Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  There were times when Rowdy initiated an episode’s central action, and other times when he played a key role in bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. But often as not, his contributions to an “incident” were about what they were in his first appearance—a couple of decent scenes and then a few more appearances in which Clint’s acting consisted largely of reacting.

  All in all it was the guest stars who got to do the most interesting work. The regulars, to the show’s writers and directors, were the givens in the weekly equation they had to solve—no reason to fuss unduly over them—and they were, as Clint recalls, often left to their own devices, making up their own bits of business, their own modest subtexts, doing what they could to stay interested and grab a little screen time they might call their own.

  But if the regulars were more or less taken for granted creatively, they were vital to the success of the show, which debuted fairly low in the ratings (forty-second in its first week), but made it to the top twenty within three weeks and remained there for four seasons. They, not the guests, had to win the loyal regular weekly audience that all long-lived television programs must recruit. Here the convention of regarding the regular cast as family aided the writers. The ups and downs of their long-term relationships constituted a sort of tacit running story easily sketched in: Gil Favor, the stern but forgiving father figure; Wishbone, the fussy mom feeding them, dressing their wounds, occasionally interceding for them with the trail boss when he became too authoritarian; Rowdy, the number-one son, a good kid, troublesome (or anyway inconveniencing) because he was idealistic and quick to take up the cause of troubled or ill-used people, especially females; and so on down the cast list.

  The TV plains were alive with such patriarchies in those days. Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian and The High Chaparral featured all-wise elders rallying a real or surrogate family against the anarchic threat posed by the outsider, the other. It says something about the popular culture’s raging need for a particular kind of order that this pattern was imposed on the television western, thereby creating a spurious historical example to reassure the suburban middle-class family that it had made the right choice, should be wary of intruders, adventurings, passionate emotions. Indeed, this imposition was essentially new to the fictive West—a weak coinage that would eventually drive out the stronger species offered by theatrical westerns.

  We had, for instance, occasionally witnessed in movies the creation and defense of cattle empires (besides Red River there had been Duel in the Sun and The Furies among others), but in these films the emperor-patriarch was seen as a dark and driven creature, making life miserable for his children. Even in films that did not focus primarily on such characters, the cruelly patriarchal rancher (often attended by his moronic and sadistic get) driving out homesteaders (representing more benign family values) infringing on his domain was a familiar figure.

  Gunslinging loners were, too, especially in the late forties and early fifties, as westerns enjoyed a renaissance and gained a new respectability with critics and the middlebrow audience, films like The Gunfighter (1950), High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953). Rather self-consciously “classical” in form and “serious” in intent, they were, perhaps, westerns for people who didn’t really like westerns, but all at least concerned themselves sympathetically with the fate of their professional killers—which is what a gunfighter is in essence—very different from the traditional western hero, the small rancher or cowboy who is an amateur with guns, strapping them on reluctantly and only after insistent provocation.

  These films in effect prepared the way for tougher, less culturally aspiring but often more interesting studies of the gunfighter—the hardbitten wanderers played by James Stewart in the Mann films, the grave, courtly, profoundly isolated westerner Randolph Scott portrayed in the austere, low-budget pictures Budd Boetticher made for the star’s Ranown company. These lean, hard movies (which have deservedly grown in repute over the years) offered us, if you will, David Reisman’s “inner directed man” kitted out in chaps and spurs, living by his own rules and paying a price for his alienation. Or maybe he was a kind of romantic outcast, almost a poetic figure, so devoted to his rare and deadly art that he was unfit for normal society, just as real poets, real artists, seemed to be in the fifties. One could even see him as Richard Slotkin does in Gunfighter Nation—an embodiment of America’s paradoxical self-image during the Cold War, “at once supremely powerful and utterly vulnerable, politically dominant yet helpless to shape the course of critical events.”

  But however you saw him, this much was certain: You did not see him for long on television. It may be, as many have suggested, that the popularity of the movie western initiated the western cycle on television. But its key figures, the ripsnorting patriarchs and the radically alienated gunmen among others, were deemed too rich for the television audience’s blood. These were roles for the guest stars to play, characters who briefly, colorfully, menaced the decorous little world they invaded only to be overcome within the hour by the collective gumption and good values of its permanent residents.

  There is something consensual here, some need for nightly reassurance that the family (which was also metaphorically a small corporation), properly managed and controlled, could be an institution for all seasons, that its leader, its father figure, was capable of mastering all situations. Daddy always knew best, even in the wide-open spaces. The old general in the fifties White House, the older doctors and lawyers on the medical and legal shows, the younger but no less controlling fathers of the sitcoms—all eventually rounded up their charges and headed ’em out on a righteous path.

  When today’s right-wing social critics call for the media to celebrate “family values,” it is something like this that they are nostalgically attempting to summon up. They forget—as people refused to acknowledge at the time—that there was always something abnormal about fifties normalcy. At best, that word refers us in any period to a consensus about what the culturally dominant middle class believes to constitute the good—or, anyway, respectable—life for its members and aspirants. Yet everyone knows that millions are excluded—or exclude themselves—from these consensuses. The Era of Good Feelings that we thought we shared in the fifties was in the largest sense a fraud or, at best, a kind of metafiction. On most important matters—the relationships between races, sexes, classes and generations, for example—it grotesquely, even tragically, misrepresented reality, with the mass media amplifying (and in the process further distorting) this misrepresentation.

