by Marc Eliot
Clint decided the time had come to take a good, long, hard, and realistic look at his career and his life. And to once and for all get rid of Sondra Locke.
He had continually tried to widen the growing distance between them, accelerating it after the box-office failure of Ratboy. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but it made no difference; the time had come to remove himself from her life, and she from his.
What he didn’t anticipate was how difficult, ugly, embarrassing, and costly that was going to be.
*Fosse had earlier won the Oscar for Best Director in 1972 for Cabaret.
†Revenge was released in 1990, directed by Tony Scott, starring Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn.
*“Mrs. Smith” was Sondra Locke.
*The Dead Pool was released before Bird. Both Warner and Clint agreed that The Dead Pool was a better summer film, while Bird might have a chance in early September. The Dead Pool received a national release in several hundred theaters; Bird was released in only a few cities and less than a dozen theaters.
EIGHTEEN
In redneck mode with Bernadette Peters in Pink Cadillac, 1989
There is only one way to have a happy marriage, and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.
—Clint Eastwood
Approaching his sixtieth birthday, Clint Eastwood wanted to clean house, literally and figuratively. The only property he actually owned in Los Angeles was the house he was leasing to Locke. She had to go, and there was no point in putting it off any longer, but California law had an especially sticky issue called palimony. The word had come into the popular lexicon in the late 1970s, after Lee Marvin’s live-in girlfriend successfully sued for support when they broke up. That court decision sent a chill down the spines of the Hollywood social set, where it had once been business as usual for a star or an upper executive, married or single, to keep a girlfriend, maybe a pretty starlet, stashed in an apartment, with a car and a credit card, until the heat cooled, at which point the gal-pal had to give up everything and leave.
Clint, like most stars, enjoyed a lot of different women, and his privileged life allowed him to live by his own social (or antisocial) rules. By now his pattern had long been set. He had liked being married, or at least the appearance of it. Unquestionably it had been good for his image in his Rawhide days, when moral clauses hung on actors’ backs wherever they went, and their personal indiscretions, real or suspected, were discussed in the powerful and feared Confidential Magazine, the forerunner of today’s celebrity gossip megaindustry. Marriage to Maggie, even with all its restrictions and compromises, had given his life some structure and his image some sanitation. And to ensure that his real-life image did not clash too much with the righteous character of Rowdy Yates, he made sure that Roxanne Tunis was content to live separately, raised their child as a single mother, and stayed far away from Clint’s public persona. Locke, however, had not been as cooperative or as willingly conforming; in fact, she had committed a couple of unforgivable sins, for which he was now going to make her pay.
The first was that she had never divorced her husband, Gordon Anderson. Now Clint was, more or less, supporting him by allowing him to stay in the house he had bought in Hollywood; as for the house on Stradella Road that he had bought for Locke, Clint had kept it in his name and set up a lease arrangement that gave him all the control and all the power. He had moved Kyle in, but Locke had dug in her heels and apparently was as ready as Clint for the coming slugfest.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the fading blossom finally fell from the tree, but sometime in the middle of 1988 the tensions between Clint and Locke visibly escalated over, of all things, a relatively minor pickup accident Locke may (or may not) have had while driving one of Clint’s trucks outside Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, at the time the most popular music megastore in L.A. A motorcyclist claimed he had been hit by the pickup in Tower’s parking lot.
The incident made Clint furious when the motorcyclist sued his auto insurance company. When Clint confronted Locke about it, she claimed she couldn’t remember having had an accident in his pickup at Tower or anywhere else. Clint did not believe her. He took away her driving privileges and told her that from now on she was to drive her own car—not his pickup, not his blue Mercedes, just her own vehicle. And, he added, with emphasis, that went for Gordon as well.
When Locke took the bait and defended Gordon, Clint’s response was “Well, I’ve divorced Maggie, but you haven’t divorced Gordon.” To Locke, he seemed to be invoking their not being married as one more reason why he was angry. Understandably, this made no sense to Locke, who called him on it. “Do you want us to get married now, Clint?”
