American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  The restaurant was in a former antiques shop and had become the prime social hangout for Clint and his local non-show-business friends, including Paul Lippman and Walter Becker, whom he knew from one of Carmel’s more upscale restaurants, Le Marquis. According to Bacon, “The Hog’s Breath’s courtyard has an old-fashioned fireplace, and the entire place is surrounded by white picket fence and climbing ivy. The menu offers such basic food as Swiss cheese on rye with avocado and alfalfa sprouts, a char-broiled hamburger on organic bun with cheese or sliced tomatoes, a vegetarian salad bowl, fresh mushroom omelets and an assortment of Monterey Bay fish, including crisply sautéed filet of sole, squid sautéed in white wine and minced shallots, and a wide selection of teas.”

  “It’s been a gold-mine,” Maggie happily told Bacon.

  Clint’s rare inclusion of Maggie in an interview (probably in order to “humanize” him after the accident) prompted Bacon to portray her as Clint’s partner in the fun-and-games pastime of running this other family business. In truth, she was increasingly frustrated by her continued marginalization in her marriage and in Clint’s life. Clint brought her along to another interview to promote the film; she told Peter J. Oppenheimer in an off-the-cuff response how she handled Clint’s propensity for “danger” in his moviemaking: “There’s nothing I can do about it.” It was a strikingly apt response as well as a reflection on her life with Clint—an innkeeper hostess while her husband costarred with nice asses. In the same interview Clint described his home life as sheer perfection. Asked why he shot some of the sequences for The Eiger Sanction back in Carmel, Clint replied, “Because I have a home in Carmel and this way I can stay home with my family and bounce my kids on my knees.”

  Lippman, who was also interviewed for the piece later on, claimed—doubtless in a joking manner that somehow did not come across—that Eastwood was a “romantic Casanova at the pub. He chats up all the girls. Especially the blondes. Clint likes small or slight women—he calls them ‘squirts’ or ‘shrimps’ and ‘spinners.’” Lippman also claimed that he and Clint “often double-dated and compared notes the morning after, while watching cartoons.”*

  To Clint’s great surprise and disappointment, The Eiger Sanction proved a dud at the box office, earning fully a third less than Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. After its initial domestic release, it settled in at a little more than $6.5 million in sales, to Thunderbolt’s already modest $9 million. Five years away from fifty, with his career on the decline, and a marriage that served only to scrub his public image, Clint allowed himself to be lured back to Warner by Frank Wells, who vowed to resurrect his fading star.

  To do so, Wells insisted, Clint should revisit the money franchise, Dirty Harry, hoping that it would return him to the top of the box-office heap, flush with cash, fame, and all the eager young blondes he could handle.

  Part of Clint’s deal was a new suite of offices on the Warner lot, a re-creation of his old Malpaso offices at Universal, down to the same knickknacks dotting the place. Warner is only about a mile away from niversal in Burbank, California; he would remain in that office for the next quarter-century.

  But before Clint could do another Dirty Harry, a suitable script had to be written and developed. Restlessly, he asked Wells if he had anything ready to go. When Wells said he didn’t, Clint went in-house to Sonia Chernus, whom he had made head of Malpaso’s story department as payback for her help in getting him the part of Rowdy Yates. As it happened, in keeping with Malpaso’s bare-bones makeup, Chernus was the story department. She did have an outline and story treatment of a novel that had come in unsolicited—such over-the-transom submissions were usually rejected unread and returned. But Chernus had taken a quick look at this one, liked it, and now felt it might be of interest. The tentative title was The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wells.*

  Chernus was proven correct when Clint had Malpaso take out an option on the rights to the unpublished book. Wells agreed to fund the movie if Clint could bring it in at $4 million. Once the money was in place, Clint went to the William Morris Agency in search of a writer and director to develop the project. They put Philip Kaufman up for the job, who in 1972 had written and directed The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, a bank-robbery western drawing on the seemingly endless adventures of Jesse James.

