This was catch-up reviewing, a long-delayed tribute to a filmmaker the magazine’s previous reviewers had either ignored or patronized. It was also an acknowledgment, like others occurring around this time, that in the matter of Clint Eastwood, the people had spoken; they had found in him something they liked, or feared, or anyway were fascinated by. It was time, at last, for reviewers to begin following the crowd.
This was a well-established pattern. Clint was not the first star (and not the last) to have been at first dismissed by the critics for his lack of obvious theatrical training and credentials, put down as a lunky, hunky Hollywood phenomenon, then reconsidered as his popularity with the people proved irresistible. As such performers refine as well as broaden their screen personae—or in some cases merely persist as audience favorites—their “development” gives aid and comfort (and Sunday pieces) to reviewers as they reevaluate. This would be increasingly true of Clint, though it must be said that it took him longer to win the kind of critical endorsement he now enjoys than it did some other actors, in part because he added variations to his screen character rather patiently, in part because of the controversy that surrounded his Dirty Harry characterization and his persistence in so often returning to it.
Clint was certainly aware of what was being said critically about the Leone films as they came out and was aware of the reviews of his first American productions when they appeared. He has an acute sense of who his critical friends and enemies are. One suspects, indeed, that he is more hurt by bad notices than he lets on. But he has also always been a man with his own agenda, and at this moment it did not revolve around reviews. Nor was the question of establishing the full dimensions of his screen personality uppermost in his mind or in the minds of his advisers. They were all more intent on reinforcing the foundations of a career the full scope and solidity of which was not yet clear.
This means, frankly, that they were, for the moment, more interested in money—which is how Hollywood determines status—than they were in critical prestige. A little more than a month after finishing Coogan’s Bluff (and months before either it or Hang ’em High was released) he was off to Europe to make Where Eagles Dare (reported salary, $500,000), after which he was scheduled to start Paint Your Wagon (reported salary, $600,000). Sooner than expected he was approaching the $750,000 fee David Picker had predicted for him. More important, these big, mainstream pictures would, whatever their modest intrinsic merits, force people to stop seeing him as a curiosity, begin to see him for what he wanted and needed to be, a major industry player.
SEVEN
LESSNESS IS BESTNESS
The habits of insecurity die hard. “It takes a long time for an actor to get over the thought that whatever he’s doing at the moment may be his last job” is the way Clint Eastwood puts it. For some actors it is never completely put to rest, which is one reason anxiety—not to mention desperation—floats so freely through show business. As he approached thirty-eight, Clint thought he might be old for the game, just beginning to establish a star career at a time in life when the careers of other leading men (and certainly leading women) were starting to decline.
Actually age was part of his good luck. He had been spared the premature accretion of fame, money and cosseting that turns actors who receive these boons when they are too young into spoiled brats. The fact that Clint still felt obliged to spare a prudent thought for the dubious future kept him in touch with two significant realities—that of the business he was in and that of his audience’s lives.
Grasping, at last, the brass ring, he did not at this moment think his ride on the carousel would necessarily be a long one. Indeed, a couple of years later, with several more successful movies behind him, he was still saying to a reporter, “We are like boxers, one never knows how much longer one has.” His thinking, as of 1968, was that if he was lucky, the merry-go-round would keep spinning for him until he made it through his forties. This is one reason why, as he has often said, he was beginning to think about directing; it was something he might do when the public had grown tired of him on-screen.
So he decided that if he took up all the reasonable offers he could handle, and worked very hard, then when the music stopped he would have enough put by to see his family through in comfort, no matter what. And a family, in the full sense of the word, was what the Eastwoods were about to become, for Maggie was now pregnant. They considered therefore whether or not he should accept the offer to costar in Where Eagles Dare, a World War II adventure story, which was to begin shooting in Austria and in London in January 1968. But she was not due to deliver until the spring, and though the picture had a long schedule, they couldn’t see how it could possibly go five months. He should be back in plenty of time for the baby’s birth.
