Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  But that was impossible. Kyle Eastwood was born in St. John’s Hospital, in Santa Monica, on Sunday, May 19, 1968. In London, Burton’s response was predictable: “Let’s go out and celebrate.” So was Clint’s. “Wait a second,” he said. “I don’t want to go out drinking in pubs. I want to get the hell out of here.” A day or two later, he did.

  Despite the fact that Clint’s character in Where Eagles Dare was the most abstract figure he ever played—a pure killing machine, vouchsafed not a single humanizing moment, romantic or comic—it did not stir the kind of agitated comment his work for Leone had or his work as Dirty Harry soon would. This is the more remarkable when one recalls that it went into release in 1969, when antiwar sentiments were at their height in the United States and such headlong displays of ‘“traditional” masculinity were at a deep discount in the better cultural circles.

  But this was the kind of film that does not bring out the best in critics and no one had anything very interesting to say about it. Time dubbed it “Mission Ridiculous,” and found it “melancholy” to see Burton in it. Life called it “inelegant” while Vincent Canby in The New York Times thought it had so many predictable situations that it threatened to become “as numbing as an overdose of novocaine,” but somehow didn’t. In general, the range of response to the movie was very narrow, from amiable dismissal to amiable indulgence—formulaic responses to formulaic filmmaking. The ironic appeal of Where Eagles Dare for a subversive, postmodernist like Quentin Tarantino is much more interesting to consider. In his films, typically, people get killed because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time—that is to say, they die quite whimsically, proving, at best, that we live in a chance universe. Equally typically, his films—like Leone’s, like any that actually make us feel the astonishment of sudden, violent death—are criticized because they offer no obvious moral justification for the deaths they deal out; lack of same, in fact, being their basic moral point. Thus in Tarantino’s remarks about this movie one may read a sort of seriocomic envy for the ease and simplicity with which moral questions about mass mayhem, at least as absurd as any presented in Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), are elided.

  The nameless creatures who die so unceremoniously, without evoking more than a bemused response from the audience, are brothers under the skin to Tarantino’s wrong place—wrong time victims. The thought that, in reality, these German soldiers were probably draftees, that some of them must surely have doubted the cause that obliged their service, that most of them must just have been dumb kids like so many of our own soldiers, does not occur to us, especially since they are slaughtered en masse, impersonally, usually at some distance from the camera. Hey, they’re Nazis—and dumb Nazis at that. Let’s rub out a bunch more.

  At the time, the only people to discuss this point were a pair of college journalists. Deliciously innocent yet determined counterculturists, they unaccountably turned up poolside at the Las Vegas junket MGM staged to promote the picture, where their “interview” with Hutton was recorded by a wicked journalist named Bernard Drew. “Why did you pick a glamorous war?” one of them inquired. “Why didn’t you do something on Vietnam? Would you have treated the Vietcong as you did the Nazis—all morons?” His female partner chimed in: “Even in the most frivolous of entertainment there has to be one moment of reality. Did all of the Nazis have to be such bad shots?” They weren’t entirely serious; they were goading the director, trying to get him to admit to selling out (he had earlier made some small, earnest, unprofitable pictures), while proposing that evil Hollywood might better have parceled out this film’s large budget to their contemporaries, struggling to make “personal statements.” Eventually they got the explosion they wanted (“For fifteen lousy goddamned stinking years I paid my dues …”), an outburst that plagued Hutton for years in Hollywood, where such complaints are supposed to be confined to the “community.”

  Finally it all comes back to generic conventions, doesn’t it? We’re used to movie heroes doing slaughter within the well-established morality of standard-issue war movies, westerns and crime dramas. It’s only when a movie strays outside those lines, asks its audience to think actively about the assumptions that routine action dramas are built on, that its “violence” (or its gender implications) is deplored.

  At this time—though it is doubtful that anyone around Clint articulated it in so many words—the effort was clearly to edge Clint away from that morally interesting fringe, position his developing screen character at the center of the movie mainstream, where it could function less controversially, and with this expensive and successful film—so obviously not a B picture—that goal was achieved. Whether a critic mildly liked or mildly disliked the film itself, none of them attacked his work or worried in grand cosmic terms over what his popularity might suggest about the state of the national psyche.

  Where Eagles Dare would become MGM’s biggest hit of 1969 (it grossed close to $7 million in North America alone) as well as Clint’s biggest box-office success to date. This pleased him, of course. But it also displeased him. He could see that films of this kind lacked the singularity and impact of the Leone films, and he hated their long, tedious schedules. He did not want to become just another well-paid Hollywood gun for hire, lacking autonomy and range of choice.

  Circumstances would soon crystallize these still-somewhat-inchoate feelings. If he now knew how not to be a movie star, the film he now began would teach him more than he ever wanted to know about how not to make a movie. Insignificant in and of itself—a film with no historical resonance—it would nevertheless have an impact on Clint Eastwood’s personal history almost as significant as that of A Fistful of Dollars or Dirty Harry.

  It was to be a musical—a lavish, no-expense-spared musical, a form that Hollywood, looking back on the midsixties grosses of My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, had decided represented the high, if risky, road to vast profits. Camelot, Star! and Doctor Dolittle had thrown doubt on this supposition, but at this moment the game was still on, and Paramount was determined to get in on it.

