by Marc Eliot
Clint was, of course, shaken up by the death, but after a short and intense period of private mourning, he resumed preproduction on his new film. Familiarly reticent, Clint would be able to talk easily about the loss of his father only years later, expressing both regret and caution: “My father died very suddenly at sixty-three [sic]. Just dropped dead. For a long time afterward, I’d ask myself, why didn’t I ask him to play golf more? Why didn’t I spend more time with him? But when you’re off trying to get the brass ring, you orget and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount of regret later on, but there’s nothing you can do about it, so you just forge on.”
He told himself that if he didn’t want to wind up like his father, he had better start cleaning up his own act—give up the smoking and cut back on the drinking. Exercise and health food were already part of his daily regimen, but several cold beers interspersed throughout the day remained and still are an essential part of his daily intake.
At the same time he promoted Bob Daley to full producer for Malpaso. One of Daley’s first assignments under his expanded duties was to pull together the rest of the preproduction of Play Misty for Me.
The original screenplay had been written by Jo Heims, another longtime female friend of Clint’s from his days as a contract player at Universal, when she was one of the studio’s many legal secretaries. Like everyone else in Hollywood, she really had two professions, her own and the movies. All the while she was working her day job, she spent her nights writing screenplays. When she finally had what she considered a strong sixty-page treatment for a film, she took it to everyone she knew who might be able to help get it made. She got it into Clint’s hands while he was still shooting The Beguiled. He promised Heims he would read it. He did and liked the story about a disk jockey who has a one-night stand with a caller to his late-night radio request show, who turns violent when she refuses to accept that it’s over between them.
Clint turned the sixty pages over to Dean Riesner and asked him to work his magic and turn them into a shooting script that, since Malpaso was producing, could be made quickly and cheaply. As he later recalled, “It was just an ideal little project. The only downside to it, it wasn’t an action-adventure film in the true sense of the word … but you have to keep breaking barriers.”
Under the provisions of the deal he had made with Universal, Malpaso was going to have to underwrite the film. That meant a lot of nearby location shooting, so Clint chose to film it in Carmel, closer to home than any previous movie he had made; it meant few if any special effects or outdoor setups, and no large and expensive cast.
None of that especially mattered to Clint. The only thing that did now was the chance to direct. As Clint would later remember,
I started getting interested in directing back when I was still doing Rawhide. I directed a few trailers and [the producers] were going to let me do an episode until CBS kind of reneged. Somebody sent down an edict that said no more actors from the series could direct so they dropped me from that. I forgot about it for a while. Then I worked with Leone in Italy, and Don Siegel close together on several films. Don was very encouraging. “Why don’t you direct, why don’t you try it,” he kept saying to me. It took a while for me, because I’d come in as sort of an outsider, through three European films, and now here I was, after hanging around for five or six years, suddenly here’s this guy who wants to direct. I think there was a certain [industry] negativity toward it in the beginning. But I learned the most from Don Siegel and Sergio. They were such completely different people. Sergio was very humorous, and working on shoestring budgets, especially the first two, it was a little bit of chaos all the time. Everything was very loose, to say the least. But we were making a film for $200,000. With Don Siegel, he was very efficient and printed [used] only what he wanted.
The key to making the film work, Clint felt, was the casting of Evelyn, the murderously obsessed fan. The actress would have to make him believable as the victim of her sexual advances and violent abuse—not an easy thing to do. He saw and tested numerous actresses before catching Jessica Walter’s performance in a screening of Sidney Lumet’s 1966 film version of Mary McCarthy’s controversial novel, The Group. Despite the studio’s stubborn insistence that he cast a star in the role, something he never liked to do—Clint was not a big sharer in that way, as the roster of his costars reveals—he felt Walter was a perfect Evelyn and gave the part to her. She was attractive without being “bombshell,” good-looking enough to do the nude-scene montage but not overly voluptuous (which would get in the way of her neediness), yet explosive and capable of projecting the kind of craziness the script required.