  Clint hired him with the expectation of a quick return, but Kaufman’s deliberate preparations made Clint antsy. He was used to filming unpolished scripts, like The Eiger Sanction. But because of that film’s failure, he was willing to give Kaufman a little more breathing room.

  When he finished the script, wearing his director’s cap, Kaufman boldly cast Chief Dan George in the key role of Lone Watie, the Cherokee companion, and conscience, of Josey Wales. (The chief gave the ilm a bit of a wounded–Native American authenticity that would be echoed in Kevin Costner’s 1990 Dances with Wolves, which owes more than a little of its physical look, directorial style, and thematic story line to The Outlaw Josey Wales.) As Wales’s mission progresses, he and the chief pick up stragglers along the way, which gave the film a light coating of Christian allegory—unusual for a Clint Eastwood film, which usually emphasized physical revenge over moral redemption. In the end the film is less Jesus than journey, as the conquest of a mountain, à la The Eiger Sanction, leads to a greater understanding between the two.

  To play the role of Laura Lee, another convert to Josey’s bandwagon of soul-searching Civil War survivors, Clint wanted Sondra Locke, the actress he had once considered for Breezy. Her career had languished since her Oscar-nominated performance in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but she had managed to hang on to the fringes of the business, and when Clint saw her, he immediately remembered her. Despite the seventeen-year difference between them (or because of it), he was strongly attracted to her, and she to him. He pushed Kaufman to green-light Locke, but it seemed the more he did, the more Kaufman resisted. So Clint went directly over his head and hired her anyway—which he had every right to do but was considered poor form.*

  Locke remembers that moment of their connection this way: “‘So what have you been up to since I saw you last,’ Clint asked as if it were just last week.” Locke was given the part, and a few nights later Clint called to ask her out for dinner. “‘I gave the orders to hire you …’ ‘Really?’ ‘I never forgot meeting you for Breezy, Sondra.’ ‘But you didn’t hire me for that film, did you,’ I teased. ‘No. I didn’t. Big mistake … but I’ve hired you now.’ ‘I’m glad.’ I genuinely blushed.”

  Shortly after Clint signed on Locke, Kaufman privately told a friend that Clint’s going over his head was “the worst thing that anybody’s ever done to me. He cut my balls off.”

  Production began in October 1975 on location in Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming. Clint was holding a script in one hand, so he could study his lines, a stopwatch in the other, so he could bring the film in on or under budget and thereby keep Wells to his financial commitment. But Clint fumed at Kaufman’s snail-pace style of directing, considering it a sign of his lack of talent.

  Some believe that what happened next was solely attributable to Kaufman’s failure to assert his authority from day one, beginning with Clint’s hiring of Locke. Passivity was a quality Clint had little use for in a director. Clint always preferred the shoot-the-film-now, ask-questions-later kind of moviemaking—not a style in which the director contemplated his ammunition.

  The situation took a nuclear leap in the wrong direction when Kaufman (despite being married and having his wife along for the shoot) asked Locke out to dinner—on the same night Clint had. Locke, no fool she, turned down the director for the producer. Kaufman claimed he needed extra time to work with Locke on her characterization, but a testosterone-fueled battle had clearly erupted between Kaufman and Clint.

  A few days after his faux pas with Locke, Kaufman, appearing timid and confused on set, totally messed up her rape scene by letting the camera roll too long and apparently confusing the word cut with the word action. Finally, his inability to catch a golden-hour
sunset during another important scene proved the breaking point for Clint. Kaufman was nowhere to be found—he had apparently gone to another location—so an impatient Clint shot the scene himself. The next day he angrily handed Kaufman his walking papers.

  Clint was furious about Kaufman’s apparent bungling, but the Directors Guild of America (DGA) did not sanction the firing. All directors’ contracts, they said, contain a clause that says if a director completes preproduction and has begun shooting, he or she cannot be fired at an actor’s command. The fact that Clint was also the producer only made matters worse, and the film’s production nearly came to a halt. Finally Wells frantically negotiated a buyout for Kaufman and accepted a DGA penalty for Clint of $50,000 (which Warner almost certainly paid).

