But all of that aside, Bridges offered him a chance at something he had never tried before as an actor—classic, flat-out, leading-man romanticism. That it was controlled by his friend Steven Spielberg, who was at that time thinking of directing it himself, added to its appeal, as did the fact that Spielberg could not get at it for a while. Clint was determined to take some time off, beginning in December 1993, when the release of A Perfect World was behind him.
His primary goal was to spend as much time as possible with his new daughter, and this he did. One of the more delightful cognitive dissonances available to his friends that winter was being greeted at his front door by Dirty Harry with a burbling baby cradled in his arms. He was not entirely idle, of course. There was his usual round of celebrity golf tournaments to play in, he was trying to develop a film script based on Golf and the Kingdom, a fable beloved by the game’s devotees (he has yet to lick it), he was looking forward to Cannes again, this time returning as chairman of the festival’s jury, and, as the spring came on, there were unsatisfying drafts of the Bridges script to study. The press was reporting interest in the project by Robert Redford, but given its auspices one had the impression that the role was Clint’s to turn down.
This calm, however, was soon shattered by tragedy. On the first weekend in April Clint joined Frank Wells, who was now the chief operating officer of the Walt Disney Company, and some other friends for a weekend of high-altitude skiing in Nevada. It is a sport for true aficionados, involving helicopter flights into virgin snowfields high in the mountains, beyond the reach of ordinary ski lifts. They had “a great day” on Saturday, under cloudless skies. Sunday, however, the weather was more threatening, and after a few runs Clint decided to leave. He had flown his own helicopter to the resort where they were staying, was due in Sun Valley later in the day and feared he might not be able to take off if the weather continued to worsen.
It was a decision that almost certainly saved his life. When he reached Sun Valley he put in a call to Wells to see how the rest of the day had gone. He was answered by a hysterical receptionist telling him that his friend and the rest of his party—all except one man—were dead. The chopper that had been sent in to retrieve them at the end of the afternoon had crashed in a canyon. Heavily laden, it apparently lacked the power to overcome whatever winds it encountered as it tried to lift off.
This was a devastating loss to Clint. Wells, who had taken time off between his Warners and Disney jobs to try to climb the tallest peak on every continent (only Everest defeated him), was in his rhythms and sensibility probably as close to a soulmate as Clint had ever known. In his tribute to him at his memorial service Clint sang a few lines from “Hey, Jude,” a song he had heard Wells singing as he schussed down his last mountain.
By now his relationship with Frances was reverting to its former troubled state. Clint’s mother, Fisher says, “told me on a number of occasions that she thought I loved him too much.” She is also, in her own words, “very demanding” and now, as the mother of their child, saw no reason to be shy about making her needs known. He, in his turn, was beginning to find some of her “new age” ideas—which included strong reformist impulses about traditional masculine modes as well as theories of feminism—puzzling, irritating and, as they applied to his own ways of thinking and being, impossible to adopt. He also says he found himself once again under pressure to find roles for an actress who had a large personal claim on him.
It does not appear that their bad feelings were often or very openly discussed at this time. They went off to Cannes en famille, took a villa in the hills above town and lost themselves happily in the pleasures of the occasion. Clint enjoyed his official duties enormously. He says he found his experiences as mayor useful in conducting the jury’s business and stoutly denies the rumor that he had unduly influenced its choice of a controversial American film, Pulp Fiction, as winner of the Palme d’Or. With its bold mixture of violence and comedy it was undeniably his kind of movie. But his tastes are wildly eclectic—he voted for Beauty and the Beast in the Academy balloting of 1992, and the actress he is most frustrated about not working with is Maggie Smith—so he would have been open to almost anything. He says Quentin Tarantino’s film won on the first ballot, with only one juror holding out against it.
