by Marc Eliot
Maggie’s ongoing relationship with Wynberg didn’t help Clint’s intense and lightning-quick mood swings. She was now talking about finalizing her divorce from Clint and marrying Wynberg, which would mean for Clint a payout in the neighborhood of $25 million and an asset split that he had tried to avoid for several years. As if in response, Clint, according to Locke, rather than moving closer to her, pulled away and talked less and less of their future together.
Perhaps even more telling, she had not appeared in Firefox, which might have been understandable in the light of its typically Clintonian lack of any substantial female role. But when he publicly announced his next movie, a somewhat inexplicable return to Red-neckville and country music, Honkytonk Man, the female lead, into which Locke would have fit like fingers into gloves, went to a young and beautiful unknown, Alexa Kenin.
Honkytonk Man, based on a 1980 Clancy Carlile novel of the same name, is a fictional biography of a failed country singer, Red Stovall, whose only apparent goal is to make it to the Grand Ole Opry before he dies. Loosely based on the lives of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, the book ends with tovall’s death before he achieves his dream.
Carlile, as it happened, was a William Morris client, and the agency, as always, wanted to keep the project in-house. That was how the book came to Clint, who was looking for a project to introduce his son, Kyle, now fourteen, to feature films. Clint offered to buy it, star in it, direct it, and produce it through Malpaso, believing it had a good part for Kyle that would bring them together both professionally and personally.
Carlile, however, was reluctant to sell Clint the rights, thinking that at fifty-two he was too old to play the role of a country singer who dies at thirty-one. And while Clint had done some singing, his voice in no way matched the soaring beauty of either Williams or Rodgers, the models Carlile had used for Stovall.
Clint invited Carlile to his home and promised him that, if he sold Clint the rights to the book, he could write the screenplay adaptation of his novel without any interference. That was enough to get Carlile to agree to the deal.
Once Carlile finished the screenplay, Clint went to work adapting the story to his liking. He never wanted to die in his movies, so he had Carlile change the ending so that Stovall is inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame for his hit song, “Honkytonk Man,” as he lies dying, thereby letting the character “live on.” Clint also enlisted the services of his favorite music producer, Snuff Garrett, and charged him with juicing up Carlile’s screenplay with “classic” country hits, including songs by John Anderson, Porter Wagoner, and Ray Price, all of which would appear on the original sound-track album.
If Carlile objected to any of these changes, he had no real opportunity to express them. Once production began, he made repeated requests to become more involved, but Clint paid little attention. To be fair, this often happens to writers, because producers, stars, and directors—of which Clint was all three on this film—do not want them watching the script to make sure every word they’ve written gets onto the screen. In this case, however, the situation was more delicate, as Clint and Carlile were both William Morris clients, which made it impossible for the agency to take sides. Carlile was left out, and there was nothing he could do about it. In struggles like these, the writer always loses.
As Carlile had feared, the obviously middle-aged Clint was not remotely believable in the part (although he did bear some resemblance to Hank Williams, whose dissipated look shortly before his death made him seem far older than he was). The film opened poorly, quickly disappeared, and is rarely seen to this day.
Locke’s final big-screen appearance with Clint was in his next film, a one-more-time, perhaps desperate resuscitation of Harry Callahan in Sudden Impact. After seven years away from the Dirty Harry franchise, this would be his fourth visitation to his most successful screen persona. And to everyone’s surprise, including no doubt Clint’s, it turned out to be by far the best. “It was like an homage to Don Siegel. I was the only one who hadn’t directed one so I thought, well, why not?”
The project began, oddly enough, with a script sent to Locke. It was by Earl Smith, with whom she had worked on a small independent film in the early, pre-Oscar-nomination days of her career. She agreed to help develop it. But by now she knew the dangers of doing anything without Clint’s approval, so she talked with him about the possibility of her being involved as a producer. “Naturally, I talked about it with Clint, hoping that he would have no objections. But before I knew it, Clint had bought the treatment outright from Earl, had hired a writer of his own choice, and begun to turn my story into a Dirty Harry film, without even so much as a courteous ‘Do you mind, Sondra?’”
