American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  His next film, Bronco Billy, began with a script that came to him after a casual conversation during an informal dinner with friends at Dan Tana, a popular film industry red-gravy hangout on the edge of Beverly Hills. “When I was sent the script by Dennis Hackin,” Clint later recalled, “at first I thought it was about Bronco Billy Anderson, the silent movie star. I devoured it at one sitting and I immediately thought it was the kind of film [Frank] Capra would do today if he were still making movies.”

  When he finished reading it, he gave it to Locke, who shared his enthusiasm. Five and a half weeks later production began on Bronco Billy near Boise, Idaho. Clint starred as the down-and-out star and owner of a Wild West show that is as faded as the times it seeks to glorify, and the spoiled society girl he falls in love with along the way is played by Sondra Locke.

  In Bronco Billy the central character is in show business, playing two-dimensional re-creations of western heroes, surrounded by a band of loyal players. He falls for Antoinette Lily, another in a long string of imperfect, socially outcast women. It turns out she is married to a man she does not really love, who has now abandoned her and apparently swindled her out of her fortune. Billy helps her by letting her join the show as the target for his sharpshooting and knife-throwing stunts. Eventually she straightens out her money and marital problems and returns to her life in New York City, only to realize she was really in love with Billy all along. Leaving everything behind, she rushes to rejoin him and the show.

  If the movie also sounds like a lot of other Hollywood films, it’s because it does resemble several of the great ones, including Clint’s role model for it, Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), which featured a wealthy but unhappy woman on the run from her husband who is aided (rescued and ultimately redeemed) by a poor but honest workingman (a newspaper reporter). It also echoes Preston Sturges’s 1941 on-the-run romantic comedy Sullivan’s Travels. Clint’s by-now-familiar cynical view of modern urban city life appears, cloaked here in the familiar poor-but-happy, rich-but-miserable themes that especially appealed to the working-class audiences at whom this film, like Every Which Way but Loose, was aimed.

  By now, Clint once more felt strong and self-assured enough to direct himself. He bolstered the sound track with a lot of country music produced once more by Snuff Garrett, highlighted by a duet he sang with Merle Haggard that rose to number one on the country charts. Figured into the film’s profits, it helped increase its bottom line. Bronco Billy, released in the spring of 1980, gained Clint some of the best reviews of his career. The critics liked this Clint more than the public did, but no one liked him more than Clint, who had found a comfort zone parodying the very western characters that had first brought him to the attention of the public.

  On May 31, 1980, a few weeks before Bronco Billy opened and flopped at the box office, Clint began to make wholesale changes at Malpaso. Many of the original members of the production team were let go. Frank Wells, Malpaso’s best ally at Warner, took off, he said, to fulfill his dream of climbing the highest mountains on each continent. Robert Daley’s “voluntary” departure may have been due at least in part to his growing objection to Locke’s presence and apparent influence on Clint. Some felt she had taken him away from his mon-eymaking tough-guy characters, softening him up and pushing away his core audience.

  To mark Clint’s birthday and the onset of the new decade, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) scheduled a one-day tribute to him with a marathon screening of four of his films, A Fistful of Dollars, Escape from Alcatraz, Play Misty for Me, and Bronco Billy. The museum was most likely celebrating Clint the populist actor, “who has given his personal imprint to a host of movie genres,” as the program put it, and who earlier that year had been named by Quigley Publications as the number one box-office star of the 1970s. But the Clint who showed up for the tony audience’s Q and A was not the hotheaded action hero but the self-styled auteurist.*

  And he showed up alone.

  *Clint’s take was reportedly 15 percent of the gross of the film, in addition to his regular acting and producing fees. By contrast, Tuggle and Siegel received net points, payouts based on a film’s profits after all expenses are deducted from the cost of prints, advertising, distribution, etc., for a total of less than $2 million each, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

  †Neither Clint nor Siegel ever discussed their working relationship in any terms except the most positive. In his autobiography Siegel suggests ever so gently that there may have been some friction between them: “Clint is very loyal to his friends; in my opinion, sometimes too loyal … We’ve never had a quarrel. Disagreements, yes. Differences of opinion, yes. Perhaps that’s because he might look up to me as a surrogate father.” Siegel, A Siegel Film, 495.

