Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays

by Norman Mailer

  How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)

  With MM, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, William Powell, David Wayne, Rory Calhoun. Directed by Jean Negulesco. (Magnetic Video cassette, color, 96 min., $59.95)

  Marilyn Monroe (1967)

  Documentary with narration by Mike Wallace. (Karl Video cassette, B&W, 30 min., $45)

  Fallen Stars: Elvis and Marilyn (1963 approx.)

  Documentary with narration by John Huston. (Discount Videotapes / Sound Video Unlimited cassettes, B&W, 60 min., $39.95)

  Marilyn also did Right Cross and Home Town Story for Metro. For Twentieth there was The Fireball, As Young As You Feel, Love Nest, Let’s Make It Legal, We’re Not Married, Don’t Bother to Knock, Monkey Business, O. Henry’s Full House and Niagara. They are all in varying degree unimportant pictures, and need little more description than their titles. Love Nest is worth a footnote in any history of cinema, for Jack Paar has a part in it, We’re Not Married is comic, and Don’t Bother to Knock, although a slow and disappointing piece of cinema, is worth study for a student of Monroe since she gives a serious performance in the part of a deranged girl with nuances of alternating numbness and hysteria, although she fails to project menace. It is a role she does not go near again. She has a classic stuntman’s ride in an automobile with Cary Grant in Monkey Business, a scene with Charles Laughton in Full House, and a starring role in Niagara, in which she offers the only interest.

  After her orgy of attention in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and her skill in stealing How to Marry a Millionaire from Betty Grable and Bacall, she managed to get past There’s No Business Like Show Business and River of No Return to go on to be the center of every production after (except for Let’s Make Love, which has no center), dominating directors and running away with each movie. They have all, in varying degree, become her movies. Few prizefighters could point to such a string of triumphs.

  The films she made through the last years of her life are her best, the fulfillment of an art. Her art deepened. She got better. Her subtlety took on more resonance. By The Misfits she was not so much a woman as a presence, not an actor, but an essence—the language is hyperbole, yet her effects are not. She appears in these final efforts as a visual existence different from other actors and so leaves her legend where it belongs, which is on the screen.

  All the Pirates and People

  (1983)

  My dad was Scots-English; my mother’s Dutch-Irish, strange combination. All the pirates and people who were kicked out of everyplace else.

  —CLINT EASTWOOD

  BACK IN 1967, I was trying to cast The Deer Park for Off-Broadway and needed a tall, young, clean-cut American to play the hero. Only you could not find talented actors in New York with such looks—they were all on the West Coast. One day, drinking a gloomy beer, I happened to glance at an old black-and-white TV set which had been muttering in the corner all afternoon and noticed a man on a horse. “There’s the guy,” I cried—it was much like a scene out of films one used to see—“that’s the man we want. There’s our Sergius O’Shaughnessy.”

  The director’s name was Leo Garen, and he looked at me in pity. “Yes,” he said, “he’d be wonderful. But we can’t afford him.”

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s a soap opera. He’s probably dying to get into a play.”

  “No,” said Garen, “this is an old rerun of Rawhide. The actor you’re looking at is the hottest thing around right now.”

  That was my introduction to Clint Eastwood. Now, looking back on his years of starring in films which return prodigious profits, it is obvious he satisfies some notion in hordes of people of how an American hero ought to look.

  NORMAN MAILER: I’ve seen an awful lot of presidential candidates, and you’re one of the few people who could go far that way.

  CLINT EASTWOOD: (laughs)

  MAILER: I’m not kidding. There’s one guy in five hundred who’s got a presidential face and usually nothing else.

  EASTWOOD: If I’ve got the presidential face, I’m lacking in a lot of other areas.

  MAILER: Well, all lack it.

  EASTWOOD: I don’t feel I could get up and say a lot of things that I know I couldn’t perform on. Yet they have to do that to win. The ones that are honest about what they can or can’t do don’t have a chance.

