Dedication

To Shannon, for her patience

To Paula, for her pluck

To Paloma, for her promise

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: A Cool Gaze

Part I: Oakland to the Open Range

One

Two

Three

Four

Part II: The Rise of the Sidekick

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Part III: Defining a Kingdom

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Part IV: Pulling All the Strings

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Part V: A Higher Level Yet

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Part VI: A Pantheon of One

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Part VII: Unbowed

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Coda: Sunset . . . in Due Time

Acknowledgments

Sources

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

About Mariner Books

Also by Shawn Levy

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

A Cool Gaze

He can speak with his director and fellow cast members only in gestures, facial expressions, scant broken English.

Wearing clothes and cowboy gear he brought with him from back home, he’s stuck atop a mule and is coated with several days of stubble and sweat and attitude.

He has no entourage or plush accommodations or even a dressing room.

The broiling sun, the swirling dust, the blasted landscape, the gibbering crew, the foul cigarillo in his teeth, the nagging suspicion that he’s involved in something crazy: Of course he’s gonna squint.

In a sense, at age thirty-four, he’s finally doing what he’s always wanted to: starring in a film of his own choosing, without the approval of Hollywood pencil-pushers. He knows that his part was offered to several more bankable actors and that they all passed on it. And he knows that he was a last-minute choice, and a cheap one at that: $15,000 flat. There’s little glory here.

But it got him to Europe—or this forsaken bit of southern Spain, anyhow. And if it turns out to be as lousy as the pictures he made before he became a TV star, he can sleep comfortably in the assurance that nobody back home will ever see it.

Still, on the outside chance they might, he’s been doing his damnedest to make it hard for anyone to remember anything his character says and maybe even his name.

At the director’s command (“Azione!”—he’d learned that much), he presses his heels into the mule’s flanks, loosens the reins, and rides forward into the unknown.

What the hell . . .

C-L-I-N-T.

In that short, sharp syllable, there is an emblem of American manhood and morality and sheer bloody-minded will, for better and worse, on-screen and off-screen, for more than sixty years.

Whether he’s holding a pistol, an orangutan, or a boxing glove, whether he’s staring down bad guys on a Western street (Old West or new, no matter) or peering through the lens of a camera on yet another film set, he is as blunt, curt, and solid as his name, a star of the old-school stripe and one of the most prolific and accomplished directors of his time, a man of rock and iron and brute force.

Clint.

It fits him.

No Hollywood figure has so complexly represented the cultural and political climates of contemporary America as Clint Eastwood. At age ninety-five, he has lived a tumultuous century and embodied much of his time and many of its contradictions. He is an inkblot in whom we see a variety of opposing ideas at once—or one whole idea at one moment from one angle and the converse notion at the next from another.

He is a genuine box office superstar, tall and lean and handsome, with a glint in his eye (often of malice, but often, too, of wit) and a record of hit films spanning more than five decades. He is a prolific, popular, and admired director, whose dozens of films have earned billions of dollars and won thirteen Oscars (out of thirty-five total nominations), including two for Best Picture. And he’s a marvel of physical endurance and dogged work ethic; into his nineties, he could still be found not only behind the camera but in front of it, directing and/or starring in a film in both 2021 and 2024. He’s old enough and deserving enough and chiseled enough to be on Hollywood’s Mount Rushmore, and it’s a fair bet he could serve as contractor on the job and get in a couple of swings of a hammer.

In the popular mind, in the most common image of him, he is gruff, flinty, squint-eyed, stoic, even sadistic, prone to slow burns and violent outbursts, a vessel of privilege and patriarchy, an old-guard warhorse clinging to power, fame, wealth, and righteousness long past his sell-by date. From his violent Westerns to his violent cop movies to his late-career films that can seem to promote vigilantism and distrust of government to his cameos in the political world to his . . . let’s call it complex history of wives, partners, and children, he seems, at a cursory glance, the sort of dinosaur who gives other dinosaurs a rotten reputation.

But of course, that’s only the surface, below which other pictures emerge: a shy kid from a surprisingly comfortable upbringing who learned his crafts and rose to their summits—acting, directing, even music composition—with exacting and painstaking rigor; an iconoclast who changed the business of movies to his advantage while toiling within the system; a sober sentimentalist whose art regularly evokes romance and pathos for the downtrodden, the marginalized, the abused; an inconstant lover who regularly abetted the careers of his romantic partners (and who, incidentally, directed and starred in one of the greatest films Hollywood has made about grown-up love); a man averse to the spotlight who stepped into the political arena when he felt his sense of equity thwarted; a self-described loafer who has directed fifteen films since turning seventy-five (and acted in four and—why not?—produced four more).

We picture him most vividly, of course, as he has appeared on-screen: squinting through cigarillo smoke in A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; imposing rough justice at the point of a .44 Magnum in Dirty Harry and its sequels; cavorting with an orangutan in Every Which Way But Loose; sowing moral vengeance in the Old West in The Outlaw Josey Wales or Pale Rider; abandoning farming for murder-for-hire in Unforgiven; grudgingly training a woman boxer in Million Dollar Baby; standing up for his neighbors despite his racism toward them in Gran Torino.

But those are roles, however well cast, however convincing (and they are), however iconic, and they are two-dimensional in comparison to the whole life. The reality of Clint Eastwood is far more rich, knotty, and absorbing—a saga of cunning, determination, and conquest, a great American story about a man ascending to the Hollywood pantheon while keeping a gimlet eye on its ways and habits and one foot firmly planted outside its door. To think about him is to consider the history of movies and of America itself; how the idea of what a man is and should be has changed over decades; the ideals of self-determination and hard work and communitarianism; the notions of privilege and merit and grace; and the strange turns of fate and fortune that can transform a journeyman into a master, an also-ran into an institution, a promising nobody into an icon.

So who is Clint Eastwood, really?

He’s a lifelong loner who, at an early age, found comfort and identity in dreaming and self-reliance and self-expression, first at a piano, then in front of a movie camera, then behind it.

He’s a self-styled man’s man of an almost extinct generation and ideal who finds virtue and worth in physical activity, sexual conquest, financial independence, and the ability to tell bosses and other big shots where to get off.

He’s an old-school Libertarian who believes in small government and big business; in individual freedom regardless of gender, race, sexuality, or lifestyle; in protecting natural resources; in the value of traditional guardrails and institutions; and—surprisingly, given his screen image—in the reasonable regulation of firearms. (It’s easy to imagine him a conservative fire-breather, but he has always named as his favorite Western William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident, a film about the dangers of the bloodthirst of the mob.)

He’s a subtle and (even with all his laurels) underrated director and steward of his image and career, with a nearly neurotic set of practices and habits and thematic hobbyhorses and a work ethic that sometimes overrides his aesthetic judgments.

He’s the last true Old Hollywood movie star, a man who rose on a vibe and a certain kind of story and lived long enough to ask serious and disturbing questions of himself and his audience about the taste for that vibe and that story.

He’s a family man who loves and supports his children (he has so many of them!) but whose taste for autonomy and pleasure has undermined his most important relationships with women.

He’s a hard and loyal boss who nurtures the careers of colleagues and employees who accept his authority but has soured on even long-tenured collaborators overnight.

He’s a committed lover of nature, from domestic pets to wildlife to vast stretches of coast and forest and parkland, who nonetheless believes that the government is an enemy if it chooses to question a property owner’s intentions for what he’s paid for.

He’s a dedicated fan of jazz and blues and country music who has made a greater place for those arts in his movies than almost any other Hollywood director and lifted them into the limelight at every chance—sometimes, yes, for personal profit, but often just for the sheer joy of it.

He’s one of the few people in Hollywood’s history to be as significant behind the camera as in front of it, and one of the very few people who can claim to have enjoyed a seventy-plus-year career making movies.

He’s an honest-to-Pete American icon, a man who appeared in and created dozens of memorable films, has participated actively in public events that mattered to him, and has stood the test of time in real time, in real life, while still living it.

And what of, as is so central to his story, the movies?

Clint’s film career is an utterly singular thing. As previously noted, it has lasted seventy years,* longer than the lives—not just the working lives—of many of the actors and directors among whose company he justly ranks. It has included, by my count, two dozen films as actor, actor/director, or director that stand up to repeated viewings and critical scrutiny, among them a handful of indisputable masterworks. And, as a whole, it has been an unusually transparent work in progress; he has learned his craft before his audience’s eyes, all the while centering certain ideas and tones and emphases (and, yes, missteps) that make his filmography as coherent a whole as those of many other more celebrated performers and auteurs.

For now, let’s ignore the first decade: the tiny roles in about a dozen pieces of studio hackery and the epic ride in the saddle (217 hour-long episodes!) as Rowdy Yates on TV’s Rawhide. Importantly formative work, yes, but not the real story.

We start in the desert of Almería, where Clint spent three summers making world-changing films with Sergio Leone, the famed Dollars trilogy that launched the spaghetti Western and cemented in the public mind the image of a vengeful mercenary who shot more bullets than he uttered words. They are brilliant, brutal, groundbreaking movies, and Clint is perfect in them: lean, sullen, calculating, as still as a panther in wait and quick to explode into lethal violence. They are Leone’s movies chief of all, but they are unimaginable with a better-known actor in Clint’s stead. The sheer surprise and mystery of the character is a key element of his iconic power; if an actor can be said to have been born to play a role, then Clint is that actor and this character* is that part.

Within three more years, he had appeared in a number of big-budget studio movies, some quite successful, all quite lucrative for him, but he found he didn’t like them. So he built an independent production company for himself (albeit one housed at and funded by a studio) and began making movies of his own. Straightaway, he found a second mentor/guide, Don Siegel, an exemplary Hollywood working director who delivered solid and sometimes excellent films across a variety of genres. They entered into four collaborations over four years,* the last of which was the picture that made Clint a bona fide superstar. That movie, 1971’s diabolically effective crime thriller Dirty Harry, brought Clint and his taciturn, vengeful, trigger-happy Western gunman into the twentieth century and turned him from a genre star into the centerpiece of a national cultural debate. Clint had morphed from someone committing acts of almost cartoonish violence in a make-believe world to a killing machine dispatching foes recognizable from real life with extralegal lethality and no little relish. The film was a phenomenon, spawning four sequels over seventeen years and untold numbers of imitators. And it came to define its star in ways that would take decades for him to shake.

By the time he started wielding a .44 Magnum on the wicked streets of San Francisco, though, Clint was engaged in the process that would eventually free him from his accidental public image. The same year that saw the premiere of Dirty Harry saw him direct and star in a Hitchcockian psychological thriller titled Play Misty for Me, a fine debut for a directorial career that would overlap with his superstardom for the coming decades and allow him to make self-created productions within the studio system, eventually without appearing on-screen at all. Clint’s directing life would provide him an entire second career as long as those of, oh, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, to name two storied filmmakers who have not only made fewer fictional features than him* but won fewer Best Picture Oscars.

More important, Clint-the-director has made a habit of choosing projects that seemed to comment on the imposing cultural figure cut by Clint-the-actor and the themes of violence, vengeance, and law and order in the latter’s films. Starting in the 1980s, almost systematically, his films have explicitly critiqued the bloodshed and cruelty so prevalent in his earliest work. Several of his most notable later-career movies—Unforgiven, Mystic River, Gran Torino, American Sniper, Flags of Our Fathers, and White Hunter Black Heart—weighed the cost of killing on the soul of the perpetrator with a bluntness rare in the work of any action star. It’s hard to think of another movie icon who built such a towering image in the public mind and then regularly asked himself and his audience to reconsider the value that had been placed on what he had done.

And another thematic strain became evident in his work: reflections of a life spent making art (or at least spectacle) in Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, Bird, and, again, White Hunter Black Heart. In these films—beloved more by critics than audiences—Clint presented himself to the world as a showman, a conjurer, an itinerant player, a man haunted by an itch to create and express. In a significant way, those films are the essence of him. In one light, through the prism of certain films, you might see him as a machine, more intent on commerce than art. But in another, more personal view, he is someone who only feels right about the world and himself when he is working in the creation of something and sharing it. How else can we explain his determination to endure the drudging labor of filmmaking after reaching his ninetieth year? He was—he is—a man who makes movies. Take that away from him, and he loses much of the meaning and substance that spur us to learn more about him.

In late 2024, Juror #2, his fortieth feature behind the camera, was released, making him, at age ninety-four, almost surely the oldest director ever to have made a full-length film for a major American studio (and with a major-American-studio budget). You have to wonder why he persists. After all, he can golf at Pebble Beach any time he wants (he owns the course!), he can wander the lush, wild property of his home above Carmel-by-the-Sea, he can roam his massive ranch in the shadow of Mount Shasta or visit his vacation houses in Idaho or Maui, and yet he chooses to work, to make movies, to tell stories. He is a father (indeed, a great-grandfather) and an ex-mayor and a businessman and a fitness junkie and a jazz fan and a symbol of the American spirit and psyche and an ordinary man with ordinary needs and tastes—yes, all of that. But chief of all, he is a man of the cinema, even if he would think that a grand term. He is one of the very last actors or directors alive who can recall a time when making movies was a punch-the-clock job and, ultimately, one of the most memorable figures ever to fill the screen with his presence or to create the images that keep us enthralled with motion pictures. His life, as expansive as it has been, can be distilled into this truth: The man and his movies are one and the same, and he is a filmmaker in the very marrow of his bones.

There is already a shelf of books about Clint Eastwood, including several full-length biographies, coffee-table books, academic studies, collections of interviews, and such irresistible oddities as Clint Eastwood: Sexual Cowboy and Clint Fucking Eastwood. But two volumes stand especially tall amid this company: Richard Schickel’s 1996 Clint Eastwood: A Biography and Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 Clint: The Life and Legend. They are both good books, and they obviously cover much of the same ground as each other, but the two could not be more different; indeed, they often seem to be at war. Schickel, who had access to Clint, his family and friends, and his film crews and casts, wrote a gentlemanly, even fawning account of his subject, judicious about and approving of Clint’s work, respectful of his longevity and status, and awkwardly dismissive and forgiving of anything untoward or downright ugly in his behavior. McGilligan didn’t have Clint’s cooperation, but he did impressive and unassailable research, puncturing some half-truths in Schickel’s account (as well as those of previous authors) and exploring areas, particularly dark areas, that no previous biographer had mapped. But just as Schickel can be faulted as overly generous, McGilligan is overly harsh; he doesn’t reckon Clint to be much as an actor, a director, or a man, and he thoroughly chronicles every misstep and flaw in Clint’s work and life. If the one book presents Clint as too good to be true, the other presents him as too awful to countenance. Each is worthy in its way; each is also at once overmuch and only partly sufficient.

When I started this book, I feared that those authors had explored every aspect of Clint’s life and achievement. And, in a way, they had. But they did so rather long ago, considering how much Clint has done in the twenty-first century, and they did so from such distinctly opposed points of view that they left a massive space between them, a middle ground where Clint and his work could be described and evaluated from a position of neither acquiescence nor denigration. It was still possible for a book to celebrate the man and his work and deeds while acknowledging the flaws—and worse—in him, his choices, and, yes, his films. I have come to admire Clint greatly as an artist, to be able to tip my hat to many of his actions as a man of heartfelt beliefs, to acknowledge some real unpleasantnesses about him, and to be grateful that I never worked for him or was a woman in his life. I believe he’s an indelible screen icon, an occasionally great director, and an emblematic citizen of Hollywood, Carmel, and the United States; I think, as well, that he has indulged in behavior that men of his breeding and generation have too often taken to be their right and due. I like him, and I revere some of his performances and films. But I’m happy to do so at a cool remove. And I think that this book reflects the balance of respect, appreciation, caution, sobriety, and neutrality that lives inside me when I think of him. The facts that comprise Clint Eastwood can be seen in plain daylight, noted, and weighed; his achievements, his endurance, and the sheer fact of him demand and merit an impartial assessment. I hope that’s exactly what you have in your hands.

Part I

Oakland to the Open Range

AN AMERICAN TALE

A FAMILY TREK

A TALL, LONELY BOY

A PIANO

HARD WORK

A CALL-UP

A SWIMMING POOL

A SPLASHDOWN

A GIRL

A JOB IN A DREAM WORLD

A PINPRICK OF HOPE

The life that prepared Clinton Eastwood Jr. to become an icon was ordinary enough. But chance and fortune and resilience all played a part in creating him, especially at the start.

ARCHIVIO GBB / Alamy Stock Photo

One

If you were to imagine a family line for Clint Eastwood—or for the characters he has most famously played—you’d probably come up with something like his actual genealogy. As might be surmised by his name, his work, his aura, the place he has occupied in American culture, and even the Lincolnesque physique by which the world knows him, he is about as deeply imbued with Anglo-European colonial and frontier heritage as it is possible for an American to be.

You’d likely think white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, colonialist, pioneering, empire-expanding, perhaps with some military connections, maybe a few stints enforcing the law, maybe a few stints outside of it, tracing back to the lands around the North Sea and the Irish Sea and arriving in North America as far back as, oh, the seventeenth century—and that would be, more or less, spot-on. Both main branches of his family tree—the paternal Eastwoods and the maternal Runners—have ancestry in Great Britain, Germany, Holland, and Ireland; both sides had a presence in the pre-Revolutionary colonies of New England and the mid-Atlantic; and both sides migrated westward over the generations, establishing homes in the Midwest, the Great Plains, and the Rockies before arriving in California as early as the Gold Rush era of the midnineteenth century and altogether by the dawn of the twentieth.

The lineage constitutes a fairly ordinary history of working families, employed mainly in the ordinary occupations of small-town life, with some seafarers, soldiers, public officeholders, and even a handful of dreamers and drifters in the mix. There were churchmen and doctors, sawyers and peddlers, hoteliers and miners, entrepreneurs and farmers. There were no outlaws or lawmen to speak of, to answer one obvious question, nor were there many people engaged in the arts, to answer another, save a pair of paternal great-grandparents who were music teachers and a maternal great-grandfather who occasionally indulged small-town theatrics as a sideline to commercial careers.

If that sounds like a heritage likely to produce nondescript descendants, it is equally the sort of inheritance that could also create someone capable of standing comfortably in the middle of American history and society and making art about it from a position that nowadays might be called, without prejudice, cultural advantage. Whatever else he may be, Clint Eastwood is a pure product of America, the good and the bad and the varied faces of it; and, as such, he is able to portray, examine, and assess what that inheritance means from a perspective that few other Hollywood filmmakers of the past half-century have enjoyed. Like his choices of subject matter, his heritage reveals in the man and his work a chronicle of a nation and its understanding of itself.

On the Eastwood side of the family, the great California Gold Rush of 1849 found a great-grandfather, Asa B. Eastwood, managing a mine in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, while his wife and three children resided mainly in San Francisco. The youngest of that family, Burr, born in 1871, lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay area and worked almost his entire career in retail enterprise. In 1900, he married Jessie Anderson, whose family, recently immigrated from Scotland, was composed of those aforementioned music teachers and their four daughters. Burr and Jessie welcomed their first son, Burr Jr., in 1902 and a second, Clinton, four years later, mere weeks after the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Two more years later, the family relocated to the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay and the newly founded city of Piedmont, which then sat northeast of Oakland proper but today is essentially a neighborhood of Oakland, technically a city but completely surrounded by another, larger one. And that was where Clinton grew up as, by family accounts, a textbook all-American boy.

The Piedmont of the early twentieth century was a place where families from the port city of Oakland would move if they were lucky enough to rise in the world. One such was the family of Waldo and Virginia Runner, descended from a line with an even lengthier presence in North America than the Eastwoods. Waldo was born in Colorado in 1882, the first child of Charles (“C. C.”) and Sophia Runner. C. C. Runner played and sold organs, performed in local amateur shows, and was a notorious drinker, gambler, and Sabbath-breaker who abandoned his family, traveling to Alaska in the gold rush of the 1890s. Save for a single encounter with Waldo, who went north to see him, he never laid eyes on Sophia or their children again.

In 1903, Waldo married Virginia McClanahan, who came from a line of physicians, businessmen, and educators, and the two welcomed a daughter the following year. By 1906, when their next child, a son, arrived, they had moved to Oakland, where Waldo worked for a firm that manufactured automobile parts. A third Runner child, Margret Ruth—who would always go by her middle name—was born in 1909. By the time she was in middle school, the Runner family’s fortunes had so risen that they, too, were living in Piedmont. And a few years later, when Ruth Runner was thirteen, she set eyes on a tall, athletic, attractive boy two years her senior: Clinton Eastwood.

They were honest-to-gosh high school sweethearts, Ruth and Clinton, and they made a striking couple: He was quarterback of the football team and a competitive swimmer, a Big Man on Campus; she was pretty and tall and liked to dance and was musical, able to pick out hit tunes of the day by ear on the family piano. They were popular around school and were sought after socially. Clinton, Ruth later recalled, was “the first one at a party and the last one to leave.” His son later remembered Clinton playing the guitar and singing with friends and always being in the midst of the fun. “My dad would have loved to have been an actor,” he recalled, “because he was kind of a ham.”

Before long, Clinton and Ruth would be bound together not only by sparkle but by loss. In 1925, when Clinton was enrolled in what would be a brief college career, his mother, Jessie, died, aged forty. That same year, Waldo and Virginia Runner dissolved their marriage. The connection between Clinton and Ruth deepened amid these upheavals. Two years later, on June 5, 1927, after Ruth had graduated high school and when they were both working at office jobs, they were wed at the Piedmont Interdenominational Church, a centerpiece of the small city.* Ruth was eighteen and Clinton a few days shy of twenty-one.

By mid-April 1930, they were entered into the federal census, having set up house in an apartment on Beacon Street in Oakland, just a block or so from Lake Merritt, with Clinton then selling stocks and bonds. On May 31, at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, their first child, a son, was born. He was a prodigy, weighing in, per his mother’s recollection, at an elephantine 11 pounds, 6 ounces. The nurses on the maternity ward nicknamed him “Samson” and showed him off to visitors, including, per family legend, a local news reporter. But on paper he was named Clinton Eastwood Jr.—with, just like his father, no middle name. (For the record, he hated sharing a name with his dad. For one thing, it meant that around the house he was called “Junior” or “Sonny”; for another, as he told a Hollywood columnist, “I think a kid deserves his own name.”)*

It being the spring of 1930, scant months after the stock market crash that inaugurated the Great Depression, Clinton’s securities career had ground to a halt. Now responsible for the care of a wife and child, he sought any work he could find, wherever he could find it. An opportunity arose in Spokane, Washington, where Ruth’s brother operated a refrigeration company, and the little family spent a short period there before beginning a chapter of wandering as Clinton’s employment opportunities emerged and faded. They moved back to Oakland for a spell, during which time Clinton was offered a job as an attendant at a service station in Pacific Palisades, smack on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and the Pacific Coast Highway. The opportunity to make a steady wage pumping gas was a sufficient lure for him to uproot his wife and child again and move 370 miles south. “That’s how tough times were,” his son later recalled. “The guy had a year or two of college and that was the best job he could get.”*

The Eastwoods rented a home in Pacific Palisades, which was almost countryside at the time, “a little dumpy house,” as Clint recalled, “with nothing around it apart from other dumpy houses.” They moved on to the more central Wilshire district of Los Angeles, where they lived through at least January 1934, when a second child, a daughter, Jeanne, was born, completing the family. And they kept moving in search of financial stability. The following years found them bouncing around, living in Redding, Sacramento, and, finally, the East Bay area, where they settled permanently by the late 1930s, making a home in Piedmont by the time Clint was twelve.

They weren’t desperate; Clinton always seemed to be able to find a position, often a step above the previous, and even with all their worldly goods towed behind their car in a cargo trailer, they would never be mistaken for the Joad family. “It wasn’t Grapes of Wrath stuff,” Clint acknowledged, “but it wasn’t uptown, either.” He could see that there were folks worse off than his family: “I still have an image,” he said decades later, “of someone coming to our house when I was about six years old, offering to cut and stack the wood in our backyard if my mother would make him a sandwich.” Clint was deeply impressed by the determination, selflessness, and drive his father demonstrated. “My dad was a hardworking guy, and he’d been brought up under the ethic ‘Nothing comes from nothing.’ You get what you give. And you work for what you get. . . . You look back as an adult, and you see the struggles both of them went through, and you think they put out a lot for us.”

Still, the pattern of settle-and-move, settle-and-move throughout his childhood meant continual upheaval for a young boy who, naturally, longed for the security of a regular school and a steady group of friends. “Those were shitty years,” Clint recalled. He was, by his own telling, stoic about the routine of pulling up stakes, but that didn’t mean he was happy about it. “I must have gone to ten different schools in ten years,” he said. It was a routine guaranteed to cultivate reticence and loneliness. “Having moved around and never getting to know too many people,” he remembered, “you spend a lot of time alone.” Worse, perhaps, than the isolation was the fact that he stood out doubly: for his sudden appearance in a new school and for his height, the combination of which made for a painful pattern. “When you’re the new kid in town, you always have to punch it out with the kids the first day or so,” he said. “Kids always seem to pick on tall kids, too, and I was six feet tall at the age of thirteen.” Even as a mature man looking back on a successful life, he could vividly recall the cost that his family’s transitional life imposed on him: “You always hated it, because, you know, you just get to know a few kids on the block and get accepted a little bit and then, all of a sudden, boom, you’re gone.” As he put it bluntly: “I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

He was, later on, able to identify a positive strain in all of this discomfort: His boyhood loneliness opened a portal to an internal world, where, as he would later realize, his future life was taking root. “Since I was almost always the new boy on the block, I often played alone, and in that situation your imagination becomes very active. You create little mythologies in your own mind. I suppose it was the best thing that ever happened in my youth.” One of his favorite imaginary lives involved, predictably, the Wild West, but there was a stay on that fantasy. “My mother wouldn’t let me dress up as a cowboy,” he said, laughing about it years later—perhaps because of his penchant for simulating gunshot wounds; Ruth “hated it when I covered my shirts with ketchup.” He lost himself in reading—he was especially fond of Walter R. Brooks’s series featuring Freddy the Pig, who solved barnyard crimes and mysteries—and he had a talismanic toy, “a little bear [with] a suit and a hat, sort of a brown fedora. It belonged to my grandfather and then to my dad’s brother, and then my dad,” and Clint kept it long enough for his own grandchildren to play with it.

It’s hard to look at this early, wandering life and not empathize with its lonely, introverted, dreamy protagonist. It would be a long time before the tall, fantasizing boy with the tight lips and sharp eyes would find a plausible conduit for his internal life. But his mother always encouraged him, telling him repeatedly, “You have a little angel on your shoulder.” Perhaps, but it didn’t do much to buoy him. He was wary of connection, protective of his emotions, and deeply desperate to cut away on his own and find some other life. “I always wanted to flee the flock,” he remembered. “I just always wanted to be out somewhere.”

Just as the family’s wandering years weren’t the stuff of Steinbeck, the life Clint lived as a middle schooler and teen hardly evoked Dickens. “We weren’t hungry,” Clint recalled, “and my parents were always cheerful,” but they were scary years in which to grow up. “There was no fallback position for anyone. You didn’t know how things could turn out. I think it left me with a feeling of uncertainty about life.”

By the time of the 1940 census, the Eastwoods were living on Ardley Avenue in Oakland; Clinton was working at a jewelry store in San Francisco and earning $2,200 a year—almost double the national average salary—while Ruth added to the household income with occasional work as a keypunch operator at a local bank, where she earned $25 a week. Their meanderings came to an end in 1942, when they put together enough money to buy a house on Hillside Avenue in Piedmont from one of Ruth’s aunts. There, young Clint started attending what turned out to be a string of schools—an impermanence necessitated by his inability to fit in, academically or socially, and by the occasional disciplinary infraction, which school officials resolved by simply sending the bothersome boy somewhere else.

The country was, of course, at war by then. As he recalled, “The day of Pearl Harbor, I remember my dad coming home with all the newspapers from San Francisco. I remember all the headlines and the wild rumors.” Clinton began to work as a pipefitter at Bethlehem Steel’s Oakland shipyard in lieu of serving in the military, and he contributed to the war effort in his time off as well, as his son recalled: “My dad was a block warden, and he’d go around with his little hat . . . [making sure] everybody was shading their windows with black.”

In those preadolescent years, Clint found two chief forms of solace, both, as it happens, granted him by his grandmothers. From Jessie Eastwood (whom he never knew), he got the gift of music in the form of her parents’ piano, originally imported from Germany and still maintained by the family,* providing Ruth with an instrument on which to share her musical skills with her son. His interest sparked in late 1943: “My mother, when Fats Waller died, brought home his records and said, ‘That’s what I call real piano playing.’” He spent hours listening to those records and trying to imitate them, note for note, eventually developing a facility for a jaunty, boogie-woogie playing style. The piano would become a lifelong passion and outlet, providing a quiet boy with an escape valve for his emotions and a creative pastime to alleviate boredom—and, later, a means to find social acceptance and, later still, a means of expression as an artist.

A second outlet was provided by Ruth’s mother, Virginia, who, after her divorce from Waldo Runner, settled in the rural East Bay community of Sunol. Her small house regularly received her grandson for weeks at a time. As Clint would recall, his parents’ need to keep moving around to find work sometimes meant splitting up the family for brief spells: “There were times when we had to be separated, when times weren’t good.” He harmonized with the rustic setting of Virginia’s home, growing comfortable with farm animals and the rhythms and ways of country living. He learned to ride and care for horses, he earned a little money by helping nearby farmers with chores, he began a lifetime of affectionate connection to wildlife (even snakes—his mom would one day find him with a collection of, as she recalled, thirteen of them in her house), and he wandered the nearby hills, an experience of solitude more nourishing than the lonely remove he felt amid his classmates back in town. Once again, he had few friends. “I talked to the chickens a lot,” he joked. But that early introduction to nature marked him permanently. He would become a bona fide animal-lover; he thrived on outdoor activity; he grew into an active and generous conservationist; and his films, particularly his Westerns, would be steeped in their settings to a degree that made the natural world itself a theme of his work.

As the war wound down and Clinton found increasingly solid and remunerative work, the family moved from that first Piedmont home on Hillside Avenue to a series of larger residences, some complete with backyard swimming pools. Ruth continued her clerical work, including a spell at IBM, and the dual incomes meant that the family could own two cars, take vacations (including, for a time, at a lakeside cabin they owned in Central California), and belong to a local country club, where they played tennis and golf. Photos of Clint in these years reveal a happy, active kid, well fed, clean, in neat clothes, playing with a toy rifle, wading in a stream with a fishing rod, smiling alongside his parents and sister on a beach outing—at a time when great swaths of the country were still burdened by economic depression and war.

Years later, Clint would come to recognize how fortunate he was that his folks were who they were. “They were very young parents,” he understood, but “my father . . . knew who he was on the planet and my mother . . . knew who she was, and they liked where they were.” He appreciated attention and reliability. His mom, he recalled, was “an extremely giving lady . . . always very flexible, very supportive, when I was growing up. I was always taught to be respectful of her. My father was big on basic courtesies toward women. The one time I ever got snotty with my mother when he was around, he left me a little battered. . . . I was taught values.” As he put it: “I think my parents and my grandmother—she was quite a person, very self-sufficient, lived by herself on a mountain—probably had more to do with my turning out the way I have than any educational process I may have gone through.” As one of his chums put it, Clint’s parents were “loved by everyone. If you were to pray for parents, Ruth and Clint Sr. would be the ones you would pray for.”

The Eastwoods had emerged from the worst of the Depression a lot better off than many. They weren’t the wealthiest family in Piedmont or the most socially connected, but they were legitimately knit into the fabric of a well-off community, and Clint grew up with comforts beyond those of most American boys of the time. That didn’t, however, mean that school was any easier for him—either as a learning experience or a social setting. He was a natural lefty at a time when the practice was to force children to learn to write with their right hands, and this caused him physical discomfort and embarrassment.* And he was prone to internal wanderlust: “I daydreamed constantly. I was a mediocre student because I would sit in the classroom, the leaves would rustle, and I would be off on a journey somewhere.” He was tall and physically coordinated but unwilling to pursue athletics, and he never participated eagerly in team sports, despite his physical coordination;* he was eager to play music but not in any band that would be asked to perform before an audience.

He made a group of friends, one of whom, Fritz Manes, would become part of his filmmaking family decades later; another, Don Kincade, would remain a lifelong connection; and yet another, Harry Pendleton, would stand as his best man at his first wedding. But as Manes would later reflect, he stood slightly apart from the group: “Even in junior high, Clint was a solid loner. He was always right on center with himself, very sure of himself. . . . He didn’t need the support of a circle of friends.” As Clint himself recalled, “I never seemed to get into any of the cliques. I don’t know if I really liked hanging out a lot, but I got used to it. In a way, being alone is a good lesson. You become introverted, maybe, but you also learn to think for yourself. You develop a sense of self-reliance.”

Similarly, he never found an academic or extracurricular activity to commit himself to in school. Not even acting, which he gave but a single try. In eighth grade, he was cast in a play, learning to his horror just before the premiere that actual high schoolers would be in the audience (“We just about crapped,” he recalled); the show started a shambles but righted itself, and kudos were offered by some of the older kids and by the teacher who had buttonholed him for the role. Didn’t matter. Praised by the drama teacher, he told her, “I don’t want to do that again, ever in my life.”

The following year, enrolled at Piedmont High School, Clint seemed sparked by only three subjects: girls, hot rods, and the piano. Music was the principal thing that distinguished him as a teen. He’d fallen completely under the sway of jazz—boogie-woogie and stride piano especially, but also Dixieland, swing, big band, and the nascent strains of bebop and West Coast cool, even the very first rumbles of rhythm and blues. He bought stacks of Blue Note 78s and saved his job money and allowance with a vague dream of someday visiting New York’s 52nd Street, then the mecca of the music. “Jazz always represented freedom in general, but also a freedom of expression,” he reflected. “It was just a quality of being different, of not really fitting in but doing your own thing in your own way.” He tried trumpet and flugelhorn, but they didn’t stick; piano would forever be his instrument, even if, as he later admitted, he lacked the application to excel in it. “For a while, I thought I had a real knack for playing,” he said, “but I was never very disciplined about it, even though I recognized it early as a way to express myself.”

At the same time, he discovered that even more fun than playing music was watching it live. Once he hit high school, he began to bundle into cars with his chums and head into downtown Oakland or some other East Bay town where the club owners weren’t fussy about admitting underage kids. Having sprouted to over six feet, he found it relatively easy to get into such venues as Slim Jenkins Corner, an Oakland blues joint; Hambone Kelly’s in nearby El Cerrito, which specialized in Dixieland; and such famed San Francisco clubs as the Blackhawk and the Dawn. He saw such legends as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, Stan Kenton, and Kid Ory, among dozens of others. In April 1946, he attended a Jazz at the Philharmonic all-star concert in Oakland and had his mind blown:

I had gone to see Lester Young, who was God to me, and suddenly this guy in a pinstripe suit steps forward playing, and I’m not sure what it’s all about, but there’s a lot of things going on here. It’s unexplainable—there was nobody like him. . . . And he looked like somebody special, different from the other guys. They were great, they were giants, but here was somebody different. It was like four Joe Smiths and Gary Cooper or Clark Gable. Just something about the guy.

The “guy” was Charlie “Bird” Parker, the genius bebop innovator and one of the greatest virtuosi, on any instrument, of the century. Clint never forgot him.

Inevitably, too, he was a bit of a movie buff. “I didn’t get to see a lot of them in my early years, but through the ages of eleven to my teen years, I got to go to the movies.” His earliest movie outings were family affairs, but he had a vivid memory of seeing one particular picture with his dad alone, “because my mother didn’t want to go see a war movie: Sergeant York. My dad was a big admirer of Sergeant York stories from the First World War. It was directed by Howard Hawks. That was when I first became aware of movies, who made them, who was involved.” As a young filmgoer, he was partial to meat-and-potatoes Hollywood films: The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, and such. Unlike his musical explorations, his filmgoing was strictly for entertainment. But the seed of an artistic aesthetic was lurking in his preferences: a taste for plain, classic staging, shooting, and editing; an interest in stories about stark moral choices; a professional polish that was recognizable the world over as the classic Hollywood studio style. He may not have known the names of every director whose work he admired—John Ford, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman—but he consistently returned to their work as ideals in his own conception of moviemaking, and he would cite their films for the rest of his life as his chief influences.

Of course, neither jazz nor cinema was on the curriculum at Piedmont High in the mid-1940s. And frankly, it didn’t matter much what was taught there. As he had previously, Clint ignored his studies and cared only about the things that were fun to him. Before his freshman year had finished, school administrators suggested he find an institution better suited to him.

That place turned out to be Oakland Tech—or Oakland Technical High School—a mile or so west of Piedmont High but, as it sat in the big city proper, a distinctly different world. In that short drive from home to his new school, Clint went from a privileged, all-white* bubble of fewer than ten thousand residents to an integrated community of more than three hundred thousand. Instead of a small suburban high school where everyone knew everyone else, he found himself in a large school with renowned science and math programs, a strong athletics department, and a socially active student body that had raised $175,000 during the war to fund a B-25 bomber and would later found the first Black student union at any high school in the country. (Additionally, by the time Clint showed up, the student body included a number of demobilized servicemen, some as old as their midtwenties, a rougher and harder crowd than any he ever encountered on the mean streets of Piedmont.)

Clint’s education emphasized “manual arts”: wood shop, aircraft maintenance, and—his fave—auto mechanics, which fed a passion for cars and engines that would persist his whole life. He’d owned a car since before he was old enough to get a license (underage driving was an accepted thing in Piedmont), and one of Clint Sr.’s great inspirations as a dad was to allow his son to keep any car for which he could take complete financial and mechanical responsibility. Clint worked multiple jobs—paperboy, lawn mower, grocery bagger, caddy—to keep his rides on the road, going through a series of woebegone beaters, a ’32 Chevy without a roof and a two-door ’34 Ford coupe among them, jalopies that, per his recollection, were “running on chewing gum and spit and wire.” They could be frustrating to own—“brake rods’d be falling off, and batteries wouldn’t start”—but he loved working on them and, especially, the entrée they provided him to a wider world; getting school credit for learning even more about how they worked was pure kismet.

Oakland Tech proved a doorway into the bigger city and its neighborhood joints and hangouts, and Clint found he could fit in there without much trouble. “He just seemed more relaxed at Tech,” his mother later recalled. He split his social time between his old gang in Piedmont and his friends at Tech, gliding between the two circles rather than trying to bring them together. His preference leaned toward the Tech gang, at least judging by the look he came to favor: Unlike the clean-cut Piedmont crowd, he began to wear a leather jacket and sport a slick, greasy haircut with a pompadour up front and a back of the sort known as a DA (or duck’s ass, for the way the sides came together). He wasn’t a delinquent. If anything, he was a dreamy loner interested in making art—or music, anyhow—who hadn’t found his medium or the courage to declare himself. But he looked like a hoodlum, and he enjoyed suggesting, at least to the eye, that he might be one.

With his wheels, his tough affect, and his piano chops, he began to hang around a joint in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood called the Omar Club (Omar’s Pizzeria, or just the Omar). The club featured professional musicians at night, but during the day Clint and his chums could hang out and the owners allowed Clint to tinkle at the piano. “I’d go in there,” he remembered, “play piano and get a beer for a quarter. In those days, the only ID you needed was the dough in your pocket. They’d give me free pizzas and meals, and I’d hang out there and play.” According to Fritz Manes, Clint was an attraction in and of himself: “Everyone started gathering around and listening and having a great time. Then whenever we came back, they tried to get Clint to play and people would come in and ask for him. And he’d walk in and say, ‘Well, we’ll get to it later,’ but he always did because he wanted to, and he would play for hours, literally for hours.”

The piano playing became more than a way to fit in. It was a way to stand out. “I was such a backward kid at that age,” he remembered, “but I could sit down at a party and play the blues. And the gals would come around the piano, and all of a sudden you had a date.” (Fritz Manes had a different angle on Clint’s allure for girls: “He had a kind of natural charisma that was really maddening. You could sit in class and do all your little tricks of flirtation—flex your muscles, shuffle your ten-dollar bills—and nothing would work if Clint was in the room. He’d be sitting there doing nothing, just looking at the floor, and all the girls would be looking at him, as if they were in a trance, locked in on some kind of secret magnetism he had. It was very demoralizing for the rest of us guys.”)

He and his jazzbo pals drove off to other cities to see their favorite musicians play: San Francisco, of course, but also Los Angeles and beyond. Under the cover story of tagging along with a friend while he toured colleges, Clint’s gang launched a road trip to Southern California, seeing shows on the fabled Central Avenue in South L.A. and accidentally meeting movie royalty. During a party at a home in Westwood, and well into the evening’s ration of beer, Clint and his crew noticed horses wandering loose on Sepulveda Boulevard. They leaped into action—Clint legitimately had experience with horses—and herded the animals into a nearby corral where a gate had swung open. They were approached by the owner, an older man who was all smiles and gratitude—“Oh God, you got the horses. Thank you guys.” When they told the story to their party host, he told them that the horses’ owner was Howard Hawks, who had directed Clinton Eastwood’s favorite movie, Sergeant York. “I was really impressed,” Clint recalled.*

Tall, handsome, vaguely dangerous, quiet, with his own car and the ability (and nerve) to play music in public, he inevitably met a lot of girls. He had lost his virginity at fourteen (“I had nice neighbors,” as he once put it), and he had at least one steady romance in Piedmont, a situation that both sets of parents stepped in to break up. After that, he found himself always looking for love—or sex, anyhow—and remaining unattached through his school years.

He was mostly unattached to school as well. He skipped out on a lot of classes, and he participated in barely any activities. He once told a columnist that in high school his “best subject was basketball,” and it may well have been, but he was never on the school’s team. He remembered playing some boogie-woogie piano onstage in a school talent show, but his senior yearbook listed only two extracurricular connections for his entire tenure: planning committees for the annual Senior Day and Senior Banquet. Despite having made friends, he wasn’t especially connected to the community. He spent summers out of town, doing hard, physical work on farms or with the forestry service in North Central California, then dutifully returning to the drudgery of school.

He managed to graduate with the January class of 1949, not long before his nineteenth birthday. In at least one way, it was a bit late: During the previous year, Clint Sr., Ruth, and Jeanne had left Piedmont for Seattle, where Clinton, by then an executive with the Container Corporation of America, had been sent to manage a plant and oversee Northwest operations. When they moved, Clint still had some time left to finish school, so he stayed behind, living with a friend whose family operated a small apartment complex, until he graduated.

Soon after receiving his diploma, in early 1949, Clint drove north to reunite with his folks, his only assets being a car, the know-how to keep it running, a jazzy way with a piano, and his native good looks: His high school yearbook photo shows a slender boy with a crest of styled hair, a soft, bow-shaped mouth, and gentle eyes that look at once determined and self-protective. He had no plan for future education, for employment, for what he should do with himself. If he hadn’t had his family’s new home to aim toward, he would almost literally have been going nowhere.

Two

Say this about Ruth and Clinton Eastwood: They raised their boy to work. Clint may not have excelled in school or had the slightest inkling of a career, but he absolutely always had a job, and he never shied away from hard labor. In Seattle, his folks lived in a big house steps away from Lake Washington, and Clint lifeguarded at Kennydale Beach, about three miles south, during that first summer after graduation. When the season turned, he went back to Oakland, where a friend got him a job at a can-manufacturing plant. Then he and his buddy returned to Seattle and any paying situation they could find: odd jobs, none cushy. He was lost, directionless: “I was a bit of a screw-up, a loser.”

Clinton, who had contacts in the lumber industry, got Clint and his friend hired at a logging operation in the southern notch of Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It was hard, dangerous work—Clint was hit by a load of timber and was lucky to escape with only a slightly injured knee. He found a safer gig in a paper mill near the town of Springfield, a fetid working environment that gave off a reek you could smell for miles and infused his skin and his clothes. “It was always wet, really depressing. Wintertime. Dank,” he remembered. He and his buddy could manage only the cheapest rental housing, and it was as damp inside as out; once, preparing to hit the one good bar in town, Clint found his one good suit mildewed and unwearable.

He didn’t even have music to console him: There was no jazz to see in that part of the world at that time, and even the radio offered just “one jazz program out of San Francisco late at night,” he recalled. “Hell, just to hear a taste of it, I used to stay up late even though I had to get up early and go to work.” His moaning about missing jazz was so well-known that a fellow logger, a poetical proto-hippie who was making a movie about roses, asked him for a list of jazz songs with flowers in their titles for a soundtrack. In desperation, Clint frequented local bars to see what was then known as “hillbilly music,” and he stumbled on a sound he enjoyed. “Someone told me to go out to this place where there was a lot of country music. I wasn’t very interested, but this guy told me there were a lot of girls there. So I went. I saw Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Unlike most country bands, they had brass and reeds and they played country swing. They were good. . . . Also, there were a lot of girls there, which didn’t surprise me at all. So I guess you could say that lust expanded my musical horizons.”

But that was meager consolation for his situation; even a young man without focus or ambition could see that this was no way to live. “It’s beautiful,” he said of the deeply forested setting, “but in the winter it socks in. You go six, seven months without seeing blue.” So back to Seattle it was, where he stoked furnaces, pumped gas, drove a delivery truck, worked as a parts clerk at Boeing, and even considered applying to Seattle University. He had a chance to sign on to a long-haul trucking company, but there was a snag. “They said, ‘Sure, we’ll hire you. All you have to do is join the union.’ So I went over to join the union, thinking, ‘Why wouldn’t the union want you to join if you had a job lined up?’ But they said, ‘Sorry, you can’t join.’ And I said, ‘Well, why not?’ And they said, ‘You just can’t. We’ve got too many people unemployed.’”

He slipped back into chasing girls, drinking beer, tinkering with cars, hitting jazz joints. But there was a new wrinkle: In 1950, with no dependents and unenrolled in school, he was of draft age—and there was a war on in Korea and a drive to fill the U.S. military with new recruits. He tried to wiggle out of the service, but, he confessed, “I wasn’t tricky or smart enough,” and he was called up and conscripted into the U.S. Army for a two-year-minimum stint. Later on, he could be wry about the experience: “I went from the drift to the draft,” he quipped. But at the time he wasn’t so sanguine. Just a few years earlier, when the world war ended, the future looked so peaceful. “I remember the celebration in downtown Oakland,” he said. “Everybody was screaming and going crazy, and I thought, ‘This will be history. This will never happen again.’ A few years later, I’m drafted in the army. I thought, ‘What happened to “never again”?’” He visited Oakland en route to basic training, and friends remembered him grousing about his fate. And in early 1951, not long before his twenty-first birthday, he reported to Fort Ord, a stone’s throw north of Monterey, California.

As during World War II and, later, the Vietnam War, Fort Ord was a staging area, absorbing civilians into a months-long regimen of basic training, then funneling them into combat duty as new batches of recruits followed immediately behind. Clint was assigned to the infantry, meaning he was virtually certain to be deployed to Korea, which he decidedly did not wish to do. Like most of his fellow draftees, what he wanted out of the army was out of the army: “Two years is the maximum I want to be here,” he told anyone who asked.*

But he nonetheless was the son of Clinton Eastwood, and was a young man who took his duty seriously enough that his platoon sergeant noticed his work ethic and asked him if he wished to enroll in officer training. He didn’t. He hated the regimentation of the army, he hated the bureaucracy, and he hated the way small-minded people imposed their will on him without cause or explanation. “When I was in boot camp,” he remembered, “I had to have my rifle inspected to get weekend liberty. It was this old beat-up M1, it had all kinds of nicks inside the barrel. I used lighter fluid to make it shine, and this guy with almost no rank at all looks down the barrel and says, ‘It looks like crap.’ I said, ‘Let me explain.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. No pass for you.’ I had dozens of piddling things like that.”

A friend suggested that it was possible to avoid being shipped out by volunteering to be an instructor or do some other essential work on the post, and Clint followed his lead. The two went to see if there were any positions for which they qualified. As Clint recalled, an officer walked in and said, “They need three or four guys down at the pool,” which he thought meant the motor pool—fantastic for a born car nut. “We were thinking, ‘This will be good. We’ll go to the motor pool, we’ll drive some cars and keep our mouths shut. . . . We won’t be going to Korea.’” But the officer meant the swimming pool, which was short a few lifeguards and instructors. Well. Not only had Clint legitimately worked as a lifeguard in Lake Washington, but he had Red Cross lifesaving certification and had been a strong swimmer all his life. He and his friend stepped up, and they were sent to the fifty-yard, ten-lane pool to audition, as it were, for the gig. After swimming impressively, Clint was told that the pool was fully staffed and he would be notified in the event he was needed. A few days later, the call came: Clint Eastwood, buck private infantryman, became Clint Eastwood, army lifeguard. And, as a member of the faculty, he was yanked from the feeding tube of infantrymen headed off to war.

