Dave Kehr, virtually the film’s only critical supporter, would eventually argue that Tommy constituted a statement no less personal than the ones Clint had made in weightier works, offering him a character through which he could pay tribute to the escapist and self-expressive pleasures he had found in performance. When Nowack dons false colors “he lights up with self-enjoyment; the straight bearing softens, the gestures expand, and he can’t stop smiling,” the critic observed.
Clint does not disagree with this reading. The problem was context. These sweet, goofy moments are contained in a movie of mercurial mood shifts. As Clint says, there were moments when Lou Ann, dealing with the loss of her baby, comes close to tragic bereavement. At other times the picture skirts country traversed by hundreds of pickup trucks in dozens of redneck road comedies. At the end, Buddy Van Horn and Clint deliver an assault on the survivalists’ redoubt, full of high-impact car stunts and automatic weaponry; it belongs in a different movie.
In short, the film develops no firm point of view toward its varied elements. It is genial enough, but it has a definitely slapped-together quality. Tall tales need to be told confidently, and Pink Cadillac achieves that spirit only occasionally, generally when Clint is cutting up or Peters, belying the airhead voluptuousness of the first impression she creates, zings someone with a one-liner. (She has the movie’s best line, a response to a flasher inquiring of her what she sees: “Looks just like a penis, only smaller,” she says sweetly.)
Unaccountably, the studio decided to release Pink Cadillac on the Memorial Day weekend, the traditional opening of the summer movie season and, by more modern tradition, a period ceded to some high-decibel action movie—that year Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It may be that studio executives thought of Clint’s film as counterprogramming to this surefire blockbuster, something a slightly older crowd might get a kick out of. Then again, they may not have been thinking at all.
The show-business press immediately made a contest out of this situation—Clint Eastwood versus Indiana Jones. It was, of course a mismatch—this shaky little comedy going against Steven Spielberg’s handsomely mounted behemoth. The latter grossed $37.7 million; Clint’s picture did $4.4 million, about half of what recent Eastwood movies had been doing on their first weekends. Much was made of this, all of it deleterious to Clint’s standing as a box-office favorite.
Clint was not quite willing to admit that he had reached an age and a stage where he could no longer afford such seemingly regressive filmmaking. But he did derive some consolation from the higher standards to which he was now being held. He remembers thinking, People wanted me to go another step and maybe that’s good—at least they’re rooting for you to go somewhere.
Pink Cadillac opened on Friday, May 26. By the following Wednesday, all the bad news about its disastrous grosses was in as he confronted Locke in the unpleasant, unsuccessful attempt to reach a settlement. Almost immediately thereafter he left for the media-free zone of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, where he would shoot White Hunter, Black Heart.
We can judge the state of his spirit at this time by noting that Frances Fisher did not accompany him. He had, she says, previously hinted that he would like her to come along, but in the end he did not even call to say goodbye. Obviously he could not so soon undertake another serious relationship. He needed instead to immerse himself in the healing routines of a far-distant production.
On the way to Africa, Clint stopped off in Paris for its annual air show, where he completed arrangements to purchase the most expensive indulgence he has ever permitted himself, an Acurielle helicopter, known outside its country of origin as an A-Star. Fulfilling the promise he had made to himself when he first took the controls of one of those contraptions on the Paint Your Wagon location, he was now a fully qualified pilot, and though his machine was shipped home for him, he ferried himself and others from place to place in Africa, using choppers leased to the production.