  The creators of My Fair Lady and Camelot, Alan J. Lerner and Fritz Loewe, had one more property in their trunk, the least successful of their Broadway collaborations, Paint Your Wagon, a saga of the California Gold Rush. Lerner, who signed to produce the project, assured Paramount that playwright Paddy Chayefsky could rewrite and update it so that it appealed to the sensibility of the sixties, especially since he would be working under the guidance of director Joshua Logan, who had shared a Pulitzer Prize for his work in adapting South Pacific to the stage.

  How could anything possibly go wrong? As it happened, almost everything did. It began the first day Clint reported for work on the Paramount lot. Logan had decreed a week or two of rehearsals on a Hollywood soundstage before the company left for location on East Eagle Creek, in Oregon’s Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Clint drove up to the gate in his customary underwhelming vehicle, in this case a tan pickup truck, gave his name to the guard and was told that there was no pass for him. “Well, you know, I’m supposed to be here,” Clint replied mildly. “They’re kind of expecting me down there.”

  The guard said he’d have to make a U-turn, find a phone somewhere and call a number he’d be glad to give him. Clint was now afume: “I’ll tell you what, buddy. I’m gonna go over to Universal—here’s my number there. If anybody calls here asking for Clint, just tell them I’m over there, because I can get on that lot.”

  One imagines a screech of tires, the smell of burning rubber. When he arrived at his Universal office he told his secretary to inform callers that he was out, then withdrew into his office to read some scripts. The phones began jangling, and after a time his assistant appeared: “God, they’re going crazy down there.”

  Clint accepted the next call, playing dumb. “You know, fellas, I couldn’t get on, and I thought maybe I’d been replaced.”

  When he returned to Paramount he found Logan, the rest of the
principal cast and key department heads, like William Fraker, the cinematographer, gathered in a corner of a cavernous soundstage, with the actors, scripts in hand, reading their lines as they moved about at Logan’s command. He was blocking action as if this were a theatrical production. It was essentially busywork, since the crucial element in movie staging, the camera, was missing.

  Elsewhere, other lunacies were occurring. Tom Shaw, a veteran and expert assistant director, who specialized in complex, large-scale productions, had signed on as the film’s associate producer, and one day found himself at the center of a perplexed and angry group of horsemen and stuntpeople. They had been called in for auditions, because, even though they would not have speaking parts, they had to look like the citizens of a mining camp. But they found themselves grouped with chorus boys and, like them, being asked to take their pants off so that the casting people could study their legs. This was not something these rough-and-ready types were accustomed to. Worse, Shaw got the distinct impression that someone in the production hierarchy was perhaps thinking of saving a few dollars by having the dancers double as riders and as drivers of the film’s many horsedrawn vehicles. It was ridiculous—musical-comedy performers trying to master the arcane (and dangerous) art of driving a six-up or an eight-up, every bit as ridiculous as asking one of the riders to attempt a jeté.

  Shaw quickly straightened out this confusion of realms, but not without a sense of foreboding, which elsewhere, for different reasons, Clint was also entertaining. For a man who did not like to overthink a performance, Logan’s rehearsals were intolerable, and Clint found himself wondering if he had made a terrible mistake when he signed for this picture.

  He had been drawn to the project for two reasons: because it offered him a chance to sing and because he liked the first script he was shown. Musically, he would not encounter serious problems. Lerner had at first thought Clint might have to talk his songs, as Rex Harrison had in My Fair Lady, but then he listened to some of his old records and had a session at the piano with him, where Clint handled the Paint Your Wagon melodies well enough. He knew, of course, that he didn’t have a big musical-comedy tone, but thought, I’ll try to sing what the character is, not try to come out with a booming voice, which he feels works better anyway on-screen. It had always worked for Fred Astaire, hadn’t it?

  The screenplay, on the other hand, turned into a growing issue. Chayefsky, who was struggling with a writer’s block at the time, had signed on largely for the money (his fee was $150,000 plus a percentage of net profits that never emerged) and for the opportunity to practice his craft on something that did not involve him emotionally. This strategy worked for the writer; when he finished the job he found that his block had dissolved. Moreover, he produced something that attracted not only Clint, but Lee Marvin, then regarded as an even more bankable star.

  Chayefsky’s work bore no resemblance to the book Lerner had written for the 1951 Broadway production, which recounted the adventures of a widower and his daughter searching for new lives, new wealth (and in her case a new love) in a California mining camp during the Gold Rush era. The playwright retained the setting of the original show, and found a place for most of its songs (plus some new ones that Lerner wrote with André Previn) but threw out everything else. His was a story about the creation of a frontier menage à trois involving an old miner, Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin); his friend, known only as Pardner (Clint); and a young woman named Elizabeth (in which role, after much dithering, Jean Seberg was cast). No-Name City, the site where this nonaction takes place, eventually, literally, collapses as a result of rampant greed (Ben and some friends secretly tunnel under the town searching for gold, weakening its foundations).