And things would only get better. Over the coming weeks, deployments and discharges meant that Clint and his chum quickly became the senior members of the swimming staff. They transferred their living quarters from the regular barracks to a makeshift bedroom on the grounds of the pool itself. Talk about soft duty. “While everybody else was getting up at five in the morning, in the cold air,” he recalled, “I was sleeping. I didn’t have classes until 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock or whatever. . . . It was a good life.”

Clint and his friend weren’t the only ones who’d figured out that the swimming pool provided a means of escaping combat. All trainees had to demonstrate competency in swimming, and if you could swim, you were that much closer to being shipped out. So, inevitably, “everybody was trying to fake that they couldn’t swim. They all wanted to stay there and have lessons [rather] than go out in the field and run with the other guys carrying rifles.”

As a fine place to goldbrick, the pool was a social center. Enlistees ate their lunch poolside or simply took in the sun, pleasures augmented by the presence of members of the Women’s Army Corps, which had training facilities at the fort. Lording over this scene in trunks and a T-shirt, Clint met most everybody on the base. One new acquaintance was Lennie Niehaus, a saxophone player and arranger who’d been drafted out of the Stan Kenton band and who met Clint literally by accident. “Leaving the pool one day,” Niehaus remembered, “I slipped and fell, causing a pretty good-sized gash between two toes. From nowhere, a hand and arm reached out to steady me and help me over to the first aid station. This kind stranger stayed with me while the medics, without giving me a painkiller shot, stitched everything together. The sergeant in charge said, ‘Okay, soldier, get your boots on and get back to the barracks!’ The stranger said, in a voice of steel that would later become famous, ‘This man has just had a serious injury and can’t walk.’ Considering that he was only a private first class, speaking to a career master sergeant like that took a lot of courage.” They cemented their bond over their shared love of jazz; Niehaus played at beer clubs on base where Clint would sometimes put in shifts behind the bar, and when Clint could wrangle a weekend pass, he would often drop in on nighteries where Niehaus was performing.

Among the other grunts hanging around the pool were a few fellows with nascent careers in Hollywood. “Guys like Richard Long, Martin Milner, and David Janssen . . . became my friends,” Clint remembered, and those future stars of TV’s The Big Valley, Route 66, and The Fugitive, respectively, gave him the idea that there might be some potential for him in that line of work. He heard the same from an army clerk named Norman Bartold, who’d made a single film at Warner Bros. before being drafted, and a guy named Chuck Hill, who also had eyes on a movie career. When Clint mentioned that he was thinking of using his G.I. Bill benefits to enroll in college after the army, maybe in Stockton, California, Hill suggested Los Angeles City College, where he would be situated to at least try his luck in the crapshoot that was a career in show business.

It was a thought.

All in all, hanging around a pool, giving swimming lessons, and operating the projector on movie nights* was a hell of a lot rosier than the life he imagined when he first reported to Fort Ord. But as he soon learned, a serviceman could face life-or-death danger as readily stateside as overseas.

In October 1951, he was granted a weekend’s leave and decided to visit Seattle, where there was, of course, a girl. He knew that if he wore his uniform he could claim a seat on a military plane, so he went to a nearby naval air station and grabbed a flight north. When the weekend wound down, he showed up at the airfield in Seattle, where he was told that the best he could do for a return ride was to squeeze into the radar operator’s compartment of a Douglas A-1 bomber that was headed to a base near Oakland. Close enough, he reckoned.

From the start, it was a troubled flight. The weather was foul, and the pilot, Frank Anderson, couldn’t achieve sufficient altitude to ride above it. The external door to Clint’s little perch kept opening, so he tied it shut with some loose cables. Then the oxygen system started to fail, and then the electronics: radio, intercom, navigation. They were approaching San Francisco Bay—Clint caught sight of the Golden Gate Bridge—but Anderson couldn’t contact the control tower at the airfield, which was near a populated area. He decided to find a more open spot for an emergency landing, so he turned north and west toward Point Reyes, where there was a military airport. But now the plane was low on fuel. Anderson jettisoned the auxiliary fuel tank to reduce the plane’s weight, but he realized that he couldn’t reach an airport. He decided to do a bellyflop landing in the Pacific—which, without any intercom, Clint did not know. The plane flew lower and lower, skimmed along the ocean, and then—bam-bam-bam-bam!—skidded onto the surface and came to an abrupt halt.

They were floating on the water. Clint crawled out onto the top of the fuselage. Anderson popped open his canopy and joined him. He was, Clint recalled, “pretty cool . . . for a guy who’d just lost his plane in the ocean.” There was light in the sky, and they could see Point Reyes, perhaps three or four miles away. Clint declared, “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the hell out of here.” The two of them ditched any clothing they didn’t need and dove into the water, intending to swim to shore. “What was going through my mind was just a stark fear, a stark terror,” he admitted years later. “The water felt much more comfortable, because in the air the sound of the engine not running was very disconcerting.”

There are no straight lines in the ocean, however. Aiming for Point Reyes, they were pushed north by the current. Darkness fell. They swam through kelp beds and schools of jellyfish that lit up the water with fluorescence. They were separated by swells. Clint kept pushing. It took hours. He kept an eye on the shore, where dots of light appeared as the night deepened. “You just have to shut off the doubt,” he remembered. “I could have said, ‘God, I’ll die,’ but then I also could have said, ‘If there’s a chance to live, I’m going to seize it.’”

He knew that he had to find a beach and not a cliff base or a rocky shoreline where he would be tossed around and killed. A small cove appeared in front of him, and he made his way for it, struggling against an undertow that kept pulling him back. He got close enough to grab hold of a rock and pull himself out of the water. There was no sign of Anderson. Freezing, exhausted, with no idea of where he might find help, he climbed out of the cove and saw a light. He headed for it. Barefoot, he walked and scrambled along, coming upon a field dotted with antennae and a small concrete structure, all surrounded by a chain-link fence. He climbed over and entered the small facility, where he startled a lone radio operator. “What are you doing here?” the guy asked. “I’ve just been in an accident.” “You mean an automobile?” “No, we were in a plane crash.” “Oh, yeah, yeah. I heard that Alameda was reporting somebody was missing.”

Phone calls were made. A Coast Guard vehicle fetched him and brought him to Point Reyes, where he was reunited with Anderson, who’d hit land farther north. The following morning, they were driven to the Presidio base in San Francisco and told that they’d be summoned back north for an inquiry. Then Clint returned to Fort Ord with a yarn that he recounted again and again around the pool and the barroom.

The story of the abandoned plane and the two servicemen who swam to safety made headlines in the newspapers in San Francisco, Oakland, and Salinas before Clint had a chance to phone his parents about it. Ruth first heard about the crash when a Seattle reporter knocked on her door and asked, “Are you related to the Eastwood who went down in San Francisco Bay last night?” She had no idea what he was talking about, much less that her son had been in any danger: “I almost fainted. . . . It was very harrowing.”

Clint recovered from his brush with death “like a person feels when [he’s had] a concussion.” He waited, as instructed, to be summoned to testify at a naval inquiry, during which time his unit was shipped off to Korea. “The hearing never came about,” he recalled, “so I missed the trip and stayed at the fort.” As if in recompense for his harrowing crash-and-survival experience, he was spared having to face live combat. “I can’t say I regret it,” he confessed.*

The remaining year-plus of his military tenure was reassuringly uneventful. While on leave, he traveled around the Monterey Peninsula and encountered Carmel-by-the-Sea, an impossibly picturesque town of some forty-five hundred souls, where the arts—particularly theater and painting—thrived.

Clint had wandered into town by accident, seeking a place to unwind on a weekend pass. “We got off too late to go to San Francisco,” he remembered. “One guy had a car, and we drove to Monterey, hit a few pubs, then came over the hill to Carmel.” For a young man smitten with nature, it was Heaven on earth. Settled in the late 1770s by Spanish explorers and missionaries, then turned into an arts colony by Stanford professors and bohemians in the early twentieth century, it was nestled in a dreamlike combination of gentle hills, wild woodlands, dramatic skies, and a roaring, rock-hemmed ocean. Among the fancies he entertained in those unfocused days of his young life, “I said to myself, ‘If I ever have any dough, I’d like to live in this place.’”

He got into the habit of visiting the town on his free days. One of the area’s great lures was golf. Some of the world’s most famous, most beautiful courses are clustered around Carmel, and Clint had enjoyed the game since his teen days caddying at Oakland’s Claremont Country Club. During his rambles around the peninsula, he snuck into the legendary Bing Crosby Clambake at the historic Pebble Beach links, an annual tournament in which top pro golfers played alongside Hollywood celebrities. As he later recalled, he presented himself as a cub sportswriter: “A friend of mine and I told the guard at the gate that we were Art Rosenbaum’s assistants. The guard knew we were GIs, but he let us in anyway.” They wandered into a party “and ended up having dessert on them.” Like Carmel itself, Pebble Beach was a place to which he’d return.

Back on base, according to some unverified accounts, he met somebody involved in movies who suggested that he look him up if he ever found himself anywhere near Hollywood. A few accounts of his entry into showbiz say that he was discovered by film folks using Fort Ord as a location, and he himself suggested in the early 1970s that he’d sat for a screen test on base. But there are more plausible accounts of his first encounters with moviemaking. It is true, though, that the bug that a few of his fellow soldiers had put in his ear about taking a shot at Hollywood had stuck.

More immediately, he was thinking about college after the army, specifically the music program at Seattle University, where he thought he could turn his passion for jazz into a career as a musician and a teacher. He would need to get a few college-level classes under his belt to qualify for enrollment, though, and he wasn’t sure where he’d take them.

When he was discharged in early 1953, he headed back to his parents’ house in Seattle and another summer of lifeguarding on Lake Washington. In June, he popped up in a Seattle Times story about a lifeguard-training program at nearby Beaver Lake, where he was one of the instructors teaching rescue techniques, CPR, and other skills; his cheekbones and pouf of hair were instantly recognizable. And that was the extent of his ambition for the time being: Sitting waterside—and chatting up the girls who buzzed around the lifeguard station—still seemed like an agreeable gig.

Living at home at twenty-three years old, though, he knew he had to do more. He had the opportunity to go to school with his G.I. Bill benefits,* and he hadn’t forgotten the idea of attending L.A. City College and taking a swing at the movies. In fact, he was starting to learn about acting—and he was pointedly thinking hard about getting out of Seattle. Per Patrick McGilligan’s 1999 biography, Clint was dating a young woman who was involved with a local amateur theater (he took part in the productions so as to be around her), and he told his friends that she was pregnant. There was no thought of marriage, according to McGilligan, and Clint asked his parents for money to terminate the pregnancy, which they provided. It was all enough to make him eager to pursue his education well to the south.

And there may have been another reason he was thinking about Southern California—predictably, another girl. Before returning to Seattle after his discharge, he passed through Oakland and ran into a high school friend who was attending the University of California, Berkeley. The guy’s girlfriend had been asking him to find a date for her sorority sister, and he roped Clint into the job. It turned out to be one of those blind dates on which both parties were pleasantly surprised to find one another as attractive as advertised. Margaret Neville Johnson—Maggie, almost always—was pretty, blonde, fit, smart, and amiable, a Southern Californian who radiated good vibes beneath a low-key manner; Clint took immediate notice. And, as Maggie related, she took one look at her date and “was amazed at what he looked like.” The date went well, and there were a couple of others before Clint headed north. She told him that she’d be graduating soon and living with her family near the foothills east of Pasadena and that he should look her up if he was ever down that way.

Just a few months later, he made his way down to Los Angeles, and he did just that. In the fall of 1953, he began to take classes in business administration (“That’s what everybody studies when he doesn’t know what to do,” he explained later) at L.A. City College while working as live-in manager/superintendent of an apartment complex near Beverly Hills and as a gas station attendant on Santa Monica Boulevard. And he started dating Maggie, who was working as a clerk at an auto-parts distributor.

They were attractive, they were young (he turned twenty-three that May, she’d be twenty-two in the fall), and they were drawn powerfully together. He took her to jazz joints, which she discovered she enjoyed (her mother, Edith, had been a music teacher), and they shared a passion for surfing, hitting beaches up and down the coast with a little clique of similarly minded friends. They had known each other just a few months—and had been living hundreds of miles apart for a lot of that time (during which, of course, he had gotten a girl in Seattle pregnant). But there was a real connection. “We were physically attracted,” he admitted, “but we also had everything in common.” As his piano playing had long revealed, there was a reservoir of emotion beneath his stoic aspect. That fall, he surprised Maggie with a marriage proposal, and she, perhaps surprising herself, accepted.

On December 19, 1953, in a church in South Pasadena, they were married. After honeymooning in Carmel, they moved in together at the apartment complex he managed. With almost the same spirit in which they tested their daring on their surfboards, they set up as husband and wife.

Three

For as long as there’s been a Hollywood, men with Clint Eastwood’s tall, muscular physique, chiseled good looks, and thick head of hair have been mined by Hollywood as a kind of raw ore. It was so obvious that he fit the mold that even his friends at blue-collar jobs thought he should at least try the movies. As one later recalled, “I told him then, ‘You should be an actor, you could make it, because people notice you. Even when we go in a restaurant, people turn and look at you.’ ‘They probably just think we stole something,’ he said.”

He joked about it, but he was curious. As he recalled, again, in jest, but maybe not so much, “A friend of mine says, ‘I go to this acting class at night, every Thursday.’ And I said, ‘Well what the hell do you do that for?’ And he says, ‘Come on down some time.’ So I went down there one night and sat in and watched, and there were about 30 gals in the class . . . and there’s about four or five guys . . . and I said, ‘You know? This class needs me!’” He may have been superficially dismissive, but the idea kept coming up. Years later, he would claim that he stumbled into acting as a profession, that he had no designs on a career. But he encountered it continually, as often through initiative as by sheer happenstance.

It was a funny time to get started in the business. The Hollywood of the early 1950s was a place of transition and contraction, and while the welcome mat was always out for hopefuls with the right look, the door wasn’t necessarily as open as it had been before the war. Since 1948, when the major film studios were hit by the wildfire spread of television and the legal obligation to sell off their theater chains, the movie industry had been shrinking. Gone were the days when every studio had an on-site training school that transformed attractive young folks into plausible film performers, maybe even stars. Equally, the opportunity to be signed to a long-term studio contract was vanishing as movie stars began to operate as free agents, hiring on to films on a one-at-a-time basis or even forming their own personal production companies that were aligned with but not controlled by the studios. It was still a gold rush town, but the boom had peaked.

The one significant exception to this decline was Universal Pictures, often seen as the runt sibling of MGM, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Bros., but the only one of the big studios to fully embrace television production—a factory-based enterprise that resembled Universal’s low-rent movie output of the 1930s and ’40s. While the more prestigious studios tried to make their films attractive to ticket buyers with such ballyhoo as wide screens, location shoots, big musical production numbers, and epics with casts of thousands, Universal chugged along on cheap films and a steady—indeed, growing—line of TV programming. Its backlot was the busiest production line in town, perennially in need of new faces to fill its big- and small-screen schedules.

To that end, it was the last studio in Hollywood with a school for actors still functioning on its lot, the Universal Talent School, or UTS, and it was a fruitful enterprise: In the late 1940s and early ’50s, such emerging stars as Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, Shelley Winters, Jeff Chandler, and Piper Laurie had been educated in the ways of film acting under its aegis. And that school, with its coursework in elocution, poise, fitness, horsemanship, singing, dancing, stage fighting, fencing, and, yes, acting, would be where Clint’s seventy-year career in movies would begin.

The matter of how he found himself under contract as an actor-in-training is clouded by studio hoopla, press agent puffery, and the mists of memory. By one account—certainly false—he was discovered at Fort Ord by somebody on the crew of Francis Joins the WACs, an entry in Universal’s “comedy” franchise about a talking mule, directed by Arthur Lubin, who had been making such throwaway stuff for decades after a brief acting career; Lubin, the fable goes, noticed Clint and encouraged him to look him up should he ever find himself near Hollywood.* Another version holds that one of Clint’s army buddies snuck him onto the Universal lot and introduced him to a cinematographer who, in turn, introduced him to Lubin. Yet another version involves a woman who worked at Universal and told Clint she could arrange a meeting for him with someone in the casting department. And yet another version involves somebody driving Lubin—who figures in almost all of these accounts—out to the gas station where Clint was working and introducing the two of them, at which time Lubin encouraged Clint to come by the studio to be evaluated.

What’s certain is that after a single semester, L.A. City College—like every other school he’d ever attended—wasn’t working out for him, and he kept up his complement of working-stiff jobs through the early months of 1954. That April, he signed a five-month contract at $100 per week—twice the median national salary—to enter the UTS (with, notably, Arthur Lubin named as his agent). That handsome salary didn’t impress Clint Sr., who was aghast that his son would walk away from college and pursue a chimera, declaring, his son recalled, “God, don’t do that! Continue your education! Don’t get in this dreamworld shit!” Clint appeased him with the assurance that he wasn’t harboring unrealistic hopes. “I told myself, ‘I’ll try it for six months,’” he said. “That’s like saying, ‘I’ll try neurosurgery for six months.’ Once you get into it . . .”

In some ways, the UTS was like a high school, but one attended by only the cool—and, it must be said, comely—kids. Everyone in the program was, at least at a glance, possessed of the looks that audiences would expect of new stars: clean-cut, fit, all-American, conventionally attractive. The boys lean and dashing, the girls pretty and curvy, they appeared in publicity photos exercising, swimming, dancing, often dressed to show off their bodies, looking like anonymous models in an advertisement for The Good Life of Southern California.

Clint’s UTS cohort, who appeared alongside him in promotional articles and photographs in a number of movie magazines throughout 1954 and ’55, included his army acquaintance David Janssen; the intense New York actor John Saxon; Barbara Rush, who was already steadily building her acting résumé; and Mamie Van Doren, who would, in the short run, eclipse them all as a kittenish star of teen exploitation movies. In a number of publicity shots, Clint appears in a group of students, almost always unidentified, sometimes diligently listening to acting coach Katherine Warren or a visiting lecturer such as Marlon Brando, sometimes stripped to swim trunks and dancing or exercising alongside his female classmates, who are also scantily accoutred. He is instantly recognizable: handsome, tall, and fit, with a hawklike gaze and a surprisingly soft aura.

But behind the appealing pictures, per the testimony of his instructors and per himself, he was barely able to speak lines or inhabit characters in a plausible, let alone convincing, fashion. From the first moment that Clint stood in front of a movie camera, everyone who watched him agreed that he was completely raw and could only maybe be formed into an actor. He was unschooled in even the least rudiments of the art. He didn’t know how to stand on a mark, where to aim his glance, how to inhabit his body, how to read a line—and it all showed. As he admitted, remembering his first screen test, “It was awful. You know how it is when you first hear yourself on tape? Well, it’s just twice as bad when you see yourself and you keep saying, you know, ‘What’s the matter with this guy? Why didn’t he move?’ A dolt, you know.”

The talent instructors at Universal were a little less despairing, writing in their reports that they found him “conscientious . . . ambitious and cooperative . . . likable.” In time, the reports grew rosier. They praised his intelligence and felt that he had tapped into a vein of natural, casual energy that recalled the relaxed vibe of Gary Cooper; some of them even took to calling him “Coop.” But no one was predicting that he’d provide a return on their investment any time soon. And no director on the lot found him worthy of even a small role in even the least project. (He didn’t blame them: “I thought I was an absolute clod.”)

His lack of sparkle didn’t mean that he lacked ambition. In October, just six months after beginning acting lessons, he reached for the unlikeliest of brass rings. The great director and screenwriter Billy Wilder was ramping up work on a biopic about aviator Charles Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis, and there was a well-publicized talent hunt for a young unknown to play the lead. Clint, who had never spoken a line on camera, was brought by Arthur Lubin to the set of The Seven Year Itch to meet Wilder in hopes of being considered for the role. Lubin wrote to Wilder the very next day to reinforce any impression his protégé had made:

Dear Billy Wilder,

Thank you very much for talking with Clint Eastwood to whom I introduced you on your busy set yesterday. Only because of Solly Baiano’s enthusiasm for his possibilities for the Lindbergh picture did I take of your time and mine to bring him out. Believe me, the boy has much talent, though still undeveloped. I urge you to give him consideration when you are casting. As I will be in England on a picture, the lad can be easily reached by contacting the Casting Department at Universal.

Much appreciation,

Sincerely,

Arthur Lubin

Like a birthday boy following his mother’s insistence that he write thank-you notes, Clint followed up with a handwritten letter a week later:

Dear Mr. Wilder,

Thank you for taking your time to see me last Tuesday when Mr. Arthur Lubin was kind enough to introduce us on your set. Mr. Solly Baiano of Warner Brothers seemed quite enthusiastic about my possibilities for the Lindbergh role when he met me here at Universal, where I am under contract.

I was concerned when you mentioned to Mr. Lubin that you would like to see a test. The only one Universal has made was one of those difficult interviews in which I felt I was not very good, even though I was given a contract on the strength of it. When the time comes for casting, I would appreciate so much your letting me talk with you rather than seeing this test, for I have improved in every way since that time. I feel the qualities you might be seeking can better be found in a personal interview.

Again, may I thank you and trust I did not take too much of your time. I now look forward to our next meeting.

Respectfully yours,

Clint Eastwood

4020 Arch Drive

North Hollywood

Alas, the part did not pan out, as Clint remembered somewhat bitterly: “They ended up picking Jimmy Stewart, who just put on some makeup to make himself look younger. So much for the worldwide talent hunt!”

Instead, credit for directing Clint Eastwood in his screen debut would not go to Wilder but to Jack Arnold, then emerging as a maestro of B-movies (that is, films that were second on the bill behind prestige titles and cost little time or money to make). Clint was given a small speaking part in Revenge of the Creature, Arnold’s sequel to his surprise hit of earlier in the year, Creature from the Black Lagoon. Clint had a single scene, and some forty words, as comic relief. In an ill-fitting white lab coat, he was cast as a scientist’s research assistant who has misplaced a lab rat only to find it in his pocket. The film has almost nothing to recommend it; decades later, it served as the basis of an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Clint’s cameo is so bland and inconsequential that the joke made about it—“This guy’s bad, this is his first and last movie”—isn’t entirely risible. He’s handsome, yes, but he’s painfully green: He looks as if the words he’s saying have no meaning, and he’s hardly even saying them; his voice is breathy and mumbly. (As he recalled, the director and screenwriter openly quarreled in front of him about whether his scene was even worth shooting at all; they shot it only to stop wasting time fighting about it.) Mercifully, when the film debuted the following spring, reviewers left him out of their notices.

By then, he had a few more screen appearances to his credit. He had a small part in the medieval costume drama Lady Godiva of Coventry, which was directed by his mentor (and, recall, agent) Arthur Lubin. Cast in a role identified as “First Saxon,” he has two sentences to speak and mainly stands around looking tall and uncomfortable; the handful of scenes in which he can be distinguished from the crowd, during one of which he comes riding into a military camp on horseback, occupy maybe two minutes. Then he popped up in another Jack Arnold quickie, Tarantula!, playing a jet fighter pilot shooting missiles into the giant-sized title creature; hidden behind an oxygen mask, he spoke eight or ten words in a blink-and-you’d-miss-him bit.

He had a larger and far more visible part in Francis in the Navy, once again under the direction of Lubin (who had directed all five of the previous entries in the improbably popular Francis series, about an army lieutenant and a mule who could converse with him and him only). Perhaps because Lubin put him at ease, perhaps because he was getting the hang of acting, perhaps because he was cast in the familiar role of a serviceman (and alongside his Fort Ord buddies David Janssen and Martin Milner), he seems a little more grounded. His character, Jonesy, almost always appears in a scrum of sailors engaged in the insipid hijinks of the plot, and he even gets to do a little bit of physical business—leaping into a rolling Jeep, climbing from one moving vehicle to another, washing ashore in a wayward landing craft. There’s a vitality to him; even though he doesn’t contribute to the story (which, to be fair, no one does or can), he catches the eye, and not just because he’s the tallest among his nondescript group. He wasn’t singled out by critics when the film appeared in June of 1955, but he got fifth-billing in the on-screen credits; it’s not star-making work, but it’s credible.

What had happened to transform the self-described “dolt” and “clod” into someone who could embody even a slender character on a movie screen? In short, he had learned about acting and about himself. Ironically enough, as he would explain, he came to forget the lessons in maturity he’d learned and returned to the dreamy state of his boyhood:

As you grow up, you pile all these inhibitions upon yourself and all the social mores. You get kidded by people as you’re growing through your teenage years and into adulthood. And then you’re at the stage where you don’t want to make a fool of yourself if at all possible. So when I hit my twenties and wanted to be an actor, I had to think of how to strip all this stuff off and go back to when I was about ten or eleven and I could just sit there and daydream. . . . I just joined acting classes and acted stupid. We would have acting classes where you do inhibition-relieving exercises, or whatever they were, where you played chickens walking across the floor. How the hell do you play a chicken? . . . You tried all kinds of things like that.

His progress had been noted by Universal not long before Francis in the Navy began production. In September 1954, the studio renewed his contract; the announcement, noted in passing in Variety, marked the first time his name appeared in the daily chronicle of showbiz. This time he was offered a full-year deal—which was at least a modest vote of confidence. There were still reservations about him: His voice was soft; his teeth were irregular; his Adam’s apple was too prominent; he was still a bit gangly around the camera. But his instructors never questioned his diligence, his willingness to take direction, or his incremental progress, which continued to give them hope that they might turn him into a solid working actor; hell, they even said they found his singing voice surprisingly pleasant* (he was soon rumored by a Hollywood gossip column to be in the running to appear in a comic musical, The Wedding of Rat Holla, which was never made).

Some of Clint’s growth can be credited to changes in the staff of the UTS. His first acting instructor, Katherine Warren, had been replaced by Jack Kosslyn, a stage actor from Connecticut who’d been directing plays around Los Angeles since his discharge from the service after World War II. He was only ten years older than Clint, but he served the fledgling actor as a significant mentor. Kosslyn had a down-to-earth attitude toward the craft that connected with Clint’s instinct that acting was something that you could take apart, practice, and learn—rather like a car engine or a song on the piano.

Clint’s acquaintance with Kosslyn came at the historical moment when Method acting was on its way to becoming the Hollywood standard. In a nutshell, the Method encouraged actors to look to their own psychology and experiences; find personal reflections of the words, deeds, and backstories of the characters they played; and discover ways to allow their private emotions and histories to emerge as part of the character’s reality. In the early 1950s, the Method-trained likes of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean were—or were becoming—the most celebrated and in-demand stars of the moment, and such other practitioners of the Method as Karl Malden, Paul Newman, Rod Steiger, and Joanne Woodward were rapidly rising in their wake. Young performers were learning how to dig into their pasts, express their inner pain, find their characters’ emotional motivation, and engage in other such stereotypical exercises in Method acting.

The Method revolution may have excited young thespians, but the people training new talent at the UTS weren’t interested in furthering the art of acting or indulging the aesthetic inclinations of artistes. They were trying to give novice performers a sense of how to stand, project, and make an impression on camera; in their view, emotions were found in the script, not in the inner self, and certain gestures, postures, and facial expressions could reliably express them—it was more like learning a golf swing than devising an interpretive dance. The technique the studios taught actors derived from some rudiments of theater and was modulated for the camera and the big screen, but it had essentially been the same for decades: You didn’t need to experience or recall or generate an emotion, you simply expressed it; you play-acted it, as it were. That was the Hollywood Method.

As someone who had channeled his emotions chiefly through his piano playing and had no high-minded thoughts concerning acting, Clint might have felt threatened by the rising popularity of the Method, and he confessed that he was awed by the likes of Brando and Dean. But he knew he couldn’t replicate what they did and that he didn’t have the tools—or, perhaps, the inclination—to dig into his emotions to fuel his work. He did, however, find a lifeline and a way to deepen his acting craft through Kosslyn, who emphasized professionalism, solidity, and seriousness, qualities with which Clint instinctively jibed. He wasn’t interested in making great art; he wanted to learn how to act as a job. Kosslyn took note of the diligent efforts of the tall, reticent young actor: “Clint worked very hard, but you could never predict what was going to come from him.” And while Clint was, predictably, impressed when Kosslyn invited Marlon Brando to speak to the class, he felt more connection when another guest instructor, Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy, revealed that his philosophy of acting was to “just get up and do it.” Even more, Clint loved—and forever quoted—Kosslyn’s famous dictum about screen acting: “Don’t just do something; stand there!”

In retrospect, that tongue-in-cheek-but-not-really precept would become the root of Clint Eastwood’s screen aesthetic, both as an actor and, for almost as long, as a director. When the acting vogue of the day was the struggle to make the internal external, to express the repressed, he sought to embody a quiet, ordinary realism—a choice based perhaps on his personal limitations in matters of transparency and vulnerability, perhaps on his discomfort with emotional expression, perhaps with some notion of male “dignity,” perhaps on his finite skills for the craft he was studying, or perhaps on an authentic preference for the lived-in reality of stillness. Yes, everyone has inner wounds, but it’s equally true that a great many people spend a lot of time hiding those wounds, staying present in the deeds and conversations before them, simply being rather than being on. That was Clint’s comfort zone. Whether he had mastery of it is another question. The fact remained that although he was exposed to the Method and admired the best examples of it he observed, he preferred a different path, a choice that may have, in the short run, stymied his career.

Universal’s decision to re-sign him in the fall of 1954 may have seemed like a vote of confidence, his increased screen opportunities may have made him feel like he was rising, and he was certainly beginning to understand more about the work he was in for as a professional actor. But he must have been aware, at the same time, that he principally had Arthur Lubin, his “discoverer,” agent, manager, and—for half of his screen appearances to date—director, to thank for any progress he was making. The studio itself continued to assign him roles as brief and forgettable as the earliest ones on his résumé. And he didn’t necessarily blame them. “In the beginning, I hated myself on the screen,” he told Hedda Hopper in 1961. “I couldn’t get over how different the image on the screen was to the one I had pictured in my mind.”

In 1955, he worked, uncredited, as a navy corpsman in the World War II action film Away All Boats!, a ranch hand in the Western melodrama Stars in the Dust (his first appearance in a Western, let it be noted), a soldier in the cavalry-vs.-Natives drama Pillars of the Sky, and a lab assistant in the melodrama Never Say Goodbye.* That last one proved especially rankling. His sole bit in the film involved handing some X-rays to leading man Rock Hudson and wishing him luck with an upcoming speaking engagement. On the day the scene was shot, director Jerry Hopper decided that Clint’s character should wear eyeglasses, so Clint dutifully went off to try on a bunch of frames. But when Hudson, the most prominent male star on the Universal lot, got a look at Clint in his eyewear, he asked the director, “Where are my glasses?” After another search for frames, Hopper shot the scene with both actors bespectacled, and he found that he didn’t like the look. So he had Clint remove his glasses. Clint felt like a mannequin—and an ill-used one, at that.

But there was a benefit to finding himself with so much idle time on a movie studio backlot: He could use the place as a technical school, wandering through soundstages and various postproduction facilities and learning about more than just the acting side of filmmaking. “I used to go around to sets all the time and watch people direct,” he remembered. “As much as they’d let you. Usually, the bigger the director was, the stricter they were about not having people just hanging around. I wanted to watch the actors, for one thing, but I also became very curious about the director’s participation. . . . I did go on sets where Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk and people like that were working.”

The instructors at Universal remained positive about his attitude and his growth. “Clint would try anything, get up and be a crooner or a stand-up comic or dance or do mime, you name it,” remembered Jack Kosslyn. “The turning point came when he did a scene from Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. One night I said, ‘Stop pushing it and do it naturally.’ And he played very, very well. After that, he had more authority. He was more comfortable.”

But his string of minor performances in Universal films hadn’t made any particular impression on anyone on the production side of the studio. And his guardian angel, Lubin, was also falling out of favor. In late 1955, both men received bad news. Lubin was let go from his contract with the studio and went off to set up shop as an independent producer-director. And Clint, his unsuccessful discovery, was told that his contract with the UTS would not be renewed. “They didn’t say much of anything: ‘We can’t use you.’” He left the lot on October 25, thinking maybe he’d reenroll at L.A. City College, his father’s talk of “dreamworld shit” no doubt ringing in his ears.

Four

The first year of marriage was terrible,” he told the British movie magazine Photoplay in 1963, not long before his tenth wedding anniversary.

Sometimes he suggested that the problem was that he and Maggie were kids when they wed. “I don’t really recommend getting married that young,” he said. Sometimes he suggested the problem was money: “We had it rough in the beginning, but she knew it wouldn’t be a lark, and she was also from a modest-income family.”

But the more unpleasant truth of the matter, which he admitted on several frank occasions, was that he wasn’t cut out for marriage—or even for monogamy. “If I had to go through it again,” he told Photoplay, “I think I’d be a bachelor for the rest of my life.” Indeed, by many accounts, including his own, he more or less comported himself as if he were a bachelor. Outwardly, he and Maggie looked like an all-American couple: sunny and healthy and active, with their fondness for the beach and their careers based on their good looks—him at Universal, her as an occasional background player on television and a bathing suit fitting model for Caltex and Catalina (“She was a good bathing suit–type,” he liked to brag). The Oakland Tribune even ran a story about their twin ambitions in Hollywood, a little filler item titled (erroneously) “Piedmont High Grad, Wife Appear in Movies and TV.” It seemed so cozy.

Close observers, however, especially Clint’s guy friends, were aware that he considered marriage to be a form of confinement, and he gave himself free rein when it came to other women. As, again, he told Photoplay: “One thing Mag had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t be married.”

His wanderings had already, of course, resulted in a pregnancy in Washington soon after he and Maggie met, and they apparently resumed not long after their wedding and, especially, after his enrollment in the UTS. Inevitably, that program was infused with an atmosphere of sexual energy and license, and the young enrollees often paired off in steady romances or brief liaisons—whether they were otherwise committed or not. Clint was no exception to these intramural goings-on. Years later, his classmate Mamie Van Doren told People magazine that Clint “always knew the most straight and direct path to my dressing room” and made it clear that his visits had nothing to do with rehearsing lines.

His affairs, he later admitted to Richard Schickel, “just became . . . I don’t know . . . addictive . . . like you have to have another cigarette.” There were many other women, some from the ranks of classmates, some encountered at the nightspots and jazz clubs that he frequented, some from among his neighbors at the apartment complex in Studio City, near Universal, to which he and Maggie had moved when he first went under contract to the studio. The atmosphere of that small apartment building—which, naturally, was centered around a swimming pool—not only encouraged sexual adventures but facilitated them; several of Clint’s friends from Oakland, Seattle, and Fort Ord moved into the place or similar places nearby, meaning that there were always apartments readily available for a quick tryst—and buddies willing to help him cover his tracks.

It wasn’t entirely evident, though, that he needed such help. As a friend put it, “Clint goes where he wants, does what he wants—goes to dinner with a girl if he wants. Maggie doesn’t say a thing. Clint is the undisputed boss.” He referred to himself half-jokingly as a “married bachelor,” but there were significant hints that his wife knew the score and was okay with it. “Maggie and I have an understanding,” he was quoted as saying. “I’m independent, a vagabond, and she accepts me as I am and doesn’t strangle me with female possessiveness.” Speaking more broadly, he declared, “Maggie doesn’t chain me. The worst thing is owning people. I don’t want to be owned by anybody—maybe shared, but not lock, stock, and barrel. . . . Love is respecting privacy, accepting faults. But I don’t believe it’s a one-way street. The sophisticated woman accepts that chances are a guy’s not being 100 percent faithful. If she talks about it, it only makes it worse.” Later, he put it thus: “There’s no ownership in this marriage. My soul is my own. Maggie knows this. Possession is the worst thing.” He admitted he was not an ideal partner. “I’m hard to live with. I’m moody, and lots of the time I’d rather be alone. . . . It took Maggie a while, but she learned.”

Despite his tomcatting, he and Maggie seemed generally contented and well matched. They were both dedicated to their health and fitness routines and were happy to be photographed in swimwear; they really did look fabulous together. (Clint had spent a lot of time in the gym at Universal, toning his body with weightlifting, and he continued to be a gym rat as a lifelong habit.) In addition to regular workouts and all that time swimming and surfing, he and Maggie were early advocates of what was, at the time, an exotic health food diet, eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and such rare-for-the-time oddities as wheat germ, alfalfa sprouts, goat’s milk, yogurt, and whole grain bread, groceries they sometimes had to drive to the west side of Los Angeles to buy. (He’d been converted to a lifetime of being careful about what he ate, he recalled, by a chance encounter: “I walked into a health-food store. . . . There was a little old lady in there talking about pesticides and things. . . . I thought, ‘Gee, what she says makes sense.’”) Not many of their acquaintances would have sensed trouble between them.

But their private life was another matter, as Maggie admitted some years later when she told an interviewer, “We’re not advocates of the total togetherness theory.” It’s not clear that she was aware of just how many liberties Clint took, or, for that matter, whether she availed herself of any. But they stayed together through these lean years, despite living near enough to her family for her to make other choices, so she either didn’t know or didn’t care about his sexual entanglements—or she believed that they were his business and nobody else’s, not even hers. It seemed to some who knew the couple that she thrived. “She’s got more steel than a hardware store,” a friend noted. “Clint talks to her about everything.” And Clint himself admitted, “She is the very best friend I have. She loved me when no one else did.”

If nothing else, Maggie was, by and large, the one supporting the family financially. Cut loose from Universal and entirely unproven as an actor, Clint submitted to a dispiriting regimen of fruitless casting calls and auditions and meet-and-greets. He got a few one-off TV shots. On an episode of the crime drama series Highway Patrol, he played a leather-jacketed motorcyclist who wanders into a town that has recently been terrorized by a biker gang; one traumatized resident greets him and his chum with a shotgun, and Clint’s method of depicting fear for the camera is to bat his eyelashes speedily. In an episode of TV Reader’s Digest about negotiations between the U.S. Cavalry and the Apache chief Cochise, he plays a junior officer who denounces Natives as “savages” and, again, blinks excessively while standing around in obvious unease.

Appearances like these kept him working, but none were particularly noteworthy, and none seemed to lead to anything more. He felt he was being used as the acting equivalent of cannon fodder: “I’d get a supporting role, or a semi-lead, because I could ride a motorcycle, jump off a building, do some crazy thing. They didn’t have to pay for a stuntman.” He could still, however, count on Arthur Lubin to try to further his career and his interests. Soon after they both left Universal, Lubin popped up at RKO Pictures, where he took the helm of a wan comic Western, The First Traveling Saleslady, a puff piece starring Ginger Rogers and Carol Channing as a saleswoman and a singer, respectively, who make their way out west, first selling corsets, then barbed wire (don’t ask). Clint plays a cavalryman who falls into an absolutely urpy flirtation with Channing; he’s got a handful of scenes with her, in which she repeatedly comments on how handsome he is (and he does look great in his blue uniform).* But the film was unwatchable and had no impact at the box office, despite such promotional efforts as sending Clint on the road to select West Coast cities, where he performed comedy skits before showings. Thankfully, Clint was, for the most part, spared the embarrassment of having his performance evaluated by reviewers; one trade review called him “attractive,” but no other critics mentioned him, and nobody who wrote about the film had a word to say about his acting itself. His physical allure resulted in a comic episode that June, when journalist Earl Leaf rang him up and told him that a New York movie magazine editor wanted pictures of him for a “Stars of Tomorrow” spread: “Who? Me?” Clint said. “I’m a nobody. . . . I haven’t done a thing worth mentioning.” When Leaf arrived, Clint asked, “Some friends of mine put you up to this, didn’t they? We’re always pulling practical jokes on each other.” It was no joke, Leaf assured him, saying that the editor wanted to meet him when she was next in Hollywood, adding, “She didn’t know you were married, I guess.”

The failure of Traveling Saleslady was yet another instance of his hopes devolving into disappointment. He’d get a gig on TV or in a film, work for a few days, then spend weeks collecting unemployment and phoning his agent (or, rather, agents; he went through, by his own count, six or so during this time, old-school, lower-rung representatives at the Kumin-Olenick Agency, the Mitchell Gertz Agency, and so on) for work that never materialized. He was told that his hair was too fair, that his voice was too soft, that his teeth needed capping, that he squinted too much, that he was too tall, that he didn’t look like a leading man. He endured the casting-call process, and he despised it. “Every day during those years was like someone taking a big wet towel and slapping me in the face with it,” he remembered. “I’d go interview for some dumb commercial which I never got, and the room was filled with guys who looked just like me and who I had seen the day before at another audition for another dumb commercial. Your tolerance level for crap has got to be high, very high.”

He understood what the racket required. “You have to keep selling yourself. You have to run around peddling a commodity that is you.” But he despised being made to feel small by people for whom he had no respect: “I used to go on interviews and see the same people. The producers would all sit around, never crack a smile, smoking cigars and blowing smoke in your face. When you finally get a chance and things start working for you, the same guys suddenly won’t smoke in front of you. That’s okay, as long as you don’t have illusions about it. As long as you know that if things fall apart they’ll be lighting up again.” Even decades on, the memory of it could rouse a fire in him. Speaking in 1983 with Norman Mailer, he admitted, “I wanted to pull people out of their seats and say, ‘Don’t talk to me that way!’” Mailer, impressed, commented, “I just realized that in a lot of the Dirty Harry movies you’ve got a deep well of anger to dip into.” Clint replied, “Oh, yeah. It’s easy. People think I play the anger well. All you have to do is have a good memory.”

In late 1956, he appeared in an episode of the TV drama series West Point, playing a cadet with a knack for electronics who, on a ski trip, uses his technical know-how to help rescue the survivors of a plane crash (talk about reliving a trauma). It’s his best performance to date: He’s leaner and sharper than in any previous appearance, at once more relaxed and more focused; you honestly believe that he’s the fellow he’s supposed to be and that he’s present in the moment. Soon afterward, he appeared in another forgettable film by Arthur Lubin, a blink-and-you’d-miss-him bit in Escapade in Japan, playing—and, again, this is remarkable, given his personal history—a pilot trying to intercept an airliner that crashes into the sea near Tokyo.

On the one hand, he seemed to be flailing. On the other, he was amassing a sufficiently sizable résumé to be called in to be considered for significant work. Such was the case with his next notable job, Lafayette Escadrille, a pet project of director William Wellman, who made some of Clint’s favorite movies, including The Ox-Bow Incident, which he often cited as his favorite Western, and The Story of G.I. Joe. Wellman had been among the first Americans to volunteer for the French Air Force in World War I, before the United States formally entered the war, and he’d been wanting to depict the episode for years. In 1956, he got the project situated at Warner Bros., with Paul Newman penciled in for the lead, and he interviewed Clint several times for a key supporting part, a role based on a real-life character, Reginald “Duke” Sinclair, who happened to be the tallest fellow in Wellman’s unit.

Clint was so hopeful of getting the part that he grew a wispy mustache so as to more closely resemble Sinclair. It can be seen atop his lip in an episode of the Western anthology series Death Valley Days that aired in December 1956. Clint plays a down-on-his-luck prospector in the California Gold Rush who’s too broke to pay for someone to forward his mail from San Francisco, meaning he doesn’t learn about an inheritance falling his way until it’s almost too late to claim it. He appears four times in the half-hour show, and it’s his best performance yet, in turns sulky, angry, self-pitying, realistic, hopeful, despairing, and ebullient. It’s sensitive work, and it makes Wellman’s interest in casting him plausible. However unlikely his path had been, he was in sight of arriving at being a proper actor.

But his luck continued to come up short. Paul Newman wound up backing out of Lafayette Escadrille, and his role went to Tab Hunter, whom Warner Bros. was grooming for stardom. Hunter was taller and lighter-haired than Newman, and Clint resembled him sufficiently so as to render his being cast alongside him in the central ensemble potentially confusing. The part of Duke Sinclair went to David Janssen, Clint’s Fort Ord and UTS chum, and Clint wound up playing a small role amid a large ensemble of mostly anonymous faces, a character based on another real-life flier, George Moseley, an All-American football player from Yale.* He mainly appears as background or filler, his one notable scene being an almost farcical baseball sequence that devolves into a brawl (Clint’s batting swing, by the way, is awful). The film, shot entirely in California, would be Wellman’s last, and it was a complete dud: lifeless and phony and not remotely attractive to audiences; the New York Times, which failed to mention Clint at all, deemed the picture “soundly embarrassing” and “slightly idiotic.”

In the spring of 1957, he got cast in a TV commercial, and even then his luck failed. “You remember the old Greyhound commercial where the driver sticks out his head and says ‘Leave the driving to us’?” he asked an interviewer. “I was there when they shot that. Then they did mine, which had me as a parking attendant with a lot full of cars. I had one line—‘We’re all filled up’—which was to tell people that it’s always better to ride the bus. Mine ran once. The other one ran 50 times a day.” He took a role in an air force training film, Seven Letters to Susan, that was shot at March Field in the Moreno Valley, well east of Hollywood, where his career was hanging on by the thinnest of threads. Word of that air force film appeared in the Los Angeles Times because he had made some changes in his professional situation. He had put his business affairs, such as they were, in the hands of Irving Leonard, an accountant who was developing a roster of Hollywood clients and who impressed Clint with a philosophy of financial conservatism that mirrored that of Clint Sr. And he hired the publicity firm Paul Marsh and Associates to handle his press. As a result, items began to appear in Hollywood gossip columns whenever any little sniff of good fortune came his way: that training film; a comic Western (never made) called Sam O’Rorke and the Indians (Clint would get “a topflight stellar part,” per the press release); and The Sad Sack, an adaptation of a comic strip about army life that wound up, sans Clint, as a Jerry Lewis movie. He had another brief, one-off TV role as a serviceman, a junior officer basically relaying telegraph messages and saying “Aye-aye, sir” in the episodic drama Navy Log; if nothing else, it proved once again that he looked great in uniform, which seemed to be his fate.

This thin diet of intermittent work couldn’t remotely nourish a career. He returned to the sort of physical labor that he had done after high school and the army; he swept the floors of a furniture factory, and he found himself with a shovel in hand digging swimming pools in backyards in the San Fernando Valley. He would claim, later, that his immersion in blue-collar life was an asset in his conception of his roles and his films, asserting that the movies he made were, by and large, for and about ordinary working people. But he wasn’t romantic about it at the time, as his friend George Fargo remembered: “We were working for the United Pool Company. One day I got fired, and the boss looked over and saw Clint unbuttoning his work shirt. ‘What’re you doing?’ the guy asked Clint. And Clint just said very casually, ‘Well, George is my friend, and he hasn’t got a ride home.’ And he quit just like that.” (In the ’80s, a global superstar and multimillionaire, he found himself in a Las Vegas casino absentmindedly making bets, only to be jolted awake by a memory of these days: “I used to work for 30 cents an hour! What am I doing here?” He walked out.)

He even took to day-drinking, spending time in bars near the studios in Burbank where, among other elbow benders, he encountered Robert Mitchum and lapped up that famous roué’s tales of the movie life. And at least once, the whole frustrating mess of it—the lack of money, recognition, and stability, the woman chasing, the humiliation, the sheer, exhausting, hopeless grind, the booze—burst out of him in violent fashion. At around this time, his Oakland high school buddy Fritz Manes, who had fought as a marine in Korea and was stationed at Camp Pendleton, visited Hollywood to party with Clint. They wandered into the Tailspin, a dive bar on Cahuenga Boulevard just off Hollywood Boulevard, and, as Manes later recounted, things got fiery:

There was a bunch of sailors in there, and I said something like, “Aw, a bunch of fuckin’ swabbies.” Well, I took the first punch and it knocked me right out the door and onto the sidewalk. And then Clint jumped in and proceeded to kick the shit out of all of them, about six sailors, singlehandedly. This is no exaggeration. When the police and the Shore Patrol got there, these guys were lying all over the place, and Clint was left there standing.

