Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  But manner aside, isn’t there something quite unexceptionable at the core of his argument? As modernists, as feminist sympathizers, aren’t we obliged to accord women equality in evil as in all things? As realists, aren’t we obliged to acknowledge the tension, verging at times on hatred, that exists between the sexes and is, indeed, the crux of much drama and fiction? In the particular case of The Beguiled, wouldn’t it be more useful (and more accurate) to read it not as a narrowly misogynistic work, but as a broadly misanthropic one?

  In fact, it balances its admittedly dark vision of femininity with an equally devastating portrayal of masculine nature. McBurney may have entered this female web through mischance, but he always imagines, in his male egotism, that he can escape full and fatal entrapment in it and, indeed, turn the misfortunes of war into good fortune. “You know,” says Clint, “he’s totally justifiable. What guy wouldn’t try to save his life in a situation like that?” And then, “With seven girls hauling you around on a stretcher say, ‘Hey, well, I’ll grab a little nookie while I’m here, and who cares?’ ”

  As a man who was himself used to taking his sexual pleasure when and where it presented itself (he had an affair with one of the women in this cast), Clint understood his character as entirely typical of his sex, succumbing “to what we all succumb to through life, which gets us all into trouble”—that is to blind, and in this case fatal, instinct. In that condition, “A man’s brain has a way of lowering itself down out of the cranium, down into”—he pauses, searching not entirely successfully for a genteelism—“the lower extremities.” Thus, as these women come to represent the male’s darkest fantasies about the opposite sex, he comes to represent the female’s darkest fantasies about the footloose and feckless male: at best, a casual user of her body and careless abuser of her trust; at worst, a cock of the walk to whom any woman is but the unearned entitlement of unearned status.

  For him, then, this is, finally, the story of a fucker fucked, possibly even a projection of retributive fears he may have known. And its conclusion represents for him an ironic, unpleasant, but in no sense tragic, comeuppance, more final than those usually meted out to the sexually restless, but not different in spirit from them. This role, permitting him as an actor to be both more voluble and more overtly sexual than he had ever been before, also encouraged him to subvert not only his own image but the standard leading-man image common to most movies, blending it, if you will, with second-lead caddishness.

  Still, without denying that The Beguiled presents a particularly vivid portrayal of a particularly deadly engagement in the war between the sexes, Clint offers another reading of it that is, so far as one can tell, unique to him. He suggests that the film is about the mysterious workings of blind faith. Rather surprisingly, he analogizes it to Unforgiven. In the later movie it is wildly exaggerated rumors of unspeakable violence visited on a woman that drive and justify Will Munny’s mission of vengeance, a series of misapprehensions and mischances, their effects heightened by the violent, near-anarchic context in which they occur, that brings everyone to grief. Something similar, he argues, is going on here.

  In normal times, Clint suggests, McBurney might not be a bad guy. He certainly would not be a guy whose goodness or badness, strengths and weaknesses, would ever seriously be tested by circumstances. Imagine him in peacetime as, say, an itinerant peddler taking refuge from a storm at Miss Farnsworth’s place. He might or might not in such an instance find himself in bed with one of the ladies. But early the next morning he would move on, having created nothing more consequential than some sort of traveling-salesman joke. Or write the scenario from the women’s point of view: In peacetime Miss Farnsworth and her charges would offer the beset traveler gracious, flirtatious “Southern hospitality,” and if, perchance, something more than that innocent interchange occurred, it would be resolutely denied and, again, he would be waved off without regret.

  But in this case such easy escapes are impossible. Because he is caught behind enemy lines his movements are restricted, and because the military situation is fluid, it is quite rational for the women to want to keep a man around the place and for him to stay put until he is rescued by his fellow Yankees. Having been thrown together by the combined workings of chance and megahistorical forces—by fate, in other words—they are then held together by them, in the process “bringing out the worst of himself and the worst of them, too.”

  To read this film in these broader terms is to give a fuller and more accurate account of it than the gender specialists, blinkered by narrow ideological concepts, are able to provide. It is also to place it more usefully in the larger context of Clint’s career. Fate’s workings are a topic that has always greatly interested him. So, obviously, do the tormented conflicts of men and women—it would seem more so at this time in his life than at any other—for his next film would take up and vary many of the themes explored in The Beguiled.

  By now Malpaso was a fully functioning, if minuscule, independent production company. Sonia Chernus had come aboard as Clint’s story editor, charged with finding material he could develop on his own, and on February 1, 1970, Robert Daley, his old pal from Arch Drive, came to work for the company as its staff producer. He had by this time gained much valuable experience—at Ziv in its declining days, as head of production at Desilu, the TV-production concern founded by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, then as coproducer of the Doris Day Show.

  Daley’s first task, which he began working on as The Beguiled finished shooting, was to prepare Play Misty for Me, scheduled to shoot in the late summer and early fall in Carmel. This project had a long history. The original story had been written some years earlier by Jo Heims, a tiny one-time legal secretary whom Clint had known since his apprentice days. They had never had a romantic relationship, but they had shared aspirations; she was as eager to succeed as a screenwriter as he was to succeed as an actor. Clint responded strongly to her sixty-page treatment of a story about a disc jockey who enters into a casual affair with one of his fans, only to discover that she is far from casual about it, turning into a violent stalker when he tries to end their relationship.

