This he was by early spring. Frances and Francesca moved temporarily into the guest house on his Bel-Air property, while she looked for other quarters. He happily continued his fatherly duties, which included baby-sitting when Frances was busy.
He did manage to compose a theme for Bridges, which he called “Doe Eyes,” a rather obvious reference to Dina. A gossipy buzz occurred when he appeared without Frances at the Academy Awards ceremony in the spring of 1995 to accept his Irving Thalberg Award. There was no buzz at all when he appeared solo at the premiere of Bridges, which also inaugurated the handsome new Steven J. Ross Theater on the Warner Bros. lot on the eve of Clint’s sixty-fifth birthday. By this time it was common knowledge that he and Frances were separated. It was far from common knowledge, however, that he was in love with Dina Ruiz. He was not at all eager to subject her, and their relationship, to a confusion of realms.
Bridges launched as gently as any picture he had ever made. Basically, the critics heaved a collective sigh of relief when they saw it. Many could not bring themselves to rave over a movie drawn from this contemptible source, but most could very warmly appreciate the way the sappiness of the novel had been blanched away, leaving, they had to admit, a surprisingly solid emotional core exposed. The film did not jerk tears; it gently encouraged, at most, a rueful tingle behind the eyes.
Almost a year later, in a long critical consideration of the movie, Richard Combs made explicit what was implicit in many of the early notices. The film’s success, he argued, was based on its “spatial and temporal” framing, which the novel had only hastily attended. It grounds these characters in a realistically observed place and in a historical continuum, as Waller’s fiction does not. Francesca is seen to be rooted in this countryside. And her sense of panic at a future in which she abandons all that it represents in the way of stability and sustaining duty is vividly reflected in Streep’s eyes. Thus real space and imagined time become in the film what they never quite are in the novel—palpable, potent antagonists in a tale moved not by desperate prose but by the easy, natural rhythms of an honestly, and gently, felt reality.
As Combs says, the movie’s erotic passages are “a matter of charged space, the way characters move around each other. What’s kept apart is as important as what’s brought together in this scheme.…” The long sequences—rather daringly extended by a director who simply will not be hurried—in which Robert and Francesca get to know one another, full of tentative approaches and withdrawals, are among the most painfully authentic and suspenseful seduction scenes ever recorded on film.
In this context Streep’s Francesca ceases to be a ditsy romantic mooning in goofy animalistic metaphors over a superstud, but a woman caught in true and anguished conflict. And Clint’s Robert ceases to be Waller’s faux poetic “last cowboy” and becomes a man recognizing that his wandering ways are the expression of a flawed spirit. Indeed, in the playing, he becomes a rather pathetic figure, a man grasping desperately for a last chance at happiness. When he and Francesca see each other for the last time, he is the one out in the rain, looking like a stray cat; she is sheltered and at least minimally warmed by her husband’s benign, if uncomprehending, presence.
The public responded very warmly to this conscientious, carefully unexploitative production. By Labor Day the film had grossed in the neighborhood of $70 million, enough to edge it into the top-ten summer releases. It did even better abroad, so that it came close to the $200 million mark in worldwide grosses.
Its release in Europe offered Clint an occasion to introduce Dina—gently, he hoped—to his celebrity existence. He asked her and two other couples, friends from Carmel, to join him on a promotional tour to England, France and Italy, which included stops at some of the better golf courses. None of them had ever been exposed to this side of his life, and seeing it from the inside left them dazed: the crowds, the demands, the frenzy.
It may have left Dina dazed in another way. For Clint granted an interview with Paris-Match in which he was more open about his private feelings than he had ever been before with a journalist. As he had once or twice in the past, he confessed to his fondness for women of a certain age; maturity made them more interesting, more attractive, to him than their younger sisters. Aha, said the alert reporter, What about Ms. Ruiz? (then just past thirty). “She’s someone very rare, very special,” came the astonishingly open reply. “She is beautiful, generous, full of life.…” Love, he said in answer to another question, “is much stronger when one meets in the second half of one’s life. It hits you when you least expect it. If I have a message, it is simply to say, ‘Don’t let anything pass.’ ” Which is, of course, the lesson he had taken very much to heart from The Bridges of Madison County.
Here, it seemed, was a new Clint Eastwood, or at least a new public Clint Eastwood. He was then, and he has remained since, a visibly smitten man. With Dina he would become a cuddling, nuzzling, nibbling, almost-adolescent figure. “My silly son-in-law,” Dina’s mother would soon start calling him.
For in September, shortly after they returned from Europe, Clint presented Dina with a diamond-and-ruby engagement ring. On December 29, he lured her into the courthouse in Hailey, Idaho, near Sun Valley, on the pretext of showing her its architecture. He’d always wanted to use it in a movie, he said. It was odd, she thought, how he kept insisting she bring her purse with her. It was, she soon learned, so she could produce some ID for the county clerk when they applied for their marriage license. He swore everyone in the office to secrecy, which they managed to maintain for at least forty-eight hours.