He kept pursuing acting jobs—going out on any number of auditions and cattle calls*—but it was Maggie’s income that kept them solvent. And then, in late summer 1957, he got a role—third-billed, in fact—in Ambush at Cimarron Pass, a Western being made by Regal Pictures, which supplied B-movies to 20th Century Fox at a rate of a new film every other week. Shooting with budgets of around $100,000 and schedules of seven workdays, Regal made absolutely uninspired, unoriginal exploitation films: cheap Westerns, crime stories, and science fiction and monster movies with names like Hell on Devil’s Island, The Desperados Are in Town, The Black Whip, and Ghost Diver.* The film in which Clint was cast didn’t seem much more auspicious: The director, Jodie Copelan, was a veteran film editor making his debut behind the camera; the leading man, B-movie stalwart Scott Brady, was known to show up tipsy for work and had recently been arrested for marijuana possession; and the budget and schedule—a generous eight days—wouldn’t allow the use of horses for more than a couple of hours, forcing the screenwriters to contrive a scenario in which the characters’ mounts were stolen. But the gig would pay him $750 (more than $8,000 in 2025 terms) for the week, and it was third-billing. How awful could it be?

Turns out, plenty awful: Clint plays Keith Williams, a former Confederate soldier working on a cattle drive that has been relieved of its herd by an Apache band. He and his fellow cowboys encounter a cavalry platoon charged with transporting a prisoner who’s been selling rifles to those very same Apaches and has been caught in flagrante with a shipment of arms, which the soldiers have confiscated. The cattlemen and soldiers are surprised by the arrival of a small Apache party delivering to their care a young Mexican woman they’ve been holding as a hostage—a seemingly humanitarian gesture that is in reality a distraction, allowing the Apaches to steal their horses. The soldiers, cowboys, gunrunner, and señorita decide to walk across the wilderness to the safety of a fort. This arrangement is unbearable for Williams, who hates the “lousy,” “lyin’” Yankees who killed his mother and sister; several times he reaches for his sidearm to take a shot at the soldiers, only to be wrestled into submission by his fellow cowpokes. He secretly connives with the gunrunner to take control of the soldiers’ weapons and go after the Apaches and the horses; and he is one of several of the men who court the señorita. Eventually, the Apaches, who covet that load of rifles, attack, and the soldiers and cowboys defeat them and recover their mounts.

Even by the standards of the indifferent pictures Clint had already made, Ambush at Cimarron Pass was unspeakably bad, staged, shot, and cut like a not-especially-promising student film, stuffed with stilted acting, written as if on the fly. Under the direction of Copelan, who never made another feature film, Clint, looking very fair-haired, is as stiff and mumble-mouthed and emotionally shallow as in any of his least convincing TV work. He does get a couple of convincingly angry close-ups, but they hardly recommended him for greater things. For the rest of his life, he would declare it the worst Western ever made, and it’s a legitimate contender for the title.

The film debuted in February 1958, playing in Southern California on the bottom of the bill at a half-dozen theaters that were showing the established hit Old Yeller. The producers didn’t hold a preview screening for the cast and crew, so Clint went to an opening-day matinee with Maggie. As he watched, a sick-making realization dawned on him: “This is just . . . dog shit.” He later remembered, “It was sooooo bad that I just kept sinking lower and lower in my seat.” He endured until the end and then made an effort to hide his face when he left the theater, lest any of the others in the audience recognize him and share their impressions. It was a shock and a wake-up call: “I said to my wife, ‘I’m going to quit, I’m really going to quit. I gotta go back to school, I got to start doing something with my life.’”

You couldn’t blame him for thinking he’d hit bottom. He was twenty-seven years old, he’d been in the movie game for four years, and if this was where it had led him, he really should have been thinking of packing it in. He had ignored his father’s advice about taking risks with his future, and there couldn’t be much clearer evidence than this turkey that his father was correct. The salt-of-the-earth wisdom that his father had instilled in him became more tangible in his mind: Nothing comes from nothing. Maybe he had been a dreamer. He’d taken his shot—his shots—and missed, again and again.

He was, he later admitted, ready to quit Hollywood and Los Angeles altogether: “I was on the verge of tossing it all. I’d run out of my unemployment a few times.” But what he didn’t know for certain that nauseating afternoon was that a door had already opened for him, one that would change his entire life. Some weeks earlier, through the it’s-who-you-know serendipity that governs so much of the so-called luck in business, Clint had screen-tested for yet another TV program. But this wasn’t for one of his one-time deliver-the-line-and-go-home deals. This was for a featured part—second-lead, in fact. He was being considered for a new Western series being developed for CBS by Charles Marquis Warren, a veteran pulp magazine writer who’d come to Hollywood in the late 1940s and was the main force behind adapting the radio drama Gunsmoke for television. Warren’s new show would focus on a cattle drive, and Clint was up for the part of the ramrod, essentially the sergeant of the outfit, who conveyed the orders of the trail boss and oversaw the wranglers and cowboys. It would be called Rawhide, and while the network wasn’t entirely sold on it quite yet, around the time Clint was sent reeling by the sorry sight of Ambush at Cimarron Pass, word appeared in the Hollywood trade papers that he had gotten the part.

Part II

The Rise of the Sidekick

A DOPE ON A HORSE

A “HEALTH FOOD” DIET

A TRIP TO THE OLD WORLD

A RUFFIAN POET

A PONCHO

A STARE

A MYSTERY HIT

SOME BABIES

A HOMETOWN

A SPOTLIGHT AND SNICKERS

A MENTOR

A REALM OF HIS OWN

Hollywood could always use a guy who looked good on a horse. But who knew that Italy could as well? And who knew you could jump from the saddle to stardom and even dominion?

Moviestore Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Five

The sheer ubiquity of the Western as a form of entertainment in the decade or so after World War II is almost impossible to comprehend. The Western was easily one of the most popular film genres produced by Hollywood studios, and it thoroughly dominated television programming. By one count, 30 of the 108 prime-time shows aired by the three national networks in 1959 were set in the Old West. Between October 1958 and April 1959, Westerns accounted for the nation’s top four most popular TV shows (Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Have Gun—Will Travel, and The Rifleman), three more of the top ten, and another seven of the overall top twenty-five. Factor in the TV broadcasts of theatrical Westerns, occasional episodes of anthology series with frontier settings, and the fact that most Westerns were full-hour shows, perhaps half of prime-time TV involved six-shooters, stagecoaches, and sagebrush. And that doesn’t count the fifty-plus Western films that premiered in the nation’s theaters in 1958 alone. It was the Space Age in the real world, but it was still the Wild West in the popular culture.

This taste for stories about the “taming” of the Wild West was, in a sense, proof that a certain tendency of the national mind—call it “Manifest Destiny,” call it “colonialism”—was endemic to the era. If the ’50s can be stereotyped as a decade of complacency and comfort for the so-called mainstream of American culture, then the Western can be seen as its self-congratulatory reverie, a dreamworld victory lap for a nation that believed it had conquered history. Of all the forms of popular entertainment that American culture has produced, the Western is the most central to the nation’s self-conception. Even the most superficial Westerns brush up against our collective notions of history, morality, justice, honor, sacrifice, courage, ecology, even love and beauty—as well as concepts of what and how and why America should be. The westward expansion of European culture; encounters with and campaigns of violence against indigenous peoples; human reckoning with nature; power struggles between colonializing empires; the advent and aftermath of the Civil War; the effort to amass and control natural and economic resources; the imposition of “civilization” on the landscape, even the contemporary, man-made landscape—all of these have been essential questions of American culture since before the dawn of the republic, conscious or not, and all of them are dealt with again and again in the Western. The motley chunk of culture that we have loosely labeled “the Western” is a big part of what America is, of how the world sees it, and of how it thinks of itself. And, as one of its most famous stars and creators reminds us, it is one of the only forms of artistic expression that can truly be said to be wholly ours. “There are two American art forms, the Western and jazz,” Clint has repeatedly said. And his word carries some weight, as without the Western, we likely wouldn’t know his name at all.

How Clint got from the embarrassment of Ambush at Cimarron Pass to, virtually overnight, being cast as second-lead in a prime-time TV show that would last nearly seven full years is another stroke-of-luck story, the details of which are a bit lost in the fog of time. The most streamlined—and plausible—version goes like this: In early 1958, Clint’s agent-of-the-moment, William Shiffrin, gave him a heads-up about a new Western series being put together at CBS, where, coincidentally, Clint had a friend/admirer, Sonia Chernus, who had served as a story editor/writer/secretary for Clint’s discoverer, Arthur Lubin, for years. Clint stopped by CBS headquarters to ask Chernus what she knew about the series. As they chatted in the cafeteria, their little klatch was interrupted by a fellow in a suit who wanted to know (a) if Clint was an actor and (b) if so, how tall he was. He answered affirmatively, standing to his full height and pumping up his résumé in the telling. The man introduced himself as Robert Sparks, and he asked Clint to come along with him. Chernus vigorously nodded encouragement and made “shoo-shoo” hand gestures, so Clint followed the fellow out.

Sparks, it happened, was overseeing the birth of the series that Clint was interested in, just as he had overseen the creation of Gunsmoke and Have Gun—Will Travel, among other significant hits. He explained that the lead character of the series, a man in his forties, had already been cast, but the right actor for the role of second-in-command, someone in his twenties, had yet to be found. This sounded fantastic to Clint, but he was puzzled when they sat down to chat and they were joined by a disheveled guy who, in Clint’s words, “was wearing old clothes [and] looked like he’d been pushing a broom in the back room. I didn’t know whether he was going to sweep under the chairs or what.” The schlub turned out to be Charles Marquis Warren, the creator of Rawhide and a man with one of the fullest and most respectable résumés in all of television Westerns.* Warren joined the chat, expressing interest in—gulp—Ambush at Cimarron Pass, which hadn’t yet premiered but which he said he’d make an effort to see. In the meantime, he said, the producers would get back in touch with Clint through his agent very soon and set up a proper audition and screen test.

On the one hand, this was all fantastic: a real shot at a potentially steady gig. On the other hand, Clint knew that Ambush at Cimarron Pass was trash, and he suspected that if anyone involved with Rawhide screened it, his chances of landing the gig could be torpedoed: “I was hoping [they] wouldn’t see it, otherwise I’d be 86-ed out of the job.” When he returned to CBS the next day to read for Warren and Sparks, he was relieved to learn that they wouldn’t be looking at the picture. But he was horrified when they handed him a page-long monologue and asked him to read it. “I had to run in and start talking to the camera,” he remembered. “And I said, ‘I can’t learn this in five minutes, there’s no way.’ Fortunately, I learned what the intent was. I came in and improvised the whole thing. The director/writer didn’t like me right away, because I didn’t use any of his dialogue. And so I left, and as I left there was another actor saying the same lines, and he was saying them all perfectly, not well, but he was saying them all. I said, ‘Oh, that guy’s got the part.’ So I went home that night, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve blown another one.’”

But the producers thought Clint had done the thing just right. Something about his lack of confidence fit the character perfectly. And he had the look (importantly, Eric Fleming, the actor who’d been cast in the lead, stood some 6 feet, 3 inches and a bit; Clint’s comparable height was a factor in his favor). Within a week, Bill Shiffrin called to tell him that he’d gotten the job. And in late January, around the time Ambush at Cimarron Pass splatted into theaters, the Hollywood trade press was reporting that he was one of the co-stars of Rawhide, a pilot for what would be, if it were picked up, CBS’s first-ever full-hour Western series.*

Meanwhile, he kept working. He appeared in an episode of the popular Western Maverick, playing a sullen, preening gunman who has his eyes on the daughter of a dying land baron only to find his scheme interrupted by the arrival in town of James Garner’s title character, wisecracking gambler Bret Maverick. Directed by, almost inevitably, Arthur Lubin, the hour shows off Clint’s lanky physicality and easy physical authority, but the drama feels a bit beyond him; he’s best when he’s sneering, but he’s constantly outplayed by Garner’s wry, sleepy wit.* Off-screen, the two actors became friends (they shared a financial adviser in Irving Leonard), and Garner recalled Clint asking him for advice on a TV career: “He said, ‘Hey, Jim. . . . They’ve offered me this Rawhide series. We’re getting into negotiation, and I want to know what to ask for.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what to ask for, Clint, ’cause I’m getting screwed. I can’t tell you what to ask ’em for.’ And evidently he made a pretty good deal.” He added, with understatement, “Clint is, without being totally aggressive, very ambitious.”

In the spring, he took a one-day gig on an educational film about what not to do while waterskiing, and on the job he met a scrambling actor who, like him, had been let go from a contract with the Universal Talent School, which, by this time, had all but shuttered. Upon his dismissal, this fellow was told flatly that he couldn’t act, and he laughed when Clint revealed that Universal’s chief gripe with him was that he had a prominent Adam’s apple. “At least I can do something about my problem!” the guy chortled. His name? Burt Reynolds.

Whatever career advice Clint followed, it led him to sign a contract for, as he recalled, $700 an episode,* with a planned twenty to thirty episodes per year, each shooting for about a week. It was a life-changing boon and an affirmation of his choice of career. “I just kind of lived on the brink all the time,” he recalled. “And then, when I got a series, it was my first steady job as an actor, other than Universal, which was a very low-paying job. This one was actually a pretty good-paying job. . . . I thought I was in high cotton.” As he put it another time, “The money looked to me as if I’d be in a league with Howard Hughes.”

Rawhide was conceived by Warren on the heels of Cattle Empire, a dreary B-movie he directed that hit theaters right around the time Clint was cast in the TV series.* The wan and phony drama concerns clashes of personality and motivations during a cattle drive, and it has obvious roots in Howard Hawks’s Red River, the 1948 classic that pitted megastar John Wayne against newcomer Montgomery Clift in an epic odyssey of beeves and men. Warren, a genuine student of Western history, also relied heavily on the diaries of George C. Duffield, an Iowa livestock farmer who, after serving in the Union Army with distinction, began regularly running cattle from Texas to Sedalia, Missouri. Like Duffield, Warren’s hero would be a trail boss, named Gil Favor, and his outfit would include a green second-in-command, Rowdy Yates (Clint’s role); a stalwart scout he knew from the war days (Pete Nash, played by Western actor and singer Sheb Wooley*); a comical, ornery cook (Wishbone, played by another veteran Western actor, Paul Brinegar*); and a band of cowhands that would occasionally include guest stars. The series was conceived essentially as an episodic anthology, with the drovers running into various people and situations as they traveled north, engaging with the drama at hand until there was a resolution, and then continuing on. The emphasis was so decidedly on the one-off adventures that Eric Fleming was surprised to see how central Favor and Rowdy were to the finished pilot. “The first script was aimed at the guest stars,” he said. “I was astounded to see the final version and find Clint Eastwood and I were the stars.”

That pilot was shot in early spring on the Universal lot, and it met with approval from CBS brass. They commissioned the remainder of the first season (a half-season, really, of thirteen episodes) and planned a fall 1958 debut for the series, with a Monday night at 7:30 p.m. time slot. While work on those episodes was underway, the show hit a significant snag. The Hollywood trade papers had been printing stories suggesting that the boom in TV Westerns had peaked and that networks were having trouble finding sponsors to support new shows. And, sure enough, Rawhide was unable to attract an advertiser to sustain it, not even a half-sponsor.* In August, with nine or ten episodes in the can, the show was removed from the fall schedule, with no release date slated.

This was a cruel blow for Clint: His one solid shot in a half-decade of slamming his head against the door was being pulled out from under him. As the year ended, with production on pause and no prospect of resumption on the horizon, he and Maggie decided to visit Oakland for the holidays. Clint had no great love for the place (“It’s an OK town,” he said years later, “but you don’t get misty-eyed thinking about it”), but Clinton and Ruth Eastwood had moved back to the area from Seattle about three years prior. Clint and Maggie went by train, which turned out to be a propitious choice. As they made their way north, a telegram arrived with news of a fabulous Christmas present: Rawhide was back on the schedule. Lever Brothers had agreed to 50 percent sponsorship of the series, and CBS had given it a Friday night slot replacing two half-hour shows. The series would debut on January 9, 1959, and production on the rest of the first season would resume after the New Year. As Clint later recalled, the news overwhelmed him. “Mag and I did a little champagne trick and yelled a lot,” he said. “I stuck my head out the window and shouted a lot of profane things.”

CBS had initially shelved Rawhide because they couldn’t find sponsors, but on the evidence of the first two episodes, they might have done so simply because they were concerned about its quality.

The debut episode, “Incident of the Tumbleweed,”* opens with two signature touches that became staples of the show. The first was the title song, positively yowled by singer Frankie Laine, a mélange of pulsing bass, whipcracks, shouts, and Laine’s 110 percent delivery. With its chorus of “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’” and its bravura shout of the show’s name, it became a jukebox and radio hit (actually reaching the top ten in the UK) and would be covered over the years by, among many others, country star Faron Young, the Blues Brothers, and the Dead Kennedys. In its wake, each episode was introduced with footage of the cattle drive and a brief, laconic voice-over by Gil Favor, talking about his workload and his crew.

In the premiere, we join the cattle drive in progress, the drovers stopping for the night by fresh water. They’re met by a prison wagon transporting a passel of desperados—including the wife of a famed outlaw—to face trial. The bad guys kill their captors, but Favor and his men subdue them, and Favor determines to deliver the wagon and its prisoners to the law, with Rowdy riding alongside. One of the captives managed to escape during the uprising, however, and soon the notorious outlaw/husband is on the wagon’s tail, with our heroes in his sights.

As in most Rawhide episodes, less attention is paid to the cattle drive than to the dramatic side story. Several of the guest actors have more lines than either Fleming or Clint, and the drama centers not on the series regulars but on the one-off cast.* Even still, we get a sense from the hour of who Rowdy Yates is, which is to say a not-too-bright hothead who falls for every skirt he sees and whose impulses to act without thinking often complicate already ticklish situations. The first close-up Rowdy is granted shows his reaction to the sight of the woman prisoner. With a strange sigh-slash-exhale, he takes her in and mutters, appreciatively, “She ain’t been in that wagon very long.” The Clint Eastwood we’re seeing is twenty-eight years old, lean and tall, with a mane of light hair, sideburns, and slightly jagged front teeth, looking a bit roughed-up for his years but, at the same time, credibly gormless and green. He’s not that different from the idiot Clint played in Ambush at Cimarron Pass—meaning that it may have helped him get the role had the producers of Rawhide sat through that botch.

What Clint brings to the part, though, is charisma. Gil Favor may be the stalwart trail boss, but he doesn’t command the eye the way Rowdy does. Clint’s face may be craggy for Rowdy’s age, but his lopsided grin is infectious, his rawboned body ambles with a comfortable jangle (somehow his hips and head ride behind his knees and shoulders, giving him almost an S-shape, a lifelong quirk that is the true essence of any Clint impersonation), and the gleam in his eye is like a klieg light. The gait, the squint, the beaming smile: Much of what would become recognizable the world over as echt Clint Eastwood is there right at the start. The show is Fleming’s, and he’s capable in the mode of an upright boss man. But given the least pry hole, Clint subtly dominates scene after scene simply by standing at ease and being himself. After a half-decade of kicking around, and getting the boot, he found himself breathing inside his own skin, and that skin fit the character of the rash, bumptious Rowdy Yates perfectly. Fleming is notable for his imperious, stoic way, but Clint radiates energy and, for want of a more precise term, star power. Even from the outset, he can’t help but draw your eye.

But that very first episode . . . Rawhide debuted on Friday night, January 9, 1959, opposite the extremely popular Walt Disney Presents on ABC and NBC’s The Adventures of Ellery Queen. And if you didn’t know that it had grown into a long-running hit, you’d likely assume it vanished instantly. The direction of Richard Whorf (who would oversee the first two episodes and, oddly, not return to the show until the very last one, almost seven years later) is ponderous, literal, and inert. There’s no sense of tension or dynamism, and little feel of the outdoors at all. The staging is clumsy, the pacing slack, and the editing between “location” shots (mostly created on the Universal backlot) and patently indoor footage is slipshod. It’s terrible filmcraft. Variety loathed it, saying that it was “absolutely—to the point of incredibility—loaded with every well-known cliché in hoss operadom, put together with random thoughtlessness.” And the New York Times was only slightly kinder: “If Rawhide were the first of its kind it would have seemed much more impressive. As it is, it is a well-polished conformist Western.”

The second episode, in which the drovers stumble across a Spanish mission where Rowdy’s old war buddy is marrying into a family involved in an inheritance squabble, isn’t much better, despite the presence of Martin Balsam as a Jesuit padre, Troy Donahue as Rowdy’s war buddy, and the introduction of a vein of comedy involving Favor’s crew. Only with the third week, and “Incident with an Executioner,” does Rawhide come to life. In it, the cowboys encounter a runaway stagecoach that is being stalked by a mysterious bounty hunter, played by film noir and Western staple Dan Duryea. Directed by Charles Marquis Warren himself, the episode is mysterious, atmospheric, and tense, right through to the end.

What does distinguish the series, even in these first few entries, is the way it continually turns away from the matter of a cattle drive to focus on matters of social justice, democratic idealism, racial harmony, the toxic impact of violence, and various tropes of midtwentieth-century psychology. Over the course of its multiyear run, there are discussions of prison reform and fair trials; depictions of the connection between juvenile dysfunction and violence; calls for social equality for women and for racial equality for Blacks and Native Americans. We even learn that Rowdy’s social awkwardness and mercurial temperament are at least partly the result of his having spent several years of the Civil War in solitary confinement in a Union prison in Arizona while still only a teenager. This tendency to dive into social and psychological matters makes Rawhide more akin to the so-called adult Westerns of Anthony Mann or the later John Ford, rather than to the wan B-movie and TV cowboy fare it superficially resembles. It’s not always gripping or fully baked as drama, but it consistently aims for a higher plane than might be expected of its ilk.

Rawhide definitively claimed its place in the CBS schedule. In its first six months on the air, it ranked twenty-eighth in the Nielsen television ratings, and it steadily climbed. Its second season saw the show rise to number eighteen, and in the 1960–61 ratings it placed at number six (and yet was only the fourth-most-popular Western, behind Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Have Gun—Will Travel). In all, it would spend more than four years in the top thirty. It inspired merchandise, toys, and branded comic books and novelizations. It wasn’t the most popular Western on TV, but it was well liked. And Clint and Eric Fleming became stars.

The security of appearing as a leading player on a successful TV series was life-changing financially and eye-opening artistically. Clint and Maggie were able to leave their tiny apartment in North Hollywood and buy a home in suburban Sherman Oaks—a pointed choice, being both more economically responsible than living in Beverly Hills, say, and fitting the couple’s preference for a low-wattage lifestyle. It was a simple three-bedroom, three-bath ranch home, under 2,000 square feet in size, built just a few years prior, and the Eastwoods went about renovating it, including putting in an in-ground pool; located just off Beverly Glen Boulevard with a view of Stone Canyon, it was a suburban dream home of the sort Clint might’ve grown up wishing someday to live in. He would remember, proudly, his father visiting for the first time and acknowledging to him, “It’s very nice you’ve made a few dollars while you’re young.”

And he grew as an actor. He could still look out of his depth when trying to express deep emotion, but he had learned how to be in front of the camera, a battle he’d been fighting since his first screen test. “Rawhide was a day-in, day-out job,” he explained. “You got a chance to be in front of the camera all the time, so the camera no longer was your enemy.” He began to develop a set of methods to get himself into character and into the moment of the scene. “I used to go and talk to the camera. . . . I’d go and stand in front of it and call it all kinds of names. . . . That’s my way of kind of dominating it. I said, you know, ‘You’re not going to intimidate me.’ . . . When nobody else was looking I’d go up: ‘Ah, you dirty son of a bitch.’ And then I’d go back, and I’d just be kind of cool.”

He appreciated the opportunity to try new things, to expand his capabilities as an actor. “It taught me how to pick up and run, how to make things up, wing things in there.” The gift of knowing that you could rely on your place on the call sheet was inestimable. “You can experiment with yourself, try a different scene different ways,” he said. “If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, ‘Well, I won’t do that again,’ and you’re still on the air next week.” Often, perhaps to hide his weaknesses as a developing actor, perhaps to satisfy some aesthetic sense, he tried to do more by saying less. As a Rawhide crew member who witnessed his efforts to improve his role by cutting lines remembered, “Some people thought he was being difficult or lazy, that he hadn’t prepared, but it was Clint’s way of making it more real.”

He learned to ride horses—really ride, not just mosey about as he had done on his grandmother’s farm. He learned how to handle a pistol, becoming sufficiently adept that he would be invited to quick-draw contests in Las Vegas for several years, winning prizes against some professional gunmen and such celebrities as Elvis Presley, Jerry Lewis, and Sammy Davis Jr.* And if he was typecast by the public as a cowboy, he didn’t mind one bit. “I knew I wasn’t a cowboy,” he said. “But if you portray a cowboy and people think you’re a cowboy, that’s fine. That’s what every actor strives for. . . . I had been unemployed for a long time, I had been struggling as an actor, and I said, ‘Are you kidding? Just get me the job and I’ll worry about being untyped later.’” (As he put it another time, “I’m no cowboy. I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Oakland.”)

He was more than just typed, though. He stood out. James Garner, who had worked with him and knew him socially, said, “You could take one look at him and know he was going to be a star. He had an aura about him.” And Christian Nyby, who would eventually direct fourteen episodes of Rawhide, starting in season five,* put it this way: “No man ever looked more majestic upon a horse—that statuesque frame wending through the chaparral on a healthy stallion in the sun was practically mythic, just a vision out of a legend.”

At first, he was a teen idol. Most of his fan mail came from young girls, smitten with Rowdy’s boyish awkwardness and fabulous mane of hair. The camera crew called him “Lionhead” in honor of his coif, and he complained about it in the press: “I always used to wear my hair in a crew cut,” he said, “and it would be kind of nice to get back to it again. They tell me the guys really did wear their hair long like this in the old days, but I don’t see how they stood it. I would have sheared mine off as close as I could get it. Darn stuff picks up more dirt.” He made scores of promotional appearances, riding along in the Beverly Hills Easter parade, throwing out the first ball of the Pacoima Little League season, and visiting orphanages and children’s hospitals in Southern California and San Francisco as part of the Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots drive with his Rawhide co-star Sheb Wooley. He attended a gala at Disneyland, alongside Vice President Richard Nixon and his family, when several new rides were opened to great hoopla. He and Wooley brushed up against history in September 1959, when they (and fellow actors James Garner, David Janssen, Dennis Weaver, and Mike Connors) took part in a celebrity basketball game during the halftime of a preseason meetup between the Philadelphia Warriors and the St. Louis Hawks at the L.A. Sports Arena—the occasion of Wilt Chamberlain’s first-ever appearance as an NBA player.

And there were outings that were less well publicized. Besides being a cowboy actor, Wooley was even more famous as a singer, especially for his hit novelty record, the goofball rockabilly-slash-comedy tune “The Purple People Eater,” which hit number one on the Billboard charts in late 1958. Clint remembered a night out that ended up at the Palomino Club, the premier country bar in the L.A. area. “Me and Sheb Wooley had gotten bombed out of our skulls on Black Russians,” he said. “We were raising hell, and Sheb says, ‘C’mon, let’s go down to the Palomino and sing.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know any songs, man.’ So he said, ‘No problem—I’ve got a real easy one I’ll teach you.’ So we came down and got onstage and sang ‘Purple People Eater’ just blitzed out of our minds. It must’ve been really awful.” The two became so chummy that they wrote a script for a Western comedy titled “But My Boots Are Too Tight!” which, according to an intriguing note in the Los Angeles Times, was to be filmed by Clint’s own company, Maggi Productions.

The second season of Rawhide, a full complement of thirty-one episodes, premiered in September 1960, just ten weeks after the shorter debut season ended. Right from the start, there were some changes. In the first episode, the traditional opening monologue introducing the cattle drive wasn’t spoken by Gil Favor but rather by Rowdy Yates, who turned out to be the only regular cast member seen in the hour. “Incident of the Day of the Dead” concerned Rowdy being tricked into a gambling debt that he could pay off only by breaking a dangerously spirited maverick for a sadistic, imperious Mexican heiress (played by Viveca Lindfors, who had once been married to director Don Siegel, more on whom later). On her ranch, Rowdy stumbles into a web of dramas concerning her ineffectual and alcoholic husband, her emotionally damaged daughter, and an uprising among her ranch hands, all reaching a climax on the titular holiday. Clint handles this bona fide leading role with ease, standing up to the accomplished Lindfors, showing kindness to the girl, and even bridling and saddling the dangerous horse (but not, pointedly, riding or being thrown from it, which duties were patently executed by a shorter, stouter, uncredited stuntman). It’s more than has ever been asked of Rowdy in an episode to date, and it’s all played with naturalistic authority and ease.

But that spotlight quickly faded, and in the coming weeks, months, and years, Rowdy returned to his traditional role in the cattle drive and the series: following the orders of, as he always called him, “Mr. Favor,” getting into jams thanks to his hotheadedness and lack of smarts, and straddling a line between providing comic relief (a running gag in the series was that nobody ever laughed at Rowdy’s jokes) and being a stalwart lieutenant and wingman to Favor. After a while, he found the character unfulfilling. “I was the dumb sidekick,” Clint later said, “the one who wasn’t too swift, the one with a little slack lip.” He would beef to the writers and producers, but he was regularly reminded that they were making television, not art, and that Rowdy wasn’t that essential to the show. Still, he was working—sometimes ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week—which was more than he could have said even eighteen months prior.

He decided to use the series just as he had used the Universal Talent School—as a form of education, in effect. Now that he was at ease in front of the camera, he started to look around behind the camera to see what lessons he could absorb about filmmaking. “Instead of going to the dressing room during breaks,” he said, “I’d hang out and ask questions about the lights and cameras.” He wandered into editing rooms and watched episodes being cut together. And, more than anything, he observed the styles of Rawhide’s directors—a roster of literally dozens. “You saw every style you could think of,” he said early in his own directing career. “Even the guys I don’t admire too much I learned something from, because you learn from their mistakes.” Later on, he was a little more forthcoming: “There were some directors who were television directors who were very, very fast. And then there were some former motion picture directors who were then doing television like Tay Garnett and Stuart Heisler and László Benedek. . . . There was a guy named Harmon Jones* who was really fast, who we used to call ‘Cut-Good-Print.’ Pretty soon he was so fast we called him ‘CGP.’” Clint used Rawhide as his film school, providing the security of a paycheck while also affording him a full education in a craft.

He approached the process with the practicality he brought to the blue-collar jobs he’d had in the past, and he took pride in learning the nuts and bolts from the ground up. “It doesn’t matter whether you get a PhD in engineering or come up through the ranks as an apprentice to engineers,” he said later on. “It’s all the same knowledge.” And in the course of the series he met—and learned from—scores of actors. In the span of 217 episodes, Rawhide employed literally hundreds of performers, as many of whom were old-time stars as were young guns out to prove themselves. To name but a large handful: Mary Astor, Frankie Avalon, Robert Blake, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, Lon Chaney Jr., Bruce Dern, Buddy Ebsen, Barbara Eden, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Martin Landau, Cloris Leachman, Julie London, Peter Lorre, Dean Martin, Vera Miles, Agnes Moorehead, Leonard Nimoy, Claude Rains, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Harry Dean Stanton, Barbara Stanwyck, Woody Strode, and Rip Torn . . . and if you can discern a thread in that, well, bravo.

But an appreciative perspective didn’t make the short leash he was on feel any less constricting. Rowdy was, per Clint’s frequent complaint, an idiot and almost perennially a teenager: “Twenty or twenty-one and just as dumb as he was.” He griped to his wife and friends and agent and fellow actors, and he sought variety in the form of outside work, a solace that the show’s executives systematically denied him, even when the gigs he wanted to take clearly weren’t in conflict with his schedule. He turned down a few opportunities to do some theater work with friends, he said, and he wasn’t allowed to take on outside jobs even during his summer hiatuses from filming.

One night, in July 1961, his frustrations boiled over. He phoned Hank Grant, the Hollywood Reporter’s TV columnist, and complained about his dismissive treatment at the hands of Rawhide’s creators. Saying that his requests to do outside jobs were routinely dismissed with “excuses you wouldn’t believe,” he went on a tear:

I haven’t been allowed to accept a single feature or TV guesting offer since I started the series. Maybe they really figure me as the sheepish, nice guy I portray in the series, but even a worm has to turn sometimes. Believe me, I’m not bluffing—I’m prepared to go on suspension, which means I can’t work here, but I’ve open feature offers in London and Rome that’ll bring me more money in a year than the series has given me in three.

This was not how TV networks handled their dirty laundry. The immediate aftermath of Clint’s frustrated pleas was that he gave a subsequent string of interviews telling the world how happy he was with his gig. “I’ll play Rowdy Yates on Rawhide until the cows come home, or as we say on the show, ‘Until we get the herd to Sedalia,’” he (or a CBS publicist) said. “I’ve never had it so good since I’ve been playing Rowdy Yates, and I’ll stick in the saddle as long as they let me.” But the following spring, they did allow him to take a gig that he’d been offered—and it was about as vivid an example of “fuck around and find out” as you could imagine.

In early 1962—when, according to one published report, he was still entertaining overseas film offers—he was granted permission to play the role of . . . “Clint Eastwood, star of Rawhide,” in a one-off appearance on CBS’s comedy hit Mister Ed, the creation of his old mentor Arthur Lubin and his secretary/assistant (and, of course, Clint’s liaison in securing the role of Rowdy Yates) Sonia Chernus.* The episode, ingeniously titled “Clint Eastwood Meets Mister Ed,” aired that April, and there would be no reason to pay attention to if it didn’t seem so strangely relevant to its guest star’s professional life. For starters, Clint receives a phone call offering him the chance at a big-payday movie role only to have the offer withdrawn when Mister Ed, on a party line, insults the producer (in the episode, Clint is a bachelor, and Ed also uses his telephone skills to torpedo a shot he has at a hot date). Later, Clint not only agrees to help the show’s regular stars stage a skit for a charity event, but he literally directs them in rehearsals for—get this!—a Western. More than eight years before his real-life directorial debut, he acts the part of a director: casting the actors, blocking the action, suggesting line readings, and so on. It’s played as a gag, and he seems to have fun doing it, but, like the scuttling of the (fictitious) movie offer, it’s as if the network is having a dig at his ambitions by putting them in the most insipid of frames.

Indeed, Clint had literally been asking the executives of Rawhide and their network superiors for a chance to direct an episode. As he recalled, they were shooting a scene of the cattle stampeding, and he was riding right in the middle of the dusty fracas. “I went to the director and said, ‘Look, give me a camera. There’s some great stuff in there that you’re not getting because you’re way out here on the periphery.’ I got all kinds of static about union problems.” But the idea stuck. In all, Rawhide employed some forty-six directors over its seven-year run, and he reckoned he could do as good a job as at least some of them. He and his agent had several conversations with the producers and the network about the possibility. And he, at least, believed that his request had been approved. “Then the production company reneged on their promise that I could do it,” he recalled. “They said that CBS didn’t want actors who were in the shows directing the shows.” They let him direct a few promotional trailers, he said, but otherwise his ambition to direct, like so many other of his wishes regarding his participation in Rawhide, was left to another day.

They did grant him permission to do something deeply unlikely, though, something only marginally related to the show but relevant, perhaps, to Rowdy Yates and his fan base of teenage girls. In 1961, he wandered into a recording studio and sang two songs—the love ballad “Unknown Girl of My Dreams” and the jazz semi-standard “For All We Know”—which were released as a single on the short-lived Gothic Records label. The disc made no mark on the charts, but there was a follow-up: syrupy takes on the R & B tune “Get Yourself Another Fool” (which would be a hit for Sam Cooke two years later) and the Gershwin brothers’ little-known ballad “For You, For Me, For Evermore.”*

These records aren’t country tunes—the saccharine arrangements and Clint’s cotton-puff vocals and dreamlike immersion in lyrics give more of a Ricky Nelson or Pat Boone vibe. But there was something pleasantly sincere about his voice, and Rawhide’s creators got the idea to have Rowdy croon on the show, which he dutifully did once each in seasons four and five. Clint even put together a side hustle based on his singing, appearing with his TV co-stars Sheb Wooley and Paul Brinegar in an act built of songs and comedy sketches that they performed on the state fair and rodeo circuits for a summer or two, to little notable renown or profit. (In February 1962, Clint, Brinegar, and Eric Fleming went on a trip to promote Rawhide in Japan, where it was an immense hit; the visit marked Clint’s introduction to Japanese food, which he came to swear by as the “healthiest thing going,” and soaking tubs, which he would dream of one day having installed in his own home.)

In August 1962, the Cameo-Parkway label, best known for Chubby Checker’s monster hit “The Twist,” signed Clint to record some proper country-and-western songs. In November, a single appeared: “Cowboy Wedding Song” and “Rowdy” (the latter complete with the sounds of whips and hollers, echoing the Rawhide theme). The following May found him in a New York studio recording an entire album of cowboy ballads, trail songs, and theatrical country tunes, including “San Antonio Rose,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” “Mexicali Rose,” and “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.”* The full LP, titled Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites, was released in September, to almost zero impact. Clint was sent out on the road to promote it, which did nothing in particular for sales; the thing didn’t get so much as a sniff of the Billboard top one hundred.

His prospective career as a singer having failed to launch, he might well have felt doomed to play Rowdy Yates. But in early 1964, a wisp of a possibility appeared on the horizon from a place even less likely than a recording studio.

Six

Being the star of a hit weekly TV series meant a bonanza of publicity, most of it of the most anodyne, star-polishing sort. Back in August 1959, during the brief break between the airing of Rawhide’s short first season and the debut of the second (first full) season, TV Guide ran an article about Clint’s fitness regimen, illustrated with a picture of him—shirtless, taut, with perfect hair—doing poolside push-ups using chaise longues as his support; extolling his surfing, jogging, and weightlifting habits; and sharing such advice as, in “his” words: “With kids who watch a lot of TV instead of playing, a few push-ups during the commercials would do wonders.”

Several of these puff pieces were centered around his home life. There were many shots of him and Maggie at their new house in Sherman Oaks, the vibe of which was less movie star’s palace than suburban midcentury American dream home. They were depicted lounging around the pool (in swimwear, in which they showed fabulously), preparing meals in their kitchen, listening to records in the living room, tending to their small menagerie of pets, and horsing around in goofily staged poses. In one multipage newspaper spread, they’re seen tending to their garden with the latest yard equipment, clad in jeans and work shirts. They are each about thirty years old in the earliest of these images, and young and beautiful, and it’s impossible to look at them and not wonder, “Where are their children?” And the answer is that they had none.

Not that any of these puff pieces would broach the question. Sometime later, Clint would at least allude to a possible explanation for their not having started a family after more than six years of marriage. “She worked for a while,” he said, “and then she got hepatitis very badly—about as badly as you can get it without ceasing to exist. She had to quit, not do anything for a year.” But even then, the question was left unasked.

And, in truth, there was more discomfort around the matter than any journalist—or even Maggie herself—could know at the time. Clint’s pursuit of other women had only been fueled by his newfound fame. As when he was under contract at Universal, he had access to willing actresses, and he took full advantage of his travels on behalf of Rawhide to dally with female fans.

He remembered one such adventure, a prowl through Seattle with jazz titan Miles Davis, with real relish:

I was doing Rawhide at the time. . . . And he came over at intermission and asked me [here he lapsed into an imitation of Miles’s famed rasp], “Will you send a picture to Miles Jr.? Miles Jr. is a fan of yours.” I said, “Sure, Miles. I’ll send one out.” Then he told me to hang out, and I said I would. So after the set he came over and said, “Let’s go out and get some bitches.” So we went to some after-hours joint. Seattle was kind of a closed town, but these clubs would last till way in the morning. So we went out and screwed off.

Closer to home, he became a fixture at a bohemian salon-slash–hookup spot in Hollywood that was overseen by Kitty Jones, a sometime singer who claimed to have found and vetted scores of girls for Elvis Presley. Clint was known to show up at informal wingdings at Jones’s Cahuenga Boulevard apartment in his pickup, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers, drink a lot of beer, and leave with a different girl each time. (One of these liaisons, with competitive swimmer Anita Lhoest, is said, in an unpublished biography of her, to have resulted in a pregnancy that was aborted.)

Amid all this carrying-on, there would be another pregnant woman not his wife, and that pregnancy was not only part of a relatively steady relationship but one that would result in the birth of a child—whose existence would be unknown to Maggie for years.

Roxanne Tunis was a pedigreed dancer and aspiring actress whose Hollywood career was stalled at the level of “unbilled day player”—or extra—when she met Clint. The two shared an acting coach in Jack Kosslyn and had some friends in common, and it surprised no one in Clint’s circle that he fell for the small, fiery, dark-haired beauty who hailed from small-town Pennsylvania but seemed more exotic than that. As they progressed from tryst to full-fledged affair, Clint got her semi-regular work on Rawhide—not featured roles but the dance-hall-girl and townie parts she was already playing elsewhere. Their relationship was an open secret among the Rawhide crew, but its depth, unique among his many entanglements, became apparent in early 1964, when Tunis was visibly pregnant and she and Clint began comporting themselves as expectant parents. By the time Tunis was ready to deliver her baby, though, its father was no longer present. He was taking advantage of the summer break in the Rawhide shooting schedule to work on a mysterious project overseas.

A press item of a bygone era, from Variety’s Chatter column, April 1, 1964: “Clint Eastwood hopped to Rome for Magnificent Stranger.”

For the first time since he slid down in his theater seat and watched his acting career dribble away in Ambush at Cimarron Pass, he was to appear in a movie. Or at least something like a movie: a Western, funded with a combination of Italian, German, and Spanish financing, to be shot in Spain and Rome by a director whose sole previous credit was a sword-and-sandal picture starring the American cowboy actor Rory Calhoun.

The sheer audacity of the risk, for both Clint and his director, cannot be overstated. Here was the second banana on a lightly regarded TV show—that, by the way, was steadily bleeding viewers—flying across an ocean to make a low-budget genre movie in a foreign land for a mostly untested filmmaker. And here was a filmmaker getting his first opportunity to bring a script of his own devising to the screen and risking it all on an actor whose last movie was possibly the worst Western ever made. On the one hand, you admire their moxie. On the other: What were they thinking?

From Clint’s perspective, it was a propitious time to go do something. Rawhide was slipping in the ratings as the era of TV Westerns waned, falling out of the Nielsen top thirty in the 1963–64 ratings (never, as it happened, to return). Most other TV Westerns were similarly fading (Gunsmoke and Bonanza being the perennial exceptions), and the flow of theatrical Westerns from Hollywood studios, a torrent at the time Rawhide debuted, had become a seep: Barely a dozen Western films of any size were made in America in 1964.

Moreover, Clint understood that his TV success guaranteed him nothing going forward. He had enjoyed more screen time in the first four or five episodes of Rawhide than in all his earlier feature film work combined, and by early 1964 he had appeared in 174 episodes, including several in which he was the focus of the entire hour. Still, he knew that he had to take whatever capital he’d accrued on the show and gamble it all on a jump to the big screen. “TV builds you for immediate stardom,” he said, “and when your show closes or starts to fade, it takes it away like chocolates from a kid.” He had been looking for other opportunities for years. But only now did the moment seem ripe, even if the job itself seemed more than just a bit daffy.

As he recounted the story many times, “My agent called me one day and asked me if I wanted to do a picture on the plains of Spain with an Italian director who spoke no English. I laughed for twenty minutes. When I picked myself up off the floor, I said, ‘I’m doing Rawhide. Why would I want to do a Western in Spain?’” He agreed to at least read the thing, which was called “Il magnifico straniero” (the magnificent stranger). When he did, he encountered a story about a loner who wanders into a small town on the U.S./Mexico border that’s being tyrannized by rival families—crime syndicates, really—who are warring for supremacy in the smuggling trade. After proving himself with a gun, he’s courted by both factions as a paid assassin, switching allegiance repeatedly so as to pit the two clans against each other in increasingly deadly battles in hopes of wiping them all out.

Clint would always claim that he recognized the plot as, basically, Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film starring Toshiro Mifune as a sour, grumpy samurai who wanders into a similarly feuding town and essentially takes the same course of action. (Kurosawa, in turn, had cribbed his plot from Dashiell Hammett’s private eye novel Red Harvest, though he himself claimed that a 1942 film adaptation of Hammett’s The Glass Key was his chief inspiration.) “At about page 30,” Clint remembered, “I realized it was Yojimbo, which I had seen a few years before down on Western Avenue at a theater that specialized in Japanese films. I thought, ‘This is good, the way they changed it from the samurai.’”

He gave the script to Maggie to read—a practice he was to rely on for years—and he consulted with his financial manager, Irving Leonard, who, after his father and wife, was his most trusted adviser and even occasional banker. (“There have been some bleak days when he had to carry me financially,” Clint later confessed. “But he had faith and stuck by me.”) When he approached Leonard for counsel about a crazy offer of $15,000* for about two months of work on an Italian Western in Rome and Spain, he admitted, “I was kind of on the fence about it.” Leonard, however, saw the project as a chance to branch out and expand. Besides, he told his client, “You’ve never seen Europe. . . . You’ll enjoy yourself. What have you got to lose?” Clint could see the logic: “I had a job waiting in TV, and I knew if it was a flop nobody would ever see it anyway.”

He took it.

And everything changed.

“I was born in a cinema, almost. Both my parents worked there. My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So, for me, cinema is life, and vice versa.”

Maybe it’s not as pithy as Michael Powell’s famous declaration “I am cinema,” but Sergio Leone’s description of his relationship to the art form he practiced from his teenage years to his death has the indubitable virtue of being literally true. He saw the world as if through a movie camera; for decades, he spent the bulk of his days creating or conceiving films; he was a bona fide innovator of cinematic styles and grammars; he even died, in his own bed, watching a movie on TV. Cradle to grave, movies were almost literally his life.

Leone was born in Rome on January 3, 1929, the only child of Vincenzo Leone and Edvige Valcarenghi, who had met in 1912 when they were employed at a film studio in Turin, he as a writer/director, she as an actress. They were veteran film people—at least as much as possible in those wildcatting days of the medium—and they worked mainly under pseudonyms, he as Roberto Roberti, she as Bice Valerian. He had enjoyed the more prominent career, and he’d even directed her in La vampira Indiana, a lost 1913 film often cited as the first Western ever made in Italy. They’d wed in 1916 but put off starting a family. When Sergio arrived, his father, nearly forty-nine, was being nudged out of the movie business by the talking-film revolution; Edvige, forty-two, had quit acting soon after the marriage.

Sergio was born and raised in the Trastevere district of Rome, an area popular with artisans and craftsmen, which might be why his folks chose it, but it was also a bit on the rough side. Sergio gravitated toward the streets when he grew to school age, running with a shady crowd, a gang of sorts, that occasionally waged battle against little knots of boys from nearby neighborhoods. He wasn’t a delinquent, much less an urchin, but he fancied himself a tough, a “Mr. Hyde” of the streets, as he liked to say, a “lout.”

But he was a lout who was, as if genetically, under the spell of cinema. He and his chums regularly devoured movies, in particular American movies, which felt much more vital than the melodramas and society comedies then popular with Italian filmmakers and audiences. When he was ten, his father briefly returned to directing, giving the boy his first opportunity to visit an actual film studio. And by the end of World War II, when Italian cinema found its rebirth in a new type of movie—neorealist dramas that discarded the trappings of the studio for the grit of street life and the stagy mannerisms of veteran actors for the naturalism of untrained performers—he drifted away from his intended profession, the law, and found his way into the world of filmmaking.

It helped that his parents’ names opened virtually any door in the business to him, but it mattered, too, that he was diligent, clever, and eager to learn. He was working as a gofer—with the exalted but uncredited title of “assistant to the director”—as early as 1946, when he was just seventeen. Two years later, he found himself in costume on the set of a masterpiece, Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief), in which, in addition to his off-camera duties, he appeared in a nonspeaking role as a bespectacled seminarian escaping a rainstorm underneath an awning alongside the film’s protagonists.

In the coming decade, Rome would rise to become a filmmaking capital second only to Hollywood in the volume, quality, and scale of the movies made there, and Leone would be the sort of young Roman man-on-the-make who thrived in that overheated environment. He worked as an assistant director and as a director of second-unit footage (that is, action scenes and location shots not involving the principal cast) on dozens of Italian films, ranging from dark melodramas to period spectacles. And he worked on major Hollywood productions that were shot in Italy to take advantage of financial considerations and the high quality of Italian craftsmanship. He worked—not always with screen credit, but verifiably—on Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951), Helen of Troy (Robert Wise and Raoul Walsh, 1956), The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinnemann, 1959), and Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959).