  He saw in it a more melodramatic version of the woman in his days at Fort Ord who would not let go when he tried to end their affair. In the years since he had heard many similar stories, from both sexes, and he came to believe that obsessions of this kind were more common than most people acknowledged. So he took an option on Heims’s story for a couple thousand dollars, and flogged it unsuccessfully around town. “I was still the kid from Europe. I didn’t have quite enough juice to pull it off.” While he was working on Where Eagles Dare, Heims contacted him, reporting an offer from Universal, and he, looking at his heavily booked immediate future, gave her permission to make the deal.

  But the script lingered in his mind, and at a meeting with Jennings Lang he brought up Misty: “There’s this little property you’ve got, this story I’d like to do. It’s an odd little story about a disc jockey.” Clint was shown an unsatisfactory script that the studio had developed. He decided to go back to the original, working a little bit with Heims on a new draft, then bringing in the ever-useful Dean Riesner, who did a thorough polish and eventually shared screen credit with Heims. Clint says that his own largest contribution to the writing involved the character he wanted to play. He knew a disc jockey not unlike the Dave Garland of this film—“a big fish in a small pond,” a little too casually enjoying the perquisites of local celebrity—and wanted Dave to have something of this man’s sleepy egotism.

  When the script was more or less to his liking, he went back to Lang and Lew Wasserman, the head of the studio, who remained dubious. “Why would you want to play a disc jockey, and why would anybody want to see Clint Eastwood play a disc jockey?” he remembers them asking. And also: “Why would you want to play in a picture where the woman has the best role?” His reply was “I don’t know, why does anybody want to see anything? But it’s a good suspense piece.”

  By this time
Clint was fairly certain he wanted to make his directorial debut with this film. It was an ideal piece to break in with, small in scale, technically quite manageable, yet with a suspenseful narrative that would sustain an audience’s interest even if the director nodded here and there. Moreover, it occurred to Clint that since the script had always been set in a small city, that city might as well be Monterey and the rest of the extremely photogenic, extremely familiar peninsula he called home. He told the Universal executives that he would shoot every scene on location, sparing them the cost of set construction. His final argument was the simplest, and probably the most telling. He told his studio bosses, “I’m gonna do it for zip.”

  At the time, Daley says, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union to which most movie craftspeople belong, had a lower pay scale for members working on productions budgeted at less than a million dollars, and Clint knew he could bring the picture in for less than that—if he worked for Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild minimums. Clint remembers Lenny Hirshan quietly but urgently signaling him to shut up as he started to make this offer to the shrewd and frugal Wasserman.

  “I know exactly what they were saying behind my back,” Clint later told an interviewer. “We’ll let the kid fool around with it. He’ll do that and then he’ll probably do a couple of westerns for us, or some other adventure-type film that will seem more commercial at the outset.” But he didn’t care; he was about to make the first movie that he had discovered and nurtured from its beginnings.

  Clint began rounding up a crew he was comfortable with, signing Surtees as director of photography and Pingitore as editor. When he talked to the latter he asked the editor if he had any tips for him. “Do you need the money?” asked Pingitore. No, said Clint. “Then go have fun, enjoy yourself. If I see something wrong [in the dailies] I’ll let you know.” Don Siegel, who along with Clint’s old Rawhide colleague Christian Nyby, endorsed his Directors Guild of America membership application, advised him simply to be sure he got plenty of sleep, the primary requisite for directing being, in his view, unflagging energy. Clint asked Siegel to take a small part in the picture as a bartender. He wanted him around, Clint said, in case he needed advice, but his presence on the set was primarily talismanic.

  Casting appears not to have been difficult. Jessica Walter, who played the psychotic Evelyn so memorably, remembers hearing that the studio was urging him to cast a star, somebody on the level of Lee Remick, in the part, but Clint ran The Group, the 1966 adaptation of the Mary McCarthy novel, which featured eight actresses who were then relatively unknown, and noticed Walter as Libby “with the big red scar for a mouth.” She wasn’t quite certifiable, “but she was on the edge, this woman,” as Walter describes her, and seeing something of the quality he was looking for Clint asked Walter to come in for an interview.

  She remembers liking the script, spotting a problem with it, but resolving not to say anything about it at their meeting. She had not, at that time, seen a Clint Eastwood movie, and she was, she says, “shaking in her boots” when she met “this big hot star” in his bungalow office at Universal. But “he was so kind and laid-back,” and when it became clear to her that he was not going to ask her to read (he never does, since he assumes that if he likes someone’s work there is no further need to prove professionalism), she permitted herself to be “bowled over” by him, the first in that long, unbroken line of performers who have succumbed to this director’s punctilious regard for their needs and feelings.

  He poured her some carrot juice, which she forced herself to drink, took her for a little stroll around the lot and solicited her opinion about the script. Thus encouraged, she offered her one criticism, of a prologue that showed her character in an insane asylum. She thought it robbed the movie of surprise. The sequence was never shot. They also discussed a point that worried him: The script never showed where Evelyn lived, and it never gave her a working life. He wondered if both those matters should be addressed briefly. Walter thought not; lack of such information would give her character more mystery and menace. Again, ultimately, he agreed with her.