After the festival they spent a night in Paris before flying on to Scotland and a week of golf before returning home. It was during that brief stopover that another of those seemingly minor incidents that seem to crystallize emotional issues for Clint occurred. They had carried several trunks with them, but it seemed foolish to tote them all on to Scotland, since their flight back to the United States was to leave from Paris. They decided to buy a couple of suitcases and leave the rest of their belongings behind. Frances said she would take care of that, but it was late, and their driver said the only nearby shop likely to be open was Louis Vuitton. She splurged, returning with something like ten thousand dollars’ worth of luggage. Clint, who is not much of a comparison shopper—or for that matter any kind of shopper—said nothing.
Long dissolve. Frances goes off to Texas to appear in The Stars Fell on Henrietta, a little film about an oil boom that Clint executive-produced. Her costars were Robert Duvall, Aidan Quinn and Brian Dennehy. The director was James Keach, who is married to Jane Seymour, on whose television program, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Frances had appeared. She had flown in on a private plane, and Frances asked if she could borrow it for a night to fly to Los Angeles for the premiere of Babyfever, a Henry Jaglom film in which she had had an important role. She told the charter service to bill her directly for the cost, but it required a credit card as collateral, and she gave them one Clint had provided her.
Another dissolve. Somehow the bill for the plane—less than the Vuitton charges, by the way, but still substantial—does not go directly to Frances. It appears on the credit card statement along with the luggage bill. Since Clint lives as he produces movies—without ostentation—he flew into a rage, which abided.
Perhaps it persisted in part because he was also simmering over The Bridges of Madison County. It had to start shooting in Iowa by Labor Day or else wait until the next year. But the scripts he had seen were full of superfluous flashbacks and fantasies; one draft, he says, even proposed reuniting modern subliterature’s most famously sundered lovers in Katmandu or some such exotic locale. Richard LaGravenese’s excellent adaptation was, at least, in work, but had not yet reached its final form. And Spielberg, exhausted by Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, had begged off directing. Bruce Beresford, the Australian whose Academy Award-winning Driving Miss Daisy seemed to qualify him for handling small, tender stories, had been engaged to replace him.
Clint claimed to find him personally agreeable, but, unfortunately, Beresford fell into a casting dither. Certain substantial names were mentioned for Francesca—Angelica Huston and Meryl Streep (always Clint’s leading candidate) among them—but he decided to fly off to Europe to test other, younger actresses for the role. The material he returned with was, at best, inconclusive.
Beresford, as he should have known, had sailed into dangerous waters and was now caught in an angry riptide. Clint issued an ultimatum: Either this issue was quickly resolved, or they could add a leading man to their list of casting problems. Somehow, Beresford disappeared in the ensuing hubbub. Clint, despite his recent, oft-repeated resolve to “wean myself away” from double duty, took over as director. He got Streep’s number from their mutual friend, Carrie Fisher (“I guess she hands out my number to anybody,” Streep would say later), and called to ask if he could send her a script.
She was not immediately receptive. Jodie Foster had quit her role in the projected film version of Richard Preston’s Crisis in the Hot Zone, and her Out of Africa costar, Robert Redford, was quite persuasively talking to her about joining him on the picture (which, ultimately, was canceled). Besides, Clint was just a man in a “boxy” jacket she had met once at a party. She knew little of him as either actor or dire
ctor, but she knew she loathed Robert Waller’s novel, especially the overripe prose of its love scenes. (Four or five people had given her the book, suggesting that she should play Francesca.) When her assistant asked to borrow one of her copies she tossed it in the wastebasket, saying “You can’t read this—it’s a crime to literature.”
But because of its auspices, she read LaGravenese’s script immediately, and saw that it solved the crime. The bad metaphors were gone, and a subtle rebalancing had taken place. The characters of the son and daughter, who discover their mother’s diary and must come to terms with its revelations, were enlarged, with their responses adding a certain resonance to the shallow romanticism of the book. Streep went out and rented a couple of Eastwood movies. One was Unforgiven, which her husband and son recommended, and in which she found a directorial “wholeness” effortlessly achieved. The other was In the Line of Fire, where Clint’s acting impressed her: “I’d never seen somebody of his age do that stuff, go out on a limb that way.”