By 1960, he was arguably the most sought-after assistant director in Rome, which was legitimately a note of distinction. And he was emerging as a screenwriter, having contributed to several of the films he’d worked on and received co-writing credit on a string of costume epics. As a result of all of this, he was given the reins of a film of his own, one of the sword-and-sandal movies so popular with Italian producers and global audiences at the time. The Colossus of Rhodes was a hodgepodge of history and melodrama; the leading man, Rory Calhoun, was a second-tier Hollywood actor; and it never gelled in the editing, meaning that cuts of varying lengths were delivered to the various international production companies that helped fund it.

Still and all, it was made fast and under budget—the producers had found that they could save money by shooting some of it in Spain—and its modest profits meant that Leone’s stock continued to rise. The following year found him working alongside another of the American directors he admired, Robert Aldrich, on Sodom and Gomorrah, and continuing to write such fare as Duel of the Titans and The Green Flag of Allah. And then, in 1963, Yojimbo was released in Italy, and Leone and some of his screenwriting friends saw it and got the idea to remake it, in effect, as a Western.

THE ITALIAN WESTERN WAS BORN NOT FROM ANCESTRAL MEMORY BUT FROM THE HERD INSTINCT OF FILMMAKERS WHO, WHEN YOUNG, WERE HEAD OVER HEELS IN LOVE WITH THE AMERICAN WESTERN. IN OTHER WORDS, THE HOLLYWOOD WESTERN WAS BORN FROM A MYTH; THE ITALIAN ONE IS BORN FROM A MYTH ABOUT A MYTH.

—ALBERTO MORAVIA, 1967

For Leone, the Western was just as filled with iconic figures, tropes, and legends as any of the tales of ancient Rome or Greece and their gods and histories. He compared the genre to fairy tales and, especially, to the puppet shows that he was taken to see as a child, with their commedia dell’arte archetypes and plots revisited again and again until they became hardwired in his brain. What was more, he saw in the tales of rival gangs roaming the prairie, of outlaws and posses, of gunfights at high noon, an elevated embodiment of his youthful street life: the banks of the Tiber as the Wild West. He loved the Hollywood classics—Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine and Red River and Shane—but he despaired at the theatrical Westerns of the early 1960s and, especially, at the likes of Rawhide. As he saw it, the mass popularity of the genre had, perversely, killed it. “There were so many Westerns on American TV,” he said, “that Hollywood had stopped making good ones.” He thought that there was a chance for something fresh.

The plot of Leone’s film (which was written with a number of collaborators, all of whom would remember the genesis of the film differently) was deeply derivative of Yojimbo, but what the director had in mind for it was distinctly original. He wanted to make a film that would strike viewers as he remembered being struck by the movies he fell in love with as a boy: bigger than life, stark, and bold, with the resonance of Olympian myth but infused with an earthy realism that recalled the neorealist films that Leone had worked on and reflected his own coarse, crude aesthetics and sense of humor. The script, in short, didn’t matter to him so much as how the film would look and feel. He wanted to shoot big images, vast landscapes, and garish bloodshed, with drenched colors, elastic pacing, and a dynamic musical score. Westerns were sometimes called “horse operas,” but what Leone had in mind was something more like grand opera, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—everything art—with horses and six-shooters. Leone was a storyteller, yes, and a filmmaker, and he understood the business side of things, but, chief of all, he was cinema, and the movie he had in mind would be a movie.

In early 1964, he went around Rome for financing, and he found himself sliding further and further down the scale from the most prestigious production companies to Jolly Films, an Italian outfit that had already made one low-budget Western on location in Spain, Duello nel Texas (“Duel in Texas,” released internationally as Gunfight at Red Sands), with Spanish and German money behind it, and was preparing another, Le pistole no discutono (released as Bullets Don’t Argue), with a similar funding structure. Jolly offered to let Leone piggyback his film on top of Le pistole, sharing locations and crew in Spain, if he could make it for 40 million lire—roughly $200,000,* or one-third of the sum he was hoping for. The proposed budget was ludicrous: A leading man of any real stature would cost that much alone. But Leone agreed to the deal and set about casting.

Sergio Leone had never heard of Clint Eastwood. He had always pictured Henry Fonda as his antihero, relishing the idea of using the superstar’s iconic status to sabotage audience expectations, but Fonda’s agents wouldn’t even deign to show their client the script. He considered James Coburn, who asked for a budget-busting $250,000, and Charles Bronson, who thought the script was garbage, and Cliff Robertson, who also wanted too much money, and he even thought about the nearly unknown American actors who were already starring in Jolly’s Westerns, Richard Harrison and Rod Cameron. But they didn’t sit right for him. Someone suggested he have a look at a popular American TV show called Rawhide, thinking Leone might be interested in Eric Fleming, who came on so stoic and hard as Gil Favor. And there was another actor in the cast, the tall, younger guy who played Favor’s second-in-command. He might be worth a look, too.

There is some dispute about whether Leone watched a single episode of Rawhide (number ninety-one, to be precise, “The Black Sheep”), or whether he watched a reel of Clint’s best scenes, or both. And there is some dispute, as well, over whether it was a member of Leone’s team who brought Rawhide to his attention or a Roman agent who was working with, among others, Maggie Eastwood to promote Clint’s career. Regardless, Leone was more impressed with Rowdy Yates than with Gil Favor. Years later, he put it this way: “What fascinated me about Clint above all was his external appearance and his own character. . . . Clint didn’t speak much . . . but I noticed the lazy, laid-back way he just came on and effortlessly stole every single scene from Eric Fleming. His laziness is what came over so clearly.” And, again, even more grandly: “The story is told that when Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of marble, which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses. . . . When they ask me what I ever saw in Clint Eastwood, who was playing I don’t know what kind of second-rate role in a Western TV series in 1964, I reply that what I saw, simply, was a block of marble.”

Clint himself harbored no such grand ideas about his casting: “I knew they offered me the part because they couldn’t afford an expensive actor,” he said. What he saw in the part, other than the payday and the relative low risk (“If it missed,” he reasoned, “it wouldn’t hurt much . . . and probably would have died in Europe without getting to the United States”), was the chance, finally, to play something other than Gil Favor’s impetuous, dull-witted lackey. The character he was off to play “was the type of guy I always wanted to play during those years I worked on Rawhide. I was always frustrated playing sort of a ‘Quincy’ type who goes along with the cattle drive and comes up with dumb statements. I always wanted to create a sort of a mythical character who says very little but still makes a point.” Much to Clint’s delight, Leone’s hero “just didn’t give a shit and was very self-motivated.” He knew he would have some work to do—the script was filled with long passages in which his character explained his past, his inner life, his plans. But he was game for the challenge ahead.

With his $15,000, flat-fee, guaranteed deal, he left his wife and his pregnant mistress behind in Hollywood and flew off to Rome with the makings of his wardrobe. He’d bought some black Levi’s and battered them into a suitably worn look. He’d found a hat he liked at a costume shop in Santa Monica—black and wide-brimmed, with an oval crown, akin to a riverboat gambler’s hat. He’d borrowed boots, spurs, and a gunbelt from the Rawhide props department. In Italy, he found some thin, long black cigars, which he cut into thirds; he wasn’t a smoker, but he saw his character as a guy who hid behind his cheroot, keeping his hands busy, giving him a slightly infernal air. (“They were about [a foot] long. I said, ‘I’ll chop ’em in threes.’ Boy, they tasted ugly. Put you right in the mood for killing.”) And, lastly, when he arrived in Spain, he found a poncho he liked—tobacco brown, with a pattern of white zigzags and diamonds around the collar and sparse white fringe at the ends. The total look, which is as iconic as Humphrey Bogart’s trench coat and fedora or James Bond’s tuxedo, was literally one of a kind: The production was low-budget even by the standards of his earliest film work, and he had no replacements for any of his gear. “I had one hat and one poncho,” he confessed. “If I’d lost them, we’d have been in bad trouble.”

He’d managed to psych himself up to take the role, but he quickly faced a test of confidence. When he got to Rome, he wasn’t greeted by Sergio Leone (who, he soon learned, spoke almost no English), but by an assistant. When Leone visited him at his hotel, Clint found the director gruff and haughty (a posture that Leone later admitted was a front to hide his own feelings of being intimidated). And at a party he attended soon after arriving in town, his ears were filled with gossip about how shoddy the picture was and how long it had been lingering on the shelf without any hope of being made. “Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, stay away from that project! It’s been around for a long time,’” he remembered. “And I said, ‘Well, I don’t care if it’s been around. I think it’s a lot of fun, and I think I want to do it.’” He was there, he had his gear, he was getting paid, and he was ready to work. He headed off to Spain.

Some of the film was shot not far from Madrid, but most of it was shot in the hot, dusty southern province of Andalusia, in particular in the area around the town of Almería, which was developing a reputation as a filming center due to its proximity to desert, coastal, and mountain terrains. A dozen or so Spanish films had shot there, and bits of a dozen international productions as well, including such large Hollywood pictures as King of Kings, El Cid, Lawrence of Arabia, and Cleopatra. Jolly Films, a relative lamprey in this sea of whales, had found that the locals had learned how to accommodate film crews, had some bare-bones lodgings and hospitality to offer, and even had some equipment and props to rent. Jolly’s paltry sack of lire would stretch further there than anywhere in Italy or the States.

As Clint anticipated, it was a cheap production. There were no proper hotels near the filming locations; there were no trailers or bathrooms on the set; they worked through lunch most every day, fighting against the clock and the financial chokehold of the budget. And on top of all of that, almost nobody but Clint spoke English. Leone had a habit of acting out scenes as he described them—to co-writers, to producers, to his actors. So he and Clint managed to communicate with gestures, postures, and facial expressions . . . somewhat. At other times, they had to rely on the intercession of a translator whom the German co-financiers of the film had sent to the set. As Clint remembered, “This Polish gal could speak seven or eight languages. Sergio would walk on the set and start rattling off nonstop Italian, waving his hands, and she would say, very calmly and softly, ‘He wants you to move over there.’” Prior to arriving on location, Clint might’ve hoped he’d be able to chat with his main co-star, one John Wells (or, sometimes, Johnny Wels), but he discovered that the guy was in fact a rising Italian actor named Gian Maria Volonté who spoke no more English than Clint did Italian; they could greet one another and little else.

What Clint didn’t know, at least until he got to Almería, was that it didn’t matter: Italian filmmakers—even the ones working with the biggest budgets—didn’t directly record actors’ dialogue live on set but rather always dubbed it in during postproduction. So it was fine with Leone if only one actor in a scene spoke lines in English and the others spoke in their native tongues (mostly Italian) or mouthed gibberish altogether. “They put the sound in later,” Clint recalled. “So people would be playing Frisbee and everything else in the background.” (When the film was being prepared for release, Clint, as was the Italian practice, dubbed his own English dialogue, and his speech was rendered into Italian by an actor named Enrico Maria Salerno, who imbued the character’s voice with a menacing hiss that influenced Clint’s own delivery of dialogue for the rest of his career.)

Language barrier aside, Clint enjoyed working with Leone, who was an efficient worker and a playful, excitable collaborator. “Leone was very childlike,” he recalled fondly. “He wore a Western hat when we were shooting, and he always had a cigar. . . . I’d be doing a scene, and I’d look off camera, and I’d see him sitting there, and he’s imitating me.” Clint immediately recognized that Leone was using photography, casting, and stylization to do something different with the genre. Several of these innovations were really just a matter of Leone seeing the material through his own cultural lens. As the director said, more philosophically, “I brought to the Western some strict conventions of my own. . . . Obviously, there’s a culture behind me that I can’t just wish away.”

Clint had spent so much time in the laundered atmosphere of an American TV Western that he really appreciated watching Leone “breaking unwritten laws about making Westerns. Like you weren’t supposed to tie up a person before you shot him. You never photographed a scene so that the audience could see both the shootee and the shooter in the same frame. But Sergio didn’t even know about such things and rightfully didn’t care.” Not everything Leone conceived met with his star’s approval: Clint recalled that when he arrived on the set he saw actors dressed in coonskin hats and pointed out that nobody in Mexico would wear such a thing. But he was aware as filming progressed that something new and fresh was underway.

He also appreciated Leone’s willingness to let him cut his character’s paragraph-long speeches in order to create an air of mystery, menace, and self-containment around him. When he first received the script, he was appalled at the prattling dialogue he was supposed to deliver. “ ‘These guys got to be kidding,’” he remembered thinking. “I told my agent, ‘We have to cut the exposition.’ It was too much. The thing is, the more a character says, the more it takes away from the image of decisiveness, of control. It weakens the character.” The taciturnity he was after in this role—and throughout much of his career—has often been mistaken for laziness (as when he cut his lines on Rawhide) or as a limitation of his acting talent. Fact was, it was an aesthetic choice, based in part on Jack Kosslyn’s teachings (“Don’t just do something; stand there!”) and his own introverted personality: “Being sort of a nontalkative kind of guy in my real life . . . it was easy for me to suppress certain things and still get across to the audience that there was something cooking there.” In his mind, “the public understands silence. . . . It’s difficult to play strength on-screen if you rattle on. I like to make the audience use its imagination.” The result was the creation of a mythic persona, a man who speaks only when necessary and, then, often in terse apothegms.

His director, who’d co-written those lengthy expository speeches, didn’t necessarily see things the same way. “Leone thought I was crazy,” he recalled. “Italians are used to more vocalizing, and I was playing this guy who didn’t say much of anything. I cut it all down.” When all else failed, he flat out tricked him. “I’d just say, ‘Sergio, in a B Western you’d have to explain. But in an A Western you just let the audience fill in the holes.’”

Along with an economy of language, Clint thought an economy of motion would also suit the character. “On the surface it looks very easy,” he said, “like the guy’s just standing there and walking around. But you take an economy of dialogue and build a whole feeling through attitude and movements. It takes a very concentrated thought process to do that.” He had in mind not John Wayne or Gary Cooper or some other icon of Hollywood manliness but rather the most unlikely model you could think of: the singer Perry Como. “Como doesn’t look like he sings much,” he said. “He makes it look easy. But that doesn’t mean he lacks musicianship. He’s a good musician. When your technique shows, you’re playing technique, rather than the part.”

The most striking instance of his efforts to craft his character by trimming his verbiage comes late in the film, when Clint’s character undertakes his one selfless act of the entire story and rescues a family from one of the warring clans. He is asked why he’s helping them, and, as Clint recalled, “There were pages and pages about this guy’s background. I said to Sergio, ‘No one wants to stop the movie at this point to find out about what happened to this guy. Let’s keep the mystery of the character and just allude to what happened.’” Instead, he speaks but a single line: “Because I knew someone like you once, and there was no one there to help.” And then, as if embarrassed at his verbosity, he adds, “Now, get moving.” It’s easily one of his best moments in the picture.*

However it happened, the lack of dialogue, the stare, and the stillness and silence didn’t sit well with the investors in Italy and Germany who financed the picture. They weren’t paying him a lot of money, but they were paying him, and they didn’t think they were getting their money’s worth. As Clint remembered, “They said, ‘Christ, this guy isn’t doing anything! He isn’t saying anything! He doesn’t even have a name! And the cigar is just sitting there burning!’”

It was all, Clint reckoned, a chance for him to ditch Rowdy Yates and carve a new image for himself—and at a low risk, as chances were the film would never be seen in the States. “At first I didn’t think I wanted another Western,” he said, “but then I felt I could show versatility in that field. I thought it would enable me to move out into other directions.” It was as if he was trying to scrub the scent of Rowdy off his skin: “I was tired of the Rawhide morality,” he said. “In most Hollywood Westerns, the good guys all seem to work for everyone but themselves. I like the idea of a lead who thinks only of what’s in it for him.”

Shooting wrapped and Clint headed home, with no particular hopes for the film and no conception of how original it was, as the traditional opportunity to watch himself in the previous day’s footage—the rushes, in the parlance of the trade—wasn’t available; each day’s exposed film was couriered straightaway to Rome for developing. He didn’t get to see Leone’s mastery of wide-screen compositions or his famous, feverish close-ups.* He wouldn’t, likely, understand how visceral the violence in the film was (it would be another three years before American audiences were sent reeling by Bonnie and Clyde and five before the slow-motion bloodletting of The Wild Bunch). He had no idea of the operatic pacing that Leone would impose on the imagery, unlike anything ever done in a Western anywhere. And, of course, he wouldn’t have heard the music, which was composed after principal photography was completed and was a story in and of itself.

Finishing the film back in Rome, Leone didn’t know what he wanted it to sound like so much as what he didn’t want it to sound like. He hated the symphonic, orchestral scores of so many classic Hollywood Westerns. He imagined something as iconoclastic and primal as the photography, violence, stoic acting, and primitive morality of his film. But he had to get it written and recorded on a shoestring budget and with local Italian talent. His producers suggested he take a meeting with Dan Savio, who had scored a Western for them the previous year and was already at work on another. Leone watched that first film but was unimpressed with the score, which he felt was exactly derivative of the Hollywood pap he hoped to avoid. But there weren’t too many options. He took the meeting.

When Leone arrived at Dan Savio’s home, he learned that the fellow was actually named Ennio Morricone, and he learned, further, that the two of them had been classmates in middle school, which the composer proved by producing a framed class photo from those days. That wasn’t enough to get him the job, though. When Leone declared that Morricone’s score for Duello nel Texas was entirely derivative of the work of the great Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin,* Morricone concurred: “They commissioned me to write a watered-down version of Dimitri Tiomkin!” Convinced his old schoolmate was on the level, Leone gave him a shot. In return, he got a genre-bending score that would change film music forever and launch the obscure composer on a titanic half-century career.*

There were other things that Clint didn’t know about the movie he’d just filmed. The producers felt Italian audiences wouldn’t want to see a Western directed by an Italian, so the credits—both on-screen and in the scant promotional materials—declared the film to have been made by one Bob Robertson.* The producers had still not come to a copyright agreement with the Japanese creators of Yojimbo, whose work had obviously inspired “Il magnifico straniero”; Leone had gone so far as to defend his clearly derivative film by citing an obscure Italian fable with a vaguely similar plot as his chief influence. This highly dubious claim was enough to clear a path for the finished film to be shown in Italy and a few other European markets, but there was no way it would stand in Japan, much less in the United States, where copyright protections would more strongly favor plaintiffs. Not that it mattered: Nobody in the States was interested in distributing the thing.*

Nor, for that matter, was anyone in Italy. In the summer of 1964, the freshly finished movie screened at an annual film market in Sorrento, and nobody offered to buy or distribute it. In August, normally a dead month for new releases, the film played on a single screen in Florence, in a mostly empty theater, but it nonetheless turned a profit because the company that booked it had bought a large block of tickets to ensure that the film would play for more than a single day. But those attendees who had purchased their own tickets were impressed, and they told their friends, and after a few days the theater was packed with paying customers. Without reviews, without advertising, the film was a word-of-mouth hit; the theater manager even refused to return the print when the originally contracted engagement expired.

In early November, it opened in Rome, where it was treated as a brand-new release by the critics at the nation’s most influential newspapers, most of whom hailed it as a breakthrough. (One of the most positive reviews came from a former collaborator of Leone’s who had become an enemy; in his review, the guy had made flattering comparisons with the work of John Ford, and Leone called him to thank him for forgetting their feud and saying such nice things, to which the critic replied, “What do you have to do with it?”; he, of course, had believed he’d been reviewing the work of Bob Robertson.) And Roman audiences responded as enthusiastically as their Florentine counterparts. The film played to packed houses in some of the city’s biggest theaters, and the producers’ phones rang regularly with requests to book it elsewhere in Italy and in some other European territories where legal action by the makers of Yojimbo was no threat.

But there was no talk of an American release. And the star of the film, back at home and back at work on his waning TV series, had no idea that anything at all had come of his quixotic venture in making an Italian Western in Spain. In mid-November, Variety ran a review of the film, calling it a “cracker-jack western . . . with a James Bondian vigor and a tongue-in-cheek approach,” deeming it “a major candidate to be the sleeper of the year,” and, further, praising Clint as “handl[ing] himself very well” and “shaping a character strong enough to beg a sequel.” But the review was of a film called not “Il magnifico straniero” but, rather, Per un pugno di dollari—A Fistful of Dollars. Clint had never heard that phrase, nor had he heard of the director, Bob Robertson. It would be months before he realized what had happened to the movie he’d made and got an inkling of what was about to happen to his life.

Seven

He may not have returned home as a triumphant movie star, but he did come back to a role that had thus far eluded him: daddy. In June 1964, while he was wearing a poncho and sneering and scheming on a film set in Spain, Roxanne Tunis gave birth to a daughter, Kimber Lynn Tunis, whose birth certificate named Clint as the father. When he came home and met her, he comported himself, at least around the Rawhide crew and some trusted friends, like a proper doting papa. Roxanne was still making occasional appearances on the show, and she often brought Kimber to the studio, even on days when she wasn’t due on set. Clint grinned and cooed and bounced his daughter on his knee without reserve. But at the same time it was clear to everyone around that Maggie did not know—and would not know—about the baby. Whether it was a measure of the times or of the man, nobody broke that wall of silence.

Rawhide was in its seventh season. The original drive to Sedalia had long since been completed, and the series had taken on a variety of different moods and shapes, often abandoning and finding its way back to cattle drive plot lines. (“They tried a lot of different approaches,” Clint recalled, “but [CBS president William S.] Paley would tune in every now and then and get on the horn with ‘What have you done with the show?’ and they’d get back to basics.”)

Charles Marquis Warren, who had created the series and overseen the first three seasons, had been replaced at the start of season four, moving on to create The Virginian, another hit Western series. (Clint’s chum Sheb Wooley had left at the same time.) A string of showrunners followed him. And the dynamic between Favor and Rowdy, always a little paternalistic and strictly hierarchical, became far more inflamed. By the start of the seventh season, Favor looked rough around the edges, boozy and mean, comporting himself less like a stalwart than like a man unhappy with his situation. It wasn’t far from reality: Eric Fleming, never what might be called a beloved figure on the set, was increasingly disgruntled with the work and was vocal about his feelings. Where Clint tried to get along and understood that his part, however limiting, was still his best shot in the business, Fleming made it clear to everyone that Rawhide was beneath him and his sense of his own horizons. He had told the producers he’d be leaving, and they thought it was a ploy to get a raise, which, remarkably, they agreed to. “I decided I wouldn’t continue with the show for a million dollars,” he told the Associated Press, “but then they came up with a deal that virtually amounted to a million dollars. I had to reconsider.” (He had received approximately $200,000 for the show’s first season.)

The dynamic of competition and friction around Fleming found its way into the scripts and performances. Rowdy had a long history of quitting the drive only to see the foolish errors of his ways and beg forgiveness and readmittance into the fold before the hour was up. But in the first episode of season seven, “The Race,” he not only stood up to Favor but went into business against him, starting his own outfit and racing Favor and his herd to a trail end to collect a bonus fee and to prove he was the better man. It’s a sparkly and tense episode, demonstrating not only Clint’s development as a confident actor but the rich potential for darkness that lay beneath the show’s original coat of old-timey ease.

These complexities didn’t draw audiences, though: As Rawhide continued its slow slide down the ratings, CBS tried moving it around the schedule. In season five, it had moved from Friday to Thursday, and season seven found it on Tuesday. It still struggled. You didn’t have to be a savant to see that the series was doomed.

Of course, by the time that seventh season of Rawhide began plodding along, Per un pugno di dollari had become a box office phenomenon, looking likely to earn ten times its $200,000 cost in Italy alone. Distributors around Europe were eager to screen it, and a slew of imitators went immediately into production. Fewer than a dozen Westerns were made in Italy and Spain between 1960 and 1964; the next decade would see more than four hundred.* The explosion was so great, Sergio Leone claimed, that a Milan newspaper ran an ad that said, “Businessman seeks director with some experience to film a Western.” But none had the special ingredient that Italian movie fans seemed most fond of: namely, the star. As the Associated Press reported in December 1964: “If Clint Eastwood came back to Italy, he could be elected president.” Even the nation’s unofficial queen, Sophia Loren, was under his spell. Appearing in 1965 in the United States to do publicity for Marriage Italian Style, she was asked if there was anyone in Hollywood she’d like to meet. “Clint Eastwood!” she said, to which the interviewer replied, “Who?”

In Rome, Leone found himself riding very high, and he was determined not only to strike gold a second time but to do so on his own terms. He owed the producers of Fistful a second film, presumably another Western. But he felt that various of their actions around the making and distribution of Fistful amounted to breach of contract, so he decided to make his next film without them. His meeting with Jolly Films about a follow-up went so poorly that he declared to them that he would make another Western, with Clint, and that it would be called—and this, he always claimed, was an in-the-moment inspiration intended as an insult—Per qualche dollari in più: literally For a Few Dollars More.

Now all he needed was a producer, a script, and his leading man. Trouble was, as far as Clint was concerned, based on the evidence of Rawhide’s waning ratings and the failure of the film he’d shot to cross the Atlantic, there was no future in Westerns. As he remembered, “There were a lot of predictions in the trade papers that Westerns were through. And I said, ‘Swell, now that I’m doing one they’re through.’” The Italians hadn’t even bothered to tell him they’d changed the title; as a result, whenever he heard that the only hit Western in Europe was something called A Fistful of Dollars, he despaired at having missed the bull’s-eye once again. “Then about the fourth or fifth time they mentioned this film they said, ‘A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood,’” he recalled, “tiny little letters down there, and I said, ‘Oh, God, that’s it, huh?’ And then just about a day or two later they called up and said, ‘Would you come back and do another one?’” It was, he said, the first time he’d heard a single word from the producers, “who hadn’t bothered to write me since I left, saying ‘Thank you,’ or ‘Go screw yourself,’ or whatever.”

Now they were approaching him hat in hand. The previous year, they had cast him because they could get him cheap. This time, they flew to America to woo him, checkbook in hand. Leone and his co-screenwriter came to Los Angeles and visited Clint and Maggie’s home, where the director, still capable of only the most rudimentary English, told the story of the new film largely by acting it out right there in the living room. (Clint had only agreed to talk with them at all on the condition that he be allowed to see A Fistful of Dollars, of which he evidently approved.) Business talks ensued. Clint’s people negotiated a flat $50,000 fee for his appearance, and he also got first-class travel and accommodation for himself and for Maggie, who would join him to take in the sights. Clint’s representatives pressed Leone about when A Fistful of Dollars would make its way to U.S. screens. They were told that a legal agreement with the Japanese creators of Yojimbo was forthcoming. So, once again, Clint was off to ride the range on the plains of Spain—as soon as season seven of Rawhide was finished filming.

This time there really would be another English-speaking American in the cast. Fistful was about a loner who comes into a town and stirs it up. The new film was more of a two-hander, with Clint’s character finding himself in a rivalry with a bounty hunter with a military background. And cast in that role would be . . . not Henry Fonda, or Charles Bronson, or Robert Ryan, or Lee Marvin, or Jack Palance, all of whom either refused the role or wanted too much money, but the almost completely unknown Lee Van Cleef. A striking-looking native of New Jersey, Van Cleef had made his screen debut as a bad guy in High Noon, created an acting career mostly out of playing villains in theatrical and TV Westerns (and dying in them—he was killed twice in literally back-to-back episodes of Rawhide, once by Gil Favor, once by Rowdy Yates), and had all but retired from acting, taking only the occasional gig to augment the money he earned as a painter of art canvases. Leone came to California to meet Van Cleef, and he got him cheap—$10,000, as Van Cleef later recalled, which was a fortune to him: “Hell, my per diem, just the living expenses they gave me, was as much as I made on my very first picture.” He also got him quick. Along with an attaché case of cash as down payment on his salary, Van Cleef was given a script and a ticket on a flight to Rome just two days later. The sets had already been built, and the crew and Clint were waiting to shoot. Within about a hundred hours of first hearing the name “Sergio Leone,” Van Cleef was acting for him.

For a Few Dollars More was made while A Fistful of Dollars was still entering new markets and revealing itself to be fantastically popular, and everything about the second film—which wasn’t a sequel, no matter how similar the leading man, the visual textures, the music, and the rough morality of the script may have been—was bigger. Rather than use sets left over from other films, for instance, Leone was able to have a Western street and some interiors built to his specifications. And more important, he was granted time. The six- to seven-week schedule of Fistful was doubled for the follow-up. Leone and his crew still worked fast in Hollywood terms—their pace was much closer to that of, say, an episode of Rawhide than an American A-picture—but there was more latitude for perfectionism, experimentation, errors. Nobody knew it yet, but Leone would expand the scope, scale, and length of his vision with each chance he got to make a film.

Also grander was Clint’s figure in Italy. When he arrived to make the first film, he might as well have literally been a man with no name. “The first time I went to Italy, I just sneaked in,” he said. “I had a beard, but it didn’t matter. Nobody knew me. And no one paid me any attention. But this time—I was mobbed. I’d walk down the Via Veneto* and people would come up and ask for my autograph. I was wined and dined and treated like a king.” The paparazzi, who’d come to life in the Dolce Vita era of the late 1950s, snapped pictures of him every time he ventured out in public, and casual fans on the street would shout out “Il Cigarillo” (“The Little Cigar”), their nickname for his character, whenever they spied him. He was rarely recognized back in Hollywood, much less treated as a household name. In Rome in 1965, for the first time in his life, he was received as a movie star.

He didn’t comport himself like a big shot, at least according to Van Cleef. He befriended his new co-star and gave him pointers about coping with this strange filmmaking milieu, encouraging him to think less about the script than about the style/attitude. He urged him to see A Fistful of Dollars as quickly as he could. Van Cleef quickly settled into the unusual rhythms of shooting an Italian Western, finding an entirely new career for himself, first with Leone, then as the star of a string of Westerns built around him, and then back in Hollywood, where he was received not as a B-movie actor on the rebound but as an exotic import from overseas.

Even with Leone indulging himself in his bigger budget, expanded storytelling arcs, bespoke sets, and longer shooting schedule, the production of For a Few Dollars More was, by Hollywood standards, speedy. When the Spanish sequences were done, Clint returned to Rome, where an offer was waiting for him. Producer Dino De Laurentiis was overseeing The Witches, an anthology of short films by a number of notable directors, a popular genre in Italian movies. All five of the episodes would star Silvana Mangano, the star of Bitter Rice, one of the first Italian films to make an international impact following World War II (and, incidentally, De Laurentiis’s wife). Clint was offered a part in “An Evening like the Others,” which would be directed by the great Vittorio De Sica* and concerned a bourgeois wife whose husband has become so dull that she reimagines her life as a series of fantasies—in one of which her spouse is a Western gunslinger dressed in black who dispatches his rivals for her affections. De Laurentiis offered Clint $25,000 for a couple of weeks of work—or, if he preferred, $20,000 and a new Ferrari that would be delivered to him at the end of the shoot and shipped to the United States at the producers’ expense. He took the latter offer (“There’s no 10 percent on that Ferrari,” he quipped) and made arrangements to return to Italy to shoot his part the following year.*

Back home, he began production on the eighth season of Rawhide, and things had, once again, changed. Eric Fleming was well and truly out, whether because he finally made good on his threats to leave or because the producers and network had tired of them and/or him.* Rowdy Yates was now the senior member of the trail crew, Gil Favor having vanished without explanation. New producers and writers came aboard, and the regular cast was fleshed out with the addition of Raymond St. Jacques, who became the first Black actor to land a recurring role on a TV Western. The rotation of guest stars (Charles Bronson, Rip Torn, Robert Blake, Bruce Dern, Warren Oates) continued, and the parade of directors resumed. Episode thirteen was put in the hands of Richard Whorf, who had directed the first two episodes of the series some seven years prior and none since. His return to the show provided a deeply ironic harmony. Soon after that episode finished shooting, CBS pulled the plug on the series altogether. After eight seasons, seven calendar years, and 217 hour-long episodes, Rawhide was done. The final new episode aired December 7, 1965; after a couple of weeks of reruns, it left the prime-time schedule altogether, replaced by Daktari, an hour-long drama about an American veterinarian running a clinic in East Africa.

This was the moment that Clint had feared. After years of a regular salary, a visible presence in the business, and a degree of recognition as an actor, he felt that he stood a very real chance of losing everything he had worked for and achieved. Yes, he was paid $119,000 for the seventeen episodes of the series that were scrapped. And, yes, there was some promise in the rising trajectory he was enjoying overseas. But at the same time, he understood that there was a ceiling to what success in those movies meant back home. Hollywood studios, he knew, held “a stigma against television actors, and another against people who make films in Europe.” But he wasn’t getting any offers outside of Italy, so after the New Year he found himself back in Rome to make The Witches and to see how his second film with Leone was faring.

If he’d thought the Rawhide crews and Leone’s Italian-Spanish companies worked fast, he was astounded by Vittorio De Sica, a titan of Italian cinema whose films Shoeshine and Ladri di biciclette won two of the first three Oscars for Foreign Language Film. Straightaway, De Sica disarmed Clint with his combination of playfulness and exactitude. A veteran actor, De Sica would perform scenes for his cast before shooting them. “He gave you line readings,” Clint recalled. “He’d say ‘Look me, look me,’ and then he’d come in and he’d walk you in and he’d do the thing.” But as he soon learned, there was a precision to De Sica’s instructions. “He’s like Hitchcock,” Clint said, recalling his time watching that other master work on the Universal lot. “He has the whole picture planned to the very fraction. We’d be in the middle of a scene, I’d be halfway through a speech, and he’d say ‘Cut!’ I assumed that something had gone wrong, but he only needed so much. I finally got him to compromise, to let me at least finish my lines.” He noted another of De Sica’s techniques: “He has a lady who cuts films for him. She follows right along. The day after he’s finished shooting, she has the whole thing laid out for him. He makes a few adjustments and heads home.” Consciously or not, just as with the directorial carousel of Rawhide, he was picking up hints on how to direct a film—if he were ever to get a chance.

While he worked on The Witches, he was on hand to see For a Few Dollars More—which Leone had finished with another fantastic Ennio Morricone score—open to become an even bigger hit than A Fistful of Dollars. The film debuted in late December in Rome to audiences who were hungry for it (and were still buying tickets to the first movie), and it quickly outpaced the original at the box office—which was especially notable, as that film was doing better business than Goldfinger, the James Bond film that was the top money-earner most everywhere on Earth that wasn’t Italy. Before long, A Few Dollars had done triple the business of Fistful at Rome’s largest theater. Clint was now considered the biggest male box office star in Italian movies, surpassing even homegrown hero Marcello Mastroianni. (Variety got around to reviewing the film a few weeks after it premiered and was impressed, calling the dialogue “literate and satisfying to the ear,” praising Leone’s “bigger-than-life style” and “hard-hitting pacing,” and deeming Clint “fine in a tailor-made role.”)

In February 1966, he took a brief break from working on The Witches to fly, along with Leone and De Sica, to the premiere of For a Few Dollars More in Paris, where his status as a box office draw was also rising. Introducing him to a packed house, De Sica declared Clint “a fine, sensitive actor” and predicted, “He will soon be one of the biggest stars in the business, the new Gary Cooper.”*

If that was going to happen, though, he would have to make movies in the United States—or at least movies that would be seen in the United States. Leone and his producers were still dealing with lawsuits from the creators of Yojimbo, and no distributor in North America had yet stepped up to make a deal to show Fistful or A Few Dollars. The money that the films were making overseas, though, caught Hollywood’s eyes. Leone and company floated one possible means of resolving the dispute: a co-production with the Japanese that would bring Clint and Toshiro Mifune, the star of Yojimbo (and its semi-sequel, Sanjuro) together in what was being billed in the Hollywood trade papers as “an Eastern-Western.” But that pipe dream never materialized.

Instead, Leone and his producers entered talks with an American distributor, United Artists, which wasn’t, technically, a studio (that is, it did not operate a physical production facility) but had been the funding and distribution entity behind the James Bond franchise. United Artists was one of the hottest and wealthiest companies in a Hollywood that still hadn’t figured out what moviemaking looked like in a business dominated by television, independent actors, and a rising teen culture. UA’s brass thought they could reach a financial agreement with the Japanese to allow Fistful to be shown in North America, and they were willing to discuss funding a third go-round for Leone and his leading man.

Leone didn’t have a story in mind, but he had an idea for the setting. The elements of the first two films—the lone stranger, the greed motive, the cynical morality, the wide-screen cinematography, and the operatic plotting—would play out against the background of the American Civil War. He had in mind a pair of rivals (Clint and Lee Van Cleef) trying to recover a fortune in gold buried in a cemetery near the front lines. And he had a title as well: “Il due magnifici straccioni” (the two magnificent rogues). But as he was negotiating with United Artists, who were willing to give him $1 million to make the film (on top of $600,000 for the American distribution rights to the first two movies), the idea morphed. A third protagonist would be added, a partner/rival to one of the leads, who would equal the other two characters in screen time and impact. The original title, which was mostly spitballing, would be rethought. And it was Luciano Vincenzoni, one of Leone’s co-writers on A Few Dollars, who came up with a suggestion for a new title: Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo—literally “the good, the ugly, the bad.” With his passion for the carnivalesque, the grotesque, and the extreme, Leone loved it.

Eight

In 1966, you could buy a custom-built new home within the city limits of Beverly Hills for under $200,000—and a mansion for half a million.

That year, Clint’s agents negotiated a deal for him to appear in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for $250,000 and 10 percent of the film’s Western Hemisphere gross—a throw-in that could easily exceed his salary.

Working closely with business manager Irving Leonard, Clint and Maggie decided to buy a home, not in Beverly Hills or Malibu or one of the Southern California canyons where so many movie stars and celebrities lived, but in Carmel-by-the-Sea, the oceanside haven some three hundred miles north that Private Eastwood had first laid eyes on during a weekend pass, the place he had determined to live should he ever come into some money.

He had returned several times, mainly to play golf; starting in 1964, he became a regular at the annual pro-am golf tournament at Pebble Beach that had been founded in 1937 by Bing Crosby and reliably attracted Hollywood stars who liked to play golf and party. Clint was often paired with pro golfer Raymond Floyd, about twelve years younger than him. “We called him ‘Junior,’” Clint recalled. “A good player, but he could have been a better player than he showed because he liked to party and loved the good life.”* Schedule permitting, Clint would show up at the Crosby, as it was known,* every year for decades. Now he would live minutes from the course.

His paycheck for his third Italian Western was, at minimum, more than fifteen times what he’d made for his first, just two years prior, and he had hopes that the films he’d been making during his summer vacations would be seen in America and maybe get him a meaningful job in Hollywood. His dreams started to get big. But his feet never left the ground. Indeed, he seemed determined to comport himself in such a way as to make it seem that he didn’t need or even like Hollywood much.

Take that choice of home. Carmel was a long day’s drive from the nearest movie studio, and it was hardly rich in celebrities. It was a site of stunning beauty, an arts community, a great destination for those who appreciated sports and the outdoors. But it wasn’t a place to see famous folks or to be gawped at as one. What was more, the Eastwoods didn’t buy a grand home but rather an ordinary one, albeit one situated on a magnificent parcel on a gorgeous stretch of coastline. They planned to build something of their own, from scratch, a dream house with majestic ocean views surrounded by acres of untouched, wild property that was home to a bluegum eucalyptus that was once designated the world’s tallest hardwood tree and so much isolated acreage that authorities would one day discover a pot-growing operation functioning on the property, about which the Eastwoods had no idea. There was also enough space to accommodate a family. Although they’d been married since 1954, they still didn’t have children (well, she didn’t). But they knew where they would raise them once they did.

For years to come, he would be asked to explain his decision to live so far from Hollywood. He claimed, legitimately, that he and Maggie weren’t really much for the social circuit of the movie world, the groupthink that prevailed there. “It isn’t that I have anything against Hollywood or Beverly Hills as a base,” he told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “It’s just that you can get locked in here on too much shop talk. Go to a party here and most of the talk is about your new picture or the other fellow’s.”

Sometimes he could sound a little defensive: “In Carmel, I don’t feel isolated from the world. If I want to go to Hollywood, I can be there in 45 minutes by plane. Carmel is a quiet community with clean air. It’s also not jaded by having a wall around it. Many people in Hollywood think that nothing exists between them and New York. They honestly believe everything in between is a wasteland.”

And sometimes he sounded like a man of plain tastes: “I don’t dislike Hollywood. I just like a smaller town. I have friends in Carmel. I like to go to the movies with regular people. Here I see things a little bit differently than I would in L.A.”

He would come, in time, to be defined in large part by his choice to live in Carmel, and in turn, he would come to define the place. It would be a mutual love affair, and it would be multigenerational: Clint Sr. and Ruth Eastwood would soon retire to Pebble Beach, and Clint’s sister, Jeanne, and her husband, William Bernhardt, would also wind up in the area. The simplest explanation that he could give for the choice that he and Maggie made to put their roots down there was, perhaps, also the most believable: “Carmel is primo. The place just gets in your blood.”

Before settling down in his new hometown, though, it was back to Rome and Spain and the poncho and cigarillos, to a film of a scale, ambition, and conception grander than anything he—or, really, any actor who’d ever made a Western—had yet experienced.

In the wake of two hits that were knocking Bond movies off the top of the global box office charts, Leone’s third Western was drawing a new level of attention in the press. Hollywood trade papers had been following the rise of European Westerns, but now mainstream American magazines and newspapers were reporting on the phenomenon as well; the phrase “spaghetti Western” was coined as an insult. (When Leone first heard it, he mistook it for wit: “I thought it was quite subtle,” he said. “Maybe the spaghetti had replaced the lasso.”) And Clint himself was the subject of a lot of disparagement. The idea that an actor from a canceled TV series was becoming a movie star thanks to his appearance in foreign-made Westerns was treated as laughable in the press, much as the French veneration of Jerry Lewis (or, later, the German superstardom of David Hasselhoff) was, a way of mocking both the performer in question and the overseas audience that enjoyed him.

But ridiculous or not, it was news. The chief film critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, caught Fistful on a sojourn to Rome in May 1966 and wrote about it twice. In May, he described Clint as “a tall man, rather thin, with an almost delicate face” and the film as “full of action and violence.” Six months later, back in New York, he recalled it with words that sounded as if he needed smelling salts: “Don’t say you haven’t been warned,” he told readers as he announced the impending U.S. premiere of the movie, characterizing Clint’s character as “long on sadistic inclinations and short on heroic qualities” and calling the film “as gory as any Western I’ve ever seen.”* The Times also ran an on-set interview of Leone, capturing the rapport of star and director thus:

Clint: What goes on, Sergio?

Leone: Sorry, si deve rifare. Once more, Clint.

(unrecorded conversation in broken Italian and broken English)

Leone: OK, Clint?

Clint: Va bene, Sergio.

Another witness to the goings-on was Eli Wallach, a respected American actor with a Tony to his name, who had appeared in featured and character roles in a number of Hollywood films, including the Westerns The Magnificent Seven (cribbed, ahem, from Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai) and How the West Was Won. Often cast as an ethnic or a grotesque, he fit perfectly into Leone’s palette, playing the role of thief and conman Tuco (the “ugly” of the film’s title) with such vivid, coarse relish that his part in the sprawling movie grew larger as production progressed.

Wallach and Clint developed a friendly rapport, an entente that began with them literally sharing a bed on their first night in Spain, when they discovered that all of Madrid’s hotels were all booked. They traveled from there to the shooting location by car, at Clint’s insistence, so as to avoid “those rickety crates the Spaniards call planes.” En route, Clint gave Wallach a primer on making a Western in Spain: the lack of unions (and, as a result, overlong days of work); the heavy lunches, complete with wine; and, especially, the absolute necessity to never do one’s own stunts. “Oh, I’ve made Westerns before,” Wallach assured Clint. “I know how to take care of myself.” He found himself in the crosshairs of Clint’s hardest gaze. “No,” he was told, firmly. “You’ve never made a Western like this. Don’t show off.”

Sure enough, Wallach nearly died before very long when a horse, frightened by a gunshot and dynamite blast, bolted out from under him while his neck was in a noose and his hands were tied behind his back. A few weeks later, he skirted disaster once again when the company was filming the dynamiting of a bridge during a battle sequence. Leone wanted Clint and Wallach to be in the shot, near the bridge, and Clint insisted that stunt doubles be used and that he and Wallach be allowed to watch the explosion from right beside the camera, safely out of range. Leone tried to argue otherwise, but as they were talking a detonator was accidentally triggered, and the spot where the director had hoped to place his actors was pummeled with debris.

Just as Leone’s vision and confidence had expanded, so had his budget and shooting schedule. This third film cost more than five times what the original had, the production took three times as long, and the first cut ran more than three hours, almost double the running time of Fistful. For the first time in his acting career, Clint sat around a set watching a director think and then rethink scene after scene, the money dribbling away and the schedule stretching like elastic. He hated it. He occupied himself with catnaps (according to Leone, he could spring right into action when called to the set) and by honing his golf swing and putting stroke.

He didn’t gripe much, but near the end of the production he confided to Wallach, “This will be my last spaghetti Western. I’m going back to California, and I’ll form my own production company, and I’ll act and direct my own movies.” (“That’ll be the day,” Wallach thought to himself.) When it came time to dub his English-language dialogue, Clint put the task off until the last possible minute and then insisted on reading from the original shooting script and not the most recent one, which reflected the many changes that had been made during production. By then, Clint and Leone were barely on speaking terms, each convinced he had made the other’s name and reputation, and each insecure enough to dig in his heels about it.

That obstinacy would be unbecoming on either man’s part, and especially ridiculous in the cases of Fistful and A Few Dollars, neither of which had been seen in North America by the time The Good, the Bad and the Ugly wrapped. But that would change very, very quickly. United Artists was planning to saturate the American market with the three films, with Fistful coming out in February 1967, A Few Dollars in May, and GBU in late December. They reckoned they had lightning in a bottle, and nobody was sure how long it would last. A saturation campaign seemed the best way to recoup the $1.6 million they’d laid out.

UA’s original PR initiative was an ad campaign built around the Man with No Name.* In a series of posters and flyers that used mod, monochrome pop-art images of the leading man, audiences were told: “This long gun belongs to a man with no name,” “This short cigar belongs to a man with no name,” “This poncho belongs to a man with no name,” and, finally, “This man with no name is played by Clint Eastwood. He’s going to trigger a whole new style in adventure. A Fistful of Dollars is the first motion picture of its kind. It won’t be the last!” (Easy enough to say with two further Leone/Eastwood pictures in the can and a slew of imitations already on screens in Europe.) In short, they were selling the character and the vibe, not the actor, who, to be fair, had no particular standing as a movie star.

For many years afterward, from the top of the Hollywood ladder, he could still express some sensitivity around this moment in his career, clearly stung by how his speedy rise from TV star to movie star was met by tastemakers around Hollywood and the larger culture with raised eyebrows:

I haven’t had a special push or a big studio buildup. I never got my picture taken kissing my dog when I get off a plane, that sort of thing. There are stars who are produced by the press. I’m not one of them.

I was never the guy the press agents figured should be on the cover of this or that magazine, never the recipient of the big, glamorous studio push they used to give up-and-coming actors in the old days. I’ve never been the darling of any particular group, but somehow—somehow I got there anyway.

I was never a discovery of the press. I never had a publicity buildup or any amazing covers. I had to have the success first.

I was never anybody’s heir. It was a slow build. I never had the benefit of being the fair-haired guy. I was always the guy from outside.

But if he was dubious about the attention coming his way, he was perfectly willing to court it, to play nice with the press and keep his name and image in front of the public. He hadn’t proven himself, not really, perhaps not even to himself, and there was no harm in being treated like a movie star—or a curiosity who resembled a movie star. He spoke several times each with Hedda Hopper and Sidney Skolsky and James Bacon, three of the movie world’s most widely read columnists. And he embarked on a multicity press tour as Fistful neared its U.S. debut: New York, Boston, Toronto, Washington, D.C.

He talked of his preference for movies over television (“In films you do half the work and get twice the credit”), of the elevated stature he had reached overseas (“In Europe I’m in a better position to get the films I want and work with people like De Sica. . . . For the first time in my life, I can pick the parts I want to play”), and of the great fun of playing a morally ambiguous character (“He just doesn’t give a damn. . . . He’s double-cool. As much as Bond, maybe. . . . He’s like the guy in New York who doesn’t want to get involved.”).