To play Dave’s (Clint’s) “normal” girlfriend, Tobie, he cast TV soap opera actress Donna Mills, who Burt Reynolds suggested might be good for the part. Walter, Clint felt, would be particularly good in the early part of the film, before her craziness becomes both apparent and shocking. Here was yet another film where women—Evelyn and Tobie—willingly fall to their knees and roll backward for Clint’s character. More to the point, his emotional attachment to either is, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent. If Evelyn is a casual one-night stand, Tobie is the saner equivalent—a woman without a deeper connection to his soul. If one even existed.
This was the essential character Clint was looking for: the loner. Not the romantic loner of most films, redeemed by the love of a good woman, but the one who functioned best alone, unencumbered. In that sense Dave was a modern version of the Man with No Name.
Clint worked on the shooting script for several weeks before he felt he was ready. The night before filming began, he later recalled, “I was lying in bed, going over the shots in my mind. I had them all planned out. I turned out the light, thought ‘Jesus! I’ve [also] gotta be in this thing!’ I turned on the light and started approaching the scenes all over again, from the actor’s point of view. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep.”
On set, not too far away, just in case Clint lost control of the ship and needed some dependable directorial backup, was Don Siegel, present for most of the shoot and visible in the movie playing the small part of a bartender. Later on Siegel, who had signed Clint’s director’s card (signifying Clint’s debut behind the camera), would jokingly refer to his role as “a good-luck charm, my best piece of acting.”
Even with that buffer, Clint ran into trouble early on with Universal, which wanted to make sure the film did not veer too far from its commercial center. For instance, he wanted to use Erroll Garner’s jazzy original song “Misty” for the film’s ironic title track, which Universal adamantly opposed. It preferred something that had more potential hit appeal and suggested “Strangers in the Night,” recorded by Frank Sinatra, for which it happened to own the rights. Clint rejected that idea out of hand and instead added a second song to the film that he had heard on a local jazz station while driving to Universal one morning early in production. “I was absolutely knocked out by it,” Clint later recalled, and drove directly into Hollywood to find a copy of it. None of the record stores in town had it as a single, but he finally found it on an album—First Take—in a supermarket bin marked down to $1.38. It was Roberta Flack’s 1969 darkly intense version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Clint felt it was perfect to set the mood for Dave’s romance with Tobie.* In an age when rock and roll was the current style in movie sound tracks, ignited by Simon and Garfunkel’s remarkable one for The Graduate and the far more intense Dylan/Steppenwolf/Jimi Hendrix Experience one for Easy Rider, Clint’s choice of the bluesy “First Time” and the jazz-infused “Misty” seemed a throwback to the 1950s.
The whole film, for that matter, had a dated feel to it, invoking a time when stalkers and violence were the stuff of drive-ins and midnight showings. Many reviewers were quick to compare Clint’s debut to Hitchcock’s ultimate 1950s B-movie Psycho, which was actually released in the summer of 1960 and whose artistic merits were initially overlooked by the impact of its sho
cking story.
Clint finished the shoot in just four and a half weeks, in October 1970, five days early and $50,000 under its original $1 million budget. Amid the big movies of 1971, the year of its release, Play Misty for Me seemed to most critics more reactionary than revolutionary, especially compared to the five strong films nominated for Best Picture that year: William Friedkin’s tough and supercharged New York police drama, The French Connection, which won Best Picture and Best Director; Stanley Kubrick’s striking A Clockwork Orange; Norman Jewison’s paean to Hollywood’s ethnic soul, Fiddler on the Roof; Peter Bog-danovich’s extraordinary Texas-based sleeper The Last Picture Show; and Franklin Schaffner’s turgid but nonetheless popular Nicholas and Alexandra, an instant relic about the Russian Revolution’s most celebrated victims.
In that company Play Misty for Me didn’t stand a chance even for a disapproving Academy sniff. It was neither big enough to merit attention, nor small enough to seem independent-film revelatory, as did Bogdanovich’s movie. But what Play Misty for Me did have was a bottom line that showed a profit, and for the moment, not having his film laughed out of the movie theaters was all that really mattered to Clint.
