Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  This does not mean that he was, in these days, constantly out with other women. Sometimes he was out with the guys. Sometimes he was out with guys and gals in an innocently mixed group. Sometimes he was out at Jack Kosslyn’s acting classes. Sometimes he was just out at the movies. But, yes, he was sometimes out alone with some woman. He was incapable of remaining completely faithful to his wife. It was the unspoken secret of their relationship, though he once came close to revealing it. In his 1974 Playboy interview, which contains his most extensive public comments on the marriage, the subject of “open” relationships came up, and he characterized Maggie as “a woman who knows how much room I need.” She put it differently some years later: “He had this thing about being a loner, like I kind of didn’t exist sometimes. He’s a very complex person.”

  Clint was by all accounts affectionate with “Mags” or “Magoo” as he sometimes calls her, and when he spoke publicly about their marriage, he stressed its companionability. “Everybody talks about love in marriage, but I think it’s just as important to be friends,” he said in 1974. He was careful to consult her about career decisions, and she went so far as to attend a few beginner’s classes at Kosslyn’s studio, trying to gain a better understanding of his work.

  In the Playboy interview, he stressed Maggie’s freedom to do as she pleased, to take up any job or avocation she liked without consulting him. He also mentioned his own lack of sexual jealousy and authoritarianism. “I’m not shooting orders to her on where she’s supposed to be every five minutes, and I don’t expect her to shoot them at me.” He suggested that this was one of the reasons the marriage had lasted as long as it had.

  But there was more to it than that. Besides being careful not to order her husband around, Maggie was also careful to avoid asking him difficult questions. Possibly she was naive. Perhaps she was, as we would now put it, in denial. But the fact is that she seems not to have inquired into his endless comings and goings very often or very deeply. “She had an incredible eraser,” says Fritz Manes.

  “I was never very realistic about some things,” she said some years later. “I used to always hope for the best. I wanted to protect myself. I wondered about it, but I didn’t dwell on it, because it probably would have driven me insane. I’m sure there must have been times, but I just preferred to hang in there and not worry too much about it.”

  It was well along in the Rawhide years when she drew Manes aside at a party and rather diffidently asked him if he thought Clint was “playing around.” She accepted his reassurances (though he knew otherwise), and he believes that Maggie did not fully admit to herself that Clint was unfaithful to her until the late seventies, some time after his relationship with Sondra Locke was well established and widely rumored. Don Kincade, Clint’s other old high-school friend, who remained close to both Eastwoods, thinks Clint’s unfaithfulness placed a strain on their marriage much earlier.

  But whatever the case, promiscuity was not, for Clint, one of the prerogatives of his newfound fame. It had been “habitual” for him before his marriage, and it would remain so after it ended: “It just becarne … I don’t know … addictive … like you have to have another cigarette.” It consumed half of his life, some thirty years in his estimation.

  But “consumed”—a word that implies obsession—is perhaps not quite the right word. His manner when he makes this admission is neither boastful nor regretful. Certainly it appears to be untouched by guilt. The need to have many women was a fact of his life, his nature if you will, and it remains an undeniable fact of his history.

  His opportunities increased as his “following” increased, and when he became, as he puts it, “a motion-picture actor of some renown, traveling to locations around the world all the time by yourself,” the temptations were almost daily. (Sometimes these reached comical levels. A friend of his recalls sharing a hotel elevator after a banquet in his honor in Paris, and a grinning Clint pulling three room keys out of his pockets; all had been placed there by women he had met at the dinner.) We are perhaps in the realm of evolutionary psychology here. As its great explicator Robert Wright tells us, prominent males, like dominant primates, are designed to capitalize sexually on their status. Fame, power and riches draw the attention of women, their own neurochemistry urges such men on and all the rest is easy moralizing and/or spiteful envy. Given Clint’s cool realism, especially about his own needs, it is a plausible explanation of his sexual behavior.

  But if that seems too coldly rational, one might resort to John Updike. The writer, who is of Clint’s generation and is perhaps the novelist who has most accurately portrayed the sexuality of its men, wrote of one of his protagonists: “What he wanted was for women to stay put, planted in American plenty, while he ambulated from one to another carrying no more baggage than the suit on his back and the car keys in his pocket.” It fits Clint—so amiable, so uninsistent, so lacking in macho poses. It fits many men formed by his times.

  A modern feminist may deplore this mind-set (as many have deplored Updike’s failure to write judgmentally about it). A male may envy another man who is able to act on it so casually. But such evidence as there is suggests that he made no promises, held out no hopes, that he could not fulfill. And the discretion with which he conducted his romantic transactions is obvious, since no public unpleasantness, certainly no scandal, attached to them until his famous falling-out with Sondra Locke in 1989. “Sex is a small part of life,” he was once quoted as saying. “It’s a good thing—great—but 99.9 percent of your life is spent doing other things.”

  He was obviously a man who knew how to keep things in perspective. Work included. Work especially. Making a television series, like low-budget moviemaking, is potentially a trap. If its repetitiveness does not turn a series lead into a raging egomaniac it can quickly turn him into a hack if he succumbs to its numbing routines.