In New York, where the film would open only after debuting almost everywhere else in the country (a common strategy for distributors hoping to avoid negative reviews in the national press), he sat for a string of interviews in his Sherry-Netherland hotel suite, surviving the ordeal by repairing regularly to the refrigerator for another from the stash of beers that the publicity department had laid in for him. He was the center of a gala cocktail party and dinner with reporters. He was treated by most of them, not inaccurately, as an oddity. But there were glimpses in press accounts that he was, and was becoming, something more. As he dined in a restaurant, a waiter, recently arrived from Italy, rushed over in a fluster: “Clint Eastwood! My wife see you picture three times! My son five times!” There was, it would seem, some truth behind the hype.

Alas, the hype didn’t help, at least not in New York. A Fistful of Dollars opened in eighty theaters in the metropolitan area just as it was hit with a snowstorm—the blizzard of 1967—and the box office result was a fizzle. The reviews, universally dismissive, couldn’t have helped. Critics at the city’s major dailies and the national magazines based in New York spent as much time talking about the movie’s foreign origin, its overseas success, and its debt to Yojimbo as they did evaluating what was on the screen. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther had another spell of the vapors, calling it an “egregiously synthetic . . . morbid, violent film,” and deeming Clint “a morbid, amusing, campy fraud.” (Of the prospect of more Leone/Clint films in his future, he declared, “God forbid!”) A few days later, in a callback piece in the Sunday paper, he continued to shudder, declaring the film “a dangerous overturning of the apple-cart . . . likely to do some lasting harm.”

Elsewhere, the word was likewise dire. “Made with utter cynicism,” said the Saturday Review; “a lousy film,” opined Newsday; “I doubt that Americans will take it seriously,” wagered the Los Angeles Times; “all the expertise of small boys shooting off cap pistols,” moaned the New York Morning Telegraph; “makes most American Westerns look infinitely nuanced,” sniffed Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice; and “a sadistic little . . . ha’penny production,” said Judith Crist of the World Journal Tribune. A lot of these reviews seemed to sense that Leone and company were doing something satiric; Crowther’s allusion to “camp,” one of the critical catchphrases of the moment, was echoed in several other negative notices. And they generally agreed that Clint was watchable, if not a vessel of deep meanings or emotions.

But all of that was beside—or, technically, after—the fact. In late January, before enduring the ridicule of New York reviewers, the film had opened to significant business in Chicago (where it had also snowed heavily), Boston, Washington, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and more. At a single Chicago-area theater alone, the film had grossed more than four times Clint’s original $15,000 paycheck in a single week. Critics may have turned up their noses, but the public—at least outside of New York—seemed to be eating it up.

And what, exactly, was it that they so savored? What was it that so repulsed the critics and so satisfied the nation’s ticket buyers?

Well, from the very start it was something unique. The titles are animated, with men on horseback, shooting guns and getting shot, rendered as silhouette cutouts in stark black, white, and tomato soup red, all of it over Morricone’s otherworldly soundtrack of whistles, whipcracks, pistol shots, horn blares, and handclaps.* The landscape and the tiny town of San Miguel are beautifully captured by cinematographer Massimo Dallamano (billed as Jack Dalmas), a gorgeous tableau of sky and dirt and striking architecture and menacing shadows. Leone is a master of the wide screen, and from the very start, with his hero making his way toward town astride a mule, with squat adobe buildings to either side and a little valley and mountain ridge ahead of him, we are clearly in the hands of someone who knows how to focus our attention on tiny details and how to paint in the broadest frame.

Joe, as Clint’s character is called, rides confidently into town despite being warned off and despite being mocked and shot at by loutish hired guns. He learns that there are two gangs struggling to run things and realizes, “There’s money to be made in a place like this.” He strides nonchalantly toward the men who antagonized him, enjoying his cigar, and passes the town casket maker, whom he informs, without any particular emphasis, “Get three coffins ready.” He confronts the bullies, vanquishes them with a virtuosic display of quick, precise gunmanship, then walks back to the cantina, passing the carpenter once again and declaring, flatly, without so much as a glance, “My mistake: four coffins.” Leone stages this sequence (which is blatantly lifted from Yojimbo) with striking framing of the street, of the actors’ faces, and, especially, of Clint’s eyes, their chilly gray-green blazing between his chin stubble and the dusty brim of his hat. He speaks slowly and forcefully, and he moves with a feline economy of effort; it’s just as shocking to see him flip his poncho over his shoulder to reveal his pistol as it is to watch him wield his weapon unflinchingly. This isn’t, technically, his first scene in the movie, but it’s his first emblematic one, a rich moment that would define him for audiences all over the world.

From there, the plot—the plotting—is set in motion. Joe susses out the strengths of the rival gangs and starts conniving to get them to shoot one another, learning that a woman is being held captive by the most dangerous man in town, Ramon Rojo (Gian Maria Volonté). Happily taking fees from both sides, Joe contrives to free the captive woman and reunite her with her family. That act of selflessness costs him a horrible beating, but it also leads to the complete destruction of one of the gangs, leaving just a half-dozen or so bad guys still standing when he recovers sufficiently to finish the job he’s set for himself.

But the story matters far less than the texture of the thing. There’s musicality and tension and vitality in just about every moment of the film. Leone populates the town with cackling grotesques and scurrying fools and leering sadists and sweating ogres; his characters speak few words, yes (Joe, it happens, is far chattier than a lot of critics and audiences seem to think), but they’re far more fluent in stares and postures, more like figures in a painting or sculpture than from the stage or even movies. Leone’s eye is akin to that of Goya or Bruegel or some anonymous carver of Gothic gargoyles. No American Western—and certainly no American TV Western—had ever approached this depth of lurid, nightmarish imagery.

And that doesn’t mean bloodshed. Yes, there are a lot of deaths in A Fistful of Dollars, but they tend to come in bunches—three shoot-outs involving Joe, two mass killings by one of the gangs. Critics were positively fainting and warning audiences to shield their eyes, but there isn’t a drop of blood to be seen until an hour into the film, and that’s caused by a thrown machete, not by bullet fire. The beating that Joe takes is vicious, sadistic even, and it leaves him battered (the low-rent makeup effects are completely unconvincing); but there’s a lot more death on the screen in many Hollywood movies about the so-called taming of the frontier or World War II. The reason so many critics recoiled from the body count surely had to do with the visceral manner with which Leone rendered the deaths, not the quantity of them per se.

And none of the critics who were so harsh on the film could see what was so patently obvious to the audiences who made it a sizable hit. Namely, that Joe, as Clint played him, had the panache and indifference and ease and style of an authentic movie icon, just as cool as Sean Connery’s James Bond and even, perhaps, a little more relatable. This was a man who had nothing but his nerve—no sports cars, no gadgets, no fancy wardrobe, no plummy accent. In a sense, if people in the audience could wish to be Bond, they could imagine being Joe. He’s a small-d democratic fantasy figure and a remarkably anti-establishment one; he trusts nothing and assumes everyone and everything is corrupt. His world is as bleak and ugly as the worst parts of ours, and his impulse to obliterate everyone who profits from that fallen state is, by now, practically a universal sentiment. Not for nothing is he one of the great movie icons of any genre. It’s a rich irony that the big-city gatekeepers working as film critics found him so appalling: He might as well have been gunning for them. Of course it sold scads of tickets, reaping more than $3.5 million for United Artists in its initial release.

As did For a Few Dollars More, which opened in American theaters just three months later (with, again, its New York debut delayed prophylactically to stop negative reviews from harming ticket sales). Sure enough, the critics wailed. In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas, who would one day rank among the staunchest defenders of Clint’s oeuvre, declared that “only the most uncritical audiences will feel they’re getting their money’s worth” and “the plot is impossible to follow” (he phoned UA’s publicists to have a patently obvious bit of the story explained to him). And in the New York Times, Bosley Crowther once again hyperventilated against Leone, Clint, European Westerns, and film violence in general in a review and a think piece published five days apart:

The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death, is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day.

There have been previous films of this order, and there are going to be many more. Even though they merely purge aggressive spirits, which some people say is all they do, they seem to me as socially decadent and dangerous as LSD.

(It must have cost the poor fellow untold nights of sleep to see each week’s box office returns and watch A Few Dollars earn even more than Fistful.)*

The irony was that A Few Dollars More is a more nuanced, emotional, and tightly made film than Fistful of Dollars. It could be argued that Clint’s Manco (name-dropped, by the way, before we ever lay eyes on him) is the least interesting of the three main characters (and, perhaps, has the least screen time). Lee Van Cleef’s austere, deadly colonel-turned-bounty-hunter is the alpha of the film, not only more mysterious and sharper-witted than Manco but driven to pursue the film’s villain for a personal reason beyond money.* And that villain, El Indio, played with palpable degeneracy and madness by Gian Maria Volonté, is as vivid and beguiling a bad guy as anyone on-screen in a year that also featured Wait Until Dark and In Cold Blood. Clint holds steady in their company, but he’s not nearly as dominant as he was in Fistful.

The film itself is bigger in all respects:* There are multiple frontier town locations, there are set pieces involving trains and explosions, there are some vivid grotesques among the supporting players (Klaus Kinski as a hunchback with a twitching eye; Mara Krupp as a hotelier’s sex-mad wife who, in a deleted scene, sleeps with Manco), and, again, there’s Morricone’s wild, evocative score, Dallamano’s vivid photography (the shadows are deeper, richer than in Fistful, a sure sign that he had more time and a bigger crew with which to work), and Leone’s increasing sense of grandeur and operatic plotting. The finale, with Van Cleef and Volonté facing off in a circular pit defined by stones (and Manco watching from the sidelines), expands on the climax of Fistful and presages the magisterial ending that the director was planning for his next film—which, in the way of these things, was already in the release pipeline.

To promote this not-quite sequel, Clint hit the road again; among the destinations were New York, Denver, London, Scotland, and Rome, where he was once again mobbed as a local hero. And he learned there, to his shock—and to that of his lawyers—that he had “made” yet another feature-length Western, with the once-abandoned title The Magnificent Stranger. The film, which was rolling out in Italian theaters, was, amazingly, composed of scenes of Rowdy Yates in action from a couple of episodes of Rawhide, thrown together by Jolly Films into something allegedly resembling a feature-length story. Needless to say, Clint’s legal team shut the thing down pronto.

In interviews, he was clearly perceived—by himself, even—as a man in the midst of an unprecedented career transition. There were other actors who had leaped from TV—and from TV Westerns, for that matter—to big-screen stardom. Hell, he had acted with some of them: Steve McQueen (star of Wanted: Dead or Alive) and James Garner (of Maverick). But they had made their impact at the box office in American movies. Nobody had ever followed a path from TV to Europe to a big career in Hollywood. And nobody had known if it was even possible.

Clint made it very clear that he was aware that his next steps would be crucially definitive for him. “I’ve been offered several Westerns in America,” he said, “but I’ve turned them all down because they are not terribly good.” And he knew, too, that his trailblazing was being noted by his peers. “You’d be surprised how many phone calls I get when I’m back in the States from actors asking how you go about getting into European films,” he said.

And yet, he wasn’t afraid to declare that he had decided to stop working in the poncho and beard as Sergio Leone’s dark, deadly protagonist. “I’ve played him three times so far,” he said, “and I’ve no plans to play him anymore, that’s for sure.” He knew, he later claimed, that at least one sure path to wealth and comfort lay before him. “The amount of offers from European producers to keep doing those kind of Westerns was enormous,” he admitted. “But I just felt it was time to move on, even though I was still an outcast in America. . . . I guess it had to do with returning to my roots.” Or, as he put it another time, “It would have been so easy to stay in Europe, make a lot of dough, pick up a Swiss bank account, be a disenchanted American.”

But he had already made the decision to try his hand at making it good at home. He had not appeared in a feature film shot in the United States since the ignominious Ambush at Cimarron Pass nearly a decade prior. Now, quickly rising into a spot as one of the country’s (heck, the world’s) most popular movie stars, he was heading to New Mexico to make his debut as a leading man in a Hollywood movie. It was a Western, strongly influenced by his Italian Westerns, directed by a man who’d made twenty-four episodes of Rawhide, with a cast composed of a dozen-plus actors who’d appeared on that show, and produced by one of that show’s stars, namely Clint himself, who, just as he had told Eli Wallach, had formed his own production company and gotten an American movie studio to fund a film of his choosing.

Nine

In the spring of 1966, the Hollywood trade papers carried news of the formation of a new production venture, Bigg Surr, Ltd. (sometimes spelled “Biggsur”), that had offices at 9000 Sunset Boulevard and had optioned “several” feature film scripts, including the Western “Bullet in Town.” One of the partners in the company was Robert P. Eaton, a Hollywood playboy and tennis and golf hustler. The other partner was Clint.

The news wasn’t entirely smoke. Eaton was a Zelig or Forrest Gump figure around town, a guy who knew Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable and may have had some business dealings with Howard Hughes and was, at the time the news appeared, without question the sixth of Lana Turner’s eventual seven husbands. And he and Clint did know one another. They partied together, along with some other Hollywood rakes, hitting up nightspots and parties in search of women, often using Turner’s Beverly Hills house, which was empty when she traveled for work, as a base for their philanderings. Eaton, who would in time be served with divorce papers by Turner for infidelity, happily bragged about his sexual pursuits, even writing a roman à clef, The Body Brokers, about his adventures. Classy until late in life, he declared of his famous pal in an unctuous 2014 interview, “For some reason, Clint never went for the pretty ones.”

Whatever the nature of their acquaintance, their business partnership didn’t last long. By the spring of 1967, Clint was in New Mexico, shooting the first film he’d made in the United States since 1958, a revenge Western called Hang ’Em High that owed not a little bit to the films he’d made with Sergio Leone. Bigg Surr wasn’t among the production companies behind the movie. Instead, a new entity, the Malpaso Company, was named in the credits and publicity materials. It was Clint’s outfit, co-owned with Robert Daley, an in-house production accountant at Universal whom Clint had met when they were neighbors in that apartment complex near the studio (“I knew him when he was digging pools,” Daley liked to joke). “He’s the businessman,” Clint said, “knows costs, whom to go after for a certain job, and estimates budgets,” making it clear that he himself was the creative voice in the room.

He’d formed his own company because he’d been taken aback by the state of the Hollywood film business as he found it after returning from Italy and Spain. The studio system he’d first encountered was broken completely, and no one had a clue how to mend or replace it. “Conditions are a little worse here than I expected. I’m not sure I made the right decision,” he said. On the theory that “I could foul my career up just as well as somebody else could foul it up for me,” he and Daley put together a model of a movie star production company. They didn’t have a lot of employees, they focused only on films in which Clint himself would appear, and they kept an eye on the bottom line far more assiduously than big studios or even independent operations like United Artists. “At Malpaso, we don’t have a staff of twenty-six and a fancy office,” Clint said. “I’ve got a six-pack of beer under my arm, a few pieces of paper, and a couple of pencils, and I’m in business. What the hell, I can work in a closet.” Daley explained more precisely that Malpaso would focus on sober budgets, location shoots, long-term relationships with key production personnel, and new money- and time-saving technologies. The company, he said, was built “to survive in a frightening industry by putting all the money on the screen, not in expense-account luxuries or other wasteful practices.”

The name Malpaso—a Spanish term meaning “bad step” or “bad turn”—was borrowed from a creek that ran near a chunk of property Clint had acquired on the northern end of the Big Sur region, some four or five miles south of Carmel proper. It was partly a joke on himself (what fool actor would go into production at such an unproven moment in his career?) and partly a dark-humored warding off of the evil eye. But it was ironic in another way: The wildfire success in the United States of his Italian Westerns had made clear that he hadn’t once, since suiting up for Rawhide, put a foot wrong.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly debuted at the end of 1967, and it was an even bigger hit at the U.S. box office than its successful predecessors, grossing $6.1 million, compared to $3.5 million for Fistful and $4.3 million for A Few Dollars. (Nobody was laughing at United Artists’s $1.6 million investment in the three-pack of movies anymore.) In part, the success came down simply to smart business: UA had finally managed to get the New York market interested in the film through the use of an extensive TV ad campaign. But in part, too, it was because the audience’s bewilderment and curiosity about the novelty of spaghetti Westerns had matured into an appetite for them. People liked them; movie people liked them (the buzz around the genre was so frantic that a rumor appeared that Truman Capote was writing one). And amid all that commotion, Clint and Leone were rightly recognized as the greatest star and director in the field.

And by “people,” don’t think “critics.” Once again, the nation’s major publications went to great pains to decry the film’s violence, this time carping as well about the length (Leone had trimmed the 177-minute European release to 141 for the U.S. market, which nonetheless still seemed endless to American reviewers); the acting (Clint and Van Cleef were derided as “expressionless,” “wooden,” and “unvital,” Wallach as a ham who couldn’t keep his accent steady); the plot (which several critics found incomprehensible at the same time that they incorrectly reported its details); and even the music, Variety calling Ennio Morricone’s classic score “insistent” and of a whole with “the pic’s too-muchness,” while the Los Angeles Times dismissed it as “a loud, long screech.” In the New York Times, Renata Adler, who had replaced Bosley Crowther, suggested that the film would be more accurately titled The Burn, the Gouge, and the Mangle and found nothing to praise about it. “Anyone who would voluntarily remain in the theater,” she said, “is not someone I should care to meet, in any capacity, ever.” A similarly derisive pan in the Christian Science Monitor managed to praise the film for including an intermission, “a nice opportunity for those who are not hung up on the gore to ride off quietly and unobtrusively.”

A half-century-plus later, it’s hard to explain how badly mistaken these negative reviews are, other than to say that people who critiqued movies for newspapers at that moment were simply blindered to anything that didn’t have the gilt of high-gloss production on it. Yes, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is, like its predecessors, violent, crude, grotesque, indulgent, and determinedly idiosyncratic. It’s also, clearly, exactly the film that its creator wished to make,* and it proves—again, clearly—that Leone is an indisputable master of cinema. From the very first seconds, in which a wide-screen shot of a vacant landscape becomes a close-up of a sweaty face not with a cut or dissolve but with a bravura pan of the camera, we are in the hands of a director who can manipulate space, light, time, sound, and action as only a handful of others ever have. You may decry Sergio Leone as a sadist, a misogynist, a blasphemer, a bigot, an enfant terrible, a sloven, but you cannot deny his ability to use the tools of the medium to build a powerful, sweeping epic—and many small scenes of suspense, surprise, and atmosphere. Watch Wallach’s Tuco rob a gun dealer or confront his own brother, the abbot of a monastery; watch Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes cruelly dispatch a pair of thieves, each of whom has hired him to assassinate the other; watch Clint’s Blondie all but implode into desiccated pieces after a forced march through the desert or coolly wield the upper hand over his friend/rival when they discover the fortune they’ve been hunting; watch a pair of renegades disguised as Confederate soldiers greet a line of gray-clad cavalrymen with whoops of camaraderie, only to discover that they are in the presence of Union troops whose blue uniforms have been bleached by dust: These, and perhaps another dozen sequences, are the work of a director reveling in his wild vision, his radical self-expression, the exultance of a skyrocketing career, his confidence in his concept and technique, and, maybe most of all, the luxury of an uninhibited budget (this film makes a million dollars look like five times that).

GBU demonstrates vividly its maker’s growth in just three years from a small-scale, daring, even satiric little experiment to a full and detailed canvas that indulges a taste for action and heroic drama and serves as an indictment of American greed and bloodlust. The Civil War setting, which most newspaper reviewers of the day saw as a needless inflation of the film’s scale, allows Leone to make direct connections between military ambition and unbridled human avarice, between raw cruelty and the intoxicating phantasm of patriotism. This is a movie made, after all, by a man whose homeland had experienced a devastating war—a civil war, in many regards—during his teen years. Just as he had used the ruffians of the streets of Rome as models for the feral gangs of A Fistful of Dollars, so does Leone see in the mercenary, sociopathic, homicidal, and avaricious natures of Tuco, Angel Eyes, and Blondie echoes of the human and societal forces that drove Italy—to name but one nation—to ruinous global conflict.

Interestingly, despite Clint’s name being such a big draw for the film, he is the least vivid of the three leads. Wallach plays Tuco, an apotheosis of the Leone antihero—piggish, vain, gluttonous, petty, vengeful, deranged—with an inhuman surfeit of relish and glee. Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes is just as cool and calculating as the colonel in A Few Dollars, but here his courtly manner and rigid comportment are the veneer over a psychopathic indifference to human life and a full-bodied greed. Clint’s Blondie, though, isn’t terribly distinct from his characters from Fistful and A Few; he’s a blend of the former’s icy avarice with the latter’s laser determination. He once again suffers brutal physical punishment (Clint had, in just three films, inherited from Marlon Brando—and, before him, Kirk Douglas—the mantle as the leading man most likely to have the shit beaten out of him); he once again speaks dryly and sparingly; he once again leads with his cigar and his squint. Clint hadn’t so much evolved the characterization as perfected it; it would be hard for anyone to see the three Leone films and think, “Oh, it’s Rowdy Yates with stubble and a scowl.” Rowdy was all but erased. In the minds of the world, whether they liked these films or abhorred them, the Man with No Name (who, technically, had three names) would forever be the first iconic screen character with which the actor who played him would be associated.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly absolutely cemented the team of director and actor in the eyes of American audiences, and the cult around Clint, especially, grew by the day. Posters of him as the Man with No Name became symbols of rebellious cool in college dorm rooms, and the films were among the most requested and rented by campus film societies (and, interestingly, by penitentiaries, where authorities believed that screening the movies helped keep inmates from acting violently in real life). United Artists would release the films into theaters continually for several years—at least fifteen times by 1971, per one account—and they would reap an added bonanza by releasing them as a triple feature in drive-in theaters and grindhouses starting in 1970. (The first two films were also honored with parodies in Mad Magazine—a true sign of success: A Fistful of Lasagna and For a Few Raviolis More, respectively.)

But that windfall wouldn’t keep the team of director and star together. As he had hinted to Eli Wallach during the shoot of GBU and to the press when out promoting Fistful, Clint was not only done with making Westerns overseas, but had decided to stop working with Leone, even as he was offered a significant salary to play the lead in the director’s next Western, an even larger-scale story of cruelty and revenge to be entitled Once Upon a Time in the West. Once again, Leone flew to Los Angeles to pitch the film to Clint by acting it out for him, and Clint no doubt could have written his own check had he chosen to appear in it. But he had lost his taste for the enterprise. “I think we just became philosophically different,” he later said. “I was drifting—naturally, being an actor—towards more personal, more real stories. And he wanted more production values as a director, so he was always going towards vaster and vaster scenes, with trains blowing up, and more Indians over the hill, or whatever. . . . He got into larger, epic pictures, and I got into smaller pictures.”

Small was, in fact, where he was headed with Malpaso’s first film. He had been offered the title role in Mackenna’s Gold, a multimillion-dollar picture being developed at Columbia by director J. Lee Thompson. But he didn’t want to get swamped in another gigantic production straightaway. He determined to keep the reins of his career in his own hands by staying human-scale, lithe, and fast.* Hang ’Em High was a cross between a spaghetti Western and an extra-long episode of Rawhide. United Artists had agreed to fund the joint venture by Malpaso and Leonard Freeman, the veteran producer who had co-written the script, to the tune of $1.6 million (the same price they’d paid for three Leone films), with Clint guaranteed $400,000 plus a percentage of the gross as star and co-producer. The director would be Ted Post, a veteran of hundreds of hours of episodic TV, including two dozen installments of Rawhide, but only three previous theatrical films, each one a B-movie slighter than the last and none since 1961. (Leone claimed he’d been offered the gig and wasn’t interested.) Practically the entire cast had appeared at least once on Rawhide: Ed Begley, Pat Hingle, Ben Johnson, Charles McGraw, L. Q. Jones, Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Dern among them. This being a Hollywood film, Clint’s character would be granted a love interest, played by Swedish-born Inger Stevens. As a producer, Clint wanted to match the efficiency he appreciated in both TV crews and European productions, so it would be shot unfussily and quickly. It had to be: Just a couple of weeks after it wrapped, the star would be at work on another film, this one brought to him by, of all studios, Universal. (Indeed, by the time Hang ’Em premiered, he would have two more films in the can and be at work on another.)

This second film, a modern-day police story about a stranger coming into a big city in search of a fugitive and dispensing his own personal brand of extralegal justice to get the job done, was called Coogan’s Bluff. The studio had just a decade earlier deemed Clint a lost cause. Now they were offering him a flat $1 million fee and a starring part, and he grabbed it. He had no real idea, after all, if American audiences would be willing to accept him outside of the Leone movies—nor, for that matter, how long he could command ticket buyers’ attention.

In some ways, they fit the part to him: Arizona deputy Walt Coogan may have been a man of the here and now, but he wore a Stetson hat and smoked (cigarettes, not little cigars) and was an expert at tracking wanted men. Clint hadn’t appeared in modern dress for American audiences since his episode of Mister Ed, but the plot of the film could have been a contemporary headline: Coogan, sent to New York to extradite a prisoner, has to seek him in the big dirty city’s hippie underworld, meaning Coogan gets exposed to such newfangled countercultural vices as LSD, pot parties, hippie crash pads, psychedelic discotheques, and free love. Man of an old code that he is, he runs afoul of the police brass in New York and becomes a one-man rogue posse chasing down his prey.

At least that was the finished plot. In reality, after it came Clint’s way, the script went through as many as ten revisions by a string of writers. And the original director, Alex Segal, had left the film altogether. The project might’ve died but for Jennings Lang, a onetime Universal producer, newly independent, who had originally overseen the idea of the cowboy-in-the-big-city story as a TV concept. Lang brought the project to agent Lenny Hirshan, who’d begun handling Clint’s affairs at the William Morris Agency with Fistful not long before. “I want to be in the picture business,” he told Hirshan, “and I would like to be in the Clint Eastwood business.” So even though he wasn’t a producer of the film but rather a kind of rabbi to it, Lang saved it when it was imperiled, suggesting a new director: old pro Don Siegel, who was under contract to Universal and was wrapping up work on the cop drama Madigan. Clint didn’t recognize the name and was unimpressed. “How many more Siegels are we gonna go through before we get this picture on the road?” he groused.

It’s not surprising that Clint, who wasn’t really a student of film per se, wouldn’t have heard of Don Siegel. Most American moviegoers wouldn’t have known the name, and most people in Hollywood considered him little more than a reliable journeyman. But cineastes in Paris, in London, and on various American college campuses had made a cult hero of the director, finding in his best-known films—Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Riot in Cell Block 11, Flaming Star, Hell Is for Heroes, and The Killers—a taut, cool, Hemingwayesque style that transcended genre and marked him, in their view, as a peer of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, and other masters of the studio era. With more than twenty feature films to his credit, Siegel was celebrated in retrospectives at the British Film Institute and the Cinémathèque francaise and regularly hailed by the influential French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, particularly by one of its occasional contributors, Jean-Luc Godard, who named a character in his movie Made in U.S.A. for Siegel and crowed in his diary that he had seen “an old Siegel” as if he’d stumbled on a Rembrandt he didn’t know existed. This adulation both tickled and puzzled Siegel, who happened to be fluent in French (but didn’t, he admitted, know any of Godard’s films). He was, in his view, a working stiff, still struggling to get good assignments at Universal in his midfifties and making movies at a nonstop rate simply because he’d been doing so for decades and it was the only job he knew.

He’d been born in Chicago in 1912, the son of a virtuoso mandolin player and his wife, who ran a music school. They sent their boy to England for college, hoping he’d, too, become a musician, but after three years at Cambridge University he dropped out to enroll at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which he also abandoned, drifting back home with vague thoughts of becoming an actor. He went to Hollywood, where an uncle got him a job at Warner Bros. as an archivist in the film library, a tedious position from which he segued into work in the editorial department, where his moviemaking career truly began. At first he was assigned the task of assembling montages depicting the passage of time for B-movies, then for feature films. He quickly developed a knack, creating, among many other memorable sequences, the opening minutes of Casablanca, as well as bits in The Roaring Twenties, Meet John Doe, and Yankee Doodle Dandy. Soon he was allowed to direct original footage for montages, as well as action scenes and location-establishing shots. That experience meant he sometimes worked with the studio’s big stars—including Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Peter Lorre, and Lionel Barrymore—and some of them began to suggest to their bosses that Siegel get a crack at directing.

In 1945, he was assigned to direct two films—a twenty-minute drama and a short documentary—and the following spring both of them won Oscars. And so Warner Bros. gave him a feature: The Verdict, a B-movie thriller starring Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. From there, he forged two decades of work as an itinerant director of low-budget pictures, first under contract to Warner Bros., then at RKO, Allied Artists, and, lastly, Universal, making Westerns, crime movies, adventure stories, the occasional science fiction thriller, the odd romantic comedy, and at least one musical. He had done a very little bit of television work (his 1964 remake of The Killers, featuring Ronald Reagan in his final screen role, was meant to be the first-ever made-for-TV movie, but it was deemed too violent for home viewing and so premiered in theaters). He was reliably on time and under budget, and his movies had a sturdy, plain style that nevertheless conveyed energy, heat, and tension and cast a gimlet eye on America and its alleged ideals, a point of view that Siegel, an avowed cynic and leftist, gladly espoused.

But, as noted, Clint wasn’t up on any of this, and he was reluctant to partner with a director whose work he didn’t know. He asked an acquaintance, actor-turned-director Mark Rydell, about Siegel, and he was encouraged. Jennings Lang and Lenny Hirshan urged him to watch some of Siegel’s films, which he did. But when Siegel, a bit of a cuss, heard that Clint needed to approve him, he got his back up and replied that he would have to vet the star, whose films he’d never seen. Turned out they liked one another’s stuff, and when they were introduced at Clint’s place in Carmel, they found each other agreeable company.

When it came to shaping the script, though, they were in strong disagreement, and neither was willing to cede authority to the other. At a development meeting in Lang’s offices at Universal, Clint announced that he “hated the script,” meaning the most recent version, which Siegel had overseen and agreed to direct, and which was the only one of the many rewrites that Clint had actually read. Upon hearing this complaint, Siegel said he was willing to let the project die, but Lang persuaded the two of them to put their heads together and see if there wasn’t a way to reconcile their visions. They repaired to an empty office with copies of various generations of the script and, as Clint recalled, some beers. “It was a very sort of surly relationship,” he later said. “ ‘I don’t like your suggestion for this.’ ‘I don’t like yours.’ Finally, we just zeroed in, started agreeing on a few things, and then we became fast friends.” Using scissors and legal pads, they cut their preferred passages out of the various script drafts and pasted them together into something they both felt was worth making, handing the ungainly collage they created to screenwriter Dean Riesner, whose decades-long résumé included a job for Siegel and a few stints on Rawhide. Confident that he and Clint could work together, Siegel went off to scout locations in New York and in the Mojave Desert, planning to get to work in the fall.

The clock was ticking, because there was yet another picture on Clint’s plate, a big-budget World War II action film that would shoot in Austria and London. Where Eagles Dare would be based on the first story that the bestselling espionage and thriller author Alistair MacLean (The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra) had written for the screen,* and Clint would co-star, for a firm $850,000 fee, with no less than Richard Burton, then considered one of the world’s greatest actors and movie stars, and husband number five,* as all the world knew to its great titillation, to Elizabeth Taylor. Coogan’s Bluff would have to be in the can by Christmas so that Clint could get to the Alps while they were still thick with snow.

He was delighted, then, to discover that Siegel worked with quick, certain authority and a firm sense of what was needed and how to get it—just like Ted Post, Vittorio De Sica, and, when at his most decisive, Sergio Leone. Siegel, Clint quickly discovered, “knew more about filmmaking than anyone I knew.” He had the discipline and certitude of a man who had come up through the ranks and knew better than to waste time or money; and he had a rare chameleonic talent and could easily adapt himself to whatever was put in front of him. For Clint, it was both a return to a comfortable environment—Siegel reminded him of his favorite Rawhide directors—and an education in how feature filmmaking could be a streamlined, deliberate process. “He’s very straightforward,” he said of Siegel. “His films always have energy. . . . He moves briskly and tries to get right to the point in directing. I’ve been involved with some directors who are wishy-washy, don’t know what they want. Don never starts rolling until he has an attack. . . . He never gets bogged down, even in disaster.” Coogan’s Bluff was made without a hiccup. Clint delighted in the experience, feeling he’d found a filmmaking partner: “It’s a mutual-admiration thing. He likes a lot of my ideas, and I like his.”

And so off to the Alps and the movable circus that was Liz and Dick, as Ms. Taylor and Mr. Burton were known in tabloids all over the world. They’d been together since 1962, when they fell in love in Rome while making Cleopatra and were captured in flagrante by paparazzi and divorced their spouses and began making movies together—eight, all told, by the time Where Eagles Dare went before the cameras. Though Liz had no part in the picture, she would be along for the duration of the shoot, because that was how they lived.

Just as Clint had approval over his director for Coogan’s Bluff and hadn’t heard of Don Siegel, Burton had approval of his Eagles co-stars and hadn’t heard of Clint. But director Brian Hutton had: He’d once spoken to Clint about something called “To Kill a King,” a film that was meant to pair him with Italian star Claudia Cardinale but never got made. Hutton believed that the contrast of the tall, silent American and the gnarled, voluble Welshman promised a sparkling pairing. Burton and Hutton were to meet in Rome to discuss casting, and Hutton was warned by producer Elliott Kastner that he should cater to any demand Burton made: “Don’t argue with him! Don’t argue with him! Whoever he wants!”

Hutton had Leslie Caron in mind for the leading lady, a role that Burton had reserved, in his mind, for the English actress Mary Ure, with whom he had co-starred in Look Back in Anger a decade prior and with whom he had had an affair. Hutton agreed to cast Ure if Burton would be willing to accept Clint, whom Burton said he’d never heard of. Sounded grand. And just like that, Clint was offered $850,000 plus first-class travel to make a war movie.

The plot was more than a little ridiculous. An American general has been captured by the Nazis and is being held prisoner in a mountaintop fortress that can be reached only by cable car. A British commando team, with an American embedded among them, is to be parachuted into a nearby town disguised as Wehrmacht soldiers, infiltrate the castle, and rescue the general. There’s a lot of folderol about double agents and false identities and close calls, but the bulk of the film involves our two heroes, Clint and Burton, wandering through an Alpine village and a Gothic castle in Nazi uniforms and either gunning down Germans or fleeing them.

Once again, Clint decided that his character yattered too much for a man of action. “I started scratching out my dialogue,” he recalled. “Pretty soon I realized that I had no dialogue left. . . . . Meanwhile, Richard was complaining, ‘Do I have to talk so much?’” But of course, as Clint knew, he was there to shoot people just as surely as Burton was there to talk. As he put it, “I heard Golden Pipes read his lines, and I said to Brian Hutton, ‘Give me a gun and let me do my thing.’”

Well, Burton was there to talk and drink, as it turned out, which he did to legendary excess. More than once, per crew members, Burton had started boozing early in the day and couldn’t sober up sufficiently to do his scenes. “We’d have a lot of elaborate things set up for a shot,” recalled key grip Dennis Fraser, “and then all of a sudden we’d get the word that Burton was too pissed to film.” In one incident, Burton was meant to drive a motorcycle through the snow while Clint rode in the sidecar, but Burton was so wobbly that Clint took over the driving and Burton plopped down beside him. Clint hated the delays—the polar opposite of his experience on Coogan’s Bluff—but he found Burton agreeable, and he was grateful to him for the chance to make a big movie. As he recalled, he was having a tipple with Burton and Hutton and a few others one night, and they got to talking candidly about their motivations for making the picture at all. “The subject of why we were doing the film came up. Brian pointed to Richard Burton. ‘Because he’s doing it.’ I pointed to Burton and said, ‘Because he’s doing it.’ It went around the room. ‘Because he’s doing it.’ The thing was, we all knew Richard was doing it for the loot.” (For the record, Burton was getting $1.2 million. Also for the record, he recognized the unique appeal that Clint held on-screen: “Clint is in the great line of Spencer Tracy and James Stewart and Bob Mitchum,” he observed. “They have a kind of dynamic lethargy. They appear to do nothing and they do everything.”)

But the thing dragged on for months. When they wrapped the arduous scenes in Austria, they packed up for an equally extended shoot of interior scenes in London. During the lengthy process, Clint became friendly with Elizabeth Taylor, who invited him to a private screening of the Burtons’ latest film, Joseph Losey’s Boom!, and won his admiration halfway through the awful ordeal when she declared in a thundering voice, “This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen!” and demanded the projector stop. Liz thought Clint would be ideal to play opposite her in a film she’d been offered, Two Mules for Sister Sara, a Western about a mercenary who teams with a nun to help rebels overthrow the Mexican monarchy. Clint read it and liked it. And when Don Siegel came to London to get him to record a few lines of dialogue to finish Coogan’s Bluff, he gave Siegel the script to consider, and they agreed to keep talking about it.

And while that was brewing, Clint received yet another script and offer: Joshua Logan, the great Broadway and Hollywood director (among his myriad credits were the stage and screen versions of Picnic and South Pacific, as well as the films Bus Stop and Camelot), was making a movie of Lerner and Loewe’s 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon, about love and conflict among miners in the California Gold Rush, and he had Clint in mind for one of the leads—a part that would, yes, involve singing. Clint hadn’t sung a note publicly since his cowboy-song LP and those few episodes of Rawhide, but the pay would be upward of $600,000, he would be working alongside Lee Marvin, and the shoot would take place in Oregon and California, which meant being somewhat close to home. If he ever finished Where Eagles Dare, it seemed like a good choice for a follow-up.

And being close to home had a particular significance for him as the months of Eagles dragged on. Before he left for the Alps, he learned that Maggie, after more than thirteen years of marriage, was pregnant. He hadn’t intended to leave her alone, but the film was still in production in May 1968 when she gave birth at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica to Kyle Clinton Eastwood, a whopping 9 pounds, 12 ounces of him—short of his dad’s prodigious birth weight, but chunky. And, as when Roxanne Tunis gave birth to Kimber, he was overseas on the big day. He wouldn’t meet his son until nearly a month had passed.

Ten

By the time he came home to what was now a small family, it hadn’t even been two years since The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had finished shooting, and he had three new films in the can (none of which had yet appeared in theaters anywhere), and he was already in talks about his next two films, both of which would yet again take him away from Carmel and Maggie and Kyle. At the time, he later confessed, he couldn’t see past what was lining up in front of him: the work opportunities, the money, the affirmation. He’d gone from somebody who was doubted all over Hollywood to the hottest thing in town—in the world, maybe—and nobody had even yet seen the films he’d made since the spaghetti Westerns, now famous as “the Dollars trilogy,” let alone seen them turn a profit.

He was grateful for his advancement but puzzled by it. Sure, the Leone pictures were surprise successes, but he didn’t understand how the people who’d initially laughed them off were suddenly so keen on him without seeing him do anything else. “I’d made three films that were big hits,” he said of the Leone films, “but I wasn’t getting any offers from American producers. I’d made European films, and ‘Who needs him?’ was the general consensus. But as soon as I’d made Hang ’Em High, the offers started. It didn’t make any difference whether it was better or worse than the Italian movies. Very strange out here.”

The pace he was setting for himself was brutal, but he’d been working for it for so long—those years of struggling for minor roles and digging ditches, those years of grinning and bearing the role of Rowdy Yates—that he was determined to seize everything he could. Later on, he was philosophical about it: “There’s that thing actors go through in their early stages, where they say, ‘This is my last job.’ So another job comes up, pretty soon you’re accepting [all of] them. . . . It’s that thing where you’ve got the brass ring, you feel like you’ve got to keep riding it, stay on the merry-go-round.” There was, he knew, a personal cost to this frenzy of work. “I wasn’t even in this country when Kyle was born,” he admitted ruefully a few years later, adding, as if he had no choices in these matters, “I hope that sort of thing won’t happen again.”

But there was more than work standing between him and his family life than he let on. His newfound global fame, coupled with his extended sojourns to New Mexico, New York, Europe, and, soon, Oregon, Mexico, Louisiana, and more, enabled his compulsion to find sexual partners. He was seen in the company of a number of women in these and the coming years, including the actresses Jill Banner, Susan Saint James, and Jo Ann Harris, the journalist Gael Greene, the singer Keely Smith, a trio of French beauties (Catherine Deneuve, Cathy Reghin, and Danielle Cotet), and many, many more. He wasn’t always very discreet in his trysts. Crew members were witness to many of them, as were reporters. Perhaps Maggie was the only one who didn’t know—and, as he had dubbed himself a “married bachelor,” maybe it was part of an agreement between them. But he was indulgent to such a degree that, in later life, he felt it necessary to explain, if not exactly take accountability for, his actions. In 1999, on the eve of turning seventy and married for a second time, he put it this way: “The thing with the acting profession is you go from zero to 100. . . . The temptations are out there, and if you’re not so secure in your relationship at home—as I am now—it’s hard. At that time, I just wasn’t very mature.” He understood it was part of fame: “Look at all these young [actors] that are out there now. . . . These gals are throwing themselves all over them. How do you tell ’em, ‘Just keep your head’? It’s not human nature.”

At the time, though, he was unable to stop himself from hurtling forward, either in his personal life or in his career. By the spring of 1968, he had (1) signed on to Paint Your Wagon; (2) gotten himself and Don Siegel a deal to make Two Mules for Sister Sara; and (3) agreed to appear in another big World War II movie to be shot in Europe, “The Warriors,” as it was then known (later, Kelly’s Heroes), which would be directed by, once again, Brian Hutton, and for which he would receive what had become his standard rate: $1 million flat (paid out in installments to minimize the tax hit) plus 5 percent of the total box office in Italy.

His boutique film production company, Malpaso, was equally ascendant. After a couple of years as true independents, Clint and Bob Daley had decided to attach the company formally to Universal, which would have right of first refusal over anything Malpaso developed but no say on what Clint chose to do on his own as an actor. He could go to work for someone else (as with The Warriors, an MGM project), and that was a matter between him and Malpaso. The company was housed in the bungalow on a lot that had belonged to producer Ross Hunter, once Universal’s biggest in-house money earner. The company was designed to hire Clint out at that $1 million fee and guarantee his rights of approval over his scripts, directors, and co-stars. It also arranged his payouts in such a way as to maximize his tax deferments; for example, Malpaso—and a string of on-paper-only subsidiaries—legally owned many of the large parcels of land he was buying up in the Carmel–Big Sur area.

Malpaso was at Universal, but it wasn’t of Universal, and it owed the studio nothing beyond that first-look arrangement. As an independent company, Malpaso had the right to develop and produce films that didn’t feature Clint in the cast, with, again, Universal getting first crack at anything it came up with. At the start, it comported itself like any new production company, buying up options on scripts and books. (Straight after arriving on the lot, the company commissioned a script titled “The Absolute Truth About Sex” from screenwriter Bernard Slade, which, in retrospect, sounds very 1968 and the least Malpaso thing ever.) During that initial flush, Malpaso hired development staffers (script readers, story editors, budget supervisors) and office support personnel. But Clint quickly realized that he didn’t want to be in the movie business so much as in the Clint Eastwood movie business. The company shrank to focus on that core mission. A loner even as he found himself rising amid Hollywood’s A-list, Clint chose not to become a mogul, preferring independence and flexibility. And he liked that he was doing it on his own. He especially appreciated one particular irony of his newfound situation: As he loved to remind the world, all of this was happening on the lot of the studio that had, a dozen years before, dismissed him as a man without a future. “Universal let me go,” he chuckled, “but now they’re paying for it.”

In June, after a press lunch on the Paramount lot along with his co-stars Lee Marvin and Jean Seberg, he set off to make Paint Your Wagon in the Eagle Cap Wilderness of northeast Oregon, driving himself to the shooting location in one of the toys he’d bought with his new money: a pickup fitted out with air-conditioning and a powerful stereo, neither of which was standard equipment at the time. So unlikely was the idea of a movie star driving himself to a film set, let alone in a pickup, that the security guards on the forest road leading to the location didn’t believe him when he said who he was and wouldn’t let him drive through. He turned around and drove to Baker City, about thirty miles away, and hunkered down in a hotel. “What the hell,” he figured, “I was getting paid.”

That misunderstanding was but a morsel of the wretched luck that vexed Paint Your Wagon from the start, leading it to earn a place among the ranks of the most snakebit productions in Hollywood history. The film had begun as a $10 million production with a script, by the great Paddy Chayefsky, closely following the original play (which, in truth, had been only a modest success, leaving no particular memory save one song, “They Call the Wind Maria”). But the screenplay had been rewritten by Josh Logan and Alan Jay Lerner into something unrecognizable from the Chayefsky version that Clint had initially agreed to make—a standard Hollywood practice, yes, and one he was quickly learning to dislike.

A lot of the choices behind the film proved catastrophic. Logan insisted on shooting in a rustic location, and thus the principal sets—a mining camp and a small boomtown—were built in a remote, even inhospitable spot deep in the Wallowa Mountains to which everything had to be delivered by truck along unpaved forest roads. There was no place to lodge folks near the location, so everyone was housed in Baker City, which didn’t have sufficient hotel space; several nearby homes were rented for the stars and key creators. Helicopters (for the big shots) and buses (for the hundred and fifty crew members and three hundred extras) ferried back and forth between the town and the location daily. (Many of those extras were hippies who set up an encampment in the forest and clashed with local lumberjacks and ranchers, with gunfire reported at least once; the hippie contingent also threatened to stop work unless their pay increased, to which the producers, out of other options, had to agree.) Baker City’s tiny airport provided but a single indirect flight to Los Angeles each day, so a private Paramount jet was used to transport cans of film back and forth daily to Hollywood. Lee Marvin drank hard and sometimes failed to report to the set. There was an infestation of lice in the extras’ wardrobe trailer. And then the rain started to fall, not particularly a surprise in the mountains of Oregon but uncharacteristic of the summer: twelve straight days of it—a once-a-century meteorological event, they were told. A portion of the road to the set was washed out (the studio rebuilt it at a cost of just about six figures), and the schedule pushed perilously close to autumn and the snowy season. And all of this became international news because the studio thought they had a colorful shoot on their hands and had invited the media to visit: Time, Life, Newsweek, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Paris Match, Oggi of Italy, Hollywood gossip columnist Joyce Haber, and New York Times stringer Rex Reed all dropped in on the set—and most reported the turmoil.

It was a nightmare—a string of nightmares—and it meant that the budget zoomed out of control. That $10 million quickly became $16 million and then burgeoned to over $20 million, maybe more.

Clint, just starting out as a producer, became certain that this excess and waste, just like what he’d experienced filming Where Eagles Dare, was nothing he wanted more of. Not that he wasn’t party to the drama. For the most part, he kept to himself. He stayed in a farmhouse just outside of Baker City and amused himself by slopping hogs, taking long motorcycle rides, and honing his game at a nearby nine-hole golf course. He also became romantically involved with Jean Seberg.

Seberg had been making films since 1956, and she had long struggled with a troubled relationship with Hollywood and celebrity. She was discovered as a seventeen-year-old summer stock actress in Iowa and cast by Otto Preminger in the title role of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. The film flopped, but she went to France to appear in Preminger’s follow-up project, Bonjour Tristesse. There her head was turned as both an artist and a woman. She appeared in the French New Wave classic Breathless, which proved an international sensation for her, her co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo, and their director-writer Jean-Luc Godard, and stayed on. She was married twice: to a French attorney in 1958 and then to the French novelist, war hero, and diplomat Romain Gary, whom she married in 1962, two months after giving birth to their son, and to whom she was still wed when she arrived in eastern Oregon. She had begun to take her left-wing politics more to heart than she did her film career; a prominent supporter of the Black Panther Party, she was, unbeknownst to her, under the scrutiny of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

She, too, was given a farmhouse in which to live during the shoot, and she made it available to the hippies who worked on the film. (“Never let it be said that Jean Seberg would refuse a hippie a bath,” she joked.) Not long after she met Clint, according to Joshua Logan, the two became lovers. “They were always very proper in front of other people,” the director recalled. “But one day Jean told me that she was crazy about him.” When word leaked to the press and easy-to-decode blind items began appearing about them, she tried to laugh it off: “People talk if we pet the same pigs together. We better stop petting the pigs.” But privately she told people that Clint was a man that her folks in Iowa would approve of.