In Salzburg, where the company was headquartering for the first portion of the shoot, he got his first glimpse of grand-scale international celebrity, for his costar was Richard Burton, four years into his first marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, an event that had redefined the relationship of public figures and the media and, it might be said, redefined the nature of starry excess.
“I get off the plane in Salzburg in Levi’s,” Clint recalls, “and I’ve got this old canvas bag with all kinds of holes in it, and Elizabeth and Richard came in on their own private jet and they’ve got entourages—she’s got a couple of secretaries, and he’s got people, and they’ve got clothes” (not to mention jewels and all the other accoutrements of cheerfully flaunted wealth).
It was no less wondrous to Clint than it was to people gawking from a far greater distance. The couple welcomed him warmly; with friends and coworkers they were generous and convivial. No sooner had Clint checked into the hotel where they were all staying than the phone rang, and he was invited to join them in the bar for drinks—many for Burton, a couple of beers for Clint. It was the first of many such sessions for them, and the beginning of what would turn out to be a congenial working relationship, and, for Clint, a lesson in how not to be a star, for he was about to witness, close-up, an actor in the process of sacrificing self-interest to self-indulgence.
Burton was an intelligent and extremely well-read autodidact who was also a great raconteur, with a vast fund of anecdotes at his command. These he had gathered over the course of a restless life that had taken him from a Welsh coal-mining village to the higher realms of the English theater, thence to Hollywood and Broadway, and finally to the infamous production of Cleopatra, where he and Taylor met, fell in love and abandoned their spouses to wed.
Burton’s storytelling was like his drinking; there was something grim in its relentlessness. Both were walls he constructed to hide behind—from strangers, of course, but also from friends and, most significantly, himself. It was this veiled quality, the sense he imparted of hiding out behind technique and a glorious voice, that finally precluded greatness on stage and authentic stardom on-screen. Similarly, in private one could spend many an entertaining hour with Burton but never penetrate his essential reserve and what one imagined was some essential disappointment with himself—possibly for his profession (his loathing for which filled many pages of his diary), possibly for his compromised conduct within it, for the poor lad from the large family had an inordinate need for wealth, which had led him to many foolish professional decisions.
For Clint, he was another in the long line of loquacious men, as quick with their opinions and wit as he is shy with them, whose company he enjoys. “He was very, very different than I was,” he says of Burton, “but yet not in a lot of ways.” Which is a way of saying they had both known the bite of hard times and shared a reluctance to carelessly expose their deeper feelings. They also discovered, within the first few days of meeting, that they signed on for Where Eagles Dare (or “Where Doubles Dare,” as Clint apparently dubbed it at the time) for similar reasons. Someone asked Burton why he was doing the picture, and he replied, “Because Clint’s doing it.” Whereupon Clint said he had committed to it “because Richard’s doing it.”
If it now made good sense for Clint to associate with prestigious actors in high-budget projects, Burton, too, needed to make some new associations. In the years immediately before and after his marriage to Taylor in 1964 he had enjoyed his largest popular successes (The V.I.P.s, The Sandpiper) and his greatest critical success (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) working with her. But his Broadway Hamlet had, at best, a mixed reception and was tainted by the media circus that staked its tents nearby. His other films of this period (Becket, The Night of the Iguana, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold) had not proved that he could carry a picture commercially without resorting to his jointly held celebrity. His more recent pictures with Taylor (The Taming of the Shrew, a filmed version of their theatrical production of Doctor Faustus and The Comedians) had failed, and they could not have had high hopes for their recently completed Boom!—a deeply disastrous adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.
Some sources suggest that Burton initiated Where Eagles Dare by telling his friend Elliot Kastner, an American and a former agent who was partnered with Jerry Gershwin in a London-based company specializing in expensive international coproduction, that he wanted to do something that he could take his sons to see. In any event, it made sense for him to work with a rising action star in a picture that had no artistic pretense and appealed to the male audience; by so doing he might establish himself in what amounted to a new field for him. And commercially, this pairing of supposed cowboy and supposed intellectual made sense; it might conceivably bring two normally disparate audiences to the movie.