She signed on, thereby turning Bridges into a go project. By so doing—and quite unknowingly, of course—she was instrumental in bringing Clint and Frances’s relationship to its final crisis. Given its precarious condition, Frances guessed that a couple of months’ separation, while he was on location, would be fatal to it. She therefore proposed herself for the role of the daughter, and he rejected her. Personal issues aside, she had just finished another Malpaso picture, and he was more than ever determined not to repeat the Sondra Locke scenario. But still it hurt. According to her, he was not very encouraging when she proposed a visit, though eventually she and the baby did spend a few days in Iowa toward the end of the shoot.
It was centered in and around Winterset, Madison County’s seat (and, another faintly described circle completed, John Wayne’s birthplace). It may have been the happiest of all Eastwood locations. Logistically, this was a comparatively simple production—relatively few locations, a small cast, no taxing action to stage. At its center there were simply two actors acting. And loving it: “One of my favorite things I’ve ever done in my life” is the way Streep put it.
In the doing, it fulfilled her hope that this might turn into the kind of acting experience she had known in the theater, something “we’d be making up as we went along, exploring its evolution.” It also banished her greatest fear. She had worked with two actor-directors, Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, and in her scenes with them she always felt a third, directorial eye staring objectively at her, disconcerting her. This happened only once on Bridges—in some shots where Clint was off camera, feeding her lines. She gently called him on it, and he stopped. There was another time, watching dailies of a scene where they were in bed together, half-naked, when she caught Clint making silent gestures behind her back to Jack Green. This time it made her laugh to see him doing his other job when he was supposed to be full concentrated on … well … sex, or, to be more accurate, its simulacrum. He responded with a mock complaint: “It’s very fatiguing work.”
What Streep liked best was his first-take spontaneity. She has a reputation as a “technical” actress, someone who seems to calculate her effects too closely, and is defensive about it. “I really always have loved that first encounter,” she said one day in her trailer. “I almost always like the first reading better than anything we ever do subsequently.” Therefore, she said, “this is heaven. Clint’s very instinctual. If it feels good, he says, ‘We’re outta here.’ ” As a result, she said, the film’s emotional moments “feel captured, as opposed to set up and driven into the ground.”
Her feelings were reciprocated, and they moved well ahead of schedule. However, when a newsmagazine reported this, it irritated Clint. He thought it made it sound as if they were working carelessly. “We’re not making Plan Nine from Outer Space,” he growled. They also were not enacting the cowboy-and-the-lady scenario that many journalists had imagined. They were generally affectionate, mutually respectful, often-joshing colleagues. One perfect autumn morning Clint ambled up to a little bridge where they were to shoot a silent scene in which Streep, in age makeup, reads her last communication from Robert Kincaid, a deathbed letter. The air was clear, the sky blue, a light breeze rippled leaves turning photogenically. Eyeing the scene, he sighed happily: “Great, I’ll make the cover of Cahiers du Cinéma.”
Joking aside, the film’s visual quality—pretty, but not overwhelmingly so—was emblematic of other, less obvious rebalancings of Waller’s basic narrative. In a genially cynical review of one of his other books, Robert Plunket, himself a novelist, rather cleverly gave a name to the genre this author had virtually invented: “Old Adult” fiction, as opposed to the “Young Adult” books “aimed at the anxious adolescent, feeling alone in the world, who needs some validation and reassurance.” Old Adult fiction, he said, provides the same service for the middle-aged reader trapped miserably in a Wal-Mart universe. It says: “You’re a good person. Your suffering isn’t depressing—it’s romantic. And to prove it I’m going to reward you with some really good sex for once in your life.”
Streep disagreed. She thought the film, at least, was not about belated rewards, sexual or otherwise, but about “regret. And lost chances. And how you come to things at the wrong time.” She caught in these few words the difference in tone between source and adaptation. Waller in his klutzy way was striving for the ineffable. The movie, more gracefully, strives merely to be treasurable. It grants its lovers a resonant happiness, but not a transformative one.