By September, she had decided to divorce Gary and had her press agent write up an announcement about their decision to dissolve the marriage. Gary, visiting the States on a book tour for a new novel, made his way to Baker City and confronted his wife and her lover, challenging Clint to a duel in front of witnesses; Clint demurred. When the production moved to Hollywood to film interior sequences, Clint ended the affair without explanation. Seberg was shattered, admitting to Joyce Haber, “I broke up my marriage. I got a crush on someone else, and because I’m a bad liar I had to tell Romain about it. . . . The sad thing, of course, is that my confidence in this other person was misplaced. . . . It’s always a bit of a shock to discover that people aren’t sincere.” (Seberg wouldn’t name names, but Haber would-ish: “Who’s the other man? I’ll give you one clue: It isn’t Lee Marvin.”)

And in the midst of all this, Clint became, at last, an American movie star. He was already doing the work, yes, and collecting gigantic fees, and in business for himself. But it wasn’t until the release of Hang ’Em High that he evolved into an A-list box office name. Which would be ironic, because, of all the films he’d made since leaving Rowdy Yates behind, Hang ’Em High was easily the poorest. It isn’t an awful film so much as it is an artistic, if that’s the word, step backward—an overinflated episode of Rawhide that merely hints at the genre-bending that Sergio Leone initiated and that indulges sophomorically in the adult content becoming permitted in Hollywood movies. Its main character, Jed Cooper, is given a motivation for bloodletting—revenge-slash-justice for a lynching to which he’s unjustly subjected in the opening scene. Rescued near death, he becomes a marshal and is tasked with seeking out the men who left him for dead. In the course of his extensive hunt for his would-be executioners (during which time he is, as audiences were likely beginning to expect, brutally beaten),* he has a romance with a widow (who is—and this is to become another theme in Clint’s films—a rape survivor); Leone’s protagonists, in comparison, were unsexed murder machines. Cooper chats a lot more, too, about his emotions and his plans and his ideas of justice: the Man with No Name as the Man Who Cares a Surprising Lot about Various Things.

But it’s very stiff and as phony as the homogenized Westerns that Sergio Leone abhorred. Ted Post may have been an efficient director, but he was far from an expressive one. And the picture, although shot on location, has a completely ersatz flavor—even when it’s meant to be grimy and sweaty and grotesque in that quintessential spaghetti Western way, you get the sense you’re watching something made on a backlot with brand-new costumes and actors who’ve just come from a spa. Nonetheless, it does provide Clint with a means to morph from the enigmatic loner of the Leone pictures to something like a Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart leading-man role in a way that feels natural and relaxed. It’s a mediocre film but nonetheless a kind of progress.

The picture debuted in Italy and proved a hit—to no one’s surprise—almost earning back its entire budget in that one small country. It premiered in the United States at the end of July, and the press was brutal: “A poor-made imitation of a poor-made Italian imitation of an American Western,” said Variety with discomfiting accuracy; “a cinematic meatball,” said Newsday. (Several reviewers noted that it took the appearance of a clumsy effort to imitate a spaghetti Western to make them appreciate what was worthy in the Leone films.) Didn’t matter: It was an immediate hit, outpacing any of the Dollars trilogy films, earning $6.8 million that year in the United States, en route to a $12 million global haul—of which Clint received approximately $1 million on top of his salary.

And while Hang ’Em High was still circulating in theaters, Universal released Coogan’s Bluff. In September, Clint took a respite from shooting interiors on Paint Your Wagon to fly to New York and appear at a press luncheon to drum up goodwill. Critics were of mixed opinions. Variety found it too racy, declaring that the “film sags under its sex and violence emphasis,” while in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “a joke told by someone with no sense of humor” and further added that “Eastwood doesn’t act in motion pictures; he is framed in them.” But in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, just a year into his reviewing career, saw in it a fine example of “one of the oldest American themes: the unspoiled country boy comes to the big city and tests his frontier values against the corruption of civilization.” And in the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas declared it “among the year’s best” and opined that Clint “has never been better.”

You can see the appeal. He may be wearing a cowboy hat, he may be a step or two behind some of the city-folk ways he encounters, and he may have no compunctions against using violence to see a task through, but Walt Coogan only superficially resembles Rowdy Yates or the Man with No Name. He’s the first character that clearly indicates the direction in which Clint’s career would soon go. Yes, he’s a product of the American West, but in him the characteristic individuality, anti-authoritarianism, and self-reliance of the stereotypical frontiersman is poured into the shape of a contemporary man dealing with the world as he—and the audience—now finds it. He’s a half-step between the spaghetti Westerns that made Clint famous and the modern-dress roles he would soon play and that, even more than his Leone films, would define his popular image.

Coogan is randy: Practically the first thing he does is tie up a fugitive whom he’s apprehended so he can screw his (married) girlfriend. He is sassy: When he arrives in New York and a shifty cabbie tells him the fare is $2.95, “including the luggage,” he asks how many stores named Bloomingdale’s are in town; told there’s just the one, he points out that they passed it twice, gives the guy a few bills, and says, “Well, there’s three dollars—including the tip.” And he is gonna get his man, whatever it takes, whether that means springing him from a psych ward under false pretenses, wooing his probation officer, sleeping with his hippie girlfriend, taking (surprise!) a couple of beatings, or a motorcycle chase through Fort Tryon Park.

The fun of all this, formulaic though it undeniably is, comes from how tightly and quickly it all plays in Don Siegel’s hands. There are logic-stretching patches of plot, but Siegel passes over them so swiftly that the ice never cracks beneath. It doesn’t have style, but it does have a feel: solid, durable, no-nonsense. And while some viewers (Clint among them) thought that Leone’s films were so over the top that they were satires, this one feels like it knows when it wants to be funny. It’s not a great movie, but in it you can intuit the raw material that later films—starring Clint and Burt Reynolds and Gene Hackman and Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger and dozens of others—would fashion into a formula for fish-out-of-water cop stories of the sort Hollywood makes right up to this minute.*

Coogan’s Bluff was another hit—not as big as Hang ’Em High but in the same ballpark as the first two Dollars films,* grossing upward of $3 million in the United States alone, giving Clint five box office successes in less than two years and vaulting him into rarefied air. In 1968, he appeared for the first time in the Quigley poll of America’s most popular movie stars, a survey based on theater owners’ reports of ticket sales. Clint debuted at number five, behind, in order, Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, and John Wayne. It would be the start of a record-setting run as one of the most popular movie stars in the world. Almost two decades would pass before his name failed to appear in the top ten in the Quigley poll, an unmatched streak; and only John Wayne would ever make more appearances on the list overall, twenty-five to Clint’s twenty-one.

His momentum as a box office draw continued into the winter of 1968–69, when MGM premiered Where Eagles Dare with gala screenings in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas. (Clint, at work on yet another film, couldn’t attend them all.) Like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, it was a big movie—nearly two hours and forty minutes long—and it was screened in 70 mm with an intermission. But the comparison ended there.

When Eagles Dare is ludicrous—as Clint liked to joke, “Richard Burton and I killed so many Nazis in two hours, it made me wonder why the war took so long”—but its commitment to more-and-bigger wins you over. The comic book (not graphic novel, but old-time comic book) plot is a thin excuse for a string of ambitious action sequences, which are perhaps even more impressive with age than they were in 1969, simply because we know that none of them were created digitally. It almost doesn’t matter why any of it is happening, so much as it does that the filmmakers took the (considerable) effort to make it happen at all.

Clint does little that’s memorable enough to silence critics who claimed that his acting was wooden (aside, that is, from the queerly disturbing sight of him in a Nazi uniform). And, honestly, the goings-on are so frenetic that he has no chance to show acting chops; he doesn’t even, for the first time since A Fistful of Dollars, take a beating or get injured. He’s a guy with a gun (or a grenade or a motorcycle or a fist), and his part could have been played by anyone tall and dry enough to provide a foil for Burton. It’s something of an emblematic film, nonetheless—fans of Inglourious Basterds who’ve never seen it will surely experience some déjà vu on first viewing. And if nothing else, it helped its two leading men maintain (in Burton’s case) and secure (in Clint’s) their reputations as stars who could carry big movies.

Critics appreciated the film for what it was. Variety was effusive: “Highly entertaining, thrilling, and rarely lets down for a moment . . . so good for its genre that one must go back to The Great Escape for worthy comparison.” In the New York Times, Vincent Canby deemed it “both absurd and entertaining” and cited the reaction of a ticket buyer seated near him at a public screening of the film who deemed it “bullshit”* and “fantastic” within minutes. Once again, it didn’t matter to audiences. Where Eagles Dare even developed a cult following—unusual for a film of its budget and scale. In the United Kingdom, it became one of the most watched, quoted, and revered of action movies, spawning a cottage publishing industry that included a monograph by the award-winning writer Geoff Dyer (“Broadsword Calling Danny Boy”—a radio call signal used in the film), a 114-page bumper issue of Cinema Retro magazine, and a 1983 Iron Maiden song called “Where Eagles Dare,” with lyrics that serve up the plot of the film straight-faced. It didn’t generate the same fever in the United States, but it did sell more than $7 million in tickets, meaning that films starring Clint Eastwood generated upward of $30 million* at the American box office in just a little more than two years—a staggering sum.*

And there was no hint that his roll was slowing. In the early months of 1969, he was off to Mexico to reunite with Don Siegel on Two Mules for Sister Sara, the Western that Elizabeth Taylor had shown him about the mercenary, the nun, and the revolution. Taylor had left the project, and Universal had sought to replace her with an actress of similar dark beauty: Sophia Loren, perhaps, or Claudia Cardinale. Instead, they cast Shirley MacLaine—a big star, yes, but hardly plausible as a Mexican. There were rewrites. And there were struggles: MacLaine and Siegel clashed over her habit of missing early morning calls—meaning that she pushed each day’s work into the most punishing heat of the sun, when her fair complexion required extra attention from the makeup crew.

Clint’s role, on the other hand, was practically bespoke. (“At least it’s me doing my own bag and not someone trying to imitate me,” he told a visiting journalist who suggested he was repeating himself.) As he was demonstrably a rising superstar—and with his biggest picture yet, Paint Your Wagon, still on the horizon—he was visited several times by reporters doing magazine profiles of him. They noted that while many members of the cast and crew suffered digestive maladies from the local cuisine, Clint stayed healthy on a diet of fresh fruit. They watched him be very Clint on the set: catnapping in the shade between takes and setups, idly stroking a bunny while resting in a hammock, rescuing an iguana from some locals who were going to kill it, and beheading a rattlesnake (reluctantly: it was part of the script), then taunting MacLaine with its still-wriggling body. On a couple of occasions, he flew women to the location for trysts, not bothering much to hide what he was up to from the crew or the press. When journalist Gael Greene arrived to interview him for Cosmopolitan, he was so exhausted from the day’s work that he conked out on a sofa while they chatted. She tapped him on the shoulder to wake him, and he roused and said, “Let’s go to bed.” They did. (They met again at a hotel a few months later when she was in Los Angeles on assignment; as she recalled, “my knees buckled from the impact of his Clinteastwoodness.”)

It was a lot, and he took a few days off to go to the coast by himself to refuel in anonymity. No such luck, as he would later recall. “I was in Acapulco in Mexico, sitting on the beach thinking, ‘Hey, it’s really great here. I’m by myself. Nobody’s around. No interviews, no questions, no conversations.’ I went in the water, and the further out I swam, the greater it became, because there was nobody else out there. . . . All of a sudden, I hear this voice, ‘Clint! Clint! It’s Ed!’ It was Ed Sullivan. He was just bobbing there, treading water, doing nothing. So I swam over toward him and called out, ‘Hi! How ya doing?’ ‘Great,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to get away from it all for a while.’”

He continued to chase the future with gusto. He had already agreed to another complex overseas shoot, a World War II caper movie about a motley contingent of American soldiers trying to find a cache of gold bullion the Nazis have left in a small town in France. Exercising his right to choose his director, Clint once again chose someone with whom he had a rapport: Brian Hutton. “He was one of the only guys who ever paid me back for going to bat for him on Where Eagles Dare,” Hutton recalled. “They had him signed to star . . . before I was the director. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll do the picture but I want Brian Hutton to direct it.’” (They didn’t jibe on everything: When he saw that Hutton was meeting with actors who were hoping to audition for parts that had already been cast, Clint “just got incensed,” as he remembered. He took Hutton to task: “ ‘How can you do this? You’re an ex-actor yourself. . . . You went through all this shit. You know what it’s like.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m getting this pressure to do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, just stop it, because I’m not gonna be a part of it.’”)

Before reporting to Yugoslavia, Clint spent time in Carmel and Sherman Oaks with Maggie and Kyle and met with the press to discuss his current and upcoming releases (he drove his pickup to the Beverly Hills Hotel, one reporter noted, because he didn’t trust the valets not to damage his Ferrari). In June, he was on hand when John Wayne was feted at a preview of True Grit, and he was part of a group posing with the iconic star, including Lee Marvin, Rock Hudson, Jimmy Stewart, Ernest Borgnine, and Michael Caine. He also did some business-business while in town, signing on, with his manager Irving Leonard, as one of the co-owners of the Chancellor Hotel in downtown L.A. (One of his fellow investors was James Garner, with whom he had recently bought 340 acres of wooded land in Carmel Valley for $640,000, adding it to the 185 acres of coastal land that Clint and Maggie owned as a future home site.)

The cast of Kelly’s Heroes was a hodgepodge, including Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, Don Rickles, and Carroll O’Connor (both Sammy Davis Jr. and Wilt Chamberlain had been discussed for roles), and the production was shaggy. The springtime shoot was hampered by torrential rains. The conditions were spartan: Clint, per his custom, eschewed limousines, riding to the set on a motorcycle. He didn’t even demand a trailer or a dressing room for himself. Rickles, who mercilessly mocked Clint in a promotional film shot on location, told reporters, “Give him an army cot and a nail to hang his clothes on and he’s happy. How can Telly and I go to the producer and demand better treatment when Clint’s happy with a room in one building, a toilet in another, and the ocean to shower in?”

Clint enjoyed the summer camp vibe, but he hated the scale and the waste. In two years, he’d made three large pictures, and he now knew for certain that he preferred Don Siegel’s fast, sure, no-nonsense approach to filming, storytelling, and, hell, life to all of ’em. Siegel’s work mode mirrored the values of thrift and directness with which Clint had been raised and which he found to be in diminishing supply the larger and more expensive a film got. The two began looking actively for projects to make together. At the same time, he was rejecting other big movies, such as a Western with (again) Toshiro Mifune called Red Sun, about a samurai and a gunslinger trying to track down a stolen sword (Charles Bronson eventually took the role). He was determined to carve a bespoke, small-scale path.

The final straw in his aim to make big studio films came when MGM released Paint Your Wagon in October 1969. The picture launched with a huge publicity tour that saw Joshua Logan, Lee Marvin, and Jean Seberg visiting as many as ten cities. Clint, still shooting Kelly’s Heroes, was excused from this grind, but he attended gala premieres in New York and Los Angeles. The reviews were mixed, as if straining to find something nice to say. Variety praised the cinematography and music, while castigating the “muddled script.” In the New York Times, Vincent Canby found it “amiable in its intent . . . casual in style . . . willingly played,” but acknowledged, “There is hardly one song, or one piece of comic business, that could not be placed somewhere else in the film.” Roger Ebert, finding nothing to like, said, “It doesn’t even inspire a put-down. It just lies there in my mind—a big, heavy lump.” And Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern asked, “How can Paint Your Wagon take so long to not go anywhere? How can a gold rush be so slow?”

In fact, it’s terrible: plodding, clumsy, straining to please, unappealing to the eye, overstuffed, nonsensical, tone-deaf. There’s something potentially interesting in its story of a woman with two men she considers her husbands, who love her and each other, but the film is more interested in the unengaging saga of the settlement and its fortunes. Logan demonstrates no feel for physical comedy, which he stages repeatedly, climaxing in the literal collapse of the town, a sequence that takes ages and is never engaging or funny. It’s like watching an incalculable amount of effort, activity, and money turn to ash. The singing (save Harve Presnell’s version of “Maria”) is . . . singing. Marvin sounds like a dented tuba, although you can imagine in a more spare and deft setting there might be some pathos or humor in the spectacle of him trying to express himself in song. And Clint, despite being a musical soul, never really gets a chance to show it. He wanders lonely as a clod, singing the wan ballad “I Talk to the Trees,” as lost in the task as in the dreadful film.

Most reviews found Clint’s singing lightly likable, though it was also called “whining” and compared to a moose. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, who was starting to take notice of Clint—and not liking what she saw (“How can we watch Clint Eastwood in a musical? . . . He hardly seems to be in the movie.”)—surmised that Paint was “not the sort of movie that people who read movie criticism are likely to go to.” But the public did go to it; it grossed some $31 million, which was enough to put it among the year’s top-earning releases but not enough to offset its gigantic production and distribution budgets.*

Clint knew why. “Twenty million dollars down the drain,” he griped, “and most of it doesn’t even show up on the screen!” The excess sickened him: “We had Lear jets flying in and out of Oregon, helicopters to take the wives to the location for lunch, crews of seven trucks, thousands of extras getting paid for doing nothing, everyone living in ranch houses.” Even decades later, any mention of the film could bring out a moralistic tone in him: “That was just a big waste of money and effort. A blatant waste.”

It became his mantra: Movies were bloated; more (or at least as much) could be done with less; there was something shameful about the excess. It was why, he told everyone who asked, he started his own company and steered himself toward projects of a different scale. “I’ve turned down three $1 million offers,” he told the Hollywood Citizen-News, “because I didn’t like the scripts.” To the Chicago Tribune, he said, “When I first started in the business, the amount of waste used to gall me. . . . I resolved to become a moviemaker, not a spendthrift.”

A few years later, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’ve just seen a lot of waste in this business. I just thought that with [Malpaso] there could be some kind of alternative there.”

And he once expressed a truth that made the approach he followed in most everything he did for the rest of his career crystalline: “My dad’s dream was to own a hardware store. I’m his son.”

Part III

Defining a Kingdom

CONTROLLING THE VIEWFINDER

VENGEANCE IN TWEED

A WATERING HOLE

A CLIMB TO THE TOP

A GIRL FROM A FAIRY TALE

A SIMIAN SIDEKICK

A RURAL RETREAT

He leaped from punchline to prominence so fast that it seemed another punchline. And he turned his forward thrust into momentum. He defined a kingdom within and away from Hollywood. And he found a princess to ride along with him.

Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo

Eleven

It had been a thoroughly transformative decade.

When the 1950s ended, he was second banana on an unproven, if modestly popular, TV series, with no plausible prospects of returning to movies. He had never been abroad, never been top-billed, never been the subject of much press. He had no children, and he seemed to be living a model—if, by his own description, dull—Southern California life.

Now, approaching forty, he was an international film star commanding more than $1 million per appearance; the favorite actor of movie-mad Italy; the face of a new flavor of Western; a co-star of the likes of Richard Burton, Lee Marvin, and Shirley MacLaine; and the head of an independent production company who could get a film green-lit simply by saying he wanted to act in it. He had hundreds of hours of experience as a TV actor, he had worked overseas with two of Italy’s most noted auteurs, he had starred in massive studio films, and he had produced two smaller-scale movies of his own. He’d even allowed himself to discover a mentor in Don Siegel, whom he affectionately called “Siegelini” and whom he came to trust as he previously only had his father, his wife, his business manager, Irving Leonard, and his agent, Lenny Hirshan. He had a permanent home, two children, a core. He had proven Universal, his father, the critics, and maybe even himself wrong about who he was and where he might go. He had arrived—and he’d only just started.

Nobody in Hollywood had ever followed a like path, let alone so quickly, let alone so successfully. Starting from a position of obscurity and even derision, he now found himself among the very, very few people in the movie business who could command the highest salary and steer his own journey going forward. And he chose to go small. He turned down big projects, focused on material he could control, kept working with Siegel, and put all his chips on Malpaso, allowing himself the highest degree of self-determination. In many ways, he was choosing the most out-of-the-box of all the options that lay in front of him, and he was taking the very first steps on his iconoclastic path.

While he was in Mexico shooting Two Mules for Sister Sarah, producer Jennings Lang sent him Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel The Beguiled, set at a girls’ school in Mississippi during the Civil War. A wounded Union soldier is rescued by one of the students and finds himself the only man in a large house full of women and schoolgirls. Sexual tension brews around him, leading to a series of fateful, lurid episodes, during which his male fantasy turns slowly into a nightmare.

Clint read the book and, shaken, gave it to Siegel, who, too, fell under its spell. They agreed to explore making it, under the banner of Malpaso, with Siegel producing and Universal providing the funding and serving as marketer and distributor. “Clintus,” Siegel declared, using his favored nickname for his star, “if the Black Tower* bigwigs allow us to make this book into a film, it could be the best picture we’ve ever made.” When they finished shooting Sister Sara, Siegel returned to Hollywood to get the new picture rolling, overseeing scripts by Albert Maltz, who’d written one of the versions of Sara, then Irene Kamp, and then, finally, Claude Traverse, whose revision was, in the view of Siegel and Clint, the best of the lot.* Siegel began preproduction in earnest, scouting—and then rejecting—Universal’s first choice for a location, the faux Southern plantation manor on the Disney lot in Burbank, and then visiting Louisiana to find what he considered an ideal setting: the historic Belle Helene Plantation outside of Baton Rouge.

Siegel wanted the great French star Jeanne Moreau to play the schoolmistress, but she was nixed by Universal. Then he sought Geraldine Page, a true actor’s actor, a multi-time Oscar, Tony, and Emmy nominee, reckoning he was reaching beyond his grasp. “There is no finer actress,” he said, “but she doesn’t like going on location to make a movie.” But there was something he didn’t know, something no one would have guessed, as Clint learned. “I thought Geraldine Page was out of my league,” he admitted, “being a big star on the Broadway stage and all. But when we started The Beguiled, she told me she was a big fan of mine on Rawhide.” For the second female lead they cast Elizabeth Hartman, who’d been nominated for an Oscar in her debut performance as a blind girl in a relationship with a Black man in 1965’s A Patch of Blue. And Jo Ann Harris, just turned twenty—and soon to begin a sexual relationship with Clint—took a key part as the boldest of the schoolgirls.

Before reporting to Louisiana, Clint made a couple of side trips. In March, he went to Kansas City to attend Show-A-Rama, the annual convention of movie theater owners, who had named him Male Star of the Year. In early April, he showed up at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles to make his first appearance at the Academy Awards. Wearing a beard for The Beguiled, he stood alongside Claudia Cardinale (with whom Italian producers were always trying to pair him) to present the award for Best Foreign Language Film. “They chose me for this spot because I’ve been involved in a few foreign language films,” went his scripted “joke.” (The winner was Costa-Gavras’s deliciously paranoid political thriller Z.)

Back in Louisiana, the team of Clintus and Siegelini shot quickly, even as Bruce Surtees, newly promoted to cinematographer from the role of camera operator, struggled with the lit-by-candle effects that Siegel sought. Clint was distracted by postproduction hassles with Kelly’s Heroes, quarreling on the phone with the producers and MGM over various aspects of the final cut. To compound his frustration, MGM had decided to release Kelly’s hot on the heels of the rollout of Sister Sara, meaning that in many cities he’d be in direct competition with himself.

He was right to be concerned. The reviews for Sara were widely diverse, with Variety running an outright pan, the Los Angeles Times (Eastwood advocate Kevin Thomas) and the Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) issuing mixed judgments, and Roger Greenspun of the New York Times praising its intelligence and calling it “charming, funny, cruel, sad, and occasionally quite terrifying.” (At year’s end, the paper’s Vincent Canby named it an also-ran in his annual top ten list.) All of these perspectives are reasonable. The film is hokey but also earthy, self-conscious but also footloose, silly but also engrossing. There is action and (thin) comedy, there are as many bits of plotting that surprise as that induce groans, and the stars have a rapport that never amounts to what you might call chemistry but is still entertaining—a place-saver for Clint and Siegel while they passed time between more engaging projects.

Kelly’s Heroes, on the other hand, is big and dumb and flimsy and far too long, at some two and a half hours. The press was almost unanimous in deeming it unfunny, overblown, preposterous, and even, given that it was made and released in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam, indecent (to wit, its use of war as a scaffolding for a heist plot was, in the view of Roger Greenspun of the New York Times, “a denial of moral perception that depresses the mind and bewilders the imagination”). Clint was explicitly disappointed by the film, declaring, a few years later, that it “could have been one of the best war movies ever. And it should have been. It had the best script, a good cast, a subtle antiwar message. But somehow everything got lost, the picture got bogged down shooting in Yugoslavia, and it just ended up as the story of a bunch of American screw-offs.” And he was right to beef about being in competition with himself. The films did okay at the box office—just over $5 million each, the lowest grosses of any of his films (save Coogan’s Bluff) since he had come back to Hollywood from the plains of Spain.*

He continued to work and to plan work at a torrid pace, reflecting his upbringing as the son of a couple who had endured the Great Depression and a journeyman actor who was riding a wave of good fortune. As he explained, “I realize I’m in a profession which, like prizefighting, could suddenly leave me earning nothing. So I have regulated my spending. If I decided not to get involved with pictures, or pictures decided not to get involved with me, I could continue to exist. In this business, you must have a tin box buried deep.”

He kept up his physical regimen, augmenting his weightlifting and exercise routine with a daily run, often hitting as many as ten miles. He continued to consume—and advocate—a low-fat, high-fiber, organic-whenever-possible diet (his secretary at the Malpaso offices prepared his daily lunch of a tuna sandwich with alfalfa sprouts and an oatmeal cookie from a health food store, and Clint liked to brag that his son, Kyle, had never yet eaten anything out of a jar or can). He had taken up skiing seriously after making an embarrassing showing at a celebrity pro-am event in Bear Valley, during which he wore army-surplus winter gear, fell repeatedly, and admitted, “I’m the comic relief”; the following year, he returned with proper ski attire and a much improved form. And he became a celebrity face of the increasingly popular sport of tennis, appearing in charity events and, starting in 1970, lending his name to a glitzy tournament held in Pebble Beach each summer (an event that kicked off with a big cocktail party even though it was a charity benefit for alcoholism awareness). In Carmel, he and Maggie continued to acquire land and to build their dream house, the realization of which was perpetually delayed because its size and scope seemed to be constantly changing in their minds—not to mention the hassles of dealing with architects, contractors, and zoning regulations, the latter of which was increasingly becoming a bête noire of Clint’s.

He had already identified his next two projects—a psychological thriller about a disc jockey stalked by a woman with whom he’s had a one-night stand and a police drama about a cop chasing down a deranged killer—when he took Maggie and Kyle on vacation that summer. And while they were at Lake Tahoe, enjoying the rare occasion to spend time together, he got a phone call from Pebble Beach, where his parents were living: Clint Sr., age sixty-four, had died of a heart attack.

“It was a tremendous shock,” he remembered years later. He admired and enjoyed his father, he said, admitting that Clint Sr. had a far hammier personality than his famous son: “He would have loved to have been an actor. He was a much more outgoing person than I am. He was the kind of guy everybody liked.” He was grateful that his father had gotten to see their shared name emblazoned on TV and movie screens, and he delighted in the fact that his father admitted being wrong about warning him away from an acting career: “He joked about all of that—‘I told him not to do it!’ He laughed at himself about it.”

But Clint Sr.’s unexpected death haunted him, too. “It really got to me,” he admitted, “because of the usual guilt that people have, and you wish, ‘Why didn’t I spend more time with him? Ask him to play golf more often or something?’ And hang out. And just say, ‘Dad, let’s go have a beer or something.’ But you sort of take for granted your parents are there; you think they’re gonna be there forever, especially at that age.” The one thing he knew he could do in his father’s absence was to keep his values alive in his own work practices. In the immediate aftermath of Clint Sr.’s death, he withdrew for a time from socializing and even from the workplace. But when he returned, he knuckled down and, though it would seem impossible, sped up, embarking on a new, adventuresome calling to further secure his place in his chosen profession.

For his next challenge, he was putting one of his father’s greatest life lessons into practice. There was, he said, an “old Mark Twain theory that my father had drilled into me—first show them what you can do and then hit ’em up for what you want.”

As he told the story repeatedly over the years, when Malpaso started to buy scripts in 1967, it acquired one from Jo Heims, whom Clint had known socially and professionally during her years as a secretary and production assistant at Universal (there were rumors that they were more than just friends, which both always denied). In the late 1950s, Heims started writing feature and TV scripts. Several of her projects were produced, low-budget thrillers with names like The Threat and The Devil’s Hand. She wrote a few TV episodes, and she even got screen credit on an Elvis Presley film, Double Trouble.

The script Malpaso acquired from her concerned a radio disc jockey who has a couple of no-strings-attached trysts with a woman who becomes violently obsessed with him. Clint thought it was great, in part because he felt that it rang true. “I’ve had this situation happen to me in my own life, this thing of having somebody clinging and clutching at you, not allowing you to breathe,” he said, quickly adding, “before I was married.” (As he explained another time, “I was nineteen, with a gal who was maybe twenty-three, [and] there was just a little misinterpretation about how serious the whole thing was. But it didn’t get into being homicidal or anything like that.”) He not only thought he could play the lead—which would have been different from anything he’d yet done—but that there might be an opportunity for him to direct it.

But back in 1967, when he optioned the script, all the work that was lined up in front of him got in the way. “I went to Europe on Where Eagles Dare,” he recalled. “[Heims] called me when I was maybe halfway through the film and said she had an opportunity to sell it to Universal. Ross Hunter was going to produce it. It was a great opportunity for her, so I wrote her back and said, ‘You’re free of the agreement as far as I’m concerned.’”

A few years later, though, he learned that the script was still in limbo and sensed there was a chance to return to the project. He went straight to the top of the Black Tower and the office of Lew Wasserman, Universal’s boss, widely considered the most wily dealmaker that Hollywood would ever know. As Clint recalled, Wasserman, the most courtly of sharks, happily met with him and his agent, Lenny Hirshan:

I said, “You have this story called Play Misty for Me that’s on the shelf. . . . I’ve always liked it and would love to do it.” And he said, “Fine.” “And I’d love to direct it as well.” And he said, “Fine.” And I thought, “My God, he’s going for everything here. I better get it while it’s hot.” So I got up and left the room, and my agent stayed there. . . . I was down at the end of the hallway waiting, and then he comes out, and I said, “Gee, that was easy. I mean, he went for everything.” And he said, “Yeah, but he doesn’t want to pay you.” But I said, “I should have to pay him. I should show him what I can do, if I can do anything.” And that was my dad’s influence, because that was his deal. Growing up, in the ’30s, he always said, “Don’t ask what you’re going to get, you know, ask what you can give . . . what you can do for the company. You can be the best employee in the company.”

(He said another time, “Hell, I would have waived the guild minimum if they had let me.”)

Lew Wasserman may have gotten the better of him financially, but Clint was game. He was also willing to play the less exciting part in the film. The really unforgettable role in Misty was that of the woman who stalks the disc jockey. Some people at the studio thought he should beef up his part—and maybe consider rewriting his character into something more dynamic than a late-night record-spinner. As he recalled, “An executive at Universal said, ‘What the hell do you want to make a picture like that for when the woman has the best part? And who the hell wants to see Clint Eastwood play a disc jockey?’ And I said, ‘Who the hell wants to see Clint Eastwood play anything?’”

He was determined to work with the independence, discipline, and financial creativity he’d seen demonstrated by Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. Misty was a modest project by his recent standards: The budget, for example, would be under $1 million, which wasn’t even enough for a studio to get him on board solely as an actor. And he made several decisions to keep it small and, more important, under his control. The easiest place to shoot it would have been Hollywood, where he’d have the full, reliable facilities of the studio at hand. But he didn’t want Wasserman’s minions buzzing around his set, second-guessing him and whispering their concerns up the pipeline. So he shifted the setting to Monterey, right near his Carmel home, partly to avoid scrutiny, partly because he knew the area and how beautiful it would look on-screen, and partly for reasons to do with the story: “In that way the disc jockey would be a big fish in a smaller pond, which seemed more logical to me.”

He also knew that he had to win over his crew, which would naturally be suspicious of a first-time director, let alone an actor. Since he’d started making movies again, his experience had been almost entirely on location, with only brief bits of only some of those having been shot on Hollywood soundstages. He knew that there was a band-of-brothers mentality on a location shoot, and he reckoned that if he could win the crew over early, he’d have them on his side. He would be prepared and efficient, and he had an ace up his sleeve: He’d start shooting on day one with a barroom scene, and as his character’s bartender chum he would cast . . . Don Siegel. (As he later recalled, Siegel “kept saying . . . ‘You should get a good character actor.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. If I screw up as a director, I’ve got a good director on the set.’”)

Jo Heims’s screenplay was being tightened by Dean Riesner, who was becoming essential to Clint’s commonsense idea of moviemaking. (Sonia Chernus, who had helped Clint get the part of Rowdy Yates, had been hired to help discover and develop material for Malpaso films and also had some input into the final script.) Clint was aware that his cinematographer would be arguably his most important hire, the crew member whose work—good or bad—would be most immediately scrutinized by studio brass reviewing the raw footage he shot. He chose Bruce Surtees, whose work, and work rate, had impressed him on The Beguiled.

He selected a couple of relative unknowns in the female leads. Donna Mills, with a single film and half a dozen or so TV appearances on her résumé, was selected to play the ex-girlfriend with whom the DJ hopes to reunite; and the juicy role of the hookup who turns murderous went to Jessica Walter, whose work in film and television included a Golden Globe nomination as New Star of the Year for 1966’s Grand Prix and over two hundred appearances on the soap opera Love of Life.

A lot would be asked of both actresses. Mills would perform a nude scene, making love with Clint in a waterfall in full-body shots for which no stand-in could be used. It may have looked sexy on paper, but it wasn’t on the day they shot it. The water was gelid, she recalled. “Clint sent out for some cognac. We got smashed. That was the only way we could do the scene because the water was like ice.” She also made it clear that Clint addressed any concerns she had about the scene. “He went out of his way,” she said, “to make sure that I was absolutely comfortable. He even told me that if I were uncomfortable with anything, even as late as the editing process, that he would take care of it.” Walter’s performance also entailed nudity, but it focused more on her mania and frenzy. “There’s a bit of Evelyn in me,” she said when the film was released, “the mothering, capable of killing, desperate, pathetic kind of person. . . . They’re only dormant threads, black things that a sane, civilized woman doesn’t employ. But they’re there.” There were some moments that she relished: “There was a scene where I really beat up this poor maid who comes to clean his house. I totally hack her up with a big knife. And the makeup man came around with these little bottles of blood. Clint said, ‘What do you mean? I want buckets, buckets of blood.’ And, indeed, they had to go out and get buckets. And they splashed it all over the wall for me. And it was fabulous.”

Production began in late summer 1970. As Clint recalled, he spent the weeks prior to that first day of shooting making sure that nothing could catch him by surprise. Well, almost nothing. As he described the eve of his directorial debut, “I was lying in bed, going over the shots in my mind. I had them all planned out. I turned out the light, thought, ‘I got this now.’ All of a sudden, I went, ‘Jesus! I got to be in this thing!’ I turned on the light and started approaching the scenes all over again from the actor’s point of view.” (Ironically, Siegel had repeatedly cautioned him to not shortchange himself as an actor while directing himself, advice he acknowledged the wisdom of and then, apparently, immediately forgot.)

Once he got going, he moved with assurance. He handled the twin roles of actor and director by availing himself of a video system—originally employed by, of all people, Jerry Lewis—that allowed him to videotape each take he was in so he could watch it straight afterward and see if he had what he wanted. He was especially proud of making the real-life environment of Monterey work for him, which was at once a cost-saving measure and an aesthetic choice. “We used no sets,” he said. “I didn’t want to film interiors in Los Angeles because soundstages are sterile. There’s no wind; the ocean and trees don’t move when you shoot out a window.” He also kept the production lean, deliberately making a show of not playing the big-shot movie star: “We had one dressing room,” he told a reporter, “and the girls and guys took turns using it. No prima donnas, no protocols.”

He did have to learn one important difference between the demands placed on a director and those of an actor: “Directing is hard work,” he said. “You have to stay on top of everything all day long, and it can be tiring. I learned to pace myself. It’s not like acting, where you can stay up till 1 o’clock the night before work. As a director, I had to crash before 11.”

And, of course, when the last shot is in the can, an actor’s job is over, but a director still has editing, music, and other details to see to. Clint looked forward, predictably, to scoring the film. Not only did it have music at its core—a disc jockey protagonist, a jazz standard (Erroll Garner’s “Misty”) in the title—but it gave him an opportunity to commission a jazz-inflected score from trombonist and arranger Dee Barton, whose band he had seen while nightclubbing in Hollywood. He also homed in on a pop song he’d heard on the radio, Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which had been released as an album track in 1969 but had been little noted at the time. He rang Flack’s people and offered $2,000* to use the cut (Erroll Garner got $25,000 for “Misty”). They agreed, and the song’s appearance in the film—notably over the nude waterfall scene—impelled Atlantic Records to release it as a single, resulting in the singer’s first number one hit . . . in 1972, almost three full years (and three subsequent LPs from Flack) after its initial appearance.

He delivered the film on time and within budget, but he still had battles on his hands. Someone at the studio wanted to replace the song “Misty” with “Strangers in the Night,” the ballad that Frank Sinatra had turned into a hit (and which Sinatra himself hated) and which Universal owned through its music division; Clint also hated the song, which he thought was “square,” and he especially hated the idea of retitling the film for it. He further learned that there were other people at Universal who were trying to find a new title for the picture, something with one word in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho—which, naturally, Universal also owned. But this was happening at a moment when he had a lot of capital with studio brass—in no little part because they had gotten a big star and a director for cheap. The whole thing seemed like a folly to them, an indulgence to keep a star happy in between bigger, more lucrative projects. They chose to let him have his way.

They also, at the same time, let him get away, at least for a time. While he was making Misty, Clint was at work with Siegel on the script of the police story they’d agreed to make together, their fourth collaboration in a little more than three years. The film, originally entitled “Dead Right” and concerning a renegade New York detective chasing down a murderer preying randomly on the citizenry, had been developed at Universal by Clint’s sometime producer Jennings Lang with Frank Sinatra in the lead and Irvin Kershner directing. But Sinatra backed out because he’d injured his hand and hadn’t recovered from tendon surgery. The project briefly surfaced at ABC Television, which deemed it too violent for home viewing. It landed at Warner Bros., where it was shopped to a number of high-profile actors. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and George C. Scott were mentioned as potential leads; Steve McQueen demurred because he didn’t want to make another cop movie so soon after 1968’s Bullitt; Burt Lancaster, Cliff Robertson, and Paul Newman all considered the film—the last seriously—but stepped away because they found its valorization of a cop who gunned down bad guys antithetical to their views on how justice should work.

Clint didn’t share their political scruples, and he agreed to develop the picture and star in it. The original screenplay was by Harry Julian Fink, a veteran TV writer who had only recently turned to feature films, most of which were co-written with his wife, Rita. As various stars and production entities had tried to develop the project, a string of writers, including future directors John Milius and Terrence Malick, wrote new versions. When Clint and Siegel came on board, they tossed those rewrites and went back to the Finks’ script, hiring Jo Heims and then, as sure as sunrise, Dean Riesner, to do some revisions.* (For one thing, Clint wanted the character darker than he was in the first draft, and he had the inspiration to have him repeat a taunting speech about how many bullets were left in his gun—once with a wink, once with real menace.) In the main, though, he was coming increasingly to favor first drafts of scripts, albeit with minor tweaks, operating under the theory that the initial read was what got him interested in a film to begin with; along with a preference for speedy work on the set and using first takes of scenes, even with mistakes, in finished films, this was becoming a signature—which made him feel more akin to old-time studio contract directors than to the film school auteurs who were on the rise in the early 1970s.

Among the changes in the new version of the script was getting the story out of New York. Clint and Siegel had shot Coogan’s Bluff there just a couple of years previously, and they felt the location was overused. Clint had the idea that Seattle, which had rarely been seen in Hollywood features, might work. “I told [Don] the Northwest hadn’t had a lot of exposure in movies, so we headed up to Seattle. But we got as far north as San Francisco and stopped. It was a beautiful day and we thought, ‘Maybe we ought to stay right here.’” The decision to shoot in San Francisco, about two hours’ drive north of Carmel, made it almost another stay-at-home production for the star. But it also meant that the politics of the film emerged in sharper contrast. The murderer in the script was meant to be seen, at least in part, as a product of the modern counterculture gone off the rails (his belt buckle was a peace sign), and no city was more associated with left-wing rebellion than San Francisco. A hard-ass cop on the streets of New York would have any number of likely antagonists; put the same guy in San Francisco and set him against a longhair and you’ve got yourself a battle in the culture wars.

And there was another important change. Even though “Dead Right” was an increasingly apt name for a movie that was shaded by Clint’s personal views on the subject of law and order, somewhere along the line the film was retitled for the nickname of its protagonist.

It was now known as Dirty Harry.

Twelve

Before he began inhabiting the role that would, in the public eye, define him as much as the Man with No Name had, he promoted a movie he hoped would give him a chance to step into a new screen persona—more serious, dramatic, actorly.

Universal had no idea what to do with The Beguiled. Don Siegel had shown a rough cut of the film to the famed cartoonist Edward Gorey, who came up with an ad treatment that the director loved for its Gothic vibe. But the studio dismissed it outright. Instead, they concocted a promotional image showing Clint brandishing an oversized pistol, with a gallery of actresses’ faces floating behind him and the accompanying motto “his love . . . or his life . . .” This muddle, which promised action that the film didn’t deliver (Clint’s character uses firearms only in very brief flashbacks to battles in which he’d fought), was reflected as well in the film’s release pattern. Siegel wanted it submitted to major film festivals, particularly Cannes, where his reputation among international critics might result in a welcome reception. But Universal decided to play on Clint’s overseas strength and premiered the film in front of paying audiences in Milan, Italy, thus disqualifying it from acceptance from the more serious film festivals, which prefer to host premieres. Instead, the film played a couple of small festivals in the States, and Siegel toured college campuses promoting it ahead of its March release.

The world didn’t know what to make of The Beguiled—and fifty years later it remains difficult to make complete sense of the thing. Clint plays John McBurney, a Union soldier, gravely wounded in battle and discovered by Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), a prepubescent student at Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies in Mississippi. Amy fetches Miss Farnsworth (Geraldine Page), who decides to nurse the soldier back to health before turning him over to Confederate troops. Once he comes to consciousness, McBurney realizes he is surrounded by women and uses his charms to insinuate himself into their lives—and their repressed sexual fantasies. He gets about on a hobbled leg, spending his days chatting seductively with Martha and the prim schoolteacher Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), entertaining the urges of the sexually forward teenager Carol (Jo Ann Harris), even leading on the young—and not entirely chaste—Amy.* When Edwina catches him in Carol’s bed, she knocks him down the stairs, shattering his weakened leg, which Martha decides to amputate (in a grisly scene that was even more graphic before preview audiences objected to it). Finally, Martha decides that rather than turn McBurney over to Southern troops, they will dispatch him with poisoned mushrooms.*

It’s all played by Siegel as a feverish, sweaty nightmare, with voice-overs and flashbacks and fantasy scenes, during which we learn of the atrocities McBurney has committed and of Martha’s incestuous relationship with her brother, since lost to war. There is heat and dark comedy and cruelty throughout, and while it is beautiful, it is also claustrophobic in a way that seems unintended. It’s a movie that makes you squirm, and it raises many more—and more disturbing—questions about the audience, the sexual mores of our culture, and the inner lives of its characters than it answers.*

Critics were puzzled. Variety hated it, saying that “the apparent attempt to mesh Charles Addams style with Tennessee Williams–type material cues audience laughter in all the wrong places.” In the New York Times, Vincent Canby, conceding that Clint “by simply reacting well has become an important actor of movies,” also found it a “grotesque character comedy that might—mistakenly, I think—be identified as Gothic horror . . . played for what amounts to an extended, completely silent laugh”; he summarized it, finally, as “a sensational, misogynistic nightmare.” But in the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas raved, deeming it “a film of psychological suspense laced with dark humor that is a triumph of style, totally engrossing and utterly convincing.”

That all might have made for a fascinating aesthetic debate. And the French did love it, which Siegel regularly bragged about. But it grossed just $1.1 million in the U.S.—the poorest return for any film starring Clint. He, too, remained proud of the picture whenever asked about it. “It gained wonderful notices,” he said, “but it didn’t appeal to my audiences. It was a noble attempt, and well made, and I’ve never regretted making it.” And he surmised that the studio’s mishandling of the film helped doom it: “The ads didn’t help either. They promised action.” Marketing would be another aspect of his work that he’d soon start to supervise.

By the time The Beguiled met its star-crossed fate, he was already at work on a film that would wipe it—and damned near everything he’d done since coming back from Italy—from memory. Dirty Harry began shooting in April 1971. Rather than commute between Carmel and San Francisco, Clint stayed with friends across the Golden Gate Bridge in Sausalito, visiting Maggie and Kyle on weekends. It was a reliably efficient Clint-Siegel collaboration. Their only disagreement, per both men’s accounts, was over one of the closing moments in the film, when the main character, disgusted with his bosses, throws his badge into San Francisco Bay. Clint thought it a rash and sophomoric act, and, after a bit of banter, Siegel reluctantly scratched it. On the day they shot the ending, though, Clint announced that he would go ahead with the angry gesture. But there was only one prop badge on hand and no means to retrieve it if the shot didn’t work; Clint practiced by tossing stones and nailed the badge toss in one take.

They joked, as before, about “Clintus” shots and “Siegelini” shots, even more so now that the star had also directed a film and could be trusted to take charge in a pinch. When Siegel was laid low by the flu, Clint oversaw the shooting of a nighttime sequence in which his character ascends via cherry picker to a rooftop from which a man is threatening to jump. He was confident in his ability and extremely proud of his efficiency. “The studio allowed six nights for this shot,” he told a journalist visiting the set. “I told them I could shoot it in two. So I’ll finish it in one—really stick it in and give it a twist.” (PS: He did just that.)

The reporter happened to be on assignment for Life magazine, which was preparing to put Clint’s face on its cover that summer with the headline “The world’s favorite movie star is—no kidding—Clint Eastwood,” a left-handed compliment, sure, but a demonstrably honest one. The interior headline was even more complimentary/derisive: “Who can stand 32,580 seconds of Clint Eastwood? Just about everybody” (a reference to the Dollars triple bills that were still packing theaters around the world). It was a soft-glove piece, with kind words from Siegel, some Dirty Harry crew members, and some old friends from the pre-Rawhide days, along with photos of Clint in action, in conversation with Siegel, and at lunch with Kyle on Fisherman’s Wharf. Mention was made of his basset hound (named Symphony Sid, after a famed jazz radio DJ), his penchant for rumpled clothes, his souped-up pickup, and his love of beer. Just an ordinary guy . . . about to become a millionaire many times over.

Play Misty for Me opened in the fall, and with his very first full effort as a director, Clint demonstrated complete ability with the task: shooting, pacing, scoring, casting and working with actors, finding the spine of a story, assembling a complete package that’s both entertaining and thought provoking. He’s not yet an expressive artist, but he puts together a handsome, well-paced, gripping film, and even its atmospheric meanders—lovely passages of Monterey Peninsula scenery, a jaunty trip to a jazz festival—feel part of an overall design that grounds us in a place and provides a foundation for the erotic, psychotic, and violent drama that unfolds.

As late-night mood-music DJ Dave Garver, Clint is studly, breathy, predatory, and selfish. He admits to chasing sexual conquests (“It’s just a hang-up I have”), he loses his temper, he lies and cheats—an asshole, at minimum. But he’s up front with Evelyn (Jessica Walter, in a role in which any actress would delight) and says he’s only interested in no-strings sex, a pact that he tests by sleeping with her twice more. As her attachment spirals into calculation, paranoia, and rage, she attempts suicide, scuttles Dave’s chances for a big job in San Francisco, destroys his home and belongings, and nearly murders his cleaning woman. Finally, using a phony name, she moves in with Dave’s longtime on-and-off-again sweetheart Tobie (Donna Mills), intent, apparently, on killing all of them, herself included. By that point, the tension is ratcheted to a nail-biting high. You may think Dave is a narcissistic jerk, you may sympathize with Evelyn’s obvious mental illness, but mainly you want the thing to stop—in the best thrill-ride way.

