Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Clint had, he says, understood the intricately woven nature of Sondra’s relationship with Gordon at the outset and had not imagined that it would be quickly or easily untangled. He expected, however, that eventually that would happen. As the years wore on, though, Sondra and Gordon continued as before, and Clint’s resentment of their arrangement grew. He says he kept waiting for something to happen—a “conversation,” as he puts it, “that would go like this: ‘Clint, I’m going to divorce Gordon Anderson and make myself available if you would like this to become a permanent kind of relationship.’ ”

  This issue became more pressing for him in 1984, when his own divorce from Maggie was completed. (In April of the following year she married—not for long and not very happily, as it would turn out—Henry Wynberg, the onetime used-car salesman who had gained momentary fame as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s boyfriends.) “Well, I’m divorced,” he remembers saying to Sondra at the time. “Why don’t you show your hand?” Her reply, he says, was “I have to stay married to him for tax purposes.”

  This was, to him, palpable nonsense. Who would not rather file joint returns with Clint Eastwood instead of with a not-very-successful sculptor, at the moment, according to Fritz Manes, preoccupied with manufacturing miniature guillotines? But, of course, Sondra’s significant joint returns were of quite a different—emotional—kind.

  Clint says that even when she was with him, Sondra continued to spend hours on the phone with Gordon, talking him through this or that crisis. One time, Clint recalls, a lover deserted him, and Gordon recruited her to accompany him as he drove around town, late at night, seeking this absent friend. “I, to tell you the truth, was extremely concerned about it,” says Clint, “because she was out there in the middle of the night in an unpredictable situation.” Gordon, she kept telling him, “was like a child to her, and that may be true.” But he was also a man approaching forty, and there does come a time.…

  It is reasonable to ask why Clint Eastwood, a man completely capable of asserting his needs in every other area of life, was so reluctant to press them in this matter. It is also fair to say that he has no coherent answer to that question, except to say that he enjoyed the freedom that lack of a full commitment from Sondra granted him. We may also note in his nature a profound reluctance to engage in emotional confrontations.

  This he did, probably without quite acknowledging it to himself or to Sondra. She might as easily have been cast in Pale Rider (or in Tightrope) as she was in his other films, but she was not. She might have been included on some of his longer and more glamorous junkets, which she was not. In the summer of 1985 Newsweek published a cover-length story entitled “Clint: An American Icon,” another acknowledgment of his new cultural status as well as Pale Rider’s hit status, and it quoted him thus about Sondra: “We’re very close friends. She’s very smart and good for me. She’s somebody I feel has my best interests at heart.”

  It was spoken like a gentleman, but also rather dispassionately. And the story went on: “It’s clearly a serious relationship, but his friends say it’s an open one.… ‘She gives him his space,’ one says.”

  Perhaps more than she knew. For it was around this time that he entered into a relationship with Jacelyn Reeves, a former flight attendant, who was then living in the Carmel area. A warm and seemingly uncomplicated woman, with no desire to share his public life, she wanted children, and eventually bore him two—a boy and a girl. Clint supports them unstintingly, is attached to them emotionally while maintaining with their mother the same sort of agreeable connection that he did with Roxanne Tunis. He is, obviously, a man entirely unshirking about the consequences of all his acts.

  All of this was, of course, handled discreetly—it was a long time before the tabloid press reported anything about this liaison—but, on the other hand, it was never a deep secret either: Many of Clint and Jacelyn’s friends in Carmel knew of their relationship. If there is such a thing as a masterpiece of compartmentalization, this is surely one. More important, though, it signals, in a very obvious way, Clint’s impatience with Locke and her failure to make a definitive choice between him and Gordon.

  But still, he was as yet unwilling to break with her. Instead, he offered her extremely generous support in an attempt at professional renewal. Her acting career had stalled. In the time she spent with Clint her filmography reveals only two feature-film roles for other producers and an impersonation of Rosemary Clooney in a television biopic about the singer. She was now thirty-eight and beginning to worry—justifiably—about her future. Actresses of that age, far more popular than she was, have had for the last two decades trouble continuing to get work in the movies. It is one of the most discussed issues in modern Hollywood.