“That’s not the point,” he barked. “You should do it without my asking you; you should make yourself available. I can’t ask if you’re not available.”
It sounded right, but Locke wasn’t buying any of it. She believed that it was just one of Clint’s ploys to get Gordon out of his life as well as hers. Then two seemingly unrelated incidents cut Clint’s slow-burning fuse down to ignition.
The first was a new film and a directing deal that Locke had managed to secure from Warner, green-lighted by Terry Semel and producer Lucy Fisher. The project was originally called Sudden Impulse, a psychological thriller with a female lead that Semel thought, based on the original Ratboy, Locke would be perfect for. She wanted to find a new name for it, though, lest Clint think it too close to Sudden Impact, in which she had starred with him a few years back.
According to Locke, however, even before she could make that change, Clint began doing everything he could to make the project difficult for her. “Suddenly, he’d want me to travel with him only when he knew I had an important meeting. When we were at the ranch, each time [producer] Al Ruddy would phone me, Clint would sit down at the piano and immediately start banging out Scott Joplin tunes as loudly as he could.”
The second incident was the annual Christmas vacation that Locke and Clint had taken ever since they had known each other; Christmas Eve had been reserved for just the two of them, no matter how many other people were in their lives. But in 1988, just weeks before the holidays, Clint casually informed her that he was going to be spending them by himself, in Carmel, playing golf. Locke then spent Christmas with Gordon. Then, as she prepared for her annual New Year’s Eve ski trip with Clint, she received a call from Jane Brolin. Brolin invited her to come to Sun Valley—where Locke was planning to go anyway—and told her that Kyle and Alison were coming too. Locke, fearing the worst, flew to Sun Valley on a private Warner plane with Brolin and Clint’s two children.
The next morning, in Sun Valley, Brolin confronted Locke, telling her that she was really not wanted in the group. It was a bizarre confrontation, and the first thing Locke thought was that Clint was making Jane do his dirty work for him. Words were exchanged between the two women that quickly escalated into a screaming match. Just as it reached the neck-vein-popping state, Clint walked in, listened to the two of them, and told both of them to take the Warner jet and go home.
Locke tearfully packed and left. Brolin stayed with Clint.
As soon as the holidays were over, Locke went to see a lawyer, Norman Oberstein, who suggested that this was perhaps not the right time to start a legal proceeding.
Clint, meanwhile, was spending much of his free time with actress Frances Fisher, with whom he was quite taken. On the morning of April 4, 1990, he dropped by the house on Stradella Road and waited in the living room until Locke came down the stairs. His presence startled her. He was there, he said, to tell her he wanted her to leave the house. Locke, who was preparing to direct her film, was shocked into silence. With nothing left to say, Clint simply turned and walked out the door.
On April 10, while Locke was at Warner, Clint personally came by the house again and this time changed the locks. That same day he had Locke served with a hand-delivered written notice, on set, that she was no longer welcome at Stradella and no longer had any
legal access to it. All her belongings had been taken to Gordon’s house on Crescent Heights, the one Clint had bought for him. When Locke read the notice, she fainted.
Meanwhile, Clint had been busy working on a new movie, Pink Cadillac. Three years had passed since his last legitimate box-office success, Heartbreak Ridge, and he hoped this new film would finally turn things around for him. It was a working-class country cowboy film with a slightly harder edge, even a few echoes of Dirty Harry; a noticeable absence of singing and simians; the addition of the lovely Bernadette Peters; and an appearance by still relatively unknown Jim Carrey (billed as “James”), his second Clint movie.