Kastner spared no expense to achieve this end. The rest of the cast was first-rate (it included Mary Ure in a costarring role and such worthies as Patrick Wymark, Michael Hordern and Donald Houston in supporting parts), and the director, Brian G. Hutton, a former actor and TV director who had just finished another Kastner-Gershwin thriller, Sol Madrid, had all the time and budget he needed to master difficult conditions.
Clint liked him, and they had only one awkward moment, early in the picture, after Clint encountered a friend of his, an actor he had previously worked with, in his hotel lobby. When he asked the man what he was doing in Salzburg, he replied that he had driven in with his girlfriend from Hamburg, where they lived, because she was up for a small part in the picture. Clint, however, knew the role had already been cast and asked Hutton what was going on.
“I’m just going through the motions,” he said, “because the girl who has been cast has an in with one of the producers, and we’re trying to make it look legit.”
This brought back all the anger he had felt at the carelessness and in-sensitivity he had experienced as a struggling actor. “I just got incensed,” he would later recall. “What do you mean, you’re ‘just going through the motions’?” he said. “How can you do this? You’re an ex-actor yourself. You know what it’s like.”
“Well, I’m getting this pressure to do it.”
“Well, just stop it, because I’m not going be part of it.”
Clint was establishing one of the patterns by which he would exercise his newfound power; the feelings of actors were—and are—to be treated with elaborate sensitivity. That power, it should be noted, was greatly enhanced by the film’s eventual commercial success. As Hirshan would later say, it “became an Eastwood picture, not a Burton picture,” despite his client’s second billing. By this he means that within the industry Clint was perceived as the star whose presence made it go with the broad, action-oriented audience.
For Burton, alas, the picture turned out to be an end, not a beginning—the end to his brief run as a major movie star. About all he gained from Where Eagles Dare was Kastner’s long-term loyalty; he employed the actor in something like a half-dozen subsequent movies, all of them box-office failures, like virtually every other movie Burton did in the course of the erratic downward spiral that consumed the rest of his life.
As for the film itself, Quentin Tarantino, one of its comparatively rare fans, accurately described it, in the course of a colloquy with Robert Zemeckis, as a “bunch-of-guys-on-a-mission” movie. “Isn’t that the one where Clint Eastwood kills more guys than anybody else in movie history?” Zemeckis asked when Tarantino raised the subject.
Yes, that’s the one, another work in what was then a popular subgenre, owing much of that popularity to the very man who wrote this screenplay—his first—Alistair MacLean. He specialized in what the English like to call “Boy’s Own” adventure stories (after the Edwardian children’s magazine), and it was the hugely successful adaptation of his novel The Guns of Navarone in 1961 that had begun this movie trend. Indeed, it is said that the reason MacLean decided to write an original screenplay was that all his other tales had either been made as movies or were under option for that purpose. Kastner persuaded him to this unfamiliar task by assuring him he could always novelize the screenplay later, which he did.
The soldiers’ ostensible mission is rescuing a captured American general, who was supposed to be privy to the plans for D Day, before the Nazis, who are holding him in a remote Schloss (reachable only by cable car), can make him talk. But that’s just a pretext—the general is really an actor hired to sow confusion in the enemy’s ranks. Alone of the group parachuted into the Austrian Alps (and obliged to wear German uniforms in order to penetrate the Nazi lair) Burton’s character, John Smith, knows that their operation is really designed to expose a ring of double agents operating within British intelligence. This information is long withheld from the audience. We know only that there is a traitor among the invading group, with suspicion being directed at Smith for some time. It is not until the climax that the chief villain is revealed to be the London spymaster who sent them forth.