  *Coming in number two was Burt Reynolds, followed by Barbra Streisand, Robert Red-ford, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen. Clint was also named the top box-office star of 1972 and 1973 by the Motion Picture Herald, based on the annual poll of exhibitors as to the drawing power of movie stars at the box office, conducted by Quigley Publications.

  FOURTEEN

  In Honkytonk Man, 1982

  In the westerns, you’d ride in four horses, you have a camera right there and four horses that all have to be side by side, which is very difficult to get them into a close shot. Right away they zing a boom mike out there and the horses don’t like that. They get edgy, and then some guy yells at the top of his lungs through a megaphone, “Action,” and it drives the horses crazy. I prefer not to say action. Actors are not horses but they have a similar anxiety about the word “Action.” I try to keep that level low. I start just by saying something like, “okay.” And at the end I simply say, “That’s enough of that.”

  —Clint Eastwood

  Even as Clint was being honored by MOMA, Bronco Billy, despite its good reviews, was bombing at the box office. It wound up grossing a little over $18 million, even with the profits from the hit song it produced factored in. To some, it signaled a backlash of sorts against Clint’s image-shifting. The critical intelligentsia thought it a violation of some elemental truth that Clint was spoofing his own assumed redneck persona, a sure sign to them that neither the film nor the image was true. No less a cultural arbiter than Norman Mailer sniffed sarcastically at Clint’s notable lack of heated hipness: “Eastwood is living proof of the maxim that the best way to get through life is cool.” Even more biting were James Wolcott’s cutting remarks in Vanity Fair about New York’s newest cultural darling: “Bronco Billy was an awkward, bow-legged bit of Americana, with Eastwood’s girlfriend, Sondra Locke, giving her usual shrill, nostrilly performance.”

  Clint was already in production on a sequel to Every Which Way but Loose, called Any Which Way You Can, despite Warner’s loud disappointment that he was not instead making the next Dirty Harry movie. Some at the studio held fast to the idea that Every Which Way’s success had been a fluke, due more to the presence of a cute orangutan than anything else; they thought that if Clint continued down that road, as he had with Bronco Billy and now with Any Which Way You Can, it could very well mark the irreversible decline of one of its biggest franchise stars.

  Clint, on the other hand, was convinced that he was on the right career track. He sent out missives of his own rumbling that he was thinking of severing all of Malpaso’s remaining ties with Warner. The first official comment from Warner came by way of outgoing Malpaso producer Bob Daley, who struck a melancholic note in his defense of Clint’s career: “Clint Eastwood brought in Bronco Billy 13 days ahead and $750,000 under budget of the $5,000,000 film, and it’s not because we over-skedded [budgeted] it … I’ve known [Clint] for 25 years, since he was digging pools and I was in the budget department at Universal. We talked efficiency all the time. When he got on ‘Rawhide,’ he never went to his dressing room—but stayed on the set and observed.”

  Clint then stepped directly into the fray, such as it was. “We’ve done okay,” he told one reporter. “Everyone expected [Bronco Bil
ly] to be another Every Which Way But Loose, but what is? We’ve gotten a little different audience. I’ve branched out a bit. It’s not going to lose any money—it only cost $5,200,000 … and I’ve never had better reviews. I think it worked out well.” These comments triggered a corporate showdown between Warner and Malpaso, scheduled to take place at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There Frank Wells was called in from his mountain-climbing midlife crisis to orchestrate a peace powwow between Clint and the studio.