  Let us assume we are strangers and searching about for a topic of conversation at dinner.

  We discover we are both interested in Clint Eastwood.

  Yes, I admit, I happen to know him.

  Immediately, your mood improves.

  Well, I say, I don’t know him very well, but he’s an interesting man. He’s hard, however, to understand.

  Do you like him?

  You have to. On first meeting, he’s one of the nicest people you ever met. But I can’t say I know him well. We talked a couple of times and had a meal together. I liked him. I think you’d have to be around for a year before you saw his ugly side, assuming he has one.

  It would take that long?

  Well, he’s very laid back. If you don’t bother him, he will never bother you. In that sense, he is like the characters he plays in his films.

  Since my new partner is a good listener, I begin to expatiate. I describe Eastwood on our first meeting. I talk about his tall presence, which is exceptional—exactly as one would wish it to be in a movie star. He certainly has the lean, self-contained body that you see only in the best dancers, rock climbers, competition skiers, and tightrope walkers. His face has the same disconcerting purity. You could be looking at a murderer or a saint.

  Here, my partner makes a face.

  No, I say, it’s true. Men who have been in prison for twenty years sometimes have such a look, and you can see it on monks and certain acrobats with fine and tragic faces.

  Is he very good-looking?

  I’m not used to thinking of men as that good-looking, but he is.

  And you liked him?

  He’s marvelously friendly. Just saying hello. He has no fear of others. At least, he shows none. I tell you, it was splendid. I rarely liked a man so much on first meeting.

  Good Lord. What did you talk about?

  Well, Eastwood said right off, “Do you know I tried to get into The Naked and the Dead back when they were making a movie of it years ago, but they didn’t want me.”

  “That’s fair,” I told him, “we tried to get you for The Executioner’s Song. I wanted you to play Gary Gilmore.”

  Had he read the book, my dinner partner wanted to know.

  I don’t think so. Clint only answered: “What would you say Gilmore was like?”

  “Oh,” I said, “he was a funny man, Gilmore. Very spiritual on the one hand with a real mean streak on the other.”

  Eastwood gave a happy grin. “Sounds as if he would have been just right for me.”

  That conversation took place outside a shabby Spanish-style stucco motel near the beach in Santa Cruz, California. Eastwood was on location making his latest movie, Sudden Impact, and the small crowd watching us stood outside the company barrier. They had been hanging around for hours in the hope they would get a look at him. In the background you could smell boardwalk popcorn and hear the downrush of the roller coaster after a long clanking up the first rise. Some kids with orange hair were standing next to a black girl outside the movie company rope, and a couple of old ginks with slits in their sneakers and patience in their eyes were waiting beside blank-faced kids, all waiting behind the rope, never getting bored. Once in a while, Eastwood walked in and out of the movie trailer trucks or mobile dressing rooms parked along the side street off the motel, and it was then they would have their glimpse of him. He might even offer a line as he went by. “Still with us?” he would ask. “Oh, yeah, Clint,” they would reply. Merely by standing behind this rope, they felt glamorous.

  One fellow, tall, not bad-looking, with a dark suntan to set off his dark goatee, was brought up to Eastwood by one of the company people. “Clint, this fellow has a gift for you.”

/>   It was a short leather cape of the sort Eastwood used to wear in Sergio Leone westerns near to twenty years ago when Clint played the cowboy who had no name, rarely spoke, and walked about with the stub of a pencil-thin cigar in his mouth. A killer stared back at you then—the stills taken from those spaghetti westerns certainly made him famous in Italy, then all Europe, then the world.

  Now, Clint Eastwood said softly to the man bearing him the gift, “You keep this.”

  “I want you to have it, Clint.”

  “Better not. You might change your mind in time to come.”

  “I never wear it,” protested the man with the goatee. “This cape is right for you.”

  Eastwood, however, was accepting no gifts he would cast away later. That could leave a bruise on the mood. “No,” he said softly, “I really don’t need it. I have a number of capes already.”