  Kaufman’s firing angered some among the cast and crew and frightened others. To many it looked as if Clint had had Kaufman do all the preparation work on the film—which was a lot—so he could then come in and get all the so-called glory. Although Kaufman to this day has never spoken about the incident, he did not direct another movie for nearly three years, and when he did it was, ironically, a 1978 remake of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.*

  No matter who is right and who is wrong, when a director takes a case to the DGA, it is a serious act not soon forgotten by producers. The Josey Wales incident resulted in the Eastwood Rule—a DGA mandate that no current cast or crew member could replace the director of a production.

  The Outlaw Josey Wales opened to mixed reviews but did phenomenal box office. (Time magazine called it one of the year’s ten best.) Audiences thought the “old” Clint Eastwood had returned; the antisocial, violent, cynical antiromantic loner they had all missed so much. The rentals from the initial domestic release reached $14 million, good enough to reestablish Clint as a legitimate box-office power.† It also brought him once more to the attention of Pauline Kael, who complained that with Josey Wales, Clint had established himself as the “reductio ad absurdum of macho today.” Kael’s continual attack-dog reviews disturbed Clint greatly.

  With his career back on the winning track, Clint shifted his concentration to the building of his Carmel dream house, now in its seventh year of construction. Between sessions of Transcendental Meditation (to which he had recently become devoted) and Malpaso business, he had been increasingly absent from the homestead.

  He spent some time, too, in Las Vegas, anonymously. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Up in San Francisco he began to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Ronald Lowell, who, regarding Kael’s reviews, told Eastwood, “What Kael says is actually 180 degrees the opposite of what she says, and … often a man or woman obsessed with preaching great morality is more interested in amorality.” A bit later at a speaking appearance, Clint pointed out to the audience that while Kael hated his movies for their maleness, she had adored Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, wherein Paul (Marlon Brando, a Kael darling) has anal intercourse with Jeanne (Maria Schneider), in a relationship dictated by Paul to be based only on (debasing) sex. So much for her neofeminist tirades, Clint said, chuckling. The audience chuckled with him.

  Clint was forty-six now and feeling every second of it. A preoccupation with age, or more precisely aging, is a universal occupational hazard for performers in Hollywood, and it became one of his most favored subjects whenever he did grant the occasional interview. “I don’t have any new properties on my mind right now,” he told one writer. “One thing about getting old is that I’ve developed patience over the years.”

  Patience with everything and everyone, perhaps, except his desire for Sondra Locke, whom he was now seeing as often as he could. It was a relationship that he could not resist, and it was about to effect an extraordinary shift in the dynamics of his work and his life. It would change forever the lives of all three of its principal players—Clint, Locke, and Maggie—casting them in a real-life melodrama that would make Breezy seem wistful by comparison.

  *The no-first-name Trevanian was the pen name of University of Texas professor Rod Whitaker.

  *Clint later denied it, claiming that Lippman had exaggerated their friendship.

  *The novel had originally been self-published in 1972 as Gone to Texas. The author, Forrest Carter, was actually a (purported) half-Cherokee Native American, Asa Carter, a notorious racist who had been a public supporter of the Ku Klux Klan and a speech-writer for George Wallace. The novel glorified a Southern soldier, a Johnny Reb, who refuses to surrender after the end of the Civil War and goes on a bloody rampage while pursued by a Northern posse. The story appealed to Clint, who was always attracted to antisocial types. Carter’s true identity was not discovered until after the film’s release. To one reporter Clint declared, during preproduction, “It’s a story written by an Indian about the period right after Reconstruction. The guy’s a poet… wrote Indian poetry … and someone talked him into writing this book … and I just fell in love with it.” Clint’s quote is from Larry Cole’s “Clint’s Not Cute When He’s Angry,” Village Voice, May 24, 1976.

  *In the hierarchy of Hollywood power, in the post-studio era of director-as-star/auteur, the producer was, and still is, the boss—for the simple reason that money always supersedes talent. Whoever writes the checks controls the production, no matter how creative or domineering a director appears. In this case, the man who was paying Kaufman’s salary was Clint.

