Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Wellman, upset at betraying an implicit promise, compensated by giving Clint a smaller, more anonymous role—George Moseley, a man who had played baseball against another flyer, Princeton (Tom Laughlin), in civilian life, and continued their rivalry in a game on a French airfield. This deteriorates into a brawl, with Clint chasing McLaughlan and even throwing a bat at him, while French onlookers look on in comic amusement. The sequence was all too typical of a movie in which humorous camaraderie and not very persuasive romance were stressed at the expense of aerial action, which was one of Wellman’s strengths. The uncompromising filmmaker had, for once, compromised in order to get a beloved project before the cameras. The picture was poorly received by both critics and the public, not least because Hunter’s central role is very square and old-fashioned and because Hunter, a quintessential fifties leading man, is without energy or dangerousness.

  It would be Wellman’s last film; he always said its failure caused him to retire. As for Clint, he had some location fun, put a few dollars in the bank and developed a lasting relationship with the director and his large, warm family—the last being no small reward. “He had a big influence in encouraging me to be a director,” he would later say.

  For the moment, though, Lafayette Escadrille was yet another big disappointment. But not, as it would happen, as grave as the one he suffered on his next assignment. Shortly after Clint finished the Wellman film his agents sent him on a call to Twentieth Century-Fox, where a director named Jodie Copeland was casting Ambush at Cimarron Pass. It was not an entirely promising venture. Copeland was a film editor being given his first chance to direct. The budget was minimal. The shooting schedule was eight days, the running time was just barely feature length—seventy-three minutes. The salary offered Clint was $750, but the producers insisted—somewhat debatably—that he was the picture’s second lead.

  Clint chose to look at it optimistically. How bad could it be? A few days in the deeper, drier reaches of the San Fernando Valley, working in a marginal, but certainly not disreputable, little western—it would certainly be more fun than digging swimming pools.

  Little did he know. Everyone’s troubles began when Scott Brady was cast as the lead. He was a crude, distinctly uninviting actor, useful only as a blunt, subsidiary villain in B pictures. He should never have been employed as a leading man. Worse, his price was $25,000, which bit deeply into the film’s minuscule budget. According to a story that circulated on the set, Copeland had been saying one day that, thanks to his skill as an editor, he would make the forty Indians he was planning to use in the film as menaces to a mixed band of travelers look like four hundred Indians. At which point someone rushed in with the news that Brady had accepted the role. “Without missing a beat,” Clint recalls, “Copeland says, ‘I’ll make those four Indians look like forty.’ ”

  The director was “a nice guy,” Eastwood remembers, “but he didn’t know what he was doing.” And he certainly wasn’t strong enough or experienced enough to deal with the fractiousness that quickly developed on the shoot. Brady was another heavy drinker and reported to work extremely hungover. He was surly in general, but took a particular dislike to the leading lady, Margia Dean, who he believed had got the part because she was the girlfriend of a Fox executive. When she objected one day to his habitually foul language, he simply snarled, “Go call your fucking agent.” Clint remembers the director saying to him, shortly thereafter, “ ‘Could you please treat Margia nice, because somebody needs to help her out,’ and I’m going, ‘How can I help her out, I’m just trying to fend for myself here.’ ”

  So it went on the most disorganized and unpleasant shoot Clint had ever experienced. Under budgetary pressure, the producers couldn’t afford to keep livestock and their wranglers on for the whole shoot, so the script called for the “marauding savages” to run the horses off after a day or two’s work. A western without horses is, obviously, at something of a disadvantage pictorially and in terms of pace; in the most literal sense of the word, Ambush at Cimarron Pass is stumbling.

  The story is this: A cavalry patrol under the command of Sergeant Matt Blake (Brady) is bringing in for trial a man who has been running guns to hostile Indians. On the trail they encounter a rancher and some of his riders, among them Clint’s character, Keith Williams. Their herd has been driven off by Apache. The cowboys are unreconstructed Southern sympathizers, especially Williams, whose mother and sister, it is explained, were victimized during Sherman’s march through Georgia. Indeed, Clint’s first line in the film has him begging his boss to “let me have just one Yankee.” When Blake tells the cattlemen they are surrounded by Indians, Williams refuses to believe him (“He’s a liar; all Yankees are liars”). Once the Apache have claimed their horses, they turn over a captive Hispanic woman, Dean’s role, to the soldiers so that she can offer them a deal: The Indians, she says, are willing to return their horses if they will surrender the trader’s stock of rifles.