To make it easier for her to give up control of the film, Clint promised Locke the female lead and $350,000 (at the behest of Fritz Manes, who knew that the project had originated with her and that she fairly deserved that kind of money). Having settled that part of the deal, Clint brought in screenwriter Joseph Stinson to convert the script into Sudden Impact. (As always, Clint preferred young and inexperienced personnel to veterans, who not only came with a hefty price tag but were better able to challenge Clint’s authority.)
In the spring of 1983, with Manes in place as the film’s executive producer, Bruce Surtees behind the camera, and Clint ready to perform a triple-play as producer, director, and star, production began on Sudden Impact. The film would, with Dean Riesner’s help, give Clint his career’s signature line of dialogue: “Go ahead, make my day!” It was so succinct and powerful that later Ronald Reagan would borrow it to take on Congress.* “When you point a gun at someone’s head and say ‘Go ahead, make my day,’ well, I knew the audiences were going to go for it in a big way.” “It was just a whimsical thing,” Clint later recalled. “I hadn’t directed one, and I thought, why not do one before I hang that series up. It was based on an idea that wasn’t intended to be a Dirty Harry picture, just a little synopsis. I put together a screenplay on it and said, okay, I’ll do it.”
In the story Callahan has been suspended from the police force for abusively threatening a Mafia don, who then dies of a heart attack. Clint, ever careful not to make Harry an out-and-out loser, treats his suspension as one more abuse—of Callahan—by an overly authoritarian police force that just doesn’t get his righteous sense of mission and mercy (or lack of it) that passes for personal justice in 1980s San Francisco.
Sent off to a small town to serve out his suspension, Callahan is a warrior without a war, unappreciated and tossed aside. But he investigates a homicide there and discovers that a serial killer is at work. As usual, detecting the presence of evil provides him with energy and heroism: it turns out that the local police chief, Jannings (played by the always-effective Pat Hingle, who played a similar type in The Gauntlet), is aware of the killer’s presence. And Jannings suspects the pretty young artist Jennifer Spencer (Locke) is committing the murders as an act of vengeance—she was gang-raped by a group of young toughs led by Jannings’s own son, Mick (Paul Drake). Harry becomes romantically involved with Spencer and eventually rescues her from one final kidnapping by Mick, who also manages to kill his own father. Then Callahan spectacularly disposes of him and the rest of his gang. He not only rescues Spencer but redeems her by shifting the blame for all her serial murders onto Mick.
The tailoring of the story once again mirrors Clint and Callahan (whose very name is a partial anagram—both share the letters C, L, and N). In the film, Callahan lets Spencer go free—a technicality in his world, justified by his larger (rougher, and to audiences more satisfying) sense of law and order.
Sudden Impact opened in December 1983 and proved to be the colossal comeback hit that Clint had been searching for, grossing a whopping $70 million in its initial domestic release. It also earned him great reviews, including another nod of approval from Sarris: “The staging of the violent set pieces is stylized, kinetic and visually inventive,” he wrote in the Village Voice. “Eastwood, occasional langueurs and all, has less to worry a
bout in this respect than other filmmakers. When he stands poised for his civically cleansing shootouts, no one in the theater is likely to be dozing. I like Eastwood, always have. But then I even have a soft spot in my heart for law and order.”
David Denby wrote in New York magazine:
Directing the material himself, Clint Eastwood has attempted to retell the Dirty Harry myth in the style of a forties film noir. Much of Sudden Impact, including all the scenes of violence, was actually shot at night. In a stiff, sensational, pulp-filmmaking way, the mayhem is impressive: As the camera glides through the dark, sinister thugs emerge from the shadows, or Sondra Locke, blond hair curtaining her face in the style of Veronica Lake, moves into the frame, and violence flashes out, lightning in the air.