  You make him sound good, my partner remarked.

  Since we were warmed up, I went on about commanders in forward companies during the Second World War and how you could tell at once if they were respected from the mood that came off the first gun trained on your approach. Forward companies in Luzon lived on outposts miles apart in the hills and sometimes had no visitors for a week at a time. To drop in on them was a little like boarding a ship. You never had to guess about morale. The mood told you immediately how the men felt. If the company commander was well liked, morale was as high as the greeting you get from a large, happy, impressive, slightly crazy family. Everybody feels manic in the wealth of their people.

  The same, I suggested, could be said of movie sets. They are able to offer great morale, awful morale, or anything in between. Eastwood might be renowned for bringing in pictures ahead of schedule and under budget, but he was also most popular with his crew. That was apparent. They adored him.

  Of course, not everyone might wish to be adored by a movie crew. They have a great sense of humor for jokes that go with a few beers, but little tolerance for a fancy mix. They are good enough trade unionists to suspect that art is phony and would never trust any male who could not lift his own weight in movie equipment.

  His crew obviously loved him. Eastwood could put back a few brews himself. Beer was his drink of choice. Besides, for movie crews, he had another virtue—he knew how to use animals. In the movie he was making now, there would be a big, doddering old English bull, fat, short-legged, asthmatic, pooped-out, and smelly. This dog would be a total hit onscreen. The script called for the English bull to piss on cue. At each right moment, the beast would raise one mournful leg and make water on a fallen villain. The crew loved the idea. That was cutting the mustard.

  But how do you train an animal to do such things on cue, asked my partner.

  I had put Eastwood to the same question. He came back with a glint in his eye. The modesty of the solution appealed to him. “Oh,” he said, “you attach a monofilament to the leg and give a tug.” He had to grin before the powers of conditioned reflex.

  To fill the pause that followed, my partner now said: You do seem sure of a lot of things about Eastwood.

  Well, I know him, I guess.

  You said you didn’t.

  I do, I confessed. Eastwood is an artist. So I know him well. I know him by his films.

  I also like his films, said my partner, but surely you aren’t going to say he’s much of an artist?

  I’ll go further. I’ll say that you can see the man in his work just as clearly as you see Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms or John Cheever in his short stories. Hell, yes, he’s an artist. I even think he’s important. Not just a fabulous success at the box office, but important.

  You do admire him.

  No, I said, I’m angry at him. He doesn’t know how good he is. I don’t think he tries hard enough for what’s truly difficult.

  Did you tell him that at lunch?

  No. He was making a movie.

  Our discussion was now at an impasse. Besides, it was time to talk to the partner on the other side. So the conversation on Eastwood was never finished. I had to think about it later, however. A talented author once remarked that he discovered the truth at the point of his pencil in the act of writing. It occurred to me that I usually came across the truth while talking. I would say things and by the tone of my voice they would seem true or not. When I said Clint Eastwood was an artist, I liked the ring. It was true. It might also be true that he was a timid artist.

  That made a nice paradox. For, by any physical terms, he was a brave man. Once, after a plane crashed at sea, he saved his life by swimming three miles to shore. He did a number of his own stunts in movies and learned to rock climb for The Eiger Sanction. The film was embarrassing, a prodigiously multicolored plot equal to ice cream on turnips, but Eastwood’s rock climbing was good. He rode a horse well. He did car racing. He even looked, on the basis of Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can, as if he might make some kind of boxer. He had a quick left jab with good weight behind it. He could certainly draw a gun. If it came to great box office movie stars competing in a decathlon, Eastwood would hold his own.

  He was also capable of fine acting. With a few exceptions, he invariably understood his role and did a good deal with the smallest moves. Critics had been attacking him for years over how little he did onscreen, but Eastwood may have known something they did not.