There are little touches throughout that tell us who made the film and what his sensibility and preferences are like: the setting; the jazz (even if the stuff Dave plays on the air is sappy); the classic car Dave drives and the Heinekens he drinks (Clint had recently told a Hollywood columnist that his hobby was “drinking beer from different countries”); the appearance of friends and old colleagues in the cast (John Larch, from the very first episode of Rawhide, plays a detective; Jack Kosslyn, Clint’s acting guru, shows up as a cabbie; friends George Fargo, a fellow swimming pool–digger who’d been working as Clint’s stand-in for a couple of years, and Paul Lippman, a Carmel golf-and-drinking buddy, have walk-on roles; and, of course, Don Siegel, who has breezy charm as the bartender).

But there are subtleties that reveal the director as well: extreme close-ups of Dave’s and Evelyn’s eyes; voice-overs during scenes of Dave and Tobie walking in nature that create a dreamlike effect; and the quick cuts in the jazz festival sequence and in the episodes of violence. In particular, there’s a subtle note struck by Evelyn’s wardrobe in the climax, when she slashes Tobie’s portrait of Dave while wearing a shirt of the very same color as his in the painting and a pair of male-style slacks. Visually, she is doubling him, or she has become an outward incarnation of something inside him, a theme that Clint will return to periodically: the villain as the hero’s doppelgänger. Just as he takes no pains to make Dave a good guy, Clint seems to suggest that something inside Dave (and maybe himself) has brought this fate to his doorstep—and that maybe he deserves it.

Most of the reviews were positive, with some outright raves. Variety called it “an often fascinating suspenser” and mentioned “generally excellent casting, handsome production, and stretches of good direction.” In Chicago, Gene Siskel of the Tribune deemed it “a solid shocker . . . a truly frightening film,” and Roger Ebert of the Sun-Times compared it favorably to (if lesser than) Psycho: “In the business of collecting an audience into the palm of its hand and then squeezing hard, it is supreme.” Everyone raved about Walter: “a superior performance . . . [a fine] example of split-second character transition between coyness and paranoia” (Variety); “a sharp-edged, properly nervy portrayal of a bright but pathetically destructive girl” (Los Angeles Times); “a flamboyantly neurotic, wild performance” (Newsweek); “nothing short of magnificent” (Village Voice). (In the new year, she would be nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actress in a Drama; Jane Fonda would win for Klute.) Only Roger Greenspun of the New York Times was flatly harsh on the picture, declaring that it “fails to make sense” and that it “begins to fail with its opening title sequence.”

In October 1971, the film played at the San Francisco Film Festival (one of the oldest in the United States), anchoring a brief retrospective of Clint’s career, at which some cineastes in the local press and film community took umbrage. Chief programmer Albert Johnson defended the choice thus: “We like to honor those with unique backgrounds, and certainly Eastwood’s is unique. How did an untrained actor out of Oakland Tech become a big star?” Clint understood that he was already something of an interloper in being a TV actor who had evolved into a movie star; directing, considered the most important and expressive position on a film, seemed a galling reach for someone of his limited artistic stature. As he often put it, the naysayers must have been thinking, “ ‘What is this jerk doing directing films when we don’t even like him as an actor?’” But as he also often explained, actors’ careers, like athletes’, could be very short, and if he wanted to stay involved in the business, it seemed like a smart move to develop a skill set that could keep him employed: “It’s a logical place for an actor to move, unless he’s content to sit in his trailer between shots and do nothing else. I was never satisfied to do that.” He acknowledged that his movie star status gave him an edge—“All you need to get into the Directors Guild is for someone to give you a job. So I gave myself a job. I said, ‘Kid, you got the job.’” But he also knew it meant nothing if he didn’t deliver a product that the studio considered successful.*

Based on this one film, he had done it, garnering the approval of many of his doubters and, more important, generating more than $10 million in box office against his $1.2 million budget, a sum that was especially meaningful for Clint, as he had agreed to defer salary in lieu of a percentage of the gross in order to get the film made. “They didn’t want to pay me,” he remembered. “I said, ‘That’s fine. I should pay them. They should be cautious.’ So I got a percentage of the deal and I made much more money than I would have.”

By Thanksgiving, with the critical and commercial success of Misty having washed away the bad taste that the reception of The Beguiled had left in his mouth, he was at a higher watermark than he had ever experienced. He and Maggie were still in the process of planning and designing their dream house in Carmel, and she was pregnant again (Clint called upon TV exercise guru Jack LaLanne to devise a prenatal workout for her so that she could keep fit). It was as flush and plush a situation as he could have imagined. And yet there was the doubt—common in many people who make their living in creative fields, surely, but in Hollywood actors especially—that it could all vanish, that he would be disposed of, forgotten, that, as he put it, “every job will be your last.”

That fear was put to rest for good and all in December. With Misty still doing solid business nationwide, Warner Bros. released Dirty Harry into theaters, and it was an explosion—cinematically, culturally, politically, personally. If the world had some idea of who he was, based mainly on Rawhide and the Dollars films, that impression was radically and permanently altered by the arrival of Detective Harry Callahan on movie screens. Clint Eastwood was a cowboy, yes, and an action star and a hunk and maybe even a budding director, but forevermore he would be seen as a one-man vigilante force with a badge, a squint, a battery of snappy banter, and a .44 Magnum pistol. With Callahan, Clint created a second indelibly iconic character, allowing him to toggle between two modes—stoic and mysterious, sarcastic and ruthless—and become part of a national conversation about violence, entertainment, police work, and justice in a way perhaps no movie star ever had up to then.

Dirty Harry is a lot of things, but chief of all, as even its most ardent detractors admit, it’s effective. If it’s propaganda, it’s entertaining propaganda; if it’s sadism, it’s candy-coated sadism; if it’s fascism, it’s the kind of fascism that finds otherwise broad-minded people nodding along, unconsciously, until (unless), abashed, they catch themselves.

From the outset, the film posits Harry Callahan as a loner, a renegade, a warrior not all that different from the Man with No Name. In his first three appearances in the film, he (1) investigates the murder of a woman by a sniper; (2) shows express indifference to city and police authorities; and, most famously, (3) interrupts his hot dog lunch by foiling a bank robbery and killing two of its perpetrators in a shoot-out. (The third bandit—whom he merely wounds and to whom he famously smirks and says, “You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”—he leaves for uniformed officers to clean up.)*

In time, we learn that he hates every race, creed, and lifestyle not his own, resents having to work with a relatively novice partner, doesn’t think much about his own safety, has no private life more meaningful to him than his work, and is a childless widower whose wife was killed by a drunk driver. He wears his hair longish in the mode of the day but dresses conservatively: sports coats, sweater vests, ties. He likes a beer. He’s a sexual voyeur (he ogles nude women on two stakeouts and at a North Beach strip club). He can endure physical pain. And, yes, he can dish pain out.

The complaint that Harry’s a one-dimensional murder machine, a self-appointed judge, jury, and hangman, isn’t baseless. But the charges are undermined somewhat by the relentlessly vicious, absolutely psychopathic killer, self-named Scorpio, whom he is hunting. In the course of the film, Scorpio murders a young woman and a ten-year-old boy with his sniper rifle; kidnaps, rapes, and murders a fourteen-year-old girl; wounds a cop in a shoot-out; beats Harry to a pulp; pays a street fighter to beat him bloody so he can go to the media with (false) claims of police brutality; and hijacks a busload of schoolchildren with the intent to ransom and likely kill them. He is ascribed no motive, no backstory, no handhold for sympathetic reflection; he’s no more human or relatable than the monsters in Alien or Predator. So when Harry hunts, wounds, tortures, and executes him, we are, in effect, expected to approve of this likely illegal series of responses—a dangerous invitation, especially when delivered with Siegel’s professional polish.

At the same time, while the film strains to make Harry’s actions comprehensible and to even warrant them (or at least to try), his attitudes toward modern notions of due process and justice and the rights of accused criminals are so hidebound and, technically, unconstitutional that it’s equally fair to say he’s indisputably a bloodthirsty sadist not very much different from the fellow he’s trying to subdue. The film goes so far as to explicitly compare the two. As in Misty, the script and the visuals hint at their dualism: their shared taste for voyeurism; their reliance on big guns; their ability to take a beating; their matching leg wounds. And when Harry tells his superiors that Scorpio will kill again because “he likes it,” he seems to be speaking from personal knowledge. (Shout-out to Andy Robinson, by the way, who, recognizing he was playing a horror movie villain, rendered Scorpio as a gurgling, cackling lunatic with such thick zeal that, he later said, “It got so people thought that was me. . . . Producers wouldn’t let me into their offices to read for a part. . . . Everyone was convinced that Siegel hired me out of an institution.”)

Of course, while Harry might be justified in despising and hunting Scorpio, he is also perfectly willing to shoot the bank robbers in the opening scene—who, to his knowledge, haven’t hurt anybody—without trying to apprehend them or even to identify himself as a policeman. He’s content, in short, to work outside of the justice system even when it might be possible to follow protocol. Clint would always claim the film was more about vengeance than bloodlust, but the two emotional states aren’t mutually exclusive. And Harry does explicitly mock modern trends in the study of criminality, and he definitely seems to relish stomping the wounds he’s already inflicted on Scorpio. Is he a fascist? Perhaps not. But it’s likely that actual fascists would perceive him as kindred, so the question is rather moot.

What’s potentially more disturbing than Harry’s politics is that Siegel and company are so good at their jobs that we can often sympathize with their protagonist’s point of view. The film is slick and sleek, depicting a gritty, multicultural San Francisco that never feels touristic, a pulsing timeline that rarely bothers with comic asides or scenic byways, several crackerjack action and/or ticking-clock sequences, a nifty score, and a lot of boldly dark cinematography (by, again, Bruce Surtees). Few directors could so reliably do this sort of thing, and Siegel is notably adept among that select company. Dirty Harry is a very good instance of what the French critics would call a policier.

Clint, too, is solid. Harry isn’t really a fleshed-out character, but he needs to be plausibly commanding and fierce within his self-defined limits, and Clint absolutely fulfills the role’s requirements, providing gravitas, determination, and even dry wit in various turns. His stillness is clearly a facade hiding a calculating interior, which he conveys beneath a laser-like gaze. And on the two occasions in which he comes face-to-face with Scorpio, his anger literally contorts him. When, at the climax of the film, he repeats, verbatim, the “Well, do ya, punk?” speech from the bank robbery, he looks as twisted as Scorpio himself. It’s not particularly a lesson in deep acting, but it’s iconic screen acting. And it’s a full-blooded portrayal of a self-sufficient, task-oriented American male who follows his code of ethics even when it means making himself a pariah (Harry is constantly threatening to turn in his badge and, of course, ultimately tosses it away). The performance revisits the Man with No Name and expands him into someone capable of worldly emotions and reactions. And it provides a foundation for future iterations of such a man, whether played by Clint (literally, as it happened, in the Harry sequels) or by others in the slew of movies modeled on Dirty Harry that would soon emerge.

Dirty Harry may have been laden with outrageous or ludicrous or horrifying sociopolitical views, but audiences absolutely loved it. It opened strong at Christmastime and continued to earn money through the spring, when Warner Bros. announced that a second film featuring the character was in development. It helped that they knew how to market the thing: the high-contrast red, yellow, orange, and black poster—this time appropriately featuring a large pistol—enticed with the tagline “He doesn’t break murder cases, he smashes them.”* He smashed box office records, too. By the time its first theatrical run had ended, the film had grossed more than $35 million, the highest take yet for any of Clint’s films and a massive profit on the studio’s estimated $4 million* budget (a quarter of which, of course, was paid to the star).

But if audiences ate it up, critics all but spit on it. Dirty Harry provoked outrage among big-city reviewers, even those who acknowledged its formal quality, such as Roger Ebert (3 stars), Pauline Kael (“a stunningly well-made genre piece”), Kevin Thomas (a “very well-made suspense thriller”), and Gene Siskel (4 stars), who reckoned it better than the year’s other celebrated cop drama, The French Connection, and put it in his year-end top ten. Among the outright haters were Variety (“a specious, phony glorification of police and criminal brutality”), the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris (“one of the most disturbing manifestations of police paranoia I have ever seen”), and, especially, the New York Times, where, in addition to Roger Greenspun’s verdict (“fails in simple credibility so often and on so many levels that it cannot succeed . . . as a study in perversely complimentary psychoses”), a Harvard Crimson opinion piece was reprinted as a second, scolding opinion: “a simply told story of the Nietzschean superman and his sado-masochistic pleasures.” In a more positive vein, Thomas of the Los Angeles Times deemed it “a high-style film with lowbrow appeal, a movie after which you may dislike yourself for liking it as much as you do,” and Siskel, invoking The French Connection, said Harry “has more thrills, fewer plot holes, a more coherent point of view, and something very important to say.”

And that last bit—what the film had to say—was the source of most of the brouhaha. Ebert, in a largely positive notice, flat out stated, “The movie’s moral position is fascist. No doubt about it.” And Kael, who was even more praising of the film and, especially, its star—“Soft-spoken Clint Eastwood—six feet four of lean, tough saint, blue-eyed and shaggy-haired, with a rugged, creased, careworn face that occasionally breaks into a mischief-filled Shirley MacLaine grin”—called it “an almost perfect piece of propaganda for para-legal police power” and “a deeply immoral movie.”

Having accidentally waded into a culture war, both Clint and Siegel defended themselves, their film, and even the actions of the protagonist. “I’m a registered Democrat,” Siegel told the Chicago Tribune. “Every day I get script ideas which portray the police as sadists, pigs, and perverts. Well, only a few police are like that.” In the left-leaning Los Angeles Free Press, Clint went further: “We made an action-adventure film. If it commented on the fact that courts set guilty people free on occasion, well, that sometimes happens. It was a dramatic device, not a political one. . . . One critic in LA actually wrote that because our killer hijacked a school bus in the movie we were making an antibusing statement. Incredible. Who has time to think of all that crap?” In his view, the film took note of the Supreme Court ruling that arrestees be informed of their constitutional rights (the famed Miranda warnings) and of sociologically driven efforts to understand and sympathize with perpetrators of crime at the expense, he believed, of the rights of the victims of crime. “There’s a reason for the rights of the accused,” he acknowledged, “and I think it’s very important and one of the things that make our system great. But there are also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized.” More earnestly, he flat out denied pushing a political agenda: “I’m a political nothing. I mean, I hate to be categorized. I’m certainly not an extremist. The best thing you can say about extremists, either right or left, is that they’re boring.”

But the world saw what was on the screen. The Man with No Name, who had ridden into town with an eye only toward his own advantage and who seemed a hip countercultural alternative to the traditional cowboy, was now the Cop Who Shot First and Mocked Due Process, an equal-opportunity hater infused with bloodthirst, a symbol around which the cultural right could rally. Like it or not, he’d chosen—and would continue to follow—a career path that evoked a visceral, dismissive response from the people antithetical to it. And one of those people, who seemed a fan, would turn and hound him for decades.

Dirty Harry proved to be one of those films that bled into the culture far beyond the walls of movie theaters, and in some discomfiting ways. The film was roundly embraced by police groups: The San Francisco premiere was mounted as a benefit for the local branch of the Police Athletic League; the Philadelphia police department requested a print as a training tool (not a good sign!); and Clint regularly received (and regularly declined) invitations to speak to law enforcement groups. At the White House, where Richard Nixon had left a standing order to have all of Clint’s new pictures screened for him, aides asked if he really wanted to see something so gory and lurid, and he replied, “Eastwood can do no wrong. Let’s see the picture.” Outside the 1972 Oscar ceremony, in which the film did not have a single nomination, protesters picketed the red carpet with signs reading DIRTY HARRY IS A ROTTEN PIG and NO MORE FASCIST PRO-COP FILMS. The following year, during San Francisco’s infamous Zebra murders, in which four Black serial killers murdered upward of fifteen random white victims, graffiti began appearing around town reading “Dirty Harry, where are you when we need you?” A man who committed a murder in New York in 1974 contacted police and called himself “Scorpio.” A fourteen-year-old Ohio boy, reenacting the movie the night after seeing it on TV in 1977, killed his eleven-year-old brother with their father’s pistol. And, even more alarmingly, a trio of madmen in Chowchilla, California, a rural community near Fresno, hijacked a school bus carrying twenty-six children and buried it and them in an underground bunker, demanding $5 million in ransom, in a scheme inspired by Scorpio’s crime. Clearly the thing had touched on all kinds of nerves.*

And even if the man who inadvertently became the face of all the cultural recoil that Dirty Harry engendered claimed to be “a political nothing,” that really wasn’t entirely true. In 1968, which was probably the first time anyone outside his household or circle of friends cared to ask about his views on current affairs, he lent his name to a pair of seemingly contradictory causes. In June, in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, he was among hundreds of boldface names who signed full-page newspaper advertisements calling for gun control.* Later in the year, he became one of the more visible of a cadre of famous movie stars, athletes, and musicians loosely known as “Celebrities for Nixon”; he didn’t actively campaign, but his preference was widely noted. (Shirley MacLaine, the ardent and outspoken progressive who met and worked with him soon after that election, recalled, “I loved Clint even though he was a Republican.”)

In all of his political beliefs, he was moderate, more a capital-L Libertarian than a partisan of any sort, asserting repeatedly over the years his distaste for government intrusion into the private lives of citizens and thereby favoring, if only by not speaking out against, access to abortion, increased civil rights protections for racial minorities and gays, equal pay and opportunity for women and underrepresented populations, and the rights of free expression and free speech, especially in the arts. He was a lifelong conservationist, a belief that echoed his preference for organic foods and a life in a relatively pollution-free environment. He at least seemed to be partnered in an open marriage, a broad-minded notion even a half-century later. And, most quizzically, even though he would soon, inadvertently, become a public face of big guns and law enforcement, he continually spoke of his personal aversion to shooting and hunting, his belief in safety and practical education for gun owners (and in particular gun owners with children in their homes), and, in time, his support for gun control legislation such as the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks on gun buyers. (“I don’t even own a gun,” he said as late as 1989—referring to handguns, as he admitted to keeping firearms in some of his rural properties for warding off wildlife and other threats.)

But at the same time, he was undoubtedly center-right leaning in his politics. A military veteran, he supported a strong armed forces (but not, notably, the U.S. presence in Vietnam), a limited social welfare safety net, and a relatively free hand for business. In 1972, he was appointed by California governor Ronald Reagan to an honorary blue-chip panel that would “advise” the elected slate of delegates at the Republican National Convention. He supported Nixon for reelection that year, and Nixon returned the compliment soon after the convention, inviting Clint and Maggie to a state dinner for Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev and appointing Clint as one of eight new members of the National Council for the Arts alongside such others as the painter Jamie Wyeth, the author Eudora Welty, and the (notably conservative) actress Rosalind Russell. At a White House luncheon marking their installation, Clint told a reporter seeking his opinion on cultural issues, “I’m new at this. I think it’s better to listen at this point.” Russell, seated next to him, approved: “[You are] very young and very pretty,” she told him. “Just sit there and eat your soup.”

Thirteen

With the stupendous success of Dirty Harry, he had both gained and lost. The pluses were obvious: wealth, fame, iconic status, global recognition. He would spend the next two years atop the Quigley poll rankings of moneymaking stars, per the nation’s theater owners, taking the premier spot from John Wayne, who would never hold it again. He had his pick of projects in which to act; he commanded one of the film world’s largest salaries; he could even choose scripts that he wished to direct. And although he now had detractors—people who associated him with political and social forces they loathed, people who assumed the worst about his values and motives—and although he could no longer count on privacy and personal space, not even in Carmel, the biggest thing he’d lost was something that had been with him for decades and had, in large measure, defined his working life since he flew off to make A Fistful of Dollars: a nagging fear that his personal and professional victories, whatever their scale, would be fleeting. No longer, he said, was he prey to the suspicion, so common among people who work in creative fields, “that every job will be your last. [Dirty Harry] was a great success, and I felt that I had a career doing something.”

His home life was settling into more than he’d ever imagined. In May 1972, Maggie gave birth to a daughter, Alison.* (And, once more, Clint almost missed it: He’d been shooting on location again, and he had to race from Arizona to Santa Monica to be on hand for the baby’s arrival.) That same year, work finally began on the home they’d been planning for years. (Aside from their own particularity in choosing a location and approving a design, the Eastwoods were stalled in realizing their dream home by the discovery of indigenous artifacts on their property, forcing them to pause work and hire professional archaeologists to examine the site.) The finished item was a custom-designed wonder built into oceanfront hills near Pebble Beach on an otherwise untouched two-hundred-acre site. The house would, he said, “segue right into the land” and include four bedrooms, a home gym, a screening room, a film editing facility, a Jacuzzi, a rec room complete with full-sized pool table, and a vaulted living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, built-in couches, and two fireplaces. They moved into it in 1973.

By then, the stakes they’d planted in the area were deeper than ever. In June 1972, Clint lent his name and some capital to a new business venture in Carmel’s touristy town center. Along with Paul Lippman, a former San Francisco sportswriter who’d become a drinking, golfing, and woman-chasing buddy, and Walter Becker, a respected local restaurateur, he opened the Hog’s Breath Inn, a restaurant and watering hole where, he said, he could feel comfortable kicking up his feet—a niche spot sitting somewhere between the town’s stuffier dining establishments, the quick-turnaround tourist spots, and the locals-only taverns and beer joints.

The name was Clint’s brainstorm, inspired by the fancifully dubbed pubs he’d encountered while touring England and Scotland in support of his Leone films. “I tried to pick the most ridiculous name I could think of,” he said. “I figure if people don’t have a sense of humor, they shouldn’t try our place.” The Hog’s Breath was located down an alley in a former stable that had been operating as an antique shop. The new owners commissioned a complete makeover in reclaimed redwood, stained glass, and Barbary Coast tchotchkes, adding a patio with a domed brick fireplace and mounting a taxidermied boar’s head opposite the dimly lit bar: echt ’70s California cottagecore. The chef, twenty-eight-year-old French native Henri Pujo-Perissere, had a résumé that included stints in Lyon, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. His menu would be publike with a tilt toward fine dining and an emphasis on the diet Clint favored, meaning organic, fresh, and local, with a bar and wine list featuring equally organic and local products. With a nod toward the star whose ownership drew customers, there were dishes on the menu such as the “Rawhide Special” (chili), the “Mysterious Misty” (“Maggie’s special tuna sandwich”), the “Dirty Harry Burger,” and the “Coogan’s Bluff” steak.

Per Lippman, speaking to Carmel’s Pine Cone newspaper, “Here is the nook-hideaway where husbands escape from wives,” and that was certainly true in the case of the owners, who hung out there regularly, along with such chums as Clint’s childhood pals Fritz Manes and Don Kincade, Malpaso partner Bob Daley, and even Clint’s one celebrity friend with a Carmel address, Merv Griffin, another Bay area kid (San Mateo) who came to Pebble Beach to play in Clint’s tennis tournament and liked the area well enough to buy a large ranch nearby. Clint loved to entertain Merv at the Hog’s Breath because of their shared laddish humor: “[Merv] had this habit when people were making a nuisance of themselves or being insulting: He would act like he was very friendly, but he’d throw in obscenities. It would go on like that and everybody would start laughing of course, but the person half the time didn’t know because they thought they hadn’t heard right.”

Clint and Lippman (who had a string of marriages) were known to linger at the bar in search of female companionship, Clint in particular favoring hookups with women of a certain look—pert, small, slender—whom, according to Lippman, he called “shrimps,” “squirts,” or “pocket rockets.” Clint had long comported himself as a sexual independent. But the Hog’s Breath gave him an even bigger scope, serving, essentially, as a permanent rendezvous point where any woman who wanted to take a chance at meeting him might turn up and get lucky. And he kept a studio apartment nearby for when the right moment struck.

When he discussed his personal life with journalists, he sidestepped the question of his philandering by describing his code of independence, stating that he and Maggie didn’t believe in owning one another. He spoke of their deep love, his respect for her self-determination, and his gratitude for their longevity and endurance as a couple. But, of course, she was now a mother of two, with the demands of a large new house and the menagerie of animals they kept. She was still dedicated to tennis—she was a better player than him and could be scathing when he botched shots in their matches as a doubles team. But she clearly didn’t have the time, energy, opportunity, or maybe even inclination to hang around bars meeting hookups. She didn’t even realize her own passion projects. In the early 1970s, she talked about opening a health food store in Carmel, with her husband’s financial backing and celebrity endorsement, but it never came to be. She chose, instead, to be the woman behind the throne, tolerating her husband’s waywardness while keeping a firm grip on him.

And through it all, he kept working. Just before Dirty Harry was unleashed on the world, he went to Arizona for production of another film that Jennings Lang and Universal had brought to Malpaso, a story titled “Sinola,” about a Mexican peasant revolt against Anglo landowners and a bounty hunter hired by the whites to wipe out the rebels. The script was by the novelist Elmore Leonard, whose work had already been adapted into such estimable films as 3:10 to Yuma and Hombre but who had not previously written directly for the screen. Leonard, still best known as a writer of pulp Westerns, had met Clint a couple of years prior and was still sufficiently green in the ways of Hollywood to believe that a movie star’s kind words about his work meant that it would reach the screen as he envisioned it.

Ha.

The film was titled Joe Kidd after Clint’s character, the bounty hunter, and the assignment to direct it fell to John Sturges, a veteran of over twenty-five years with such films as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to his credit. Most recently, he had worked with Steve McQueen on Le Mans, an oversized production that he had quit after seven weeks. He was said to have been fond of the bottle, and he had a difficult time balancing the demands of the studio with what Clint was asking of him in the matter of shooting efficiently. (He apparently threatened to leave this one, too.) Clint was displeased by the work rate on the film and, worse, came down with a bronchial infection, which further slowed things down. The weather was historically uncooperative: Tucson got almost seven inches of snow during the shoot. And Leonard had to suffer the indignity of everybody—Sturges, Clint, Malpaso’s Bob Daley, and some Universal hands—rewriting his work, sometimes as soon as it left his typewriter. He shared stories about his frustrations for years.

The finished product, with Robert Duvall as the wealthy villain and John Saxon as the Mexican rebel leader, was handsome, but it landed softly in theaters in the summer of 1972. Mainstream critics liked it okay. Roger Greenspun, the New York Times man on the Clint Eastwood desk, thought it began well—or “modestly decent”—before devolving, and he praised the star: “It is a very good performance . . . the only real point of interest.” The old Eastwood hand at the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas, was even more admiring, calling the film “concise, solidly crafted,” and declaring a preference for this Clint over the one in The Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, and Dirty Harry: “If anything, he is more totemic than ever.” But most critics found it muddled, confused, and lifeless, and audiences stayed away, forking over only $6.3 million for tickets—a disappointment compared to Clint’s recent successes.

By then, Clint seemed to have come to the decision to work exclusively on films of his own devising, avoiding the interference of studios and unpleasantness with directors whose sense of how a film shoot should progress differed from his. Malpaso didn’t commission new scripts, which Clint felt was like gambling away money. Instead, the company sought projects that he could readily slot himself into or easily retool. All but once he would be the lead actor; often he was the director, or, if not, the director was chosen from the platoon of colleagues he trusted—and was rarely anyone (Don Siegel aside, and then only once again) who might be considered an auteur. As he said again and again in interviews, “I could screw up my career as well as anyone.” The biggest box office star in the world, he would take that self-deprecating joke as a mantra. And he would test his instinct to work independently with a binge of three productions in less than a year.

In the spring of 1971, Malpaso acquired a script titled “Dance” written by Ernest Tidyman, a journalist-turned-novelist who was riding high on the tremendous splash of his novel and screenplay about a Black private eye, Shaft, and his (eventually Oscar-winning) adapted screenplay for The French Connection. “Dance” was a Western concerning a mystery man who rides into a town where the sheriff has been murdered while townspeople watched without intervening; it soon becomes clear that the stranger has come to avenge the death, perhaps (and the point is left purposely ambiguous) because the sheriff was his brother. Upon selling the script to Malpaso, Tidyman explained that he’d written the film with Clint in mind and “I knew he’d buy it.”

For Clint, the attraction of the story was its connection to one of the most celebrated of American Westerns. “The starting point [of the script] was,” he said, “ ‘What would have happened if the sheriff in High Noon had been killed?’” In that classic 1952 film, nobody stands with the lawman who is facing a murderous gang; nevertheless, the sheriff triumphs. Suppose he hadn’t, though, and suppose there was someone who wanted to make the town pay for its choice? That notion—combining a classic Hollywood story with the vengeance theme and menacing textures of the Dollars trilogy—was irresistible to Clint. He loved a revenge plot, he would say, in part because he felt that he had succeeded despite every dismissal Hollywood had thrown at him: “I might have some resentment that I didn’t make it by the accepted means, it wasn’t in the normal play of the cards.”

There was a lot about the project that was very comfortable and familiar to him, and a perfect vehicle for his new determination to become entirely self-governing within the Hollywood system. He knew the terrain, as it were, and he knew the look and feel that he wanted. He decided, finally, to direct it—quickly, inexpensively, and, above all, on location, where no studio bureaucrats could meddle with him. “Sergio Leone could have done it,” said Maggie, “but this one’s Clint’s baby.”

He got in his pickup and scouted possible locations up and down California and into Oregon and Nevada, seeking an isolated location beside a body of water. Eventually he found Mono Lake, a seventy-square-mile alkaline lake situated between the Yosemite Valley and the Nevada border. The eerie environment included stalagmite-like limestone formations and a barren desert plain that created tricks of light. The place, he said, “has a weird look to it, a lot of strange colors—never looks the same way twice during the day.” The lake water was too corrosive for boats to use, and the area was virtually unpopulated at the time. “I spent two hours walking around,” he said. “Not a boat, not a living soul, only the natural noises of the desert.” He phoned his art director, Henry Bumstead, who flew up straightaway. When he got a look at the site, Bumstead exclaimed, “You’d think we were on the moon!”*

Bumstead erected a town of twenty-one buildings, large enough to contain electrical generators, wardrobe departments, an editing suite (inspired by the efficiency of Vittorio De Sica, Clint wanted to assemble a rough cut of the film while he shot it), a commissary, and production offices. He even built functioning outhouses; everything the crew could need was on-site. The climax of the script, now titled High Plains Drifter, called for the entire town to be painted blood red and then consumed by fire,* meaning that the film would have to be shot in sequence, which entailed keeping the entire cast on location for the duration of the production. When filming began in the summer, a troupe of one hundred and thirty souls went to Mono Lake, but not for very long. Clint was determined to make the picture in the speedy, deliberate fashion he favored. As he later said, “It just bores me to sit around. I try to cast crew members as well as actors. I like people who are there to work, not to play. . . . We did High Plains Drifter in five weeks. At the time, I considered going to Spain, which could have been cheaper. Then I realized it would take nine weeks to do in Spain, and that clinched it.”

He relied on familiar hands—or, in some cases, first-time collaborators who would become mainstays of his work: Bumstead, whom he’d met on Joe Kidd; cinematographer Bruce Surtees; composer Dee Barton; editor Ferris Webster (another Joe Kidd veteran); stuntman (and frequent Clint stand-in) Buddy Van Horn, who would play the cameo role of the murdered sheriff, seen in flashback. And he worked alongside them as just another set of hands. As his agent, Lenny Hirshan, recalled of a set visit: “A stagecoach came into town, made a U-turn, and went out again. After the first take, Clint said ‘Cut’ and discussed the scene with the actors. Then he grabbed a broom and, with the crew, helped sweep away the stagecoach’s tracks.” With that mentality, he easily got the film in the can on time.

And it was just as well, because not even a month after High Plains Drifter wrapped, he was at work on another film, a project that was at once smaller and, in a way, more ambitious. Breezy was written by Jo Heims, but it was very different from Play Misty for Me. It, too, involved a lone-wolf man and a chance encounter with a woman, but in this case the man was Frank Harmon, a divorced, embittered Los Angeles realtor of a certain age, and the woman (girl, really) was Breezy, a teenage hippie orphan living the free life of a flower child in Laurel Canyon.

On the surface, there was little about the script that suggested Clint could have any part in it. “I understood the character,” he said, “and [Heims] kind of wanted me to play it. I said, ‘Jo, I don’t think I’m the right age. We need someone else. I’d like to direct it, but I need someone else.’” They found a veteran actor who was spot-on. “William Holden, it turned out, had lived the part,” Clint said. “That whole idea of the rejuvenation of the cynic was an appealing idea, and when I first met him, he said, ‘You know, I’ve been this guy.’ I said, ‘I thought you had.’”*

That left the job of casting the title character. Clint and Bob Daley tested dozens of candidates, and Holden himself often read with them. They chose Kay Lenz, a nineteen-year-old former child actress and model whose résumé included print ads, commercials, a few one-off TV episodes, and a fleeting appearance in American Graffiti. “She had this little-girl quality that was the surface covering of an awakening woman,” explained Daley.

As for Clint, he discovered that, yes, it was easier to do just one job on the set. Working solely as a director, he didn’t have to worry about his wardrobe or his hair or whether or not he had shaved. He’d been in a comfort zone with High Plains Drifter, simply because a Western was a familiar environment for him, but, he said, “I really didn’t realize how difficult it had been to wear both hats until I directed Breezy.”

Breezy would be the first film Clint had made since before his Rawhide days that was shot entirely in Los Angeles, but even then he chose to rely on real-life locations rather than Universal’s soundstages and backlot. Frank Harmon’s Hollywood Hills home was an architecturally notable midcentury modern house in Tarzana, and such familiar spots as the Laurel Canyon Country Store, the ornate Japanese restaurant Yamashiro, and the Fisherman’s Village pier at Marina Del Rey all pop up. The Tarzana location presented a bit of a problem in the form of a neighbor who demanded $5,000 for the inconvenience of having the crew and its equipment making noise into the night. Rebuffed, he decided to run all three of his cars throughout each night’s work, with the headlights aimed right at the filming location. As Clint recalled, “The headlights went right over us and were no problem at all. The running motors weren’t picked up by our sound. In the middle of it, I sneaked up the hill and looked to see what he was doing. The guy was in his driveway pouring cans of gas into the cars! All he did was use up batteries and gas. I hope it made him feel better.”

The film relied heavily on the rapport between the two principal actors and their ability to work with the director, and from that perspective it went swimmingly. “I’ll work with Clint any time he asks,” Holden said. “Besides, he can’t pull any crap on me because he’s an actor, too. . . . There has been no temperament, no nothing.” And Lenz felt well cared for, especially given that her part called for nudity. Echoing Donna Mills’s experience on Misty, she said, “[Clint] told me I could have final say on whether or not to keep the nude scenes. And Bill . . . never took his eyes off of my eyes. I could have been wearing tinfoil and he wouldn’t have known it.” Filming wrapped under budget and schedule in about five weeks. The world would soon have a Clint Eastwood film without Clint Eastwood in it—a previously unimaginable idea.*

But of course, audiences hadn’t yet gotten weary of looking at him; more to the point, they wanted more of a specific flavor of him. So, just as surely as he got back in the poncho for Sergio Leone, he prepared to pick up the .44 Magnum again and return to the streets of San Francisco and Dirty Harry Callahan.

The idea for a sequel to Dirty Harry had been floating around since the film’s opening weekend, but Warner Bros. and Malpaso didn’t commit to it until the spring of 1972. At the time, there were various script ideas for the first Harry still floating around. One in particular interested Clint—a story about a rogue cadre of policemen who systematically executed criminals whom the courts couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop—an unofficially institutionalized version of Harry Callahan, in a sense. The idea had been proposed by John Milius, one of the screenwriters whose rewrites had been largely rejected when Clint and Siegel came on board. But now, it seemed, Clint favored the storyline because it could, perhaps, be used to exonerate Harry of charges of fascism by pitting him against a more obviously fascistic enemy.

Since the time he’d worked on Harry, Milius had received screen credit for John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (starring Paul Newman) and Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson (starring Robert Redford). Warner Bros. and Malpaso were willing to commission a new script from him based entirely on the execution squad concept. He wasn’t enthralled with what had happened to his work on the first film, though. Working with Clint and Malpaso, he said, “is not like dealing with an actor. It’s like dealing with the chairman of the board of the Clint Eastwood Corporation.” He submitted his draft, titled “Vigilance,” and went off to direct his first feature, Dillinger, making himself unavailable for rewrites. So Malpaso asked another rising young screenwriter, Michael Cimino, who’d come to them with a spec script about a band of bank robbers, to give the Harry sequel, now titled Magnum Force, a once-over. Cimino, with the hope of Clint putting his original script into production, agreed.

It would seem a given that Don Siegel would be called upon to direct the film, but some unspoken, unspecified thing had come between him and Clint. It wasn’t bad blood, it wasn’t resentment, it wasn’t anything to do with money or credit or politics or Hollywood gamesmanship. They had both prospered in the four films they’d made in their four years working together—financially, reputationally—even if they weren’t always hits. And they still seemed to like each other personally and always, but always, spoke well of one another. But Clint apparently no longer felt the need for a mentor. He had directed three features—and diverse ones at that—and he seemed to want to progress under his own sail. For a brief moment, he considered directing Magnum Force himself, but then he called on Ted Post, his old Rawhide and Hang ’Em High collaborator, to do the job. After Harry, Siegel maintained a thriving career on his own, making the great crime picture Charley Varrick with Walter Matthau and the spy thriller The Black Windmill with Michael Caine. “Clintus” and “Siegelini” would maintain friendly relations. But they were done as a regular team.

High Plains Drifter premiered in the spring of 1973, just before Magnum Force started filming. Critics were generally accepting, if not entirely admiring, of Clint’s second turn as director, noting its clear connection to his Leone films but uncertain whether the tone he was after was “near satire” (Variety), “pitiless Old Testament wrath” (the New York Times, in a review that at one point referred to the star/director as “Eastman”), or “paranoid [and] . . . sardonic” (the Los Angeles Times). There were some complaints about slow pacing and some, inevitably, about violence. But there was widespread praise for the acting—including Clint’s performance, which several critics noted was a subtle variation on the Man with No Name, and that of Verna Bloom, playing the wife of the town hotelier—for the photography, and for the striking location and set design. And the film obviously hit nerves. Soon after its release, Clint approached John Wayne with a script called “The Hostiles,” written by exploitation meister Larry Cohen, about a gambler and an old cuss who team up to fight outlaws. Wayne hated it and wrote to Clint to tell him so, and he took the opportunity to express how much he disliked the depiction of the townsfolk in Drifter. “John Wayne once wrote me a letter,” Clint recalled, “and he wasn’t very pleased about High Plains Drifter. He said, ‘That isn’t what the West was all about. That isn’t the American people who settled this country.’ I said, ‘You’re absolutely right.’ It’s just an allegory, and it wasn’t intended to be the West that’s been told hundreds of times over.”*

And that was true: If any Western could claim to capture the feel of 1973, and to serve as a milestone in the history of the genre and the life and career of its star and director, it is High Plains Drifter. If The Good, the Bad and the Ugly feels shadowed by the Vietnam War, High Plains Drifter bears a similar spoor of Watergate. The town of Lago into which the stranger arrives is governed by a committee of business, civic, legal, and clerical interests who are operating under their own code of law and have hired mercenaries to protect them and their wealth. The stranger has revenge against the entire town in mind when he arrives, and the corruption and paranoia of the place only strengthen his resolve to clean it out by destroying it.

He quickly dispatches three gunmen hired by the townspeople to defend them against badmen whom they’ve railroaded into prison and who have been paroled and are headed back to take their vengeance. His efficacy suggests to the authorities that they hire him to run things, and he immediately sets about turning everything on its head: deputizing and appointing as mayor a jester-like little person; requisitioning free booze, boots, saddles, weapons, and lodging for himself; sleeping (and not always with consent) with the town’s most attractive women; commandeering the sole hotel; and so on. It’s a neat metaphor for Clint’s own ascendancy in Hollywood—a dude whom nobody reckons on coming in, taking over, and running things as he sees fit. He is his own avenging angel, a point underscored by his resemblance to the dead marshal, who is seen in flashbacks and who looks sufficiently like the stranger to give the townspeople nervous pause.

The film is very Leone: the little guy, the undertaker in his black top hat, the fat sheriff, the eerie score (Dee Barton aping Ennio Morricone), the finale conceit of literally painting the town red, the sudden bursts of violence. And Clint clearly has a feel for the métier. But he doesn’t have Leone’s eye for composition and contrast, or his unrestrained vulgarity and gusto. High Plains Drifter is nearer the mark than Hang ’Em High was, but it’s another point of proof of the maestro’s excellence: Even his closest collaborators can’t match him.

It’s also, however, very Eastwood. The first of the eventual four Westerns he would go on to direct (each with a distinct climate and geography), it’s packed with actors who would work with him repeatedly: Rawhide’s Paul Brinegar as a bartender; Harry Callahan’s partner John Mitchum as a prison warden; sometime acting coach Jack Kosslyn as a saddlemaker; and, making the first of his seven featured appearances in one of Clint’s films, Geoffrey Lewis* as one of the men who killed the marshal. And the themes of civilization’s corruption, single-handed justice, and the vengeful, semi-mystical outsider have echoes throughout Clint’s work past and to come.

Disturbingly, one of the signature aspects of Clint’s touch in the film is the stranger’s rape of the town’s apparently only unattached woman. It’s awful and needless and tells us nothing about the characters and too much, perhaps, about the filmmaker. There have been very few Madonnas in the universe of Clint’s films by this time, but there have been a number of whores, or women who’ve been treated like them. And the emphasis on sexual violence is both unsettling and unsettled—you don’t feel that the film has digested, or respects the gravity of, the sexual assault it depicts. Rape has sometimes been invoked in Clint’s earlier films as the ultimate atrocity, but here it’s treated as an aspect of the stranger’s personality. There’s really no excuse for it. And Clint’s films would feature rape again and again, making it feel less like a tic of his storytelling mind than a personal obsession.

There’s another personal touch here, one that lets us see the vision the man making the movie has for himself, his life, his work. In the little town cemetery, in a small cluster of tombstones that can be seen in some outtake footage and publicity photos for the film, three names are clearly visible: DONALD SIEGEL, S. LEONE, and B. G. HUTTON—the names of the directors for whom he has starred most frequently on-screen up to that point.* There’s no reason to believe that he wished ill to any of these men. But he seems intent on telling the world (or at least himself) that he’s done working with or for them. Henceforth, by his own declaration, he will be his own director. It’s perhaps a little sophomoric, and he would one day find another way to acknowledge his mentors. But at this moment in his life and career, he felt he had to shake their influence, bury them deep, and avow himself last man standing.

With a new film in theaters, Clint engaged in one of Hollywood’s most venerated forms of promotion—handing out an award at the Oscar ceremony, which took place on March 27 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown L.A. He was charged with announcing the Best Picture, the evening’s last prize, and was seated in his tux, alongside Maggie, who wore a sparkling sky-blue gown, in the second row of the theater, right behind Burt Reynolds and his sweetheart, Dinah Shore.

The telecast began with a lengthy production number featuring Angela Lansbury, during which the show’s producer, Howard Koch, came rushing over to Clint to ask him if he would step in for the evening’s host, Charlton Heston, who was due to go on after Lansbury but who hadn’t shown up yet (because, it was later learned, his limousine had suffered a flat tire).

As Clint recalled, he thought Koch “was joking. . . . I said, ‘Where’s Gregory Peck?’ You know, some of the more distinguished members of the Academy. ‘There must be somebody around here who could come out and lend a little class to the thing,’ I said. But Koch’s eyes were kind of twitching, sweat was running down his forehead, and the TV guys up there were doing their countdowns.” Maggie, Clint claimed, “said, ‘Go ahead! Help him out!’”

He went backstage and was handed a script—which, as luck would have it, had been tailored, elaborately, with Heston in mind. As Lansbury’s number wound down and Academy president Daniel Taradash took the stage (to, among other things, disparage film critics), Clint kept watching the door, hoping that Heston would arrive. He didn’t. And so Taradash introduced Clint to a puzzled audience. He entered, holding a script, via a staircase, bounding past the bottommost steps to make a beeline for the podium. He shook hands with Taradash, put his script down, and started speaking:

This was supposed to be Charlton Heston’s part of the show, but somehow he hasn’t shown up. So who do they pick? They pick the guy who hasn’t said but three lines in twelve movies to substitute for him. [He looked nervously into the wings.] If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep this book next to me. [He glanced down at the script.] So Heston’s supposed to say . . . something biblical here, referring to when he played Moses. He says, “So when I brought the tablets down from the mountains, the research staff assured me that there’d be only ten commandments. See, these people were wrong. There were eleven commandments. The eleventh commandment comes from the Federal Communications System [sic]. So spoke the Commission: ‘Thou shalt have full disclosure.’”

At this point, he froze. He’d read that last bit as if he thought that there was more to it, not realizing that he’d reached the (terrible) punchline. The camera cut to Burt Reynolds, who looked displeased, and Maggie, who was sharing a laugh with somebody off camera. (Clint would later claim that her laughter cut through to him loud and clear: “She was laughing hysterically in the audience. All I could hear out there was her and Burt Reynolds. They both have very distinctive laughs . . . and there they were in the front row, cracking up.”) Once again, he broke from the script.

C’mon, flip the card, man! This isn’t my bag, I’ll tell ya! [The camera cut to Reynolds, Dinah Shore, and Maggie, all cracking up.] “In the Book of Genesis it is written that on the first day, all eligible Academy members are asked to vote for nominations for the Best Picture of the year. On the second day, the other nominations are made . . .”

He glanced again into the wings. This time he opened his eyes wide and staggered backward a half-step in a show of mock relief, with his hand over his heart. Charlton Heston bounded out and put out his hand. Clint briefly stood beside Heston, patting his back, then exited quietly while Heston carried on with the scripted jokes, not saying a word in recognition of what had happened.

“I went backstage,” Clint recalled, “into a press room, and I saw a little ice chest on the floor. I looked in the chest and there was a six-pack of Olympia. It was like, you know, some angel had put it there. So I ripped open about four of them, and some page was running back and forth, looking in as I drank them. Finally, I went out and sat in front with Mag, and she said, ‘A page was just down here asking me how many beers you could drink before you’d get drunk.’”

But he still had work to do—and the night’s surprises weren’t finished. That was the year that Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather and sent as his proxy the actress and model Sacheen Littlefeather, who, dressed in a fringed gown with tribal markings, refused the award in protest of the treatment of Native Americans at the hands of the federal government and Hollywood films.

Much has been said about this moment, by Littlefeather and, after her death in 2022, by the press and by members of her family. She claimed to have been loudly heckled (video of the incident proved otherwise), she claimed to have been nearly assaulted backstage by John Wayne and to have been shot at in an ambush at Brando’s house that night (neither of which appeared to be true), and her stated identity as an Apache tribe member has been disputed by her family. What isn’t under dispute is that the presenters of the evening’s remaining awards felt compelled to ad-lib about what had happened. Before revealing the winner of the next prize, for Best Actress (Liza Minnelli for Cabaret), Raquel Welch said, “I hope they haven’t got a cause.” And then Clint came out, as scheduled, to present the Best Picture trophy, introduced by his onetime co-star Rock Hudson as, among other things, “a former Oregon lumberjack.” He sauntered up to the mic and said, with a mock-serious look on his face, “I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford Westerns over the years,” which got a laugh. He then read some of the scripted banter and, again, had to pause to say, “Go ahead, man, flip the card. I’m still here.” He opened the envelope and announced the name of his friend Albert Ruddy, producer of The Godfather. They shared a moment, and Ruddy made his acceptance speech.

Backstage, Clint was once again approached by Howard Koch, who thanked him for his efforts on the night. As Clint recalled, “I said, ‘Never invite me again.’ ‘Will you come back if you’re nominated?’ ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ Koch says, ‘Then I don’t have to worry.’”

Fourteen

In this period of professional transition, there was a change close to home. In October 1972, Ruth Eastwood, sixty-three and widowed for three years, remarried. Her new husband, John Belden Wood, was the scion of a Piedmont family that had prospered in the lumber trade, and he had left the family business in order to work in securities and investments. Jack, as he was known, was a couple of years younger than his new bride, and he, like her, had lost his spouse a few years prior. He and Ruth had been acquainted socially for ages, and they’d started courting in 1971 while visiting Hawaii to celebrate the anniversary of mutual friends. They wed in a small chapel in Pebble Beach, with Clint escorting his mother down the aisle and Maggie and the children watching along.