Locke’s reviews too were excellent, and her on-screen pairing with Clint was nothing less than electrifying. As a doppelgänger for him, she shared his murderous dark(er) side, this time cut with a feminine edge; more than one critic referred to her in this film as “Dirty Harriet.”
Warner quickly offered them fortunes to do yet another Dirty Harry film. But as winning as they were on-screen Locke knew it was never going to happen. Clint’s heated passion for her was gone, and there was nothing she could do about it except stand and watch it—and him—fade away.*
*Firefox did nearly $25 million in rentals and was a major popular success, but its profit was not great, due to the huge budget necessitated by the film’s special aerial effects. While Clint was the producer-director, he was not the executive producer. That slot was filled, ironically, by Fritz Manes.
*Reagan’s March 13, 1985, response to Congress’s threat to raise taxes was to threaten them with a veto, using “Go ahead, and make my day” to underscore his resolve. The American public loved it.
*Locke and Clint worked together one more time, on TV, in an episode of NBC’s Amazing Stories, “Vanessa in the Garden,” that Clint directed; it first aired on December 29, 1985. It was written by Steven Spielberg, who was also the series’ executive producer. Interestingly, Clint also cast Jamie Rose, a woman he was said to be secretly involved with at the time, in the show. The episode costarred Harvey Keitel. According to the Los Angeles Times, the episode attracted the smallest audience for the (failing) NBC series. “Vanessa in the Garden” was the eighteenth of twenty-nine episodes that were made before the show left the air.
FIFTEEN
Fired on the same day in 1955 by Universal for having no talent, Burt Reynolds and Clint were two of Hollywood’s biggest stars thirty years later and appeared together in City Heat, 1984.
Not until Tightrope do the Eastwood films deal with the fact that the voyeurism in Dirty Harry matters most as a warm-up for Tightrope.
–Dennis Bingham
Sudden Impact had been critically lauded and a box-office smash. Having finally climbed back up the commercial mountain, Clint next decided to take a giant leap off it by making a buddy-buddy movie costarring Burt Reynolds, whose career was not what it had once been. Some saw this as charity-casting by Clint.
He also appeared to have permanently warehoused Sondra Locke, as he had already begun an affair with a beautiful young Warner Bros. story editor and analyst by the name of Megan Rose, whom he had met during the making of Honkytonk Man. This relationship would last nearly five years, until 1988. During that time, Clint paid regular visits to her nearby Warner Bros. office. According to Rose, they made love in her office at lunchtime, in the bedroom he kept behind his office, at her apartment.
Due to scheduling complications having to do with everyone being available at the same time, the Burt Reynolds project was delayed. Instead Clint rushed into production a new film, Tightrope, shot on location in New Orleans. Locke was neither in the film nor accompanied him; the part that might once have gone to her went instead to Geneviève Bujold, a forty-something Canadian-born actress who had struck gold in her portrayal of Anne Boleyn opposite Richard Burton in Charles Jarrott’s Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). Afterward, her off-center looks, strong accent, and lack of bombshell vavoom kept her career on lateral hold. She was actually recommended for the part by the always-willing-to-help Sondra Locke.
Clint loved the idea of putting Bujold in the film, because to him everything in and about the film was off-kilter, and so should be the woman he cast as his costar. Her character was the head of a women’s rape center who is tough, tender, and decidedly unglamorous, but sexy nonetheless.
Tightrope was an original Richard Tuggle script that, like his Escape from Alcatraz, was loosely based on a true story—in this case, a series of Bay Area serial sex-and-slash murders that had been covered in a local newspaper. Tuggle had written the film with Don Siegel in mind as the director and Clint as the star, but Siegel begged off, still not willing to work again with Clint. Tuggle then thought about directing it himself. According to sources at Malpaso, that deal was done in a single thirty-second phone conversation to Clint, who had read the script and wanted to be in it. Some believe he was so eager to star in it that it was the real reason he pushed the Reynolds picture back to make room on his schedule.