On the last weekend in March, when Dina and a group of women she had known since her school days were scheduled to make their annual girls-only outing to Las Vegas, Clint showed an unusual interest in the affair, and on Friday, lounging at the pool of the Mirage Hotel, Dina heard herself being paged. The occasion had proved irresistible to him. All her old friends were gathered around her; his friend Steve Wynn, the casino magnate, had a perfect venue for a wedding, the patio of his home just off his Shadow Creek golf course; it would be easy to fly both their families in from northern California on short notice. What better moment for a marriage?
And so, in forty-eight hours, it was done—flowers ordered, menus set, music chosen. Just in case word leaked out, the control tower at nearby Nellis Air Force Base, which commands the air space over Wynn’s property, was alerted to be on guard against low-flying paparazzi. With everything in hand, Clint decided to pass the afternoon on the golf course—“I played pretty well, too”—as did Dina’s father. Clint spotted him strolling toward the eighteenth green just as the ceremony was about to begin, and it was delayed until he finished his round and changed into a suit so he could escort his daughter down the aisle. The band played “Doe Eyes.” Kyle Eastwood was his father’s best man. Everyone agreed that it was the prettiest wedding a man and a woman could hope for.
One is tempted to leave him there, dancing in the desert twilight with his bride while the band plays “Unforgettable.” But this is not a life susceptible to fade-outs, freeze-frames, any of those convenient and arbitrary devices by which we bring stories to some kind of a conclusion—not yet, anyway.
A month before their wedding Dina had been next to him, with his mother on the other side, at the banquet when he received the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award. A month later, after a week’s honeymoon in Maui, she would accompany him to New York when he received a similar prize from the Film Society of Lincoln Center for what he described on that occasion as “a blessed career.” A month after that they would be separated for a few weeks while he did the location work for his next film, Absolute Power, in Baltimore and Washington. Sometime during that period they learned, for certain, that they were going to have a baby. After that he was set to direct another film, the adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. There is, it would seem, no end in sight!
Somehow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, which Clint used as the epigraph on Bird—“The
re are no second acts in American lives”—insinuates itself in the mind of someone observing this particular American life, doubtless because it so definitively disproves the novelist’s dubious generalization. This is a life that has refused to confine itself to an act structure, or any other structure for that matter, and is, as we speak, redefining itself one more time.
EPILOGUE
THE BACK NINE
These things we now know about Clint Eastwood: That his movie heroes have taken the American male deeper into the country of disaffection than he has ever ridden before on-screen, reversing the great theme of our adventure movies, which has been male bonding, and insisting upon the opposite, the difficulty men have in making connections—not just with other men, but with communities, with women, with conventional morality, with their own best selves. Clint’s screen character represents an isolation more radically withdrawn than anyone has ever offered in movies intended for, and embraced by, a popular audience.
That in many of his best films he has explored the various ways that a man can fail to do what a man’s got to do, showing how through sexual arrogance, self-absorption, self-destructiveness, pride, perversity and even stupidity, he can fail, or come perilously close to failing, this primary obligation of the screen hero.
That in the presentation of that figure he has brought a self-consciousness—not so much in the playing, but in the life that goes on behind his eyes—that is the very hallmark of what we now routinely refer to as “post-modernist,” though almost never when we are thinking about moviemaking of the kind he practices.
That when he inserts this character into an action film he places it in a context radically changed from the one traditionally inhabited by the screen hero. Action movies, we have observed, resemble action painting in that their pleasures have always been found on their surfaces, in the tension arising from the arrangement of abstract elements (the good, the bad, the ugly, as it were). When, starting sometime in the sixties, movies began to acknowledge that fact openly, a cultural crisis—otherwise known as the sex-and-violence controversy—that persists to this day was initiated. It grew largely out of the dawning realization among filmmakers that the audience really doesn’t care a rap about who shoots whom or why, so long as the matter is handled with—yes—a certain “panache.”
That this revised context to some degree revises the nature of screen heroism, encouraging us to root for our guy on the basis of his superior style, not his heavier moral weight. In this new universe, Dirty Harry’s wisecracks cease to be idle verbal decor and become something like the heart of the matter. Talk about “daunting ideas”! What could be more daunting than the notion that there are no reliable guides to masculine assertion, that we succeed or fail in this matter by the degree of wit we bring to the matter? What could be more subversive to our traditional codes of heroism than the idea that its largest imperative is to style, to cool improvisation in the heat of the deadly moment?
There is something else we know, too, not only about Clint Eastwood, but about all of us: that there comes a time in life when we need to take stock, of where we have been and where we may be going, of who we have been and who we might yet become, of what we have meant to others and how we might further clarify that relationship.
It is obvious that the movies Clint has made in his sixties, so different in tenor from most of those that he had previously done, are part of the process of reconciling his accounts. It is equally clear—to me, at least—that his patient involvement with this book, as well as his pleased participation in those celebrations of his life’s achievements that have preoccupied so much of his public life since winning his Academy Awards, is also part of that process.