In it, Clint plays Tommy Nowak, a tough skip-tracer assigned to find Lou Ann McGuinn (Peters, in a nonsinging, against-type role), an equally tough young mama who has taken off with her baby after being indicted for possession of counterfeit money. McGuinn’s oppressive husband Roy (Timothy Carhart) has of late been hanging out with the toughest guys of all, a gang of white supremacists, the Birthright, who are the real counterfeiters. Lou Ann’s method of escape turns out to be her husband’s pink Cadillac. Somewhere along the way she finds some funny money in the car, drops off the baby with her sister, and heads for the nearest casino, where Nowak catches up with her. In a reversal (the script had more twists than a corkscrew), the money in the car turns out to be real. Even as Nowak and McGuinn are discovering this fact, the Birthright had sent a team of killers to kill McGuinn to recapture the money. Eventually, there is a confrontation, a shoot-out, and guess what, Nowak and McGuinn beat the bad guys, realize they are in love, and live happily ever after, or something approximating that within the confines of their colorless and uninspired lives. The film is meant to be a comedy with dramatic overtones, or a drama with comic overtones—it’s difficult to tell which.
To direct, Clint called in his former stuntman Buddy Van Horn, who had helmed two previous Clint movies (Any Which Way You Can and The Dead Pool), while he, Clint, pulled his performance out of his back pocket.
Peters was more familiar to Broadway audiences than to filmgoers; Clint had hired her, it appeared to several witnesses on the set, simply because he was attracted to her. Clint’s interior logic may have been that if he were attracted to his costar, his audiences would be too. Peters and Clint had good chemistry on-screen, but she showed no real-life romantic interest in Clint. At that point Clint turned his attention back to Frances Fisher, who was playing the small part of Dinah, Peters’s sister.
Locke, still busy making her movie, kept hearing that Clint was running around town with Fisher, and in a fit of pique she went back to see Oberstein. This time he agreed the time had come to take action. The first thing he wanted was for Locke and Gordon to sign a severance agreement. In effect, this meant that while they were still married, Gordon voluntarily surrendered his access to any and all of Locke’s property. The purpose was to remove Clint’s possible defense that Locke’s relationship with Gordon had a financial motive or that she was still beholden to him in any way.
Once they signed it, Oberstein (at Locke’s insistence) met with Clint’s attorney, Bruce Ramer, to see if any kind of informal resolution between the two was possible. Ramer said the only thing Clint would agree to was that Gordon could keep his house, but Locke had to remain out of Stradella. When Oberstein relayed Clint’s conditions, Locke knew she had no choice but to go ahead and sue.
The story of the impending lawsuit hit the national press with all the force of a Hollywood hurricane. In the tabloids it wiped everything else off their front pages for weeks, echoing the highly volatile (and endlessly entertaining) ten-year-old palimony case between Lee Marvin and Michelle Triola that had all but ended Marvin’s career.
Clint did not want to be part of anything like that, especially at a time when his career seemed in decline. Pink Cadillac had opened on Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start of the big-money, big-production summertime run of movies. But it disappeared quickly in the wake of mostly negative reviews (Richard Freedman, writing for the Newhouse News Services syndicate, called it “a 122 minute dozer”) and the cinematic tsunami that was Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In its first ten days, Pink Cadillac did about $6 million against Indiana’s $38 million, making Pink Cadillac one of the biggest flops in Clint’s and Malpaso’s history. (And it all but ended Peters’s film career.) Whether or not the negative publicity surrounding the emerging legal slugfest between him and Locke had anything to do with it, the film simply did not draw the usual Clint crowd.
Even as Pink Cadillac was opening and closing, Clint was already planning his next film, White Hunter Black Heart, to be shot on location near Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, an attractive place even more attractive to Clint because it was so far away. Fisher was not invited and, reportedly, did not even receive a good-bye phone call from Clint before he left.
But before he could leave, he received notice that Locke had gone ahead and filed a $70 million “palimony” lawsuit against him. Locke’s revelations of Clint’s philandering, and her two abortions—now a matter of public record—proved irresistible reading. The public consensus was surprisingly in Clint’s favor, however, as it appeared to most that Locke was putting a noose around his neck in order to save her own pretty face.