Much as White Hunter, Black Heart meant to Clint, it meant even more to Peter Viertel, author of the book from which it derived, for this production represented the culmination of a dream deferred for well over three decades. The son of émigré movie people—his mother had been Greta Garbo’s favorite screenwriter; his father had been a promising director in Weimar Germany (and latterly the model for the leading character in another roman à clef about the movies, Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet)—he had been hired in 1951 by John Huston, who had once worked on a script for Viertel’s father, to polish James Agee’s screenplay for The African Queen. He had accompanied the director (and, of course, Bogart, Hepburn and the rest of the company) to the film’s Congolese location, returning with material for a melodramatized account of a movie director clearly modeled on Huston, obsessed with shooting an elephant at the expense of shooting his picture. The novel became a best-seller in 1953, thanks in part to an ending suggested by Huston himself, in which his character is portrayed more monstrously than he was in real life. The book was sold to Columbia, and then entered upon what must be one of the longest preproduction Odysseys in the history of the movies.
Viertel was engaged to make his own adaptation, which proved unacceptable to the studio. Over the course of the years, two writer-directors, James Bridges and Burt Kennedy, wrote new versions of the screenplay, with the property finally passing into the hands of Ray Stark. As it happened, Stanley Rubin, whom Clint had known since he produced Francis in the Navy, back in his Universal days, was working for Stark at the time, and he brought White Hunter, Black Heart to Clint’s attention. He read one draft of the script, then another and another, then Viertel’s novel, and found himself utterly absorbed.
The Huston character, called John Wilson in book and screenplay, is a figure any actor would relish playing. His macho swagger not untouched by self-destructive impulses, his romanticism darkened by selfishness, cynicism and a talent for manipulation, his rebellious posturings undermined by his taste for the good life; there is an inescapable grandeur about him—and, to modern eyes, an air of humbug as well. Here was a chance for Clint to meditate on the most “daunting” of all American ideas about manhood, that of Hemingway and his school (Viertel was also a friend of the novelist’s and introduced Huston to him). For Wilson, his strutting (and rather literary) masculinity was no less “full of shit” than Tom Highway’s, and with fewer excuses, since he is an intelligent man who, in full, mocking consciousness of both his intentions and their absurdity, sacrifices friendship, work and the good opinion of others to the glamour of grandiose folly. “You’re about to blow this picture out of your nose,” the Viertel character rages at him, as he expensively delays its start “to commit a crime, to kill one of the rarest, most noble creatures that walks this crummy earth.” But that’s just the point. “It’s the only sin you can buy a license for and then go out and commit,” Wilson replies, relishing his existential rebelliousness.
Clint would admit Wilson’s redeeming aspects. He has, for example, a speech to the Viertel character (played in the film by Jeff Fahey) in which he tells him he will never be a great screenwriter “because you let eighty-five million popcorn eaters pull you this way and that.” In the years since, Clint has often quoted that dialogue to interviewers seeking his own filmmaking credo. In a later passage Wilson deliberately picks a fight with a white racist in an African hotel, knowing he will lose. Sometimes, he says, as he staggers away from this encounter with his younger, stronger opponent, you have to volunteer for lost causes or “your guts will turn to pus.” Clint could respond to that, too. Nevertheless, it was the man’s monstrousness that compelled him. Here, truly, was a character to test the limits of an audience’s sympathy.
In the novel, Wilson finally bags his elephant, in the process setting off a stampede in which his native guide is killed. In the movie, he does not make his kill. At the moment of truth, confronting his prey, he funks, but with the same deadly consequences to the guide. He returns to the first day of work on his film visibly chastened, possibly
even broken, slumping into his director’s chair and almost inaudibly rasping out “Action.”
It is a much more clear-cut and devastating comment on the hollowness of macho posturing. Indeed, the picture in general improves on its source. For Viertel was very much a bedazzled hanger-on in the Hemingway-Huston world, where people distracted themselves in far-flung pursuits of dangerous and expensive pleasures. He could moralize about them, but he could not entirely evade his enchantment by them. Some of his novel’s seductiveness when it first appeared derived from the glimpse it offered to goggling provincial eyes of the enviably posh path to self-loathing the privileged permitted themselves. Clint would take his tone from Viertel’s admirable title, so straightforward in the ironies and moralities it hints at, not from the more ambiguous atmosphere that suffuses the work itself, refusing even to present Africa in a handsome light. There are very few grand, glamorizing vistas captured at sunrise or sunset here.