  She thought directing might be an alternative for her, and Clint agreed. “You don’t have to worry about the twenty-eight-year-old that’s running up behind you,” he said. He also felt she had good qualifications for the job. She had a strong historical background in movies and good critical sense about them. She had always taken a keen interest in the filmmaking process when they worked together. And as an actress she was naturally sympathetic to the needs of other performers.

  So she began looking around for scripts and found a curious little fantasy called Ratboy by a writer named Rob Thompson, whose credits included Hearts of the West, an engaging portrait of Gower Gulch Hollywood in its early days. This newer script had been making the rounds for some time—Warner Bros. had once had it under option—and Clint thought it “kind of interesting,” if a little “far out.” But Sondra had a taste for fables, and this one, about a half-human, half-animal creature, discovered and exploited by a media-savvy woman who eventually learns something worthwhile about herself and the world from this innocent, seemed to suit her sensibilities.

  He would make it, he said, as a Malpaso production, securing studio approval of an $8 million budget, and providing his entire A-Team, all people she had worked with before, to make her feel secure: Fritz Manes would be the line producer; Ed Carfagno would design it; Bruce Surtees would shoot it; Joel Cox would edit; Lennie Niehaus would score. David Valdes, who had been working his way up with Clint and was soon to be his executive producer, would be first AD. Buddy Van Horn would be the stunt gaffer. Rick Baker, legendary creator of features for imaginary creatures, was engaged to design the title character’s makeup. It was further agreed that Clint would stay away, so Locke would not feel he was looking anxiously over her shoulder. It is safe to say that no first-time director ever started a film more safely cradled by strong, experienced, sympathetic arms.

  No one, however, reckoned with Gordon Anderson. The onetime director of amateur theatricals began consulting with his wife on script rewrites. Mostly this was done without Clint’s knowledge, although at one point Sondra came to him and asked if she might cast Gordon in the film. “Yeah,” he remembers saying vaguely, “if there’s some small part.” But when, at last, he was permitted to see the revised script, it had become, he says, “a tribute to Gordon Anderson. All of a sudden he was like the major lead—besides the Ratboy. And I’m going, ‘Wait a second here.’ And besides that, forgetting all of that, the material sucked. It was just awful … very, very bizarre.” Manes offers one example: Gordon’s character sprawled shirtless on a bed, ladling mayonnaise into his navel, dipping carrot sticks into it and happily proclaiming that his new diet seemed to be working.

  Clint felt betrayed. “You showed me a script,” he told Sondra. “You said you liked it. I talked the studio into going on the line with it.” And now, arbitrarily, without consultation, the agreement he had undertaken and guaranteed was being undermined. “Look,” he said firmly, “I am not making this script.”

  She retreated. This draft, she insisted, was still a work in progress. It could be returned to something like its original form. All right, he said, “just don’t try to back-door this whole deal.” Her story is, of course, different: “I was acting in a take-charge capacity instead of being a little obedien
t girl. I didn’t know what impact it would have.”

  But she might have guessed. Anyone who had ever worked with him might have. The issue here was not obedience or disobedience, but trust—and professionalism, minimally defined as self-discipline and honorable dealings with one’s backers. She had not met those standards, and that is an issue he is always willing to confront.

  In the end she shot a movie that, by all accounts, reasonably matched Thompson’s original blueprint, though, according to Clint, the writer remained no more than a puzzled and distant onlooker. Gordon Anderson’s sole contribution to it was the voice of the Ratboy, who was played on camera by a woman, Sharon Baird. Manes claims there were troubles on the set about which Clint knew nothing, displays of temper from the director, and days when she froze in panic.