  In these early days, Clint Eastwood would not have stated the issue in quite those terms. It would take a few seasons for him to grow restive with the sterilities of his series and for certain other disappointments to manifest themselves. He definitely would have preferred to play a more forceful western figure—someone more enigmatic, more independent, at the least less callow than Rowdy Yates. But before that thought fully crystallized in his mind, the program’s lack of true stylistic grit bothered him. The televised West was a very tidy West. The cry, “Get out the nine iron” (a shovel) would go up whenever a horse made droppings on the set. It would not do if the camera accidentally encountered even this much realism. The stock footage of the cattle on the move presented a similar problem; every once in a while the camera would pick up a bull trying to mount a cow, an occurrence the network’s standards and practices department would not countenance. Warren was himself similarly compulsive. He insisted, for instance, that cattle on the move always had to traverse the screen in the same direction.

  Clint’s contempt for inflexibility of this kind remains lively, even in recollection. As a director, Warren was “heavy, ponderous, slow,” as Ted Post, who directed many Rawhide episodes, says. “He didn’t understand that every scene has its own particular rhythms, and the rhythms give it variety, and the interest and the colors.” Worse, he “commanded” the actors. “You’ve got to give them the feeling that they’re in control,” as Post puts it, “and utilize whatever s
ensitivity and temperament they have to extract the values that the scene calls for.” Warren, in his opinion, “plugged them up.”

  As a producer Warren was equally difficult to work with, and his behavior in this role had a still larger effect on the company’s morale. Clint thinks, perhaps, he had something of a drinking problem, though he kept it reasonably well hidden. He also tended to keep erratic hours, doing much of his work at night, a habit that particularly irritated Fleming. “I love him,” Fleming told a reporter after he left the show, “but I loved fifty other men who were trying to make a living and he’d come in at 6 p.m., ready to work when everybody was ready to quit.”

  A more serious matter was that, as Clint puts it, “there was never a good honesty” between Warren and his coworkers. When the show first went on the air Clint, Fleming and the rest of the regular cast were dismayed to discover that they did not receive billing at the top of the show, but rather at the end.

  Warren, it would seem, was attempting to gain an early, authoritative purchase on another problem endemic to series television. The regular performers, embodying characters that don’t develop much over the years, become restless, if not downright mutinous, making ever more outrageous demands on their employers. These they can back up, for as a show runs on, power tends to flow toward its regular stars. Network executives like to pretend that they are not necessarily the source of their show’s appeal, that they could make do without them, but it is a hypothesis they are not eager to test.

  Because of his experiences on Gunsmoke, Warren was particularly alert to this problem. Doubtless he thought that by asserting his will at the outset, he would stave off future challenges. His strategy failed. The producer quickly lost on the billing issue and succeeded only in making himself everyone’s agreed-upon enemy. “He’d tell you what you wanted to hear, then behind you he’d go off and do something else,” Clint says, “and he was always playing one character off against another” within the company.

  At first, he focused especially on Clint and Fleming. It was, for Warren, a promising situation, for if he could turn the costars against one another, they would be unlikely to collaborate against him. And they had almost come to blows on their first location shoot in Arizona, when Fleming openly criticized Clint for being slow with some dialogue. Then when tempers cooled, they patched up their differences. They would never become close friends, but they remained by all accounts comfortable colleagues for much of the show’s long run.

  This was not always easy to manage, for Fleming was, as Clint describes him, an altogether prickly character. “He loved to shock people [with] radical statements—annoy a lot of people.” Rawhide was just as big a break for him as it was for Clint—maybe bigger, for he had been scuffling along the fringes of their profession somewhat longer. But unlike his costar, the cranky, self-destructive Fleming could not relax and enjoy it. If this was Clint’s first big chance to show what he could do, this was—at least in his own mind—Fleming’s last chance of doing so, and he made the worst of it.

  Fleming was only five years older than Clint, and their backgrounds were not entirely dissimilar. Also a native Californian, Fleming (who was born Edward Heddy) was the son of an itinerant carpenter and had dropped out of high school to serve in the Seabees during World War II. Thereafter he entered show business as a stagehand, took some acting lessons, got an early job in a touring company of Happy Birthday starring Miriam Hopkins, moved on to small roles in the Broadway companies of My Three Angels and Stalag 17, then drifted to Los Angeles, where he found minor roles in television and movies. This was the first job he had ever had with a future that might be measured in years instead of weeks.

  Fleming did not, however, bring to it a sense of gratitude or relief, but rather the bitterness accumulated over many frustrating years in the business. His initial suspicion of Warren quickly turned to active dislike, and he maintained that attitude toward the producer’s several successors and toward network executives as well.