Clint finished Bridges stirred up, on a high. He had never worked so intensely or with such intimacy over so many weeks with an actor or actress of Streep’s caliber. Nor had he ever worked on any film even remotely comparable to this in its romantic force. It made a man think—especially a man approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, especially a man returning to a house alternately silent and quarrelsome, and rife now with suggestions that some sort of therapy might be in order.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. If he had ever felt “lost, lonely, shut-down” he surely did not now. He had just played a figure who embodied the first two qualities, and though Clint’s grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy was as firm as ever, this character had found at least a momentary transfiguration. Why couldn’t he?
There were good days and bad in the months ahead, as ambivalence tugged him this way and that. If Frances’s fierce zeal to create a life antithetical to his nature, ever resistant to therapeutic pieties, it was yet the product of a loving and idealistic nature. Then, too, there were the interests of a much loved child to consider. And the ugliness of his breakup with Sondra Locke still weighed on his mind.
By the end of the Christmas holidays, though, it was clear to both of them that there was virtually no hope of salvaging their relationship. Now Frances discovered his “other family,” as she called Jacelyn Reeves and the children. She could accept them, but not the fact that Clint had failed to tell her about them. Then in January his old friend Jane Brolin died in an auto accident. When the news came, he cried, the first and only time Frances saw him in tears, the first and only time some of his friends were aware of him reaching out—shyly, indirectly, but palpably—for consolation.
He had always said he was too busy living to think much about dying. But this death, following so closely that of Frank Wells, rendered thoughts of mortality, and questions about the quality of the years left to him, inescapable; he did not want to spend them trying to be someone else’s idea of who he should be, and apologizing for his inevitable failures in that regard. One detected no anger or bitterness in him as he reached this conclusion, though there was some on Frances’s part. But then he had, or thought he might have, someplace else to go.
He had met Dina Ruiz two years earlier in Carmel. She was twenty-eight years old, a news anchor on KSBW, a television station in Salinas, when she was assigned to do a sort of local-boy-makes-good interview with Clint after he won his Unforgiven Oscars. She was yet another woman who had not seen many of hi
s films, but they got along very comfortably on camera, so much so that when Dina showed her footage to her boss, Maria Barrs, she—astonishingly—predicted a marriage someday. More immediately, she ordered Dina to expand her piece to a five-part series, and she supplemented her material by doing an interview with Clint’s mother.
They did not see each other again for something like a year. Then they were seated next to each other at a civic function in Carmel, and once again conversation flowed easily between them. He signaled that, from a distance, he had been keeping up with her by asking knowledgeable questions about some of her recent broadcasts. Now, the more they talked, the more interested he became. She had been raised in Fremont, where his grandmother had lived, and they found that, despite their differences in age, they shared a sense of place, of comparable formative experiences. They came from similarly modest backgrounds; her father was a high-school teacher, her mother (whom Dina had brought along on that first interview) an appliance salesperson at Montgomery Ward. At the end of the banquet he asked if he could call her, and when she gave him her number he said its last four digits—1565—would be easy to remember: “Your age and mine.”
Later on he would tell people that part of Dina’s attraction is that she is not an actress. It is a shorthand way of saying that she is of his private world on the Monterey Peninsula, a world from which the movie business is firmly excluded, not of his public life. More than that, she is a lively, articulate and straightforward woman, and a born journalist, curious about everything and quirkily well informed. It is a sensibility that is novel and refreshing to him.
They continued to see each other—occasionally, chastely—over the next months. Before he went off to make Bridges there was a night when they stayed up until five in the morning “smooching and talking” as she puts it. In January a photographer caught them in a kiss at the Pebble Beach Golf Tournament. It interested the press and, of course, infuriated Frances—and Clint as well. “She’s a friend,” he insisted at the time. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t be interested, if my circumstances were different.…” “We didn’t become a couple,” as Dina genteelly, but firmly, puts it, “until he was free.”
Clint Eastwood Page 69