The story transferred well to New Orleans, whose night-side atmospherics perfectly expressed the noirish mood of the story—darkness and fog everywhere. His character, a law officer, was both attracted to and repelled by not just the victims (mostly New Orleans-style prostitutes and hookers, echoing the notorious Jack the Ripper) but also the murderer—perhaps the embodiment of his own darker side. This time the struggle would be between a law officer and his inner self, between desire and fear of giving in to the darker, rougher, sexual side that lurked within (a sense of self utterly missing from the character of Harry Callahan).
It was that internal moral tug-of-war (the “tightrope” of the title) that Clint’s character, Wes Block, had to deal with, minus the Callahan .44 Magnum, plus two motherless girls who themselves become potential victims of the killer. In the midst of it all, Block is attracted to his fellow social servant Beryl Thibodeaux (Bujold), the head of a rape crisis center who neatly embodies the liberation of Block’s more disturbed desires and is a stabilizing force as well. She represents the social ties that bind, a restriction Block both envies and fears.
Block fears he will not be able to keep his secrets buried for long, especially from Thibodeaux; he is attracted to submissive women who give in to his kinky desires and weaknesses. He likes oral sex using handcuffs, the tools of his professional trade—then makes love to them. And a scene that takes place inside an especially seedy gay bar suggests that the aptly named Block might have some not-so-latent homosexual tendencies. The gruesome sex-and-slash murders that escalate throughout the film become a vicarious thrill machine for him, even as they set off an increasingly wild pursuit that becomes, literally, one dark soul chasing an even darker soul. The movie also marked the screen debut of Clint’s second child by Maggie. Twelve-year-old Alison Eastwood played the role of one of his two small daughters in the film.
This time even the harshest critics of the Eastwood oeuvre, except Kael, went out of their way to recognize the quality of the film and of Clint’s acting. Even if they didn’t particularly like its content, they had to admire the masterful stylistics of its contextual unspooling and the increasingly desperate yet tightly controlled unraveling of Clint’s Block. Kathleen Cornell wrote in the New York Daily News, “Eastwood is simply terrific, his lean and hungry face revealing all the right emotions … thanks to the efforts of writer-director Richard Tuggle, it’s a raunchy but surprisingly intelligent movie, which at times scares the viewer as much as one of Hitchcock’s tension-filled thrillers.” J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called it “one of Eastwood’s finest, most reflexive and reflective films since Bronco Billy—and for my money the best Hollywood movie so far this year.” But Kael remained unrepentant: “Tightrope is the opposite of sophisticated moviemaking … Clint seems to be trying to blast through his own lack of courage as an actor.” In a rare display of public emotion, in the May 1985
issue of Video magazine, Clint finally responded by dismissing Kael as a mere parasite, clinging to his career in order to make herself more important: “[Kael] found an avenue that was going to make her a star. I was just one of the subjects, among many, that helped her along the way.” In truth, there was no shortage of actors, actresses, and directors who felt the same way.
Tightrope opened the 1984 Montreal Film Festival and grossed an impressive $60 million in its initial domestic release, a number that ballooned to over $100 million after its first foreign release and before TV and eventual video rights. That year, due mainly to the success of Tightrope, Clint was named the world’s top box-office star by Quigley (for the second year in a row). It was his sixteenth appearance on the top-ten list, more times than any other living star.
On August 22, 1984, Clint was invited to place his hands and feet into cement at the fabled Grauman’s (Mann’s) Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, alongside the greatest film legends of all time. After casually conversing with the relatively small daytime crowd that had gathered—these events were never well publicized, to keep the crowds intentionally small and manageable—and with Kyle and Alison proudly looking on, Clint scrawled alongside his handprints, “You’ve made my day.”
While Tightrope was still in theaters, Clint finally went into production on City Heat with Burt Reynolds. The difference in the two stars’ individual salaries reflected the level of their current popularity: Clint was paid $5 million, while Burt received $4 million. Both stars appeared happy to be working together, even if their much-publicized redneck and roadster buddy-buddy camaraderie was a product of PR more than reality. In truth, they didn’t hang out all that much together. In Reynolds’s memoir, Clint is little more than a passing acquaintance.