If Hollywood was biased in Clint’s favor as it hadn’t been in Marvin’s, the reason was not hard to understand. Despite his last few failures, Clint remained one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, actor-producer-directors in post-studio-era Hollywood. He had built a human tower of strength on the back of Malpaso, and his thirty-five-year, forty-seven-film career had generated billions of dollars for the industry and untold jobs for actors, directors, screenwriters, and set designers, all the way down to the weekend popcorn vendors in the neighborhood movies.
Moreover, everyone in Hollywood who didn’t work with him loved him, which meant they hoped one day to work with him. He had a reputation for being fast and easy, liked to be hitting the links by early afternoon, and generally let the actors play their roles the way they wanted to. The studio suits may not have liked his way of doing business, but they lived in fear—Hollywood’s only known true emotion—that if they somehow offended Clint, they might not be able to continue to pay the second mortgage on their beach houses. Marvin had been nothing more than a fading actor, and Locke had appeared in one noteworthy movie and six Clint films and had thus far directed one unsuccessful movie.*
Locke’s legal team pressed for immediate depositions to prevent Clint from being able to leave for Africa without giving them. According to Locke, “My [oral] deposition was nothing short of hell.” Clint’s litigator for the depositions, Howard King, led a fierce attack on Locke’s character and motivations. She loved fairy tales, as she had told Clint many times, and King tried to somehow establish that she was living in one in her own mind, casting Clint as her rescuer, her savior, her knight in shining armor. He pressed her on her longtime marriage to Gordon and why she had never divorced him. He wanted to know if she had had other sexual relations while living with Clint. He condemned her for “stealing” another woman’s husband.
The deposition drove her to see a psychiatrist.
Then it was Oberstein’s turn to put Clint on the grill. For six hours Oberstein focused on Clint’s “real” intentions with the house on Stradella, pointing out that Clint had originally intended, via his will (which he had since had rewritten several times), to leave it to Locke. In response to a question regarding the nature of their relationship, Clint suggested they had only gone steady but had not lived together on a formal basis, because Locke was married to Gordon. A “part-time roommate” was how Clint characterized Locke. Pressed to explain that definition, Clint said that “anytime a person spends one night it’s part-time.” Oberstein confronted Clint with the fact that he had wiretapped Stradella’s phone; he responded that he had been the victim of a stalker and had been simply trying to gather evidence to build a case against him—or her.
On more than one occasion, he said, Locke had threatened to kill him. Later, in her autobiography, Locke described these accusations as “ridiculous, preposterous and a slanderous lie.”
A week later a closed-door preliminary hearing was held, to determine if Locke should be allowed back into Stradella. A variety of players, pro and con, mostly friends and relatives, testified in support of their espective sides. Jane Brolin testified that whenever she stayed with Clint at Stradella, which she often had, she couldn’t help but notice how much of Locke’s clothing and personal items were there. And she was testifying for Clint. It was, to say the least, a strange strategy on Clint’s part; it made him look more like a playboy than he might have wanted; Brolin’s interest in Locke’s belongings may have seemed like snooping.
It came out, under cross, that Brolin had been the “unnamed source” for many of those National Enquirer “exclusive” stories about the deteriorating relationship between Locke and Clint and also the likely source of those poison-pen letters. Kyle testified that he was the primary tenant at Stradella Road. And Clint revealed here for the first time that he had had two children with Jacelyn Reeves, a girl, Kathryn, and a boy, Scott. Until then no one had known for sure who was the father of her children, as the birth certificate for both had read, “Father declined.” The existence of these children came as a complete shock to Locke, who had had no idea Clint had begun yet another family, with another woman, during their time together.
Locke was granted interim support but was denied palimony, the judge ruled, because she had been married to another man while she was involved with Clint. But because the case was in arbitration, the decision was not binding. Locke declined to accept the ruling and pressed for a full hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court. That June, while she continued her case, Locke rented a relatively modest apartment for the duration on Fountain Avenue, in West Hollywood, and resumed postproduction on her project, now called Impulse.