  He cast Donna Mills in the other leading female role, that of Tobie, the girlfriend from whom his Dave Garland is estranged when he meets Evelyn—fear of commitment, naturally. This was on the recommendation of his pal Burt Reynolds, who knew her and told Clint to watch her on the soap opera on which she was then working.

  Then, taking Siegel’s advice about getting plenty of rest, he decided to take a vacation before starting work, and with Maggie and little Kyle repaired to a rented house on Lake Tahoe, where his contentment was brutally interrupted. Earlier in the year Clinton Eastwood Sr. had suffered a mild dizzy spell while he was hiking with Clint’s mother during a vacation in Hawaii. He checked in with his doctor on their return but was assured that tests showed nothing seriously wrong. There had been no alarm in the family. But on July 22, 1970, Ruth Eastwood called Clint to tell him that his father had died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only sixty-three years old.

  His sometime friend Fritz Manes, who with his wife was visiting the Eastwoods at the time, thinks this was a major turning point for Clint. “He’s had a lot of bad disappointments—we all have—but the major impact in Clint Eastwood’s life was losing his dad.” He also suggests that Clint’s emphasis on fitness now intensified.

  Clint disagrees. Yes, of course, his father’s death “hit me like a load of bricks,” and, yes, he may have felt a degree of anger about it, thinking his father had been careless about diet and exercise, perhaps lulled into a false sense of security because his own father had lived into his nineties. And, yes, maybe Clint did devote himself a little more rigorously to his own fitness regimens thereafter (though it is hard to think there was much more that he could do). But he says that his prevailing emotion at the time was regret over lost opportunities. He wished now that he had found more time for his dad in his later years, had exchanged more thoughts and feelings with him. He also rejects Manes’s contention that he went into a particularly long period of seclusion after his dad’s passing. Work, as the commonplace holds, being one of grief’s best anodynes, Clint returned to preparations for Misty after no more than a couple of weeks of mourning.

  On the eve of the first day’s shooting, indeed, he remembers retiring in a confident mood. The neophyte director could think of nothing he had left undone. A moment later he was bolt upright, groping for the light switch. He was in the first scene, and focusing on his new job, he had entirely forgotten to memorize his lines.

  The film was shot in sequence, so the first day’s work was in the barroom where Dave Garland and Evelyn Draper pick each other up while Siegel, in his bartender role, watches benignly. Clint immediately demonstrated what would become one of his trademarks as a director, his dislike of lengthy rehearsals. This, as it happened, suited Walter; she doesn’t like them either. Siegel, though, found himself unexpectedly uncomfortable in front of the camera. But he got through it all right and afterward he and Clint went out for some beers, with Clint later recounting their conversation this way:

  “He said, ‘You seem to have it under control.’ I said, ‘Well, I feel like everything’s going all right.’ He said, ‘So, I’m going to head on out.’ And I said, ‘Okay. Head on out. I loved having you here.’ ”

  Clint had learned his lessons from Siegel very well. “I didn’t know what he was like inside,” Walter told a reporter as the picture went into release the following year, “but he had this wonderful calm strength that was very reassuring.” His main concern, as it always would be, was establishing an atmosphere in which, without pressure, he and the other actors could find and develop their characters. On his way to work, Walter remembers, Clint would stop by her house in the morning and quietly leave a bottle of dairy-fresh milk on her front porch. More important, he made her feel “like you’re the only person who could possibly do the role, and whatever you do, it’s gonna be gold.”

  In her case, it was
. In outward manner she thought Evelyn should be “apple pie,” neat and well groomed and the kind of woman who, when she appears at Dave’s door wearing a fur coat and reveals that she has nothing on underneath, still asks if she can come in for a Coke. Beneath the cool surface was both need and rage. The need, as Walter sees it, was “real simple—she had to have this man or die. I don’t think that’s so hard to understand.” Clint’s performance, conversely, went well beyond laidback. His Dave Garland is, until threatened, like some well-favored high-school jock basking in self-regard, divinely comfortable in his own handsome skin, happy with his local celebrity and its entitlements, which include having the prettiest girl in his class on his arm and the right to hit on her peers as well.

  There is unquestionably a kinship between Dave and John McBurney. They are both in their way rather smug male animals. The difference between them is that Dave thinks he has already found an Eden, while McBurney is still looking. This makes for a contrasting development of the two figures. McBurney is wary when we meet him, then disarmed by circumstances he is sure he can master, and never really knows fear—except, perhaps, at the last moment before death. Dave Garland, in contrast, is utterly without wariness at the outset and comes to know fear intimately and extensively.

  Clint was unquestionably drawing on something of himself for this role, too. Like Dave, like any man who has known many women, the quality, and especially the staying power, of his feelings for them remain open to question. Something Susan Clark, his Coogan’s Bluff costar, said about Clint rings true, at least at this time in his life: “Part of his sex appeal is the constant mystery,” she said. “How deeply does he feel? How deeply is he involved in life?”