  *After a series of so-so films, Kaufman went on to direct The Right Stuff in 1983, which definitely established him as a major Hollywood director.

  †That same year, 1976, Clint remained in the top-ten list of Quigley Publications box-office champs, while John Wayne fell off, never to return. It is believed that Wayne sent Clint a letter highly critical of his revisionist view of the American West (some would put that onus on Wayne himself) and that Clint was upset by it. However, the contents of that letter, if it existed, were never released, and neither Wayne nor Clint ever discussed it on the record. Clint that year came in at number five. Number one was Robert Redford, followed by Al Pacino, Charles Bronson, Paul Newman, Clint, Burt Reynolds.

  TWELVE

  With Locke in The Gauntlet, 1977

  People thought I was a right-wing fanatic … all Harry was doing was obeying a higher moral law … people even said I was a racist because I shot Black bank robbers. Well, shit, Blacks rob banks, too. That film gave four Black stuntmen work. Nobody talked about that.

  —Clint Eastwood

  Mid-1975, several months before The Outlaw Josey Wales went into production, a script called Moving Target had come to Clint directly, via the Hog’s Breath Inn, written by two Oakland High School graduates. Clint read it, liked it, and turned it over to Bob Daley, to see if it was worth dipping into Malpaso’s discretionary fund to attach a professional screenwriter to develop it. Daley liked it as well and put in a call to Stirling Silliphant, an established Hollywood writer who in his salad days had written an episode of Rawhide, then moved up to the big screen with his script for Don Siegel’s 1958 post-noir big-screen policier, The Lineup, based on a popular TV show. A decade later he won an Oscar for the screenplay of Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967). Clint had always liked Silliphant personally as well as his abilities and agreed with Daley that Moving Target could be the next Dirty Harry film.

  They sent Silliphant the script, then met to discuss it. Silliphant all but dismissed the writing, but liked the film’s central notion that Dirty Harry takes on a politically subversive terrorist organization, with an added twist that his partner is a woman. Clint liked what Silliphant had to say and green-lighted money to develop a script.

  Not long after Josey Wales was released, Silliphant completed a first draft. Clint read it and wasn’t thrilled with it. It didn’t have the necessary delicate balance to keep Dirty Harry’s antisocial character intact while softening him enough to allow for a woman to “get” to him. Clint turned it over to Dean Riesner. Meanwhile Silliphant had suggested young and up-and-coming (and decidedly non-leading-ladylike) Tyne
Daly for the partner role. She read it and turned it down, not once, not twice, but three times. Changes were made with each revision, but she felt that playing off a hard-ass like Harry would make her sympathetic character look like a total ditz, too laughable to be believable. Clint ordered several more rewrites, which he hated to do because of the delays and the added expense and because he had always preferred first instincts over studied deliberation as the best method to make a Clint Eastwood movie. But this time the waiting paid off, and when Daly read a version of the screenplay that was acceptable to her, she agreed to play the role.

  Still not ready to pick up the reins of directing again while producing and starring in the same film, Clint looked for someone who would not challenge his opinion, would not screw with themes, and would get the film done quickly and within budget. Looking to avoid a repetition of the Kaufman fiasco, Clint turned to James Fargo, his longtime assistant director, to helm what was now called The Enforcer.*

  When Daly suggested the basic story line be changed so that her character and Harry did not have a romantic involvement, he quickly agreed. Clint never wanted romance in his films. He didn’t see himself as a leading man and believed his audiences would stay away from anything that even resembled a love story between the great loner and some moony costar. Dirty Harry in love? That would be like having a love interest in a film about the invasion of Normandy. It was an insane notion, and Clint was grateful that Daly recognized that.

  Production began on the streets of San Francisco during the summer of 1976. Until then Clint had been relatively absent from the proceedings. The reason was simple: he was by now hot and heavy with Sondra Locke, a fact later confirmed by several people who knew and/or worked with Clint at the time, including James Fargo.