  He was, to be sure, handicapped by the aftereffects of an accident. Working in a foundry during his Seabees days he had attempted to lift a two-hundred-pound steel counterweight and had dropped it on his face. This led to plastic surgery and doubtless contributed to his perpetually frozen expression. This he tried to distract from by overacting vocally. He was “a hamola” in Ted Post’s characterization, someone “you had to cork a lot.”

  So this isolated man, alternately withdrawn and blustery, never established himself, as the other prairie patresfamilias did, as a source of warmth and strength with viewers. On-screen he seemed, somehow, to be pasted into this landscape instead of being an organic part of it. Offscreen he became, in effect, the black hole at the center of this little universe, something everyone—especially the writers—had to navigate around.

  Fleming did have his strengths: an air of command (mostly a function of his booming baritone) and—a gift Clint envied—his ability to memorize a page of dialogue at a glance and rattle it off without hesitation. “If I had a long speech and it had anything in it, it took a lot out of me. But it didn’t with him. He’d just clip through it.” And he could sometimes be cheerful about his limitations. “Now these guys,” Clint would remember him saying about the rest of the cast, “these guys can act. I’m just a hack.” But he had no gift for fun and did not much join in the camaraderie of the show, spending much of his time in his dressing room or silently reading magazines on the set while he waited for shots to be readied.

  Thinking about his costar, Clint recalls meeting James Arness when they were both surfing at San Onofre, and falling into conversation about series television work. “Don’t you get sick of it?” Clint asked.

  “Yeah, I’ve been sick of it lots of times, but I make a hell of a good living doing this.” Arness paused and added: “You know, I’m just gonna run it till it falls over.”

  Clint saw the wisdom in this, especially since Arness had an ownership position in his program. “He just decided that was about as good as it was going to get for him. He wasn’t going to be John Wayne.”

  The problem for Fleming, the one that finally subsumed all his other problems, was that he was not even going to be James Arness, and after two or three years on the series he knew it.

  Differences in their personalities and talents aside, Clint was at quite a different position than Fleming on his career curve. He was not about to threaten to quit the series, which was Fleming’s usual tactic when he was frustrated. He had observed other actors leaving series prematurely, when they reached the first heights of popularity, thereby “losing a lot of income.” On the contrary, “It was nice having a steady job in a business where a steady job seemed like it was absolutely unobtainable. You always dreamed of it, actually working every day and getting paid every week and getting a following of sorts.” As Ted Post recalls, “He didn’t want to stir things up, which would endanger his making a living.” In the early years, “The security factor played a very important role, I think. This was a wonderful break that he wasn’t going to turn his back on.”

  Besides, steady work fed into another of Clint’s beliefs. He frequently tells an anecdote about a great classical trumpet player of the 1940s, some of whose friends were startled to find him playing in a band at a Hollywood Stars minor league baseball game one day. “Maestro, what are you doing here?” one of them asked. “You must play every day,” the musician replied simply. In the same vein Clint sometimes quotes Dizzy Gillespie to this effect: “When you stop using your lip your brain starts doing funny things.”

  Each year Clint stayed with Rawhide his salary improved, reaching the neighborhood of about $100,000 a year toward the end of the run. CBS offered to defer part of his salary, and he took the network up on it. It saved taxes, and the money accrued interest while the network held it for him. But more important, “When the series was over I’d be able to sit back rather than have to take the first job that came along.” His idea was to escape the television rut by having the financi
al wherewithal to wait for good parts in feature films. In those days, he recalls, he and Maggie lived very comfortably on a few hundred dollars a week. And, indeed, in Rawhide’s second season they were able to move out of their Arch Drive quarters into a larger Studio City apartment. A Sunday supplement picture story shows them miming bourgeois ordinariness there: He helps her hang a picture she has painted, looks dubiously at a dress she bought, grumpily goes over the month’s bills, which are spread out on a card table between them.

  A couple of years later, they bought their first home, a comfortable, but by no means overbearing, three-bedroom house located on a cul-de-sac about halfway down the north slope of Beverly Glen, with a pleasant view of the San Fernando Valley from its terrace. Clint and his friends dug the swimming pool (it was the occasion for a memorable party), and he put in a gym above the garage. In this period, too, the Eastwoods began renting a retreat in Carmel, where they eventually purchased land, intending to build what they said would be their principal residence—a project that was held in abeyance for years because of zoning squabbles.

  They delayed having children. At some point in this period Maggie contracted hepatitis—as Clint says “almost as badly as you can get it without ceasing to exist”—and the disease lingered for more than a year. Clint subsequently suggested that her illness and their fear of its aftereffects was one reason they did not begin a family. He also alluded to his desire not to face the problems his parents had confronted trying to provide for children when they were not solidly established financially. But one has to believe it was the commitment children represented that caused him to hesitate, for his commitment to this marriage was not wholehearted. His need to come and go as he pleased, without offering lengthy explanations to anyone, had not abated. It was the way he had conducted his life since adolescence, and he was incapable of altering a pattern that, indeed, persists to this day. He and he alone controls his calendar, and though he rarely breaks dates, he is also reluctant to make them very far in advance. It is one of the ways he defines freedom.