  The plot of a film works, after all, for the star. The more emotion that a story will stir in an audience, the more will the audience read such feeling into the star’s motionless face. Sometimes the facial action of the movie star might offer no more movement than a riverbank, yet there is nothing passive about such work. A riverbank must brace itself to support the rush around a bend.

  I always was a different kind of person, even when I started acting. I guess I finally got to a point where I had enough nerve to do nothing.… My first film with Sergio Leone had a script with tons of dialogue, tremendously expository, and I just cut it all down. Leone thought I was crazy. Italians are used to much more vocalizing, and I was playing this guy who didn’t say much of anything. I cut it all down. Leone didn’t speak any English so he didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but he got so he liked it after a while.

  There is a moment in Play Misty for Me when Eastwood’s character, an easygoing disc jockey, realizes that he has gotten himself into an affair with a hopelessly psychotic woman. As the camera moves in, his stare is as still as the eyes of a trapped animal. Yet his expression is luminous with horror. He is one actor who can put his soul into his eyes.

  The real question might have little to do, however, with how much of an actor he could be. What separated Eastwood from other box office stars was that his films (especially since he had begun to direct them) had come to speak more and more of his own vision of life in America. One was encountering a homegrown philosophy, a hardworking everyday subtle American philosophy in film.

  Burt Reynolds also gives us a private vision of the taste of life in America, but it is not so much a philosophy as a premise. Eat high on the hog, Reynolds suggests. The best way to get through life is drunk.

  Since it’s possible that half the male population of America under forty also believes this, Reynolds is endlessly reliable. Of course, like many a happy drinking man before him, he takes no real chances, just falls and smacko collisions. The car gets totaled, but Burt is too loaded to be hurt. He leaps to his feet, pulls the fender off his neck with a sorry look, and we laugh. The best way to get through life is drunk.

  Eastwood is saying more. If you discount his two worst films in these last ten years, Firefox and The Eiger Sanction, if you bypass Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and The Enforcer as movies made to manipulate audiences and satisfy producers, you are also left with High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Every Which Way But Loose, Bronco Billy, and Honkytonk Man.

  A protagonist in each of these five films stands near to his creator. Eastwood has made five cinematic relatives. They are spread over more than a hundred years, from the Ci
vil War to the present, and the action is in different places west of the Mississippi, from Missouri to California. They are Okies and outlaws, truckers, rodeo entertainers, and country and western singers, but they come out of the odd, wild, hard, dry, sad, sour redneck wisdom of small-town life in the Southwest. All of Eastwood’s knowledge is in them, a sardonic, unsentimental set of values that is equal to art for it would grapple with the roots of life itself. “When things get bad,” says the outlaw Josey Wales, “and it looks like you’re not going to make it, then you got to get mean, I mean plain plumb dog mean, because if you lose your head then, you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”

  One has to think of the Depression years of Eastwood’s childhood when his father was looking for work and taking the family up and down the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, out there with a respectable family in a mix of Okies also wandering up and down California searching for work. Those Okies are in Eastwood’s films, as must be the gritty knowledge he gained over the seven years he worked on Rawhide. How many bit players and cowboy stunt men passing through Rawhide’s weekly episodes were also a part of that migrating country culture that was yet going to present itself to us by way of CBs and pickup trucks and western music? “You’ve got to outlast yourself” was the only way to talk of overcoming fatigue. The words happen to be Eastwood’s, but the language was shared with his characters, brothers in the same family, ready to share a family humor: it is that a proper orangutan will not miss a good opportunity to defecate on the front seat of a police cruiser, as indeed it did in Every Which Way But Loose. Small-town humor, but in Honkytonk Man, his last film before the one he was shooting now, it became art.

  MAILER: How did you feel about Honkytonk Man before it came out?

  EASTWOOD: I thought it was good, as good as I could do it. I did it in five weeks, five weeks of shooting, and I felt good about it. I felt it might find a small audience somewhere that might enjoy it. I wasn’t looking for a big film. I just figured sometimes you have to do some things that you want to do and be selfish about it.