If Clint’s directorial choices were admirable in this austerity, his most basic choice as an actor was more debatable. Early on, he had to decide whether or not to imitate Huston’s well-known mannerisms—the rich drawl of his voice, the kingly elegance of his gestures. There were arguments on both sides. Knowledgeable people had for decades understood that White Hunter, Black Heart was a roman à clef. They had, indeed, made it part of the vast Huston legend, part of what they knew, or thought they knew, about him. Even if one was unfamiliar with this historic gossip, the film within Clint’s film was rather obviously a version of The African Queen, the most widely beloved of all Huston’s films, and also central to his legend. It was hard in this context to pretend that John Wilson was John Doe, and self-defeating as well. It would surely help the commercial prospects of the project if one legend could be clearly discerned portraying another. On the other hand, thanks to Huston’s second career as an actor, his mannerisms were very well known. A close imitation of them would inevitably invite narrow comparisons between art and reality at the expense of the film’s larger issues and pleasures.
Clint did not hesitate over this matter. Before leaving for Africa he gathered footage of Huston, studied it closely and, despite the disparity in the timbre of their voices, created a very passable impression of him. But since he directed the actors who played such easily recognizable figures as Hepburn, Bogart and Lauren Bacall away from detailed imitation, his decision in the last analysis is difficult to understand. His propensity for realism certainly went into it. So did his love of character acting. It is possible, however, that at this particular moment in his personal history Clint did not want to appear before the public in a persona closely resembling his own.
When he completed work on the Zimbabwe location, he had two weeks of work to do on White Hunter, Black Heart in and around London. There the tabloids observed him keeping company with Maggie, herself hurting from the ending of her second marriage. The papers incorrectly rumored reconciliation, especially when they took a short vacation together in the south of France. But as Clint has often said, his relationship with Maggie has turned out to be better in divorce than it was in marriage, and they turned to one another now for reliable, well-tested warmth and trust.
Once back in the United States, Clint was in no hurry to finish his picture, which would mean making himself available to the press, and in no mood to disport himself in public, for to him it seemed the stories about his breakup with Sondra would not die: “Everywhere I went, I couldn’t get away from it. When a story was written by one person, everyone else picked it up. It was so parasitic. It made me so uncomfortable.”
Other discomfiting matters surfaced as well. It was now that the press revealed Kimber’s existence, and in the fall of 1989, Alison, then seventeen, and in a rebellious phase, was arrested for drunk driving in Beverly Hills. She was jailed overnight, fined and had her license suspended. She had suffered more from the Eastwoods’ divorce than her brother had. And also, perhaps, from her father’s stardom, having herself become the target of a celebrity stalker. Clint acknowledges now that at that time his communication with his daughter was strained. He says that one of the factors drawing him to Absolute Power, the film he shot in the summer of 1996, was that William Goldman’s adaptation of the best-selling novel stressed a troubled father-daughter relationship. “I’d been there,” he said. “I could relate to that.”
At the time, he remained silent about these matters. If he was obliged to attend a public function he would take as his date Jane Brolin or Dani Crane, David Janssen’s widow and his old friend from the Universal talent program. This remained true for some months, even though Frances Fisher had returned to his life.