We may take pride, some of us, in the fact that we have improvised our way through the chance universe with a certain grace. But we need to know, too, that we have not arrived entirely by chance at our present condition, need to think, too, that some general principles, conceivably of value to others, may be gleaned from that experience. We may take pride, as well, in our independence, in our ability to function without the sanction of the social and cultural arbiters, but in some secret chamber of our hearts we covet their endorsements, if only as a sign that in quixotically choosing the more isolated path we did not preclude the summit.
My book and his apotheosis having coincided, I attended most of the large tributes that have been paid Clint in recent years. They stirred in me no desire to recant what I wrote in the prologue: I still think the desire to recast him as icon, legend, national treasure, is a way of evading his singularity, or at least to tame and domesticate it. Our desire to press celebratory hardware on figures like Clint does not reflect a desire to grapple honestly with the past, but a need to nostalgize it, and by so doing soften its conflicts, resolve its ambiguities. Our national disease, one sometimes thinks, is long-term memory loss, and though our standing ovations signal authentic affection for their recipients, they also testify that the human capacity for forgetfulness is as large as its capacity for remembrance.
I cannot say if, on these grand occasions, stray thoughts of the old criticism, criticism couched as calumny, crossed Clint’s mind. But they surely crossed mine. For in researching this book, my largest astonishment was at the breadth, persistence and vitriolic misunderstanding of the early attacks on him. It is hard to credit now, informed opinion having shifted so decisively in his favor in recent years, but it is true nevertheless: No actor in the history of the medium has attained the kind of stature Clint now enjoys in the face of such large critical contempt exercised for so long a period. One time in the midst of his recent acclaim he asked me if I’d happened to see an interview in which Pauline Kael said that one of her regrets about retirement was that she no longer had a forum in which to criticize Clint Eastwood. “Can you imagine that kind of bigotry?” He sighed. The answer was that at that moment, with the chorus of past disapprovals ringing loud in my ears, I could—perhaps better than he, who has willfully deafened himself to it.
It was only in the slightly wondering air that he wore to these gala occasions that I thought I detected an awareness of the contrast between the checkered shade in which he once danced and the bright light of acclaim in which he is now caught. But that might well have been an illusion. If, as we have observed, he has a desire to convert heroism into antiheroism, he has a similar desire to convert formality into informality. Movies are, as Joseph Campbell once remarked, but “the genial imaging of enormous ideas,” and Clint wanted all of us, himself included, to be aware of something like that usefully deflating thought.
So he addressed the thousand or two assembled in their stiff banquet finery as if they were a half dozen gathered comfortably in his living room for postprandial inconsequences, or as if they were his biographer. It is usually incongruity in the behavior of someone we know well that grasps our attention. What riveted mine at these tributes was the congruity I perceived between this honoree of theirs and this interviewee of mine. I had grown used to seeing him in quite a different light, a late-afternoon light, as a rule, but always a dim one. In life, as in his movies, Clint prefers to underlight—the famous squint is less a product of temperament than of an unusual sensitivity to glare—and there were times when the room would grow almost completely dark before he switched on a lamp.
Dress and manner were, naturally, different too. Clint on these occasions was dressed in his usual day wear—T-shirt, wash pants, sneakers. His long legs propped on a coffee table, a brew sometimes in hand, he spoke softly, sometimes too softly for the tape recorder to pick up, often pausing to grope for a memory or the right words to express it. If I fumbled the flip from the A side to the B side of the tape he would reach for the recorder and do it for me: “Like we used to say in aircraft maintenance, if all else fails, force it.”
But we forced nothing else. These were actually more conversations than interviews, rambling and leisurely, full of asides and digressions, tending to encircle a point rather than to overwhelm it by front
al assault. If there was a significant difference between the man responding to questions in his living room and the man responding to adulation in public, it was one of forbearance. We often talked on after the tape ran out; he was always quick to make his escape from the panegyric podium. Other than that, however, the continuity between the man bending earnestly to the task of recollection, seeking the proper balance between disclosure and discretion, and the figure bowing awkwardly on stage, seeking the proper balance between pride and modesty, was seamless.
I have wondered, sometimes, if as they left the hall the celebrants of this life’s achievement have felt deprived of closure by the inconclusive conclusions he supplied these evenings. Finally I have guessed not. The way he plays them suits their needs as well as the Man with No Name or Dirty Harry or Josey Wales suited them in earlier times; closure is exactly what they do not want from him.
By accepting their prizes and their accolades with a sort of genial fatalism he conveys an idea that they are part of the natural order of things, to be dealt with not as some grand culmination, but as a pleasant interruption in a life still unpredictably unfolding, something like, say, a round of golf: diverting, absorbing, a matter to be taken seriously for the moment, but not dwelt upon for very long.
Clint likes to refer to the passage he is now traversing as “the back nine of life,” adding that he often finds it to be golf’s better half, a time when one starts playing the shots rather than the score, begins to enjoy the day, the stroll, the company. Ambling toward the clubhouse, as it were, an ironic smile on his face, the double bogey on eight all but forgotten, the birdie on fourteen happily recalled, the possibility of closing out the round with a par or two still lively, he is most of the time now a man visibly content within his chosen metaphor.
Clint Eastwood Page 70