It’s less a plot than an excuse for a lot of violent, essentially meaningless action, nicely characterized by Tarantino: “Eastwood would just stand at the top of the stairs and wait for the Nazis to congregate, and then mow them down.” Yet even though he came to dominate such memories of the film as people retain, Clint’s character, Lieutenant Morris Schaffer, can scarcely be said to dominate the film. He does not speak German, which means he has to stand mute in the enemy’s presence, and even when it is safe for the agents to talk among themselves, Burton, as the unit’s leader, has all the best lines.
One gets the impression that, as the production inched along, Clint was generous to his costar on-screen and protective of him off-screen. This was his kind of picture, not Burton’s, and he was doing what he could to ease his colleague’s way. It was, Clint quickly observed, booze, more than the rigors of production, from which Burton needed protection. His capacity for it was, to Clint, amazing. As was his ability, most of the time, to carry it without visible ill effects—“just one eye sagging a little, but that’s about it.”
Nevertheless, there were times when alcohol rendered Burton balky. There was, for example, a sequence in which he and Clint, mounted on a motorcycle with a sidecar, are supposed to speed down an icy, twisting road, pausing now and then to affix dynamite sticks to high-tension towers, the plan being to detonate the explosives later on, when they are making their escape. The sequence was scheduled for early afternoon, and Burton appeared weaving slightly and dubiously eyeing the antique motorcycle he was supposed to pilot.
“You can drive this thing, can’t you, Richard?” Brian Hutton inquired. Burton replied with an incomprehensible, but not exactly reassuring, mumble. At which point Clint stepped forward. He was a veteran cyclist—at the time he owned two such vehicles—and happily volunteered a role reversal: “I tell you what, Brian, I’ll drive it and Richard rides.”
Relief all around, Hutton now pressed on to outline the rest of the business. Clint would skid to a stop, and Burton would hop out, attach the dynamite sticks (actually balsa wood and, of course, carrying no charges), hop back in, and they would speed off to the next stop (and the next shot).
“I don’t handle explosives, Brian,” said Burton, now obviously quite out of th
ings. “What?”
“I don’t handle explosives.”
“But it’s balsa wood, Richard.”
The star, woozily intent on asserting his prerogatives, shook his head adamantly.
“And Brian’s looking at me like, ‘Damn this guy,’ ” Clint recalls.
So the director manqué offered another suggestion: “I say, ‘Richard, look, why don’t we do this? Just you put this one set of balsa-wood things down here and then there’s a hostel down the road. We’ll go down there and have a shot, you and I.’ ”
“Good idea,” Burton enthused. “Good idea.”
“So I go back to Brian and I say, ‘OK. You’ve got one shot on this, so you better get it.’ ” This, happily, he did.
Eventually they wrapped in Austria and moved on to studio work in London—much of it fussy rear- and front-screen-projection special effects. There, if anything, Burton spent more time drinking; he had a number of favorite pubs to which he introduced Clint, who could be counted on to get him back to the soundstage more or less on time, in more or less functioning condition, for their next call. The indulgences with which Burton was favored are sometimes visible on-screen. There was, for example, a sequence, shot in the studio, in which he and Clint are supposed to be pulling themselves up the castle walls on ropes, hand over hand. Clint is visibly straining as he toils upward, while the older and manifestly less-fit Burton seems to be making the climb effortlessly. But he was positioned on a crane and only had to mime his ascent, while Clint had to pull himself up under his own power.
Clint shrugs ironically at this memory. By this time he was increasingly preoccupied by Maggie’s rapidly impending delivery, increasingly impatient with delays in production, which by early May was a month over schedule. Film and nature were now in a race to the finish line, with Clint equally impotent to speed up the former or slow down the latter. While he seethed, his parents came down to Los Angeles to be with Maggie, and his father called Clint to tell him that the birth was no more than a few days off. Two more days, Clint said. Two more days and I’ll be out of here. “Just hold tight,” he said to his wife.
Clint Eastwood Page 29