  “Not an up story at all, kind of a moody piece, very dark,” is the way Clint characterized it. Indeed, in the first draft he read, Marvin’s character actually died at the end. “I’d never seen a musical with this kind of a story line before,” he says, and he remembers thinking, This is very bold—maybe these guys are on to something.

  Possibly so, although even in Clint’s fond description this early draft sounds, at best, like a Tin Pan Alley version of the Weill-Brecht Mahagonny. At worst, it seems to be about what one might expect from some older Broadway types trying desperately to refurbish a decrepit property and use it to bridge the then-notorious generation gap. What he seems to have seen here was something like the Fistful of Dollars scenario. If the western had then seemed tired, the movie musical, despite its recent commercial success, now seemed positively moribund, the glory days of the first postwar decade, when Hollywood was making originals like Singin’ in the Rain, long gone. It was therefore reasonable for him to think, based on what he had read initially, that this project might revitalize this form as the Leone pictures had the western.

  This was perhaps naive of him, but not totally so. The deal memo he signed before going off to make Where Eagles Dare prudently provided an escape clause; if he did not approve of Paint Your Wagon’s final shooting script he could leave the project. As his work in Europe dragged along, Clint spared an occasional thought for this revision, and finally he called Hirshan to inquire after it. In a matter of days it was in his hands—the work of Lerner, who would eventually receive writing credit on the finished film, with Chayefsky, whose services had now been dispensed with, getting an adaptation credit.

  “I get this thing, and I start reading it, and it’s now totally different. It has no relation to the original, except the names of the characters. They had the threesome deal, but it wasn’t a dark story at all. It was all fluffy. Fluffy, and running around talking, and they’re having Lee do Cat Ballou II.” This accords with Chayefsky’s recollection that no more than six pages of his work remained in Lerner’s version. So Clint called Hirshan immediately and said, “This has really gone haywire. Just get me out of this. Get me totally, completely out this.”

  That was not easy to do. People had committed to Paint Your Wagon because Clint had. “The next thing you know, here come Lerner and Logan,” flying into London to argue that musicals have to be upbeat, cheery. That’s what audiences expected. “Yeah, but it was so interesting,” said Clint, making a hopeless plea for a return to the first draft.

  They, of course, misunderstood him. They thought he was signaling disappointment at the size of his role in the new script. They assured him that they were willing to do still more rewriting in order to “make your character more important,” which, apparently, they did in the next draft.

  But that was not at all the message Clint was trying to send: “I’m trying to explain to everybody that I don’t need a big part. Bigness isn’t bestness; sometimes lessness is bestness.”

  The next revision was, he thought, “somewhat better.” But it was “still 180 degrees from where we started.” His impulse to pass was still large. But his agency and the studio were pressuring him to sign the contract. A green light had been flashed; the vehicle was now moving; people were counting on him. Implicit in this argument was another one: You don’t want to become known around town as difficult, and you especially don’t want to discommode a major studio. And because there was a romance in his part, it remained a good career move, something that might ingratiate him with an audience that had not yet seen him. So he gave in: “I’m taking it on as sort of a Rawhide deal: How can I make this interesting, if at all?”

  It is possible that Clint’s attempts to rescue what he had originally valued in the Chayefsky script ultimately did both himself and the production a disservice. What the huge company went off to shoot in the summer of 1968 at an eventual cost of some $20 million (more than anyone had ever spent on a musical) was neither the revisionist film he wanted to make nor the lighthearted entertainment everyone else wanted to do. The movie they eventually made veered constantly, hopelessly, from one tack to the other; what humor and romance it offered was dour, and its other aspirations were so vaguely stated as to be indefinable.

  In situations of this kind, the hope is always for a mira
cle, and these are always centered on the director. But Logan was no miracle worker. He was, from the first day to the last, overwhelmed by the task at hand: “He was a terrific guy,” Clint says, “I really liked him, but he just knew nothing about film—nothing.”

  Certainly he knew nothing about making this kind of film. He was, of course, a highly regarded theatrical director, whose shows had been among the signature hits of postwar Broadway, but his relatively few movies had been made in carefully controlled situations and had involved very little complicated action. He was totally out of his element in this wilderness, making what amounted to a quasi-western. One of Shaw’s enduring memories of Logan on location is of a man in a hat, topcoat and delicate shoes, all more suitable for a stroll down the Great White Way, picking his way through the mud and horse droppings of the set, trying to line up a shot he could only vaguely imagine.

  This situation was not completely of the director’s making. In his autobiography he says he had argued strongly against location work, except for exteriors, preferring the more comfortable alternative of back lot and soundstage shooting. But he says production designer John Truscott had argued strenuously for “realism,” and had won everyone else over—possibly because it would give the production a unique visual quality, possibly because extensive Austrian location work had contributed much to the success of The Sound of Music. So, while Logan was preoccupied with rewrites, Shaw and Truscott crisscrossed the western states in a Paramount jet, looking for a location, finally settling—somewhat dubiously—on this isolated area in Oregon. The nearest accommodations were in Baker, some sixty miles away, and the road between it and the production site was narrow and twisting, which meant that supplying the shoot was a logistical nightmare; above the line people were ferried in and out by helicopter every day.