  This was potentially a threat to Clint. Fleming’s querulousness and Warren’s manipulations aside, Rawhide was a comfortable place to work. It would have been easy to sink into laziness and inattention, and sometimes they did. Everyone, for instance, liked fooling around with their omnipresent six-shooters. “I was fairly adept with it,” Clint remembers, “because you’d do it all day. You’d have nothing to do but drawing guns, twirling and stuff. You’d have calluses on your hand.” While the show was headquartered at M-G-M this activity drew something of a crowd, because people like Elvis Presley and Sammy Davis Jr. loved fast-draw and would drop over to practice with the guys. The latter, in fact, left a pistol of his, which had once belonged to Gary Cooper, to Clint in his will.

  But all the idle hours were not idly occupied. If you are alert and open to its processes, filmmaking on this level can offer a practical education that no film school, no dramatic academy, can duplicate. Clint puts it this way: “It’s not like you get to wear a different wardrobe each time, or go to a different location. It is like factory work. So how do you take an assembly line job and make it more exciting for you every day?” His technique was to look at an episode from the director’s point of view one week, then the next, see how he could vary his character a little bit—“sort of self-experimentation all the time.”

  Clint never really liked the character of Rowdy Yates. He concedes that over the run of the show Rowdy “grew a little bit,” in that he developed from his original incarnation as “a young guy who was not too swift, not too educated, just drifting along wanting to be in the cattle business.” From representing “impetuous youth, going off without thinking it through” he became someone “they started giving more responsibility to.” But still—“I never got to really play a character with him that I wanted.” By that he means that there was no darkness in him, not even some odd quirks. “I kept thinking,” Clint once told an interviewer, “wouldn’t it be great to play the hero sort of like the villain is normally portrayed, and give the villain some heroic qualities.”

  But no matter how they fuss and fume actors are finally powerless to alter television fo
rmulas. The best they can hope to do is point up a scene here, a moment there. “That was the big challenge,” says Clint, “to take a scene that was really bad and make it a pretty interesting scene—or at least passable. It’s like taking an F grade and making it a C-minus.”

  There were times when such craftsmanlike pleasures were satisfying enough. “We were still young, naive people, and we were going around saying we were looking for a great play to do, a great movie to do. And I said, ‘You know, there’s something about having to do shit every week and trying to put perfume on it and it still may end up being a hog.’ ” Or as he once put it somewhat more formally: “Having the security of being in a series week in, week out, gives you great flexibility; you can experiment with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, ‘Well, I won’t do that again,’ and you’re still on the air next week.”

  Besides learning by doing, Eastwood could study acting by observing. Over the years, as Clint puts it, “Every kind of person imaginable came through.” All ages were represented, every kind of experience, every possible approach to the craft. Older movie stars—Barbara Stanwyck, Mary Astor, Brian Aherne, George Brent, Walter Pidgeon, Cesar Romero—worked the show. So did veteran movie character people—Peter Lorre, Walter Slezak, Agnes Moorehead, Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy, Victor McLaglen, Burgess Meredith. On the other hand, the “New York actors” (as they were then referred to)—the likes of Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, John Cassavetes, E. G. Marshall, Rip Torn, Pat Hingle, George Grizzard—people out of quite a different acting tradition, often signed on. And then there were the young Hollywood comers, actors like Beau and Jeff Bridges, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Blake, on the way to star careers of their own. There were also what might be called novelty acts: Frankie Avalon, Shelley Berman, Dean Martin.

  “That was a great experience for me,” says Clint, “watching other people, seeing them operate, watching the different techniques.” What was true of the actors was equally true of the directors. “I just would watch everything,” Clint says, “the old-timers and the new-timers and some of the hacks, too.” Besides those already mentioned for their work on the early episodes of the series, Clint cites as exemplars Tay Garnett, Stuart Heisler and his old Universal nemesis, Jack Arnold, all of whom had extensive experience in features. Clint also remembers as conscientious craftsmen Christian Nyby and Laslo Benedek, both former editors. These men may not have been “auteurs,” but they were repositories of vast amounts of professional lore, craftsmen who knew how to stage action or to extract what values there were in sketchy dramatic scenes efficiently, effectively, unpretentiously, and whose pride in their professionalism—in doing their best within whatever limits were imposed on them—armored them against cynicism. It’s impossible to say how consciously Clint took in their underlying—dare one say it?—aesthetic values, since in this crowd it was a point of pride not to speak of these matters openly. But he did assimilate the working attitudes of the best directors: their belief that even in cliché forms respectable work can be accomplished if you are knowledgeable and well prepared, their contempt for time wasted on theoretical chat, for money wasted on making the producer feel important or the star more secure. The point—no, the morality—was simple: Get the work and the money on the screen.

  It is, of course, equally useful to learn how not to make a film, and Rawhide was richly provided with dull directors dutifully, ineptly grinding their way through whatever pages the day’s schedule required. “You do 250 hours of television, you learn what makes one prop man good and another fair and another lousy, and what makes one cameraman better than another one,” Clint once said. “You learn about leadership, how one week a crew can move very fast and efficiently and the next week drag. About 90 percent of the time, it’s the fault of the director.”