  Clint was true to his word, staying away from the shoot and largely absenting himself from the lengthy postproduction period, though it seems there were some disagreements then, too. Locke, however, turned an untroubled face to the world. In interviews, she very much wanted to be understood as an independent woman, admittedly advantaged by her relationship with Clint, but determined to succeed or fail on her own merits. With the press she played down Clint’s involvement, pointing out that her relationship with Warner Bros. (which had produced The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) antedated her relationship with him (neglecting to observe that its ownership had since changed), saying that though the contacts she had made through Clint had got her in the door, she had thereafter proceeded independently. She admitted she had heretofore been perceived as his “appendage”; now people would see what she could do on her own.

  Not many of them, though. The studio clearly saw no commercial possibilities in Ratboy. It opened in one small New York theater in October 1986, and on a single multiplex screen in Los Angeles the following spring. In the interim it was shown at the Deauville Film Festival and played Paris, where it fared rather well with the critics. In the United States, however, it was largely ignored. For the newspaper of record, Janet Maslin called the film not “really funny, or fanciful or even very far out of the ordinary.” She noted a certain physical resemblance between the Ratboy and Roman Polanski. Michael Wilmington, in Los Angeles, thought it “gentle, likeable, made with few pretensions.”

  They were being kind. Aside from an enlivening performance by Robert Townsend as a street hipster hired as a companion for the Ratboy, the film is almost unwatchable. This is largely because it has no firm point of view. Locke never determined whether she was doing social satire or a Beauty and the Beast variant, opting instead for a listless, charmless and distancing realism. She never addressed, let alone overcame, the film’s obvious, central problem, which is that, however sympathetically he is treated, a rodent clone is unlikely ever to become anyone’s favorite cuddle. Locke’s own performance as Nikki Morrison, the window dresser who discovers the title creature, is as unfocused as the rest of the movie, skidding heedlessly from the cynical to the maternal.

  Aesthetics aside, the picture did not accomplish what it was supposed to do. It did not free Locke from being seen as Clint’s “appendage.” Rather the opposite; Ratboy was perceived as his most embarrassing largesse. Thoughts of D. W. Griffith and Carol Dempster, Herbert Yates and Vera Hruba Ralston, flitted through the back of one’s mind. After this disaster Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke would never fully repair their relationship.

  “It’s all my fault he ran for mayor,” Sondra “chuckled” to an interviewer in the spring of 1986, shortly after Clint was installed as Carmel-by-the-Sea’s chief executive, meaning that with his staff preoccupied by her picture he had time on his hands. There may have been a grain of truth in the remark. He had always spent as much time as possible in this pretty place, and at the moment was certainly not averse to undertaking a job that would give him a convenient excuse for spending ever more time there.

  But the key to Clint’s decision to enter local politics was that he believed himself to have been disrespectfully treated by the little city’s administration, and he was angry about it. The trouble started with the building behind which, down a walkway, his Hog’s Breath restaurant was located. He had bought this structure, which was in disrepair, intending to tear it down and replace it with something more handsome and profitable. He delayed work on the project while work proceeded on another building down the block to minimize disruption on the street they shared. In the meantime, plans were drawn and approved by Carmel’s planning commission, whose decision was then overturned by the city council.

  Clint was outraged and went to the city administrator to find out what he needed to do to win approval. “Give me a pointer,” he remembers saying, “tell me what you want. Do you want it white or brown. I’ll do it whatever way you want.” No, he was told, it doesn’t work that way. He would have to start all over again, and he would have to keep guessing what might please the council.

  Now he was nonplussed. He had proceeded as he did with all his enterprises, offering a sensible, low-key, entirely reasonable idea, one that he imagined would redound to everyone’s benefit. Naturally he hoped eventually to make a profit on his investment, but in the meantime he would be replacing an eyesore with a handsomer structure that would be a useful addition to the tax rolls, too. What could be wrong with that?