Clint was already shooting a film that was in some ways the least important during this period in his career and in others the most telling. Magnum Force is a sequel that marginally expands the character of Harry Callahan in that we see more of his off-duty life (i.e., he gets laid) and learn more about his resentment of authority and his adherence to a personal credo of justice. It has more and bigger action set pieces than the first film. It has a higher body count. Harry’s gun figures more prominently. And he’s got some snappy one-liners, the most famous being “A man’s got to know his limitations,” which gets two pointed airings.

But Clint’s sense of his own limitations was evolving, and one effect of that was his increasing impatience with his directors. Ted Post may have called the shots when Rowdy Yates was a green kid, and he may have been director enough for Hang ’Em High. But Clint had been directed by Don Siegel since then and, more important, by himself, several times each, and he wasn’t happy when Post insisted on multiple takes of scenes that Clint thought had gone well enough. The two clashed openly, and Clint pulled rank several times, invoking his power as producer and top box office star and experienced director. He knew that the audience for his films wasn’t worried about the composition of the frame or the delicacies of lighting or even clean line readings by actors. He had identified a stratum of acceptability for his work—at least for this kind of work—and he had no qualms about settling for it. Post, never an A-level director, was nonetheless a seasoned veteran and didn’t care for the way Clint rode and/or ignored him; he would go on to work for another two and a half decades, but he never collaborated with Clint again.

And no sooner was he done riding herd on Post than he was off to Montana to make a film with Michael Cimino, who had initially come to Malpaso’s attention with his script, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, about a famed bank robber and a small-town car thief who team up to commit an audacious theft while attempting to evade retribution at the hands of some of the bank robber’s former cohorts.* The film, Cimino’s debut as a feature director, was budgeted at $2.2 million and scheduled to shoot for about seven weeks in a variety of locations around Montana that had been scouted by Cimino and Malpaso’s Bob Daley.

Clint would be playing Thunderbolt, who sometimes disguised himself as a clergyman to escape notice while planning crimes. The role of the breezy, ambitious, rash Lightfoot—a character cut in many ways from the same cloth as Rowdy Yates—went to Jeff Bridges, the son of actor Lloyd Bridges (the cowardly deputy sheriff of High Noon, among many other roles). Bridges had practically grown up on camera, appearing, often with his older brother Beau, in various of their father’s projects from the time they were infants. In 1973 he was on a hot streak, having made The Last Picture Show, Fat City, The Last American Hero, and The Iceman Cometh in the previous three years. But he wasn’t big box office, and he was still a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old and something of a goofball. Cimino hoped to contrast Bridges’s sunny freshness against Clint’s grizzled stoicism, and he challenged the younger actor to make Clint laugh, on and off camera. As a result, Cimino would capture moments of Bridges being Bridges and Clint corpsing—that is, breaking character and laughing out loud—that appeared in the finished film.

Clint wasn’t as contentious with Cimino as he had been with Post but, then, he didn’t have to be. Cimino, whose previous directing experience had been limited to commercials, was warned early by Clint about how different directing a feature was. As Clint recalled, “I said, ‘You know, when you make a commercial, you take ten days to do one minute of film. When you make a movie, it’s the other way around. You work as quickly as you can.’” Cimino had planned to surprise his boss by fiddling with the production schedule so that the fourth day of shooting would appear to be the first, when Clint was due to report. But Clint showed up early, on what was Cimino’s third day of work. “We were already a day and a half ahead,” the director recalled. “The sun was setting, and across the long, expansive plain came the unmistakable figure of the Man with No Name.” Cimino feared that the crew, made up of Malpaso regulars, would stop work to greet the star and that he’d be overshadowed on his own set. “But as Clint came closer and closer,” he said, “one could see the grin on his face. He knew we were ahead of schedule. Not one member of the crew broke rank except to look up and say, ‘Hi, Clint.’”

That was how it went for the most part. Cimino would defer to Clint—“Hey boss, you happy with the dailies?”—and Clint would reply with agreeable encouragement: “You just keep shooting what you’re shooting.” (Cimino’s girlfriend and collaborator Joann Carelli told him, “You better enjoy this, because it’s never going to be like this again.”)

The atmosphere was so collegial that Cimino was able to get concessions out of his famously inflexible employer. One evening, after the day’s work had wrapped, the director saw Bridges looking mopey and asked what was wrong. “I think in one more take I could have done it better,” he replied. Problem was, Clint had already changed out of his wardrobe and had hopped into his rented Firebird to drive back to his lodgings in town. Cimino took a bold step: “I said to my assistant, ‘Stop Clint, tell him Jeff feels he can do it better in one more take.’ Clint turns his car around, drives back to his trailer, we break the cameras out and shoot the scene over again. . . . Jeff did it again, and he was brilliant.”

But even with his sneaky jump start, Cimino fell behind. It became clear that the shoot would go long, which no Malpaso film ever had. That was when Clint decided to lay down the law. With three days still left on the planned schedule, Bob Daley approached Cimino and, according to the director, “told me that Clint was organizing a wrap party the following evening at a nearby roadhouse. I said, ‘Wrap party? What do you mean wrap party? We’ve got three whole days of shooting left, including the entire robbery sequence!’ Bob kept smiling and shrugged, saying he didn’t know anything except the wrap party was at 8:30 the next evening and Clint expected me to be there.” Cimino and his principal crew members spent the night rejiggering the schedule so that they could do the impossible—fifty-six different camera setups, as he recalled—in a single day. Somehow they not only figured it out but, working eleven nonstop hours, they did it. Cimino was exhausted, but there was still a party to attend. “I arrived at the roadhouse for the wrap party at exactly a quarter to eight,” he remembered. “Clint was sitting there with a huge grin and said he never doubted I could do it.”*

In November, Breezy opened to modestly positive reviews—or, at least, not very many very negative ones. Variety called it “an okay [emphasis added] contemporary drama.” The New York Times, devoting fewer than a hundred words to it, deemed it “engrossing.” Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune called it “surprisingly tender and frequently witty.” Everyone praised William Holden and Kay Lenz, and several noted that the film was the truest sign yet that Clint was developing his own directorial vision, not just imitating his mentors. In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas, correctly citing Play Misty for Me as a riff on Don Siegel and High Plains Drifter as influenced by Sergio Leone, declared Breezy “a deeply felt, fully realized film that is entirely [Eastwood’s] own.”

Well, it is and it isn’t. Breezy is best appreciated as a time capsule: of early 1970s L.A., of the so-called generation gap between hippies and their elders, and of a fairy tale about a prototype Manic Pixie Dream Girl—the young woman, free of ordinary social mores, whose liberated behavior rouses a dull male protagonist to life. In that sense, it’s not a personal film so much as a comfortable and professionally built snapshot of the moment. The catch, though (and it’s noted but never condemned by the contemporary reviews), is that Breezy is explicitly depicted as being seventeen years old—a high schooler, in effect, carrying on an affair with a man old enough to be her father’s father.* Yes, Holden’s Frank Harmon rebuffs her advances—at first. And, yes, it was another time. And, yes, the sex scenes are tasteful, if a bit timid directorially. But: Ew. Just ew. It doesn’t matter how well it’s played (and, for the record, Holden is perfect as a dour, lonely grouch, Lenz genuinely fresh as a hippie sprite). You can appreciate the performances, the smooth direction, the controlled mood, the sense of cynicism reborn into hopefulness, but you can’t watch it and not be unsettled.

Not that anyone saw it. Breezy grossed less than $17,000 in four weeks of limited release in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a few other select markets.* The following spring, Universal took another stab, releasing it in forty theaters in Utah, then in Seattle and Portland. This time—buoyed by three Golden Globe nominations (two for music, one for Lenz as New Star of the Year)—it grossed an additional $140,000, perhaps mollifying Clint, who believed that the film deserved a bigger audience and felt the studio had botched the marketing.

But it might simply have been that he himself had drowned his own creation. One month after Breezy premiered, Warner Bros. released Magnum Force, just in time for Christmas, and the audiences and critics who were surprised by the first appearance of Harry Callahan were waiting for this one.

Even though it’s only the second movie in the series, it feels kabuki-like in its reliance on tropes and set pieces established in the first. The title sequence starts with Clint’s name and a hand, presumably Harry’s, holding a revolver against a maroon backdrop, eventually turning the business end toward the audience, whereupon Clint recites his famous “Do [ya] feel lucky?” speech and fires—a more menacing version of the classic James Bond bleeding-eyehole opening. Straight off, we see the first extralegal execution by the rogue police squad (which includes fresh-faced Tim Matheson, Robert Urich, and David Soul). As in the previous film, the villains are known to us straightaway. Harry enters as if a secondary concern, “solving” a few small crimes (with his gun, of course) but increasingly concerned with the string of vigilante murders.* He has his usual run-ins with higher-ups in the police department, including a particularly condescending superior (Hal Holbrook) who steadfastly steers Harry away from investigating the executions. Harry has a couple of righteous declarations in favor of justice: “Nothing wrong with shooting as long as the right people get shot!” and “I hate the goddamn system! But until someone comes along with changes that make sense, I’ll stick with it.” Once again, he’s nearly killed (by a bomb), and once again his partner is a victim. But this time he is granted a social life—or a sex life, at least. It all ends with a big, messy motorcycle chase. Rarely is it as sleek or pointed as Dirty Harry, but clearly it’s meant as a dose of more-of-the-same and not an opportunity to dig deeper, explore further, or improve on the original.

Audiences didn’t care about any of that. Magnum Force was a big hit, grossing about $45 million—triple what High Plains Drifter made, cementing Clint’s second year as the nation’s top box office star. But critics, even those who had appreciated the first movie, had sharpened their thinking about Callahan and his brand of justice. Taking note of the efforts to posit Callahan as a defender of law and order and due process, Nora Sayre of the New York Times opened her review by pronouncing, “Let’s hear it for hypocrisy,” and identifying Callahan as “the policeman who kills to protect the public from guns other than his own.” Similarly, the Los Angeles Times reckoned the film was “slickly produced” but, ultimately, “too preoccupied in celebrating violence.”

But none of these reactions compared to the one published in The New Yorker in mid-January. Pauline Kael, who hadn’t written about any of Clint’s films since Dirty Harry, absolutely teed off on this one—and on the man himself. The review ran thousands of words, the first half or so dealing not with the movie in question but with Clint, the actor, the symbol, the human being. It began, famously, with this passage: “Clint Eastwood isn’t offensive; he isn’t an actor, so one could hardly call him a bad actor. He’d have to do something to be bad at it.” It gets worse. She calls him “a tall, cold cod . . . a man who essentially stands for nothing but violence . . . a hero who can’t express himself in words or by showing emotion . . . utterly unbelievable.” There isn’t an aspect of his screen presence or work she can enjoy: “Eastwood isn’t really a good guy; you don’t like him, the way you liked [John] Wayne. You don’t even enjoy him in the way you could enjoy a scoundrel. He’s simply there.” For her, he represents the worst of contemporary American culture and a tragic reversal of the values for which even the most inept Hollywood movies once stood: “This is no longer the romantic world in which the hero is, fortunately, the best shot. Instead, the best shot is the hero.”

She went on to excoriate Magnum Force for what she deemed its raw violence, its lack of polish, and, most sharply to the point, its insistence on having things both ways—that is, giving Callahan free rein to blow away the bad guys because they are more contemptuous of accepted norms of justice than he is. The film, she says, “disarms political criticism and still delivers the thrill of brutality.” She even predicts (wrongly) that the film wouldn’t do as well at the box office as Dirty Harry.

Kael kept up her attacks on Clint for years, seemingly going out of her way to comment on his least interesting and ambitious work, choosing not to write about films outside the narrow lane defined by Harry Callahan—The Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, High Plains Drifter, or, later, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Bronco Billy, Honkytonk Man, or Tightrope—and waiting, instead, for the next Harry Callahan movie to appear and then having another go at him. Not that she needed the excuse of a film; in a speech about violence in movies at the Los Angeles Film Exposition in 1976, she called him a “stiff. . . . Eastwood doesn’t think out the roles he plays, does not live inside them. He is empty,” and she concluded that he “represents the reductio ad absurdum of macho.” She was having a party at his expense, turning a personal aversion into a front in a cultural war: Clint was, in her view, uniquely bad at his craft, and his films embraced ideas that were acceptable only to a numbed, bloodthirsty audience—one that didn’t, it happened, share her taste for Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, or Brian De Palma. Clint’s success was, in her view, an aspect of moral decay, a triumph of sadism, cynicism, dull-wittedness, and coarseness, a sign of a society spiraling into incivility, vulgarity, and rot.

There was something so raw in this, something so personal and excessive and beyond the normal requisites of film criticism, that Clint felt compelled to respond. He generally accepted critique of his films without comment, if not always with equanimity, and he was even on the dais for a 1972 tribute dinner to Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas (an authentic superfan of his work).* But Kael went beyond criticism of what was on the screen, and Clint was asked about her in interview after interview. He tried to be diplomatic: “Some of the points she made I agree with, about the changes of [sic] movies over the years, and Vietnam. She goes on and on about the need for showing the weaknesses of men, and that’s all right—there’s a place for that.” He understood that she was just as much involved in show business as he was and that she was boosting what a later era would call her “brand” by railing against the most popular movie star in the world. He even, as early as the mid-1970s, claimed, “I’ve talked with her about it. Her image is being outspoken, so she has to be outspoken about something.”

But as she continued to target him and his work in a way that felt more personal than film criticism, his responses heightened. He let loose in particular in one interview, defending his acting ability (“You can’t hold an audience for two hours of film as a protagonist if you’re not really into what you’re doing”) and attacking her ideas about masculinity and “macho” with real venom:

I think Kael’s opinion of what a man is isn’t shared by everybody. . . . I think that women are intrigued by a certain masculinity. She was taken by Last Tango [in Paris]; it seemed romantic to her. But to me, that movie was an affront to women. If I were a feminist, I’d think that the portrayal and treatment of women in that movie was terrible. I mean, if buttering up a girl’s ass and giving her a poke job is romantic sex, or represents male tenderness, then, I’m sorry, but I’m on a different plane than she is. Higher or lower, depending on whose opinion. Jesus, how can she not see that as violence? Obviously, she’s never been on the other end of that.

The subject arose so often in interviews—and in his own thoughts—that he sought the counsel of a psychiatrist, Ronald Lowell, who told him that Kael had what he called a “reaction formation” about him: “[She] actually feels 180 degrees the opposite of what she says,” as he explained it once—or, later, “She wanted to fuck me.” Kael, for her part, cackled when she heard the theory, calling the contention “perfect . . . in fact, it’s sublime.” Years later, Clint claimed that he and Kael spoke on the phone a second time and she confessed that she was just stirring the water to draw attention to herself and her work.*

He couldn’t shake her, so he found a way to marginalize her, at least in his own head. Speaking of her body of work in the early 1980s with a prospective biographer, he said, “You can’t call it reviewing. . . . She’s suckered so many people . . . into thinking she knows something. . . . It becomes kind of a joke. Just making a lot of outrageous statements not having any bearing on anything, but you’re doing them because you’ve found that that’s the avenue to get attention. That’s exactly what the secret to Kael is: She’s found a way to get attention.”

But call it what he might, he could never not be nagged by it. Kael’s attacks marked the beginning of Clint being seen as a cultural/political barometer even when he thought he was nothing more than an entertainer making movies. He was asked about her animus for years, dismissing the matter entirely by declaring to Esquire in 1988: “It didn’t bother me, because I knew she was full of shit.” But that very year, he would take revenge of a sort on her in a way that clearly indicated that she had more than just scratched him with her barbs.

Perhaps it was just as well that he became interested in Transcendental Meditation at around this time. He was introduced to the practice in the early 1970s by Roxanne Tunis, who had paused her acting and dancing career and shifted her life’s focus to practicing and teaching the techniques of mantra meditation, eventually moving to Denver to do so full-time. Clint never became involved with the more formal practices of TM, enrolling in classes or adhering to any branches of the global TM foundation. Rather, he adopted it as an extension of his healthy dietary habits and his daily workout routines, devoting at least one half-hour per day (and, for long spells, two separate half-hours) to the practice, speaking of it frankly in interviews starting in the ’70s and continuing throughout his life. (He even appeared on an episode of The Merv Griffin Show in 1975 to discuss TM along with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who popularized the discipline.) “It’s a personal tool I use to relax,” he explained. “I’ve always been relaxed on the surface. I’m not necessarily relaxed within. Sometimes my mental motor will be going twice the speed it appears to be at on the surface. Sometimes, in order to get the inside and the outside on the same level, I have to sit down and meditate.” He found it particularly useful when he was making films. Even though he subscribed to no formal, organized religion, he said, “I’m religious about [TM] when I’m working.”

And he was always working. In the spring of 1974, he began a new pursuit, mountain climbing, after having agreed to make another film that was at one point meant to star Paul Newman (under the direction of George Roy Hill). The film was an adaptation of The Eiger Sanction by the pseudonymous author Trevanian,* a hugely popular novel that concerned an art history professor (and mountaineer) who finances his art-collecting habit by committing assassinations for a covert branch of the U.S. intelligence community. Clint would direct and star, and, as ever, he planned to shoot it on location, mainly in the Swiss Alps, where he and his fellow actors and the filmmaking crew would mount the famed Eiger, a thirteen-thousand-foot peak with a north side, the Nordwand, so treacherous that it was also called the Mordwand—or “Murder Wall.”

As he prepared the film—including climbing lessons in Yosemite and Monument Valley—Thunderbolt and Lightfoot was released. It’s a mainly agreeable mixture of caper film and buddy movie, more adept at action and macho banter than at comedy (which, alas, it insistently attempts) or deep meaning—a credible debut for Michael Cimino that doesn’t indicate the scale of his eventual ambitions so much as give a sense of where his strengths lie and what their limits are. As Thunderbolt, Clint is stretched, agreeably, into a rapport with Jeff Bridges unlike any partnership he’s shared on-screen (save, perhaps, with Shirley MacLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara). The blend of savvy old pro and excitable green kid feels like an effort to capture the chemistry shared by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting. But Clint has played lone wolf for so long that he can’t relax enough to let the vibe gel—not even when Bridges literally cracks him up. Bridges eclipses Clint again and again with the sheer ebullience of his energy and his characteristic blend of naivete and gusto. (George Kennedy, as a former colleague who thinks Thunderbolt has ripped him off, also draws attention with seeming ease.)

The film is sprinkled with little delights: Clint’s initial appearance, bespectacled, hair slicked down, posing as a preacher; the contrast between the Thunderbolt and Lightfoot duo and the aggrieved pair—Kennedy and rising Malpaso staple actor Geoffrey Lewis; the inevitable yet satisfying unveiling of a giant gun in the final act. The thing that keeps dragging the film, though, is Clint’s inability to expand, at this stage in his evolution, as an actor or a star. He’s comfortable inside some of the story: the chases and violence, the big gun, the ticking-clock narrative, and the uncomfortably dismissive depiction of women.* But he simply isn’t equal to the people with whom he’s meant to share the screen. Bridges regularly steals the picture from him, earning an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In some stars, stepping aside to let a younger performer shine would be a grace, an instance of noblesse oblige; in Clint, somehow, at least at this moment, it feels like a loss of face.

The reviews were duly impressed with Cimino’s debut without quite putting a finger on his characteristic talent. Variety, in what would turn out to be deep irony, noted that “the major next step for Cimino is developing an instinct for economy in storytelling.”* That same review credited Bridges with “warm[ing] up and humaniz[ing]” Clint and predicted the young actor had “a few decades of screen stardom ahead of him.” The New York Times called the film “a funny, tough-fibered crime comedy with an unobtrusive edge of drama . . . consistently entertaining and interesting.” And the Los Angeles Times, while noting the “adolescent, cartoon-like shenanigans” of the story, nonetheless deemed the film “sly, outrageous and finally tender.” The film did decent business—around $25 million against a budget perhaps one-tenth that size, good enough to make it one of the year’s top twenty releases. It being his only film of the year, Clint dropped behind Robert Redford in the annual box office championship poll, but that was okay with him, as he was beginning to see the film business, and Malpaso’s place in it, in a different way. “Hollywood,” he said, “was always looking for the home run. They weren’t interested in the double or triple that could win the game.” Malpaso, in comparison, would thrive by continually out-earning its modest expenditures. And if they hit the occasional long ball, that would be gravy.

That philosophy would be challenged, however, by The Eiger Sanction, a story about an assassin who joins an effort to climb the Eiger so as to identify a spy hiding among the climbing team and kill him. Universal, emboldened by the worldwide popularity of the novel, budgeted the production at $9 million, much of which would be spent in Switzerland, where the shooting would be done under conditions so arduous that an entire second crew would be employed. Chief among this unit would be Mike Hoover, a twenty-eight-year-old climber and cameraman from Wyoming who was hired to put Clint through a three-week course in mountaineering basics in Yosemite. As Clint recalled, “The second day out he took me straight up the face of a vertical cliff a few hundred feet and then told me to look down. I said, ‘No way.’” As he quickly learned, climbing involved not only conquering the physical challenges of strength and endurance but mastering your own biological instincts for self-preservation: “The adrenaline flows through your body so fast that it just seems to drain everything out of you, and your facial expression takes on a hollow look.”

He had some second thoughts about doing his own stunt work, he later claimed, but “I just got myself involved deeper and deeper. . . . There was no turning back. At first, I was going to use a double, but a double can only think of the stunt. He can’t think of the characterization.” His training sufficient for the job, he arrived in Switzerland in August, when climbing and filming conditions for the Eiger could be expected to be optimal.

But there really never is such a thing as “optimal” on the Murder Wall. Unlike the granite and sandstone peaks that Clint climbed in his stateside training sessions (some of which are seen in the finished film), the Eiger is composed principally of limestone, a much less stable substance that’s given to shedding. Climbers attempting the stark Nordwand had to be on guard for falling fragments, some the size of pebbles, some as big as one ton, some sharp enough to cut through rope that was rated to hold six thousand pounds of weight. It was bad enough that the peak created its own storms and that the temperature could drop or rise thirty or forty degrees within minutes; the debris shed by avalanches and rockslides made climbing it like walking a tightrope in a shooting gallery.

As per common filmmaking practice, the most potentially dangerous work was scheduled first. On August 13, the second day on the mountain, they were wrapping up filming of a rockslide sequence when Mike Hoover, leading the second camera unit, realized that he needed shots of the falling debris from the point of view of the climbers. He and David Knowles, a twenty-seven-year-old professional climber from England, rappelled down to a filming location to get the necessary footage with a handheld camera. Disaster struck. “We finished shooting,” Clint recalled, “and [Knowles] was getting back on the ledge, when someone yelled, ‘Rocks!’ He looked up—and was hit by a huge rock. Killed instantly.” Hoover himself was barely able to evade the falling boulder, which ricocheted off Knowles and sideswiped him, fracturing his pelvis. The helicopter that was ferrying the cast and crew back to solid ground fetched him, but Knowles’s body was left dangling until the next morning, when conditions were safer. Clint and the producers huddled, considering whether the film should be shelved. But, he claimed, the other professional climbers on the shoot, Hoover included, persuaded him that Knowles understood the risks and wouldn’t have wanted his life to be lost on something that wasn’t finished. They chose to go on.

That left Clint to face a dangerous stunt just a few days later—a moment in which, in order to save himself, his character, Hemlock, has to cut the rope that, in theory, is his only guarantee of safety. Clint insisted on shooting the scene in close-up, meaning that he himself would have to execute the action. (He would be tied to a safety line, of course, but still . . .) “It was at a spot some 4,000 feet up,” he recalled. “I must have checked that safety line a hundred times before I did it. It was the most difficult thing I ever had to do in a picture.”

That took guts, but he didn’t have the guts to share with Maggie the details of what he was up to on that mountain, not even when she traveled to the set with the kids. “I visited the location at the base of the mountain,” she said, “but when Clint and the crew left the hotel every morning, he used to tell me to go shopping or say it wasn’t going to be an interesting day for me to watch. . . . Even if I’d known what he was doing, I know that I couldn’t have stopped him.” (As he confessed later, “Maggie didn’t know what I was doing at Eiger until it was all over. Every day I went out, I got hurt. . . . I’d come home bruised and cut and tell Maggie I tripped on a curb.”)

He edited the footage through the winter, and in May 1975, the finished film hit theaters, where it did only modest business, grossing approximately $14 million against its $9 million budget. The critics were generally approving. Everyone loved the scenery and the location work—elements that for some, like Roger Ebert and the New York Times, rescued an otherwise “unlikely and confused” (Ebert) and “long, foolish but never boring” (NYT) film. Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times deemed the film “a splendid high adventure, done with much wit and style,” and predicted that “Clint Eastwood is going to be as major a director as he is a star.”

It is, in the main, a silly but magnetizing movie. The depiction of the secret spy agency, complete with evil albino boss, is ludicrous. The depiction of women is, again, troubling: Hemlock is coaxed into climbing shape by a training regimen with George, a Native American woman (played by the model, actress, and writer Brenda Venus, an intimate of both Henry Miller and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) who entices him into arduous workouts by baring her breasts; he is seduced and robbed by a fellow agent, a Black woman named Jemima Brown (no, seriously: that was her name in the novel, which the author always insisted was a spoof; Vonetta McGee plays her thanklessly);* and the climbing team is riven with strife because the wife of one of its members is having an affair with another climber and torturing her husband with the fact. Worse, a subplot early in the film involves a homosexual spy (played with unsettling relish by Jack Cassidy) with a dog with an ugly homophobic name. This is an awful lot to ask scenery and thrilling climbing escapades to make up for. And it’s more than halfway through the two-hour-plus running time before we get to Switzerland and the juicy stuff. Those mountaineering sequences are terrific, yes, and Clint is, as ever, plausible as a man of action. But the film never manages to recover from its long, ragged start or to wash away the bad taste of those ugly stereotypes.

Universal had hoped for a franchise—there was a second Sanction novel, also a bestseller—and Clint may have welcomed the possibility of a third signature role to go with his Western persona and Harry Callahan. But the relatively tepid box office quenched the appetite for a sequel. There was one last effort to realize an enhanced profit on the film, though: In June 1975, the famed Universal Studios Tour opened a new attraction, the Doomed Glacier Expedition, in which visitors could experience an alpine avalanche. Little did the folks who built that thrill ride know, however, that they were inadvertently pushing Clint away from his longtime moviemaking home by so doing.

Fifteen

You could see it in the terms of his marriage, in his decision to run his own movie company, in his choice of place to live, in the loners and rebels he portrayed on-screen, even in his love of jazz: “I’ve always worshiped independence,” he said.

At Universal, Malpaso was treated like a freestanding entity, renting out Clint’s services as star, director, and producer to the studio, which, in turn, financed its films and distributed and marketed them, and even campaigned for them during awards season. They let him make the movies he wanted to make and granted him final cut. But there were, in his view, too many times when the studio’s support for the product was insufficient, or its release strategy was wrongheaded, or they didn’t think enough of his contribution to put his name forth for prizes. He was glad for the liberty he had, but he was restless.

And he had a suitor. He’d worked only twice with Warner Bros., on the two Dirty Harry pictures, but they were massive successes and properly handled by the studio, as he saw it. And Warner Bros. had an asset that no other studio could match: company president Frank Wells. Clint had known Wells since the Rawhide days, when Wells was a young lawyer in Irving Leonard’s offices and was part of the team representing Clint in negotiations with CBS. Wells and Clint vibed immediately: They were both avid athletes, fond of tennis, golf, skiing, and water sports. But Wells was more traditionally refined, a descendant of Mayflower colonists, the son of a decorated navy officer, a high school and collegiate sports letterman, a Phi Beta Kappa key holder and Rhodes Scholar, an army lieutenant, a graduate of Stanford Law School. That all might have impressed Clint, but he was especially drawn to Wells’s wild side—when he was at Oxford, for instance, Wells and a friend bought an airplane, hoping to fly to South Africa but only getting as far as East Africa, where they crash-landed. Clint loved stories—and guys—like that.

Wells had been working at Warner Bros. since the late 1960s, and he was part of the team that had acquired Dirty Harry and turned it into a megahit. He and Clint socialized and engaged in sports together a couple of times a year, and he would occasionally remind his former client that there was a place for him at Warner Bros. if he ever felt the need to leave Universal. In early 1975, Clint decided it was time to break with the studio that, in one way or another, had been his home for two decades. Malpaso would move from Universal to the Warner Bros. lot that fall.

Clint had a beef with Universal, as he explained. “I didn’t care for [their] advertising department. They were notorious for giving up on a film fast. If people weren’t queuing up on the first day, they thought they weren’t going to come at all.” What was more, he began to feel that Universal, which was in the studio tour business, the record business, the hotel and live entertainment business, and even the laser disc business, was less and less committed to filmmaking than he was. He admitted that he enjoyed freedom at Universal, but, he said, “I began wondering about it when the tour bus started stopping in front of the [Malpaso offices]. Then you’d go to the commissary and find yourself having to sign autographs. When I went over to Warner, I told Frank Wells, who was then president, ‘I’ll stay here so long as you don’t have tour groups.’”

Warner Bros. promised him the autonomy over scripts, cast, crew, and final cut that he had at Universal, as well as things for which he had been forced to fight, often on a film-by-film basis: a dedicated marketing and awards campaign staff; a dedicated publicity executive (longtime Hollywood columnist and flack Joe Hyams, jokingly known as Warner’s “Secretary of Clint”); approval by Malpaso over release strategies, including the number of prints and the period of time that each film would be permitted to find its audience. Clint would be granted generous access to Warner Bros.’ small fleet of private jets. And his company would, naturally, get new digs—a Spanish-style bungalow that was nicknamed “the Taco Bell,” with a full private apartment attached to it. They even gave him a blank check to redecorate the place, which puzzled him. “Before we moved in,” he told a reporter soon afterward, “they asked us what kind of drapes we wanted, what kind of carpeting. I asked them what was wrong with what they had.” Twenty years later, he would brag that the decor had never been updated, save for the couch in the main reception area, which had been reupholstered once in two decades. That tracks: He was known as a penny-pincher around the studio, nicknamed, not particularly lovingly, “SkinClint,” and was said to frequently requisition new wooden hangers in his office, as he was suspected of taking Warner Bros. hangers home with him. Even with a new deal, he kept his old staff, and he kept it lean: producer Bob Daley, script and story analyst Sonia Chernus, and Fritz Manes, his boyhood Oakland buddy who’d been working in TV production and had come aboard as a general troubleshooter and to learn the ropes of producing movies.

The most remarkable thing about the Warner Bros. deal was the studio’s chief concession, a tribute, perhaps, to Clint’s thirst for self-determination but a necessity if one wished to be connected to him, in any aspect of life: There would be no formal contract between Malpaso and the studio. It was, as Clint and Warner Bros. executives would say for decades, a “handshake deal.” He would propose new work to them; if they passed, he was free to bring it to another studio; at the same time, if an outside studio offered him something to star in or direct, he was free to do so. It sounds like a tenuous way to do business at the level of stakes involved, but it wound up being a model. There would be a few occasions when Clint had to strain to make his case for a film or even accept a deeply discounted fee from Warners to act or direct. But it would be more than forty-five years before anyone at Warner Bros. so much as balked at the concept of the agreement per se. It began as a way for him to maintain his independence; it wound up being the longest deal between a major studio and an independent production company in Hollywood history.

And it began big.

Malpaso had acquired a curious little book, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales,* written by, as they understood it, a Cherokee author named Forrest Carter. It concerned a Missouri farmer whose wife and children have been slaughtered by Union soldiers during the Civil War and who becomes a guerrilla fighter, a Jayhawker, persisting even after the armistice, chasing down the men who killed his family and evading bounty hunters. In Carter, Clint and his people thought they’d discovered a raw, authentic genius, a man raised by his grandparents in the ways of the Old West and the Cherokee people. Carter’s memoir, The Education of Little Tree, which would appear in 1976, was described by its publishers as having been written by the “Storyteller in Council” to the Cherokee nation. Carter had himself printed some twenty-five copies of his Josey Wales novel and sent one to Malpaso because, he said, Clint had “kind eyes.” Clint was captivated: “The guy’s a poet,” he told the Village Voice. He was taken with the tale of a man driven to violence by the most shattering of motives and, at the same time, building a makeshift “family” of the people he encounters on his path to revenge, including a wounded fellow guerrilla, a Native American elder, a few random drifters, and a pioneer woman and her dreamy teenage granddaughter whom he rescues from ravenous outlaws intent on rape. He even had an idea of who might play the girl.

Sondra Locke was a fairy, a misfit, a unicorn, one of those people born into circumstances completely unlike the life she believed she was meant to live. She came into the world in Shelbyville in central Tennessee in May 1944, child of a single mother who worked in a pencil factory and a soldier whom the girl never met. Four years later, her mother married a builder named Locke, who adopted her children (there was by then a half-brother).

She believed in being a good girl and was valedictorian of her middle and high school classes. And she was interested in the arts, always with her nose in a book, always trying out for school plays. The only person like her at school was a boy named Gordon Anderson, an even rarer bird than she. Sondra was reserved; Gordon was sensational. He was passionate and vocal about his aesthetic tastes, his fashion choices, his opinions. They found each other, inevitably, in the world of high school theater, and they became a universe of two, fascinated with movies and fairy stories and costumes and makeup and determined to flee their small hometown and become stars, a pair of aliens (or Hobbits, which was one of their nicknames for each other) bound as if telepathically in a world where nobody else cared about the things that mattered vitally to them.

She graduated high school in 1962 (her classmates named her Most Studious) and had blossomed as a beauty: dark-haired, with fine features, bright, intent eyes, and a gamine’s figure. She was awarded a scholarship to Middle Tennessee State University, where Gordon, again, was a classmate. But he felt penned in, and he urged Sondra to join him on a new adventure. They left school and escaped as far as Nashville, where Sondra landed a job at the insurance company that hosted the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts. She modeled. And she kept acting. She and Gordon found their way into the city’s theater productions, starting by playing children (Sondra could pass for a decade younger than her true age, from which she had started to shave a few years, in any case) and gradually claiming more important roles. After just a couple of seasons, she played the female lead in all sorts of shows: A Thousand Clowns, The Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie.

In 1967, Gordon read about a nationwide search for a teenage actress to star in a film of Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. He thought that Sondra, who had just turned twenty-three, could be made up to look seventeen, pass for fourteen, and get the part. She agreed to try it. While she studied up on the character, he designed the costume and makeup to match it. She crushed the cattle call audition, and the casting director asked if she could meet the director. Again, she shone, and she was summoned to New York and further testing. Finally, she got the part.

On the brink of becoming the focus of a small media tempest, she confessed to the filmmakers that she’d lied about her age—telling them she was only twenty (ahem). And when she arrived at the filming location in Selma, she had another surprise for them: Just before the shoot began, she and Gordon had married (though they would both swear that the union was never consummated; he had begun sleeping with men a few years prior). After the production wrapped, they jammed their car with their belongings and moved to Hollywood to await her debut.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter turned out to be a fine, superior film—heartbreaking, tasteful, and real. Alan Arkin, playing a deaf man, gave one of the best performances of his remarkable career and was duly acclaimed, as was Sondra, particularly for a scene in which she describes a performance of a Mozart piece to Arkin’s character using only gestures and facial expressions. Variety called her “excellent,” the Chicago Tribune praised her “proper blend of growing-pain gaucheness and spontaneous loving,” and the Los Angeles Times declared her performance one of “the fine things” about the film. It didn’t do big business, but it was highly regarded. Arkin garnered his second nomination for an Oscar as Best Actor, and Sondra was nominated as Best Supporting Actress (she was nominated in that category at the Golden Globes as well, in addition to a nomination as Most Promising Female Newcomer).* It was, all in all, a stellar debut.

Hollywood didn’t, however, gobble her up as the Next Big Thing. She was offered a chance to play John Wayne’s co-star in True Grit, but she didn’t want to be typecast as a teenage tomboy and demurred. She did another film instead, one that seemed like slumming but became a hit: Willard, in which she was the putative love interest to the title character but really played second (or many-hundredth) fiddle to a swarm of rats. She posed in Playboy in a series of semi-nude, Lady Godiva–ish photos that she hated. And she began to work steadily in TV, claiming she’d rather commit to small roles than play bigger ones in which she didn’t believe.

In 1972, she heard about a film about a free-spirited hippie girl and went to Universal to meet with the producer and director. It didn’t go well. As she made her case that she was right for the part, the director practiced putting golf balls, hardly giving her a glance. When she got home, she told Gordon, “I’m not sure he ever actually paid any attention to me, whatsoever.” The film was Breezy. And the seemingly indifferent director was Clint. And he had paid attention. Three years later, when he was at Warner Bros. and casting the film now known as The Outlaw Josey Wales, he called her back in.

As it happened, Clint wasn’t directing the film. He had hired Philip Kaufman, whose reputation was growing after a pair of indie films and two studio pictures, the Western The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and the polar adventure The White Dawn. But Kaufman was off scouting locations and wouldn’t be involved in the casting—at least not for the part Sondra was seeking.

When she reported to Malpaso’s offices at Warner Bros., she was told that she’d be meeting with Clint alone. She was ushered in, and he appeared, all smiles and attentiveness. “What’ve you been up to?” he asked, as if their last encounter had been a week prior. They chatted vaguely for a while, and she left, once again puzzled about what, if any, impression she’d made. She reckoned that the interview was shapeless because Kaufman would have to approve her. But before she even met him, her agent called to announce that the part was hers. She had a getting-to-know-you lunch with Kaufman, where they mainly discussed her character’s appearance. The next time she saw him, or Clint, was in October at the shooting location near Lake Powell along the Arizona/Utah border. And nothing would be the same for her after that.

From the start, the atmosphere around the film was askew. Just before production, the New York Times reported that the novelist Forrest Carter was actually a man named Asa Carter, who was not only not a Cherokee but a widely known Ku Klux Klansman, segregationist, anti-Semite, and occasional political candidate who had once run for governor of Alabama on a platform of white supremacy and who had formed a paramilitary splinter group of the KKK when he decided that the larger Klan was too moderate. Forrest Carter categorically denied that he was Asa Carter, but the Times found several people who swore they were one and the same man, and the paper proved with documentary evidence that both names were connected to an identical postal address. Amazingly, Malpaso, Warner Bros., and the film press simply let this matter die; it wouldn’t be until more than a decade after Carter’s 1979 death, when a reissue of The Education of Little Tree became a surprise bestseller, that his literary oeuvre fell into disrepute. In 1976, despite the Times’s reporting still being fresh, the picture went right ahead.

On location, Sondra Locke found herself in a pincer. Philip Kaufman took her to dinner on her first night on set and spoke about his agreements with his wife concerning on-set romances. He didn’t come straight out and proposition her, but his meaning was clear. At virtually the same time, Clint was showering her with close attention, nicknaming her “Elf” and popping up around the set on days when she had wardrobe tests and other obligations. He also asked her to dinner, and she accepted, and while they dined they talked about their similar situations of being married to partners who were basically best friends but nothing more. The chemistry was powerful. That night, they slept together. The next day, she moved into his lodging for the duration of the shoot.

Kaufman, according to Sondra, accepted the situation. But his difficulties with his star/boss went beyond the fact that they both lusted after the same woman. Clint had directed as many films as Kaufman, and he had made many more, and he didn’t care for the way Kaufman worked. Two weeks in, the production was behind schedule, in part because the director preferred to find shots and performances in the moment, rather than, as Clint preferred, to know his intentions, recognize when they were realized, and move forward. As he often put it, “I think a director ought to know what he wants before he sees it. I’m not one of these guys who tries twenty different shots. That’s not directing; that’s guessing.” Kaufman, in his view, was a guesser. Frictions arose privately and openly.

It all came to a head over a sundown shot that Kaufman wanted to capture. He had a vision of it one evening—a perfect image of Josey/Clint in the open range, riding into a setting sun—and he had marked the spot where he wanted to shoot it with . . . a beer can. When the time came to get the shot on film, however, he couldn’t find the can. He had the crew drive from one spot to another while the sun began to set, threatening the chance to get any shot at all. Clint had seen enough. While Kaufman continued looking for his can, Clint told cinematographer Bruce Surtees what he was going to do, got on his horse, and executed the shot to his satisfaction. A few days later, Clint had Bob Daley fire Kaufman and formally took over as director.

This wasn’t entirely unprecedented. Just a few years prior, for example, Paul Newman was starring in a film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, on which he was also a co-producer, when he fired the director early in the shoot and took the reins himself. But because this had now happened more than once (or because Clint seemed to be intent on building a full directing career of his own), some people at the Directors Guild of America were unhappy. The Guild soon passed a regulation barring producers and stars from firing directors during production and replacing them with themselves. It would forever be commonly known as “the Eastwood rule.”

With Kaufman out of the picture, the rest of the shoot proceeded as Clint preferred—quickly—and editing began back at Warner Bros. in December.* Clint and Sondra’s film shoot romance continued to flourish. He called her “Snow White” and “Princess,” and he had her call him “Daddy” and allowed her more and more into his daily life. He was smitten with her beauty: “She’s got a nice, earthy attractiveness, it’s a real attractiveness. It isn’t a made-up thing.” They had overnight dates in his apartment at the Malpaso offices, and then she began to stay over at the house in Sherman Oaks that Maggie rarely visited. He invited her to Carmel to celebrate New Year’s Eve, putting her up in his satellite apartment in town. He spent the early part of the night with her, but then he left to attend a party that Maggie had organized at the big house. She was left in the care of Jane Brolin, who was married to Clint’s pal actor James Brolin but whom Clint and Maggie had known long before that, when Jane was working as a casting assistant at Universal. Sondra couldn’t figure out what the deal between the Eastwoods and the Brolins was (Clint had given Jane away at the couple’s 1966 wedding), but she was in love, and she was intoxicated by the whirlwind of her new man’s life. She accepted Clint’s compartmentalization and his insistence on secrecy (Sondra and Gordon, unlike Clint and Maggie, shared everything), and she went along with the idea that she had a new bestie in Jane.

Back in Hollywood, Clint finished work on Josey Wales. Regardless of how his fellow filmmakers felt about his actions regarding Kaufman, he was becoming a figure of some respect and standing, not only as a star but as a director. He spoke at a filmmaking seminar at USC, and during the Q and A session a student asked, as Clint recalled, “ ‘How come you never worked with Peckinpah?’ I said, ‘Well, he’s never asked me.’ And all of a sudden some guy got up in the back and said, ‘I’m asking you now!’ I look up, and it’s Peckinpah sitting in the class.” (They never did work together.) He got a call from an executive at Universal saying that Alfred Hitchcock, then in his late seventies and finishing editing on Family Plot, which would turn out to be his last film, wanted to meet with him. As he recalled, “This executive over there, he called me and said, ‘The picture’s not gonna get made, anyway.’ I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘I don’t think he’s got the strength to do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d love to meet him.’ So I went into his office, and he was sitting in there. And he never moved. His eyes just picked me up coming in the door, and he just followed me across the room, like the cat and the canary or something. But it was amazing. We got along famously. We talked about his movies, and I told him how, in Play Misty, I was thinking in terms of some of his ideas. Just general suspense. But we got to intellectualizing our movies, and he said, ‘You must remember one thing—it’s only a movie.’”

In May, he and Maggie were invited to Gerald Ford’s White House for a state dinner in honor of French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, marking the first, but not the last, time he would meet a French head of state, and the first time he noticed something that would come to define the way he made movies. “I saw all these guys standing around the room,” he said, “these Secret Service people, and they’re just going like [mimes speaking into a microphone in his sleeve], and you can’t hear their conversation. I went home and I said, ‘Why is it that we have these open microphones, and everybody hears these radios going off, and everybody is yelling and screaming and running around on the set yelling “Quiet!” and all that stuff when you don’t have to?’ Everybody can actually talk while the scene’s going if they wanted. And so we did that. We closed off all the microphones. All the assistant directors wear the earphones. . . . I just keep it quiet.”

In early July, The Outlaw Josey Wales premiered at a press junket in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where eighty or so journalists had a chance to mingle with and interview the star/director and his castmates, including Sondra and Chief Dan George, the seventy-five-year-old chief of Canada’s Tsleil-Waututh Nation and an Oscar nominee for Arthur Penn’s 1970 film Little Big Man. Also on hand were Warner Bros. executives, touting the first fruit of their new deal with Malpaso, a $3.75 million production that was being released, in their calculus, as part of the big Bicentennial celebration then engulfing the country.

Critics were divided on whether there was anything to celebrate about the film (and to a one failed to mention the repugnant politics of the fellow who wrote the novel on which it was based). Variety, calling the film “interminable,” was put off by the violence: “If each killing were instead to be a scene of sexual intercourse, the film would be super-X in calibre [sic].” In the New York Times, which seemed to hand the assignments to review Clint’s movies around the press room like a ticking bomb, Richard Eder called it “soggy” and carped about the acting, the script, and the historical inaccuracy (and ignored his own paper’s reporting on Asa Carter). But in the Los Angeles Times, the reliable Kevin Thomas deemed the film “handsome” and said it “develops masterfully into a full-scale saga of great impact.” And Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “strange and daring” and concluded his three-star review by saying that “Eastwood is such a taciturn and action-oriented performer that it’s easy to overlook the fact that he directs many of his movies—and many of the best, most intelligent ones.”

It’s not a perfect film, but the positive notices were more right than wrong. In much of his prior work as a director, Clint seemed to inhabit the skin of other filmmakers: Sergio Leone, Don Siegel, even Hitchcock. With Josey Wales, he finds a footing and a voice of his own. It’s a departure from any of his previous Westerns—a tale of a lone gunman, yes, but one with express motives inside him, a purposeful journey in front of him, and an intentional community around him. Compared to High Plains Drifter, it’s more generous to his fellow cast members and less derivative in its look and feel. It’s his fifth film as director and first to feel fully mature.

He again pays special attention to the natural setting—which is completely distinct from the moonlike locale of Drifter. Josey meanders through a landscape of rivers and canyons and forests and mesas—a real travelogue. The film also meanders in its running time; at 135 minutes, it’s far longer than any film he’d made with Siegel, though it’s not extended operatically like Leone’s movies. Rather, it feels unrushed, willing to follow something like the rhythms of nature, not in a hippie-ish fashion (although there is a subtle countercultural strain in it) but rather in a meditative fashion. Probably it could be cut, but probably, too, those cuts would erase the trance-like effect it sometimes imparts.

Embedded in that moodiness are short character vignettes and encounters and episodes of violence—some vast, some stark, some sudden, some slow to boil. Unlike the Man with No Name, Josey can be reluctant to use his gun; he offers a bounty hunter a chance to walk away unhurt (“Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy. . . . This isn’t necessary. You can just ride on.”), and he risks being cut down to make a pact of peace with a Comanche band. He feels more civilized than Clint’s previous Western characters—a man of family and the soil who would never have turned to violence if it hadn’t arrived at his door.

The characters surrounding him are also deeper and more empathetic than anyone in the Leone films or in Clint’s previous American Westerns. Chief Dan George is a remarkable presence as the wily old Lone Watie, who has lost everything that mattered to him and still feels a surge of life in his veins. Will Sampson, a year off his appearance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, imparts monumental grandeur to the Comanche chief. And in an abandoned mining town, Josey encounters a carnivalesque crew enlivened by the juicy performances of Joyce Jameson, Matt Clark, and Clint’s old drinking buddy Sheb Wooley. Only Sondra Locke, playing a wide-eyed naif (who nonetheless sleeps with Josey) feels out of tune—and even then her flower child vibe is part of the film’s strange tenor of naturalism infused with tempered fury.

It’s a film that backs away from you slightly as you try to grab on to it, that suggests more than demands. And even though there’s a pointed revenge plot, there’s a strong sense that the things that have accrued to Josey in his journey matter more than his score-settling. If it’s not indisputably a great film, it’s the first real indication that Clint, as a director, anyhow, has a great film in him.

Making good on its promises to Malpaso, Warner Bros. took out huge ads touting the best of the reviews. In its first ten days of release, Josey sold more than $4.3 million in tickets, en route to a total haul of $31 million—a terrific start to the new deal. They would also, as promised, launch Oscar campaigns for the film as Best Picture, Clint as Best Director and Actor, and various of his co-stars and colleagues in their respective categories. But only Jerry Fielding would be recognized with a nomination, for his score. That disappointed Clint, but he could take comfort in the fact that the film continued to grow in reputation as time passed. In the early 1980s, speaking on Merv Griffin’s talk show, no less than Orson Welles said of Josey and its creator, “I suppose Clint Eastwood is the most underrated