  Clint, meanwhile, continued to consolidate his power at Malpaso by shedding several more longtime employees. On the strength of Every Which Way but Loose, Clint had asked Jeremy Joe Kronsberg to write another script along the same lines, to be called Going Ape, which he intended to direct. Kronsberg, meanwhile, having no idea he was slated to do a sequel, had signed a deal with Paramount to develop a similar type of film, with the promise that he could produce as well as write it. When Clint found out about it, he severed all ties with Kronsberg and brought in first-time screenwriter Stanford Sherman to write the Every Which Way but Loose sequel. Sherman’s previous credits were mostly for the small screen—four episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one episode of The Rat Patrol, and eighteen episodes of Batman. Nonetheless Clint gave him the plum assignment to write Any Which Way You Can.

  To direct, Clint chose Buddy Van Horn, primarily a stuntman whom Clint had known since the Rawhide years at Universal, and although he had virtually no experience as a director, Clint liked and trusted him. Besides, Clint would be the unofficial director of the film. If it scored, he could take the credit. If it didn’t, the critical hammers would fall on Van Horn. Sondra Locke’s character, Lynn Halsey-Taylor, was brought back from the first film to continue her on-again-off-again relationship with Philo, as were Ruth Gordon and Geoffrey Lewis. For the now-obligatory musical number, Clint hired Ray Charles and once more assigned music production to Snuff Garrett.

  But as Warner had predicted, Any Which Way You Can performed like a typical sequel, costing twice as much and grossing less than the original. Despite having the coveted first-up Christmas-release position, it barely broke the $10 million mark at the box office. The small profit it showed had more to do with the film’s low budget than with box-office activity. If Clint had had any plans for an Any Which Way franchise, they evaporated after the poor box-office showing. Warner now hoped that Clint would realize his mistake, return to form, and make another Dirty Harry movie.

  However, a year and a half passed without a new Clint Eastwood film, while he waited for the perfect script to revive his career. During that time he dealt with several real-life issues he had previously relegated to the back burner, claiming his schedule left him little time to concentrate on them. Now he had to deal head-on with his relationship with Locke, or more accurately its downslide, and to face up to Maggie’s much-publicized new romance.

  According to Locke, in her memoir, her relationship with Clint never fully recovered from the abortions. For all of Clint’s explanations about not wanting more children, she saw it as a clear signal that he had no intention of staying with her forever. Moreover, in 1980 he even told Locke about his daughter with Roxanne Tunis.

  Not long afterward Locke was offered and accepted the lead role in a TV film, Jackie Cooper’s Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story, a project that had nothing to do with Clint. Shortly into the filming of Rosie, Us magazine whispered to its readers that “reports are circulating that Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke are no longer such good friends. Clint plans to make his next movie, Honkytonk Man, without her—and Sondra has already expressed a desire to establish her own solo career. So their [recent] Christmas release, Any Which Way You Can, seemingly ends a long and financially successful collaboration.”

  The whispers, which were by no means confined to one magazine, contained a kernel of truth. Clint, never a big sharer of anything—money, credits, stardom—was, according to Locke, thrown by her acceptance of the role in a movie he did not control, even if it was only for TV. In some ways, that made it worse, for it separated them even more, bringing her down to the level of the little screen, from which Clint had worked so hard to escape.

  On top of all that, Maggie was now publicly flaunting her new “companion,” the millionaire playboy Henry Wynberg, who at the age of forty-six had gained the dubious reputation as the man who had become involved with Elizabeth Taylor between her two marriages to Richard Burton. After Taylor and before Maggie, Wynberg had been briefly involved with Olivia Hussey, the estranged actress wife of Dino Martin, Dean Martin’s son.

  Despite the fact that Wynberg spent most of his time in Beverly Hills and Maggie lived in Carmel, they saw each other several times a month. According to Wynberg at the time, “We meet as often as we can … Maggie and I spend our time together skiing, swimming, playing tennis … and sometimes we just take long walks and do some talking. We also love to cook and have friends over for a dinner party. That’s one reason she likes me. I’m a great cook. I don’t know what the future holds. As for now, we have no plans to marry … Maggie never speaks of Clint.”