  Nothing, except that it challenged local custom and culture. Carmel had been settled by Spanish missionaries, but it had been discovered at the turn of the century by San Francisco bohemians looking for a secluded retreat in an area of stunning natural beauty. Over the years, the village and the area surrounding it grew steadily as wealthy people, many of them retirees, settled there and happily embraced the exclusionary values of its founders. But as the legend of Carmel’s quaintness spread, a substantial tourist trade also developed. Inevitably, conflict occurred between preservationists, who felt that any attempt to accommodate the visitors would radically alter the character of their little community, and another bloc, most of them businesspeople, who thought it impossible to stem the tide, but quite feasible to channel it so that both reasonable civility and decent cash flows were maintained.

  The protectionists held as their sacred scroll the 1929 city zoning ordinance, the preamble of which declared it to be “predominantly a residential city wherein business and commerce have in the past, are now and are proposed to be in the future subordinated to its residential character.” There were no numbered addresses in the village, few streetlights, and a city forester watched over its many pines and cypresses, some of which grew unhampered in the middle of some streets. Their opponents had no desire to tamper with these traditions, but they did cite figures that showed something over two-thirds of the $6 million municipal budget deriving from taxes on businesses, most of which were dependent on tourism. These businessmen wanted at least some responsiveness to their needs.

  Clint’s building plans had been caught in this ongoing conflict. In a city where you could be busted for changing the landscaping in front of your house without permission—all shrubbery was registered with city hall—the preservationist-dominated town council automatically rejected most construction permits, even if the proposed building would actually improve the urban prospect. It is also possible that he was victimized by celebrity prejudice. The new edifice would, after all, be called the Eastwood Building. Maybe that alone would make it an attraction for the despised tourists. Maybe the council simply felt compelled to demonstrate that it could not be intimidated by the famous movie star.

  And maybe it had not seen enough Dirty Harry movies. Clint promptly sued the city, eventually winning an out-of-court settlement that permitted him to proceed with his building. But the matter did not end there. Even now words like “punitive,” “dictatorial,” even “fascist,” creep into his conversation when he thinks back on this issue. In any case, his fight with city hall brought Clint into closer contact with the business community and led to discussions about challenging the incumbent mayor, a woman named Charlotte Townsend, now approa
ching the end of her second term. Clint heard himself saying, “I’ll help out. I’ll campaign—anything anyone wants me to do.” He then felt avid eyes turning to him. Bud Allen, a local innkeeper, finally said: “You run, Clint. We’ll bust this town wide open.”

  He demurred, of course, but the dissident group kept working on him. Finally, Clint said, “OK, I’ll run. But if I run I want to win. I don’t want to do this halfway.” So he attached a caveat to his acceptance. He would get an independent opinion on his candidacy before announcing it. A mutual friend put him in touch with Eileen Padberg, partner in a political consulting firm in Costa Mesa, California, that worked with Republicans and had enjoyed considerable success with local campaigns. At their first meeting in his Malpaso office, she suggested an exploratory telephone poll of the electorate. Clint thought that a good idea and proposed this agreement to Padberg in case he finally did run: “If you don’t tell me how to make movies, I won’t tell you how to run a campaign.”

  The poll results were ambiguous. Obviously, his name recognition was high, but there were problems. For one thing, most of the voters expressed satisfaction with Charlotte Townsend’s administration. And many were, as Padberg puts it, “taken aback” at the thought of a movie star holding the mayoralty. Many felt his presence in office would create “a circus atmosphere” in town, while others wondered how seriously he would take the job; they thought he might be off making movies instead of attending to their political business.

  Padberg phoned Clint at home one night to report these findings and to tell him that his campaign entailed a high risk of embarrassment for both of them. It would clearly attract national attention, and the media would install him as the automatic favorite. If he should then lose, which her poll showed was a real possibility, it would scarcely do his image any good. And it would harm hers as well; she would be the political consultant who couldn’t get a movie star elected mayor of his hometown. He asked her for a little time to think this over. An hour later he rang back to say, “I’m in if you’re in.”