafayette Escadrille,* conceived as a swan-song reflection of Wellman’s own life both in the military and in motion pictures. Wellman, known as “Wild Bill” for his aviator heroics during World War I, was a veteran director whose career reached all the way back to the silent era, highlighted by his direction of 1927’s Wings, winner of the first Oscar for Best Picture by the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film looked to be one of the bigger releases of 1958 after hot new actor Paul Newman was rumored to have signed on to play Thad Walker, the Wellman-like lead. Newman, however, decided at the last minute to pass in favor of playing Brick in Richard Brooks’s film version of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Wellman had difficulty replacing Newman; finally Warner, the studio that was producing the film, pushed contract player Tab Hunter on him. Wellman had originally picked Clint out of a cattle-call audition (the only way he could get into any studios in those days), principally because Wellman felt he would play well in a supporting role behind Newman. But against the weaker Hunter, Clint was too imposing. His role went instead to a smaller and darker actor, none other than David Janssen. Clint wound up as part of the background, living scenery with no dialogue. This film too went nowhere and did nothing to advance Clint’s marginal career.

  So it was back to digging more pools. Increasingly he spent his nights at a local bar among friends and on at least one occasion venting his frustrations by getting into a pretty nasty brawl. Clint could take care of himself, and from all accounts the other guy came off much worse.

  Not long afterward Clint, via Leonard, heard about a cheapie independent that was being made at 20th Century–Fox’s facilities (they would produce but not distribute the film) by first-time director Jodie Copelan, a post–Civil War action movie called Ambush at Cimarron Pass. Clint tried out for and landed the part of one of the villains, an ex-soldier loyal to the South. He got paid $750 for it; the lead, career villain Scott Brady, cast here as the hero, managed to get $25,000. For some reason Copelan wanted Brady, even if his high fee ate into production values, like extras to fill out the vapid wide screen. And horses, the lack of which made the film, ostensibly a western, look a bit odd. (A plot line was developed that they had been stolen by thieves, which might have made a pretty good film.) After the film opened, Clint got a positive single-line review in Variety—“fine portrayals also come from Margia Dean, Frank Gerstle, and Clint Eastwood”—but the film was a bomb. Later on Clint would describe Ambush at Cimarron as “the lousiest western ever made.”

  With nothing happening in his film career, Clint gave serious thought to returning to college full time, getting a degree in something, anything, and then finding a steady job with decent pay. Still, he couldn’t completely give up trying to make it in the movies and signed up for more acting lessons (a thriving storefront business in Hollywood, then and now). Mostly these classes were like health clubs for actors, a place to work out with a scene or a monologue to keep the chops tight. One of Clint’s classmates, Floyd Simmons, who was also a casual friend from the studio, suggested to Clint that he needed a better agent, and sent him to his own, Bill Shiffrin, who signed him.

  Shiffrin specialized in “beefcake,” brawny good-looking young men who could play romantic leads in B-movies without looking too ridiculous when they tried to “act.” A bent-nose kind of guy who prided himself on being able to handle himself in a rough situation (as the actors he repped did on-screen), Shiffrin represented Vince Edwards and Bob Mathias. (Edwards, dark and angry-looking, would eventually gain fame on TV as Ben Casey, a dark and angry-looking doctor.) Mathias had won the Olympic gold medal in the decathlon in London in 1948 and again in Helsinki in 1952 (the only person at the time to ever accomplish that feat); in 1954 he’d starred in a film about his own early life, Francis D. Lyon’s The Bob Mathias Story, in which he played himself. Before he knew it, a film career, if not a star, was born. He knocked around B-films for a few years, proving to everyone that he had no acting ability whatsoever, then turned to politics and served four terms as a Republican congressman for California’s San Joaquin Valley.

  Through the grapevine of agents, Shiffrin had heard about a new one-hour western series that CBS was planning, to follow up on the enormous ratings success of Gunsmoke. Gunsmoke had begun as a radio drama in 1952, a creation of producer-writer-developer Charles Marquis “Bill” Warren, director Norman MacDonnell, and writer John Meston. Put on the air by CBS head William Paley, it quickly became a sensation. Gunsmoke spawned dozens of similar “adult” westerns on all three networks. CBS wanted to find another one just as good (and just as profitable).

  The producer of the new series, Robert Sparks, an executive at CBS in charge of filmed programming, and principal writer Warren began the search for an actor who could make the series his own. Casting was crucial to a TV series’s success, more than a film’s, because of its recurring nature. The right star, like Arness, could make a bad series. The wrong star could kill a good one.

  In the new series, each season a bunch of wranglers would move a herd of cattle north, and the episodes would tell the stories of their adventures during the journey. The format was already in use quite successfully on NBC’s Wagon Train, in which passengers moved every season from the East Coast to the West. Paley wanted something that combined Gunsmoke’s drama with Wagon Train’s expanse.

  Neither Sparks nor Warren was a newcomer to series TV. Warren, who had had the original idea for Gunsmoke, had met and to some extent been mentored by the great American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald while in college at Maryland, where he made All-American as a football player, when Fitzgerald was living in the area. Heavily influenced by the romance of Fitzgerald’s addictive personality, Warren became a heavy drinker and a barroom tough guy, neither of which got him anywhere in school. Upon graduation in 1934, Warren took off for Hollywood (à la Fitzgerald), determined to break into the film industry and make a name for himself, to succeed where Fitzgerald had failed. After service in World War II as a navy commander, he found success as a pulpy western serial writer for The Saturday Evening Post. Many of his stories were adapted and made into novels, and some into movies. Forever in need of money (and booze), Warren moved into television, where he became a favorite of Bill Paley, the chairman and founder of CBS. After conceiving Gun-smoke, Warren could do no wrong, and the new series was his for the asking.

  He had originally called his new pilot script The Outrider, but Paley rejected the title, believing no one would know what it meant except outriders (the cowboys who rode outside a herd and kept it moving). Instead he suggested Rawhide, a meaningless term—a strip of leather—that had been the title of a successful 1951 Henry Hathaway western that starred Tyrone Power. Paley liked it because it immediately evoked “western” to him and also because a lot of what eventually
became Wagon Train on TV had been loosely based on the original story of that film.

  Robert Sparks, as a program executive, had specialized in westerns, most notably 1957’s slick and highly entertaining Have Gun—Will Travel, a Saturday-night half-hour hit show starring movie veteran Richard Boone in the role of Paladin, the intellectually superior, highly cultured gun-for-hire. Paley assigned Sparks to work with Warren on the proposed new series.

  Warren, for his part, had just directed a feature film called Cattle Empire (1958), written by his frequent partner and co-writer (Warren was uncredited), Hungarian émigré Endre Bohem. It was about the troubles of life on a cattle drive and starred Joel McCrea, one of Hollywood’s best-known and best-liked cowboy heroes. The film owed a lot to Howard Hawks’s great Red River (1948), which starred John Wayne and Walter Brennan and made young Montgomery Clift a star.

  Warren was a big fan of Clift’s style of acting, soft-spoken and good-looking, tough but not bullying, and sensitive in a youthful and appealing way. Knowing that Clift, now one of the biggest (and most difficult) actors in Hollywood, would not do TV, Warren wanted an actor who captured Clift’s qualities in Red River to balance off the tough, grizzled leader of the drives, Gil Favor, to be played by Eric Fleming, thirty-four years old and properly grizzled. He resembled a young Ben Gazzara with his face swollen after a fistfight. Heavier and a couple of inches taller than Clint, his acting style was thought of in Hollywood as less Method than maniac. Once cast in the role, he believed he was Gil Favor.