No one outside his closest circle knew this. He was more than ever determined to keep his private life private. This reconciliation began in the late summer of 1989, when Frances had a late-afternoon audition on the Warners lot. Burying her pride, and convinced that she knew what was best for both of them, she dropped in at the Malpaso offices sometime after six, where she found Clint at work with Joel Cox in their editing room. She was, she says, greeted by a sheepish grin, but she encouraged him to call her, and over the next few months they drifted into what would soon become an exclusive relationship. She was living then in Manhattan Beach, a long drive from his house and from her working rounds. It made sense for her to stay over in Bel-Air, to begin leaving a few clothes there, and that seemed perfectly agreeable to him. Pretty soon, without their ever formally discussing it, they were living together, although Frances took an apartment in town—she says she spent a total of six nights there—so he would not feel she was trying to entrap him. Finally, early in 1990, he began introducing her to his friends, the first such occasion being an evening they spent with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. A little later, he invited her to spend time with him at his Shasta County ranch, the retreat he shares only with true intimates. She remained, by her own account, more in love with him than he was with her. But if this was never a grand passion, he was grateful to her for restoring a sense of calm and normalcy to his life.
By the spring of 1990 he was ready to return to work, and to public life. It must be said that the latter was more gracefully managed than the former.
The Rookie, the picture he began working on in April, was another script Warner Bros. controlled and urged on him. It was a cop-buddy picture, with Clint cast as an old, low-life pro working grand theft auto (not exactly the most riveting of crimes), and Charlie Sheen as a rich kid assigned to be his partner but in serious need of maturing. The thinking was obvious: About to turn sixty, Clint was getting too old to carry an action picture single-handed; maybe by being paired with a young hotshot he could refresh his grip on this traditional franchise. His was virtually a supporting role, and he went along with it because he thought directorially he might be able to make something of it. “Also, I didn’t have something else to do at that time.”
Except carefully tend to the launch of White Hunter, Black Heart. He knew, of course, that it was not going to be a hugely popular film, and that, like Bird, it would require sober journalistic attention if it was going to make any impact on the public. He knew that was obtainable at Cannes, and so he entered the new picture in competition there, abandoning work on The Rookie to attend the festival.
This strategy contained a significant fringe benefit. After his long season in the tabloid sun, and a year of avoiding personal encounters with the press, he would be presenting himself to reporters as the director of a very serious film. They would not, in this context, dare to ask him the kind of gossipy questions they were dying to pose. Moreover, his careful reflections on this film would remind readers that he was in possession of a career and character that could not, should not, be reduced to a sheaf of scandalous innuendoes.
He was indeed treated respectfully by the interviewers. His film, however, did not create the kind of buzz that pictures in serious contention for the jury’s favor must stir. Some wondered if Anjelica Huston’s presence on the panel harmed its c
hances (Clint thinks not). Many saw it as an exercise in idle historicism, without much relevance to a contemporary audience. This was the unintended, if not entirely unpredictable, consequence of Clint’s Huston imitation. It caused people to reflect on the director, who had died just two years earlier, not on John Wilson, and on the interesting questions about fame, power and masculine self-delusion that he embodied.
Clint finished principal photography on The Rookie in June and, as postproduction proceeded, returned to the high road on behalf of White Hunter, Black Heart. He took it to the Telluride festival in August, and it was the centerpiece of a retrospective of his directorial work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. A couple of days later, he screened it at the Toronto Film Festival.
It opened in limited release—twenty-five screens—in mid-September, and at first it seemed that Clint’s work for the film would be rewarded. Grosses were good initially, and the major reviewers, on the whole, were not less enthusiastic than they had been for Bird. Several of them unequivocally called it his best work yet as a director. Doubts predictably centered on his performance. Michael Wilmington in the Los Angeles Times spoke for many when he wrote, “Huston’s persona becomes Eastwood’s own big tusker; the prey he can’t quite shoot.” He thought it might have been better to “soft-pedal” Huston’s mannerisms, but the real issue was that Clint could not soft-pedal his disdain for this character, or forgive him his trespasses. Perhaps, to him, this man’s art was insufficient compensation for his flaws. Perhaps his articulateness, implying a capacity for self-awareness that Tom Highway and Charlie Parker did not share, put him off. Perhaps the outworn theatricality of Huston’s manner, so curiously mixed with the posturings of perpetual adolescence, so completely unlike his own, interfered with his empathy.
Clint Eastwood Page 63