  Many of these “turkeys,” Clint once recalled, “didn’t direct much; they’d just come in and set up the shots and not tamper too much. And we were regular characters who ran throughout the show, so pretty much you had to guideline your own performance.” That, as it happened, turned out to be the most useful experience of all for a man who would eventually direct himself in so many films; it developed the inner eye he keeps trained on himself.

  None of this should be taken to imply that Clint Eastwood was every day in every way a nice guy. He could not always guard his temper. He lost it most memorably on location in Arizona in the early days, of the show. Clint had twisted his ankle rather severely, making it uncomfortable for him to stand. He had to do a riding shot and asked an assistant director to bring a chair out and hide it behind a tree where some camera gear was stored, safely out of the shot, so he could rest for a minute before going on to the next one. Arriving at his destination, Clint found no chair. He sought out the AD and asked, “Did you think I was kidding when I said I wanted a chair over there?” The man was smoking a cigar, and he took it out of his mouth, started waving it in Clint’s face and telling him off. Clint shoved him. The man charged him, and Clint dropped him. This set off a quite satisfying general brawl.

  Clint’s larger dissatisfactions with the show, though growing steadily, were expressed only in the most guarded terms outside the company. In a 1961 TV Guide profile of Clint, Bill Warren chose to understand Clint’s complaints as the kind that one learns to expect from actors working in a long-running series. “Like any other actor, he beefs now and again, but they’re generally justifiable beefs. If he thinks his part is too small in any given script, I’ll hear about it.” Possibly so. But Clint’s restiveness had other, more compelling sources.

  Clint rather diffidently mentioned one of them in this same article, which described him as “an amiable, quiet-spoken giant,” and made much of his habit of picking struggling bees and grasshoppers off the water in swimming pools and returning them to their natural habitats. (“I always feel they were put here for some purpose and it’s not my business to let them drown,” he said.) Buried well down in the anonymously written piece was this quote: “I’m under contract to CBS, and sometimes they won’t let me do an outside show because of what they call ‘sponsor conflict.’ ” This, Clint felt, was “farfetched.” But he quickly added that “it’s really not all that important, so I let it go.” The reporter also let it go, having bought Clint’s self-description—“dull but happy”—and constructed his lackadaisical profile around it.

  Actually it was gnawing at him, this inability to expand beyond Rawhide. He and the other actors were encouraged to make personal appearances at rodeos—a pleasant way to earn an extra $1,500 now and then—and with Sheb Wooley Clint worked up a double act, singing and telling jokes. (Sometimes, they’d stop off in Las Vegas on the way to their gigs to steal material from the comedy acts there.) But this scarcely constituted a career move. These audiences already knew and liked Clint. He needed to expand his range, establish himself with a more upscale audience than his show attracted.

  Curiously, the one show-business realm that was taking an interest in him was the recording industry. It was, as Clint says, “sort of fashionable to take anybody who had a little warmth going, who made it in a TV series or something,” and, if they could carry a tune, make a pop single or two to test their teen appeal. This was especially so after Edd (Kookie) Byrnes of 77 Sunset Strip had a hit with “Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb).” So around the time TV Guide profiled him, Clint cut a single called “Unknown Girl of My Dreams,” backed by the standard “For All We Know.”

  The record made no impact. “Unknown Girl” was strictly bubblegum, a plaint about an idealized dream girl for whom the singer yearns—not at all Clint’s kind of music. It wasn’t that he was bad; it was just that he was not very good or, perhaps one should say, not very singular. The disc sounds like a hundred, a thousand, virtually unheeded, long-since-forgotten pop records of the day. But he cut two more singles in the next two or three years and a full-scale long-playing record, Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy S
ongs.

  On all of these records he demonstrates a nice boyish baritone, and there’s a musicianship about his work, which possibly surprised such listeners as he had, that is in keeping with his own seriousness about music. He strains a bit in the upper register and uses a certain amount of vibrato to disguise some insecurities of pitch. One feels about his singing what one feels about his early acting efforts—that he is giving it a good, serious shot, doing the best possible job in the circumstances (which includes arrangements that are utterly banal).

  The album of cowboys songs is certainly the most ambitious of these efforts and the most conscientiously produced. The other singles are on the “Unknown Girl” level, with one of them offering a piece obviously written to order. “Rowdy” is—no other word for it—a hoot. And it is also, in its way, quite interesting:

  I’m gonna leave some day, go far, far away

  And find me a home and a love of my own

  When I find that little girl, and I will some day,

  I’m gonna treat her kind and good, I’ll change my Rowdy way …

  And so forth. The tactic plea is, of course, to take the lonely, wandering lad to heart, something shrewd Tin Pan Alley judged mooning teenage girls ought to be eager to do. They weren’t. The recording went nowhere. What’s intriguing about the song is that in its banal and calculated way, it gave Rowdy Yates more of an inner life, more of a romantic spirit than the show’s scripts typically did. Imagine a Rowdy Yates who was not job and issue oriented, a man capable of long, sad thoughts as the campfire died. It might have been interesting—especially for the increasingly restless actor playing him.