  Apparently Clint’s answer to Wynberg’s public boasting was to get away. He took off with Locke for Helsinki and Copenhagen, to scout future locations, according to reports in both Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. After their brief stay in Europe, Clint took Locke to London to see Frank Sinatra perform in concert.

  Upon their return to America, Locke began filming her TV film, and Clint continued to search for a script worthy of being the next in the Dirty Harry franchise. In his spare time, which was increasingly plentiful, he began visiting the new Hollywood-friendly Washington, D.C., of President Ronald Reagan. Clint was warmly accepted into the cinematic circle that Reagan surrounded himself with at the White House. Because of it, Clint had access to several of the international mercenaries who were conducting “secret” government missions in the name of democracy, many of which were sanctioned by the president.

  Fritz Manes, one of the few long-term survivors of Clint’s major clean-out of Malpaso’s staff, is credited with arranging for Bob Denard, a French self-described soldier of fortune who had seen action in Africa during the 1970s, to be introduced to Clint. After that meeting Clint, impressed with Denard’s tales of intrigue, had Malpaso option his life story for a biopic.

  At the same time, along with several other Hollywood conservatives, Clint privately funded a mercenary expedition into Laos to search for missing and possibly captive American soldiers taken during the Vietnam War. That project ended in failure, and at least one mercenary was killed during it. Clint said little to the press about either the excursion or his own financial participation in it, but after it became public and was subjected to much negative publicity, he quietly dropped the Denard project. Instead he turned to an adaptation of Craig Thomas’s 1977 bestselling novel, Firefox. That film would mark the fifty-two-year-old movie star’s return to the big screen.

  In some ways Firefox fits neatly into the Eastwood canon and was in some ways a fictionalized version of the film he had wanted to make about Denard. It is an action flick whose lead character, pilot Mitchell Gant, is also an international spy. Gant has a potentially fatal flaw that sends him squarely into the dark side—he suffers from mental disabilities that leave him unable to function well—but finds himself on a mission to save the world from the cold war Russians. He is assigned to steal their newest and potentially most dangerous plane, the Firefox, and deliver it to the NATO alliance.

  Despite the film’s timely subject matter, its James Bond gadgetry deprived it of any sense of realism. Perhaps to further distance himself from current headlines, Clint—who directed and produced as well as starred in the film—saw to it that Malpaso had no producing credit.

  Shot on location in Austria, England, Greenland, and the United States, it had a hefty budget of $21 million (another reason he may not have wanted to make Malpaso a partner) and took nearly a year to complete. When it was finally released, the reviews were at best mixed. She
ila Benson, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it “a sagging, overlong disappointment, talky and slow to ignite. It is the first time that Eastwood the director has served Eastwood the actor-icon so badly, and it is unnerving.”

  “Firefox is fun,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the Village Voice, “little more and not appreciably less.” For Sarris and other auteurists, where Play Misty for Me failed as faux Hitchcock, Firefox succeeded as neo-Bond.

  And the film resonated with audiences longing to see Clint return to his steely-eyed-if-flawed-action-hero stance. It became one of his highest grossers and returned him to the top of the Hollywood heap.*

  With his career back on the main track, Clint allowed Locke to talk him into moving into the new Bel-Air house that she had decorated—despite (as Locke later described it) Clint’s domestic temperament of wild outbursts. Brief but extreme fits of anger punctured his otherwise cool facade, usually precipitated by the lighting of some short emotional fuse. Locke also described Clint’s growing narcissism: “Rarely did Clint acknowledge any flaws of his own. I was really surprised when, sometime in the mid-eighties, he had hair transplants. He actually finally admitted that he was losing his hair, but like everything else he was unbelievably secretive about it … actually the whole situation was so ridiculous that it was all I could do to keep from laughing. I interpreted these quirks of Clint as either humorous eccentricity or simple human failing.”