  Clint’s character is all for accepting the offer. “We were doing OK until you came here,” he says to Blake. “Seems wherever you bluebellies go, you cause trouble.” But the stalwart sergeant naturally refuses the trade, and the little party meanders on, losing someone here, someone there, to the stalking Indians, the while squabbling among themselves. Eventually, virtually in sight of a frontier fort, it becomes necessary—heavy irony here—to burn the rifles they have carried so far in order to make a final run for safety. “We’ve lugged these rifles a hundred miles—a hundred miles for nothing,” someone cries. “No, not for nothing,” the sergeant intones. “Sometimes you’ve gotta lose before you can win.”

  The thought does not quite parse. Not much in the picture does. Clint has more than once called it the worst movie ever made, though that’s not strictly true. It is simply indistinguishable from a hundred, a thousand, “products” made for a price to fill out the bottom half of double bills (a style of exhibition that was disappearing even as the picture was made). Indeed, the trade reviews, taking into account the film’s limited budget and intent, were quite indulgent, with Variety listing Clint among a group of players giving “fine” performances.

  If working conditions had been reasonably professional, and the atmosphere on the set agreeable, it would have been just a minor incident in what was turning out to be a reasonably promising year for Clint professionally. For while the movie was in postproduction, he was cast in episodes of Wagon Train, Navy Log (in an episode narrated by his idol, James Cagney) and Men of Annapolis. Then, however, Ambush at Cimarron Pass was released—ineptly. There was no cast and crew screening, no advance word of its opening. One morning Clint simply opened his newspaper and discovered that it was playing all over town as a second feature. That afternoon he and Maggie headed for a neighborhood theater, sat through a main feature and prepared themselves for the worst, which turned out to be more dismaying than anything he had imagined.

  As the picture unreeled, Clint “slumped down so low in [his] seat it probably looked like Maggie was sitting alone,” outraged and shamed “to sit there in a movie theater and watch this pile of crap run by.” Maggie tried to be supportive, but he was inconsolable: “No, this is just … dog shit. I started thinking, I’m going to go back to school. I’m going to learn something. I’m going to get some other kind of job. I’m going to jump out of this.”

  None of his previous setbacks seem to have shaken his obstinacy and determination as this one did. However modest this film was, it at least had offered him his first role with, as they say, an “arc” to it—his character eventually loses his bitterness and makes peace with himself, the past, his former enemies personified by the sergeant—his first to have some impact on a film’s narrative. At the very least he imagined he could get “a piece of film” out of it, something his agents could show around town. But there was nothing even that useful to him here. If anything, the film seemed likely to harm his cause.

  At that point he simply did not yet have the skill and the force—the experienced ac
tor’s powerful sense of himself, or, anyway, his self-interest—to impose himself on a film, to override its incompetencies while he was on camera. He was still a little too well mannered for his own good, exhibiting none of the natural unpredictability, the delinquent dangerousness, the role calls for. A sort of stunned sweetness keeps shining through his fits of anger, vitiating their force.

  But if there is nothing to be particularly proud of in this work, there is nothing to be deeply ashamed of either. An actor far more experienced than he might have been defeated by these circumstances. Moreover, in his youthful disappointment, Clint couldn’t appreciate his own good-looking presence, could not see that he was the film’s most attractive figure.

  He did not want to get by on looks, of course. He wanted to be an actor in the fullest sense of the term. But what he did not realize, as he endured his little crisis of belief on that spring afternoon in 1958, was that appearances, up to now, in his opinion, a defect, were about to become an asset. For Gunsmoke and other shows like it were opening television to a new kind of western, westerns that revolved around what we would now call extended families. These programs had a need for lean, strapping, good-natured lads like Clint Eastwood to assume their man-boy roles. His professional luck was about to turn—definitively.

  FOUR

  IDIOT OF THE PLAINS

  It was the kind of call out-of-work actors often make: A friend in the business suggests dropping by the office sometime in order to meet another friend who might, possibly, introduce him to someone else who might, conceivably, do him some good. Nobody expects much of such encounters, but, still, actors live on hope, and the myth of accidental discovery—the starlet, the talent scout, the soda fountain stool—is undying, precisely because it contains a minuscule element of truth.

  Being a practical and realistic young actor, Clint Eastwood would not have been dreaming about one of those casting epiphanies. What he knew was that it was always better to be seen than not seen—especially around the offices of a television network. And, besides, his agent had mentioned that CBS was casting a new western series, though he had also been told that they were looking for a slightly older actor for the lead.

  So, having nothing better to do on this afternoon in the early summer of 1958, he decided to take up his friend, Sonia Chernus, on her long-standing invitation to visit her at CBS Television City. She was employed there as a reader; the woman she wanted Clint to meet was an assistant to one of the executives, someone with more influence on her boss than her job title suggested. The introduction was duly made, no special spark was struck, and Clint and Sonia repaired to an indoor-outdoor patio area for talk and refreshments.

  They had met through Arthur Lubin, around the time Clint was making Francis in the Navy, and she had become one of Clint and Maggie’s best friends. After Clint founded Malpaso she would join him as his story editor (and would write the first draft of, and receive cowriting credit for, The Outlaw Josey Wales). She would also become something of a surrogate aunt to the Eastwood children when they came along. At this moment she had recently found the short stories (by Walter Brooks) on which Lubin’s Mr. Ed television series would be based, the pilot of which he was preparing to make. When they finished their coffee Clint decided to walk Sonia back to her office. They were strolling along one of the building’s long corridors when a man in a blue suit stepped out of an office, glanced at Clint and said, “Excuse me, are you an actor?”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Well, I’ve done some television, and I just finished this picture, Ambush at Cimarron Pass.”

  “Fortunately, he hadn’t seen it,” Clint recalls. He also recalls doing his best, as they chatted, to exaggerate the importance of his other credits. Sonia, meanwhile, stepped out of the man’s eye line and made silent signals to Clint, indicating that his questioner, Robert Sparks, was an important figure at the network. A sometime movie producer, now in charge of filmed programming for CBS, he called Clint into his office and asked his secretary to summon Bill Warren to join him.

  Clint, at this point, had never heard of Sparks or Warren, though he might have if Sparks had called the latter by his full name, which was Charles Marquis Warren. Born and educated in Baltimore, he became the protégé of F. Scott Fitzgerald when the writer was living there and Warren was a college student. Fitzgerald even recommended him to M-G-M to adapt Tender Is the Night, saying “I haven’t believed in anybody so strongly since Ernest Hemingway.” Nothing came of that, and Warren instead turned to pulp fiction, later graduating to slicks like The Saturday Evening Post. Several of his western serials were published as novels, and one of them, Only the Valiant, served as the basis for the Gregory Peck movie, released in 1951.

  Warren apparently heard of that sale while he was in the hospital recuperating from wounds suffered filming amphibious landings in the South Pacific during World War II, in which he attained the rank of commander. It emboldened him to try Hollywood, where he was soon working steadily as a writer and a director, first in features, then in television. In 1955 he developed, produced and directed many episodes of Gunsmoke, but after one season he left with bad feelings all around. He then coproduced and directed a feature, Cattle Empire, which was currently in release. A cattle-drive western starring Joel McCrea, it owed something to Howard Hawks’s Red River, which had, a decade earlier, set the standard for this subgenre. These two films obviously inspired the new series he was developing for CBS.

  A thick-browed, fit-looking man in his midforties, Warren appeared in Sparks’s office wearing a battered, writerly sports jacket, his manner not at all prepossessing to Clint, who was leaning back into a sofa, his legs stretched out comfortably before him. “Bill, pleasure,” was Clint’s casual response to their introduction. He did not know then that Charles Marquis Warren was “Bill” only to friends and close colleagues. At work with strangers it was supposed to be “Mr. Warren,” in the same way that John Ford, also a former naval person and a maker of westerns, therefore a figure with whom Warren identified, was always “Mr. Ford” on his sets.

  Sparks and Warren started describing Rawhide to Clint. Each season a group of cowboys would take a herd of cattle from Texas to a railhead up north. Each week they would encounter and overcome some dramatically arresting threat to their progress. There would be some location work with a rented herd of cattle, and the show would be, by television standards, quite realistic.

  This was, indeed, the program Clint had heard about from his agents, and he said that he understood the lead was to be played by a man in his forties, which left him out. That’s true, he was told, but there were to be several other running parts in the series, most notably the costarring role of a young ramrod, the older trail boss’s second-in-command.

  The tenor of the meeting now changed. “All of a sudden, I’m sitting up,” says Clint. Warren continued to regard him suspiciously, but Sparks “seemed really wired, really enthusiastic.” He vowed that he would pull in Ambush to study Clint’s work, an idea that filled him with dread. But he left the meeting with Sparks promising that he would hear from them in three or four days. Events moved faster than that. By late afternoon Clint’s agent was on the phone telling him that Sparks and Warren were not going to look at the film, but instead wanted to test him. “Great, where are the sides—you got anything for me to look at?” No, came the reply, it’s going to be an interview test.

  “Well, those aren’t so hot,” said Clint, understating the matter. They had been the bane of his existence over these years. Never comfortable making small talk with strangers, particularly when he was in the role of supplicant, he felt he had lost several jobs when he was prevented from getting into character. “But I’ll do anything,” he says, dropping into the present tense as he recalls past tension, “and maybe even at this point in my life I feel a little better than I did a couple of years earlier.”

  He was back at CBS the next day, slightly dismayed to discover that his
champion, Sparks, was not present, and that Bill Warren would be conducting the test. Worse, the rules of play had been changed again. Clint was told to head down to Western Costume and get outfitted in some cowboy clothes—this was going to be a full-scale reading, after all.

  “By the way,” Warren asked, “how are you at dialogue?”

  “Well, I’m OK,” Clint replied.

  “I’ve got a monologue.”

  “A monologue?” said Clint, his heart sinking.

  The writer handed him “a full page of solid talk. It’s a speech where you had to come in and run up to the camera, and you’re supposed to be really pissed off, and deliver this monologue to the camera as if it’s a group of people. It’s about the hardest thing you could ask a person to do.”

  As it happened, it was also a portent of things to come. For Bill Warren, though he had, as a writer, a rather good feel for the western form, and especially for measuring the moral weight it could comfortably carry on television, had, as a director, no feel at all for his actors’ needs. He was peremptory and insensitive, as this surprise demand for a reading indicated.

  Very much the naval officer snapping commands, Warren brooked no discussion from people who were not, after all, enlisted personnel, but creative collaborators with whom, all going well, he would be working year in, year out. It was, indeed, an actors’ revolt over his dictatorial ways, led by Milburn Stone, that had driven him off Gunsmoke (“The whole unit, everybody, thought he was crazy,” Clint remembers hearing). No less a figure than William F. Paley, CBS’s founder and chairman, had been obliged to intervene, ordering Warren back to writing and producing, and replacing him on the set with less autocratic directors.

  It was now becoming clear to Clint that he was a finalist for the role of Rowdy Yates and that this was a do-or-die audition, for only two other actors of his age, together with the three performers (among them the eventual winner, Eric Fleming) who were up for the role of Gil Favor, the trail boss, joined him rummaging for wardrobe at Western Costume. It was also clear to him that there was no time to memorize perfectly the speech that he had been handed. He observed, however, that there were three transitions in it, and he thought if he got those right and improvised a fiery approximation of the other lines, he might get by. It was the sort of thing he had been doing in some of his acting classes, where, as an exercise, the students were encouraged to get the emotions right and forget about being word perfect with the script.