And if the Academy had overlooked him, others did not. Selected scenes from Play Misty for Me served as the centerpiece for a January 1971 “mini-retrospective” of Clint’s films at the San Francisco Film Festival, the first time he had been celebrated in that fashion.* That same month Clint and actress Ali MacGraw (who had become a sensation after her star turn in Arthur Hiller’s 1970 adaptation of Erich Segal’s novel Love Story) were selected “Stars of the Year” by the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO) for their respective box-office appeals. Even fiercely independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, who had financed his own independent directorial efforts by acting in mainstream ones, thought the film was good, if a bit derivative of Hitchcock’s Psycho. “There’s only one problem with this film,” he later remarked. “It doesn’t have Hitchcock’s name on it.”
The film turned a fairly decent profit, earning more than $5 million in rentals in its initial theatrical release, five times its negative (finished film) cost. For the moment both Clint and the studio were satisfied, if neither was completely happy with the other. Universal did not like Clint’s offbeat style of moviemaking and his lack-of-conventional-love-story style; Jennings Lang and even Lew Wasserman believed the film had strayed too far from Universal’s mainstream standard, while Clint felt the studio did not sufficiently or effectively promote the film, especially on television, the new favored medium for film. Each site was ready to sever ties, with both waiting for the right moment, one that would not publicly embarrass either the studio or the star.
Play Misty for Me may not have been the blockbuster the studio had wanted, or the completely personal statement Clint was looking to make, but it left him a millionaire. Shortly after the film opened, he bought twelve acres of pristine property within the highly coveted stretch of Pebble Beach, where many of California’s wealthiest lived, alongside celebrities such as Kim Novak, cartoonist Jimmy Hatlo, Merv Griffin, and novelist John Steinbeck. Clint built a house with a gym above the garage and a large steam room.†
Having by now become an avid golfer with a sixteen handicap, he wanted to be as close as possible to Pebble Beach’s acclaimed golf course. He was also an accomplished helicopter pilot and loved to fly back and forth from Hollywood to Carmel, cutting short several hours–long commutes.
“I’ve traveled all over the world—beautiful places like Italy, Spain, France and so forth,” Clint said shortly after he bought the new property. “But there is not another place in the world I’d prefer to live than the Monterey Peninsula. I plan on staying here forever.”
Moving up, however, did not mean moving out. Clint held on to the house in Orange County, for those times when his Hollywood schedule would not permit him to drive back and forth to Pebble, and he made it a point to keep intact his small circle of friends that included Ken Green, whom he’d known since high school, his close friend Paul Lippman, a journalist whom Clint had met at the Carmel Valley Racquet Club, and the local tennis pro Don Hamilton. (Clint used Hamilton in one of the bar scenes in Play Misty for Me.)
About the same time Clint opened his first retail establishment, a local bar in Monterey, where he and his buddies could hang out away from their wives, their jobs, and the public. Meanwhile Maggie, whose profession was now listed by several magazines as “former model and painter,” was given the job of designing and supervising the construction of their new home, something she delighted in doing. Clint continued to see Roxanne Tunis, as he had since they’d met, getting her small parts in his movies, even though—their child that he supported notwithstanding—she still could not officially exist in Clint’s world.
And he continued to bed as many women as he wanted, including Beverly Walker, a struggling writer and actress who was also working on certain films as a publicist to pay her rent. While involved with screenwriter Paul Schrader, in the years before he hit it big, she had what journalist Peter Biskind described as a “desultory romance” with Clint. The reason they got involved with each other, according to Walker, was because Clint could take women as easily as picking fruit from an overripe tree for his own pleasure, and for him, women were about as hard to resist as a piece of that luscious fruit: “In Hollywood, men put enormous pressure on women to fuck them, even if it’s only once. It’s like the dog that pisses on the lamppost. They want that kind of connection to you, and then maybe they can relax.” Walker claims she and Clint remained friends, although she never shows up in any of his movies.
As for his loner character in Play Misty for Me, Clint, in one of his infrequent interviews, explained his portrayal of this type of man as part of his own special brand of Method acting:
There are a million Mr. Perfects. The nice guys come and go, but the Bogarts, the Cagneys, the Gables, John Wayne and up through Mitchum—they’re all a bit of … they really could treat women like dirt. I think women like to see other women put down when they’re out of line. They have a dream of the guy who won’t let them get away with anything … and the man in the audience is thinking, “That’s how I’d like to handle it—cool and assured … knowing all the answers.” He wants to be a superhero … Some people have a need to discuss deep, intimate things about themselves, discuss and analyze. I don’t feel that need. Maybe it’s a strength and maybe it’s a weakness. Once I went to a psychiatrist. I did it as a favor to someone else who was having a problem, and after we’d talked the guy said to me, “You seem to have things in hand.” I think I do … to me love for a person is respect for individual feelings—respecting privacy and accepting faults.
So that was it: he wasn’t perfect, and he was proud of it, even if he had lately seen a psychiatrist “as a favor to someone else.” These were remarkably revealing comments from a man whose public off-screen persona was depicted as the happily married man, good father, and easygoing suburban weekend golfer. To his friend and journalist Earl Leaf, Clint’s life was tinted a slightly different shade of rose:
Clint lives a double life—not surprising, he being born under the sign of the twins. Though he never ceased loving and caring for Maggie, he hasn’t made a secret of the free-living sexy side of his life around other women, especially young free-thinking chicks … Maggie doesn’t question or nag her husband about his excursions to the Hollywood fun arena. Clint has described himself as a “married bachelor.” The meaning is clear to those who know him well.
If Play Misty for Me had any major flaw, it was Dave’s lack of self-recognition. Although Evelyn is obviously crazy, and Dave may at first be perceived as an innocent, what made the film far different from (and weaker than) Psycho was the absence of any hint at the darker, deeper side of Dave, a man who hides behind the persona of a smooth voice, who is sexually indiscriminate, and who engages in violence as a solution.
Still, audiences stood up and took notice of Clint and the “something n
ew” he had brought to the screen, even if his film characters did not connect all the dots between his private reality and his public image. All that was about to change with his next movie, about a detective who not only breaks all the rules but takes extreme (and extremely dark) pleasure in doing so.
Dirty Harry would allow Clint to let out the shadow side of his onscreen persona and have it happily shake hands with the light one. That extraordinary feat thrilled audiences around the world even as (or because) it scared the shit out of them. In that sense, Dirty Harry was even more personal than The Beguiled—a remarkable achievement indeed.
And one that almost didn’t happen.
After coming across Harry Julian Fink and his wife R. M. Fink’s script for Dirty Harry, Jennings Lang had taken an option flier and offered it to Paul Newman, thinking the film perfect for him. But after reading the script Newman turned it down cold because he felt the character was too right-wing for him.
Lang then thought of Sinatra, because he had previously appeared in a couple of successful detective movies. The character he’d played, Tony Rome, was also tough, but Sinatra had given him enough ring-a-ding-ding to give him some charm. Lang hoped he would do the same with Callahan. Sinatra initially showed some interest, but once he realized how unsympathetic Callahan really was, he passed on it, fearing audiences would turn on him for playing such a low-life character. He begged off, claiming a hand injury would prevent him from doing justice to the role.*
With Clint still tied up with Misty, a film in which Lang had little confidence, Lang was unable to find any star to play the role, so he sold the rights to ABC Television. ABC intended to make it into a TV movie but then realized the excessive violence would be unsuitable for television audiences. So they, in turn, sold it to Warner.
Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, as the studio was then called, had been in turmoil, in danger of going under, when it was acquired in 1969 by Kinney National Company, a car rental, parking lot, and funeral services company owned by Steve Ross, who leveraged Kinney’s assets to gain entry into the film business. While he worked to straighten out the studio’s seemingly hopeless finances, Ross hired a triple-threat team: Ted Ashley, one of the most powerful agents in the business; former Filmways producer John Calley, who had made many successful films, including Jules Dassin’s Topkapi (1964); and Frank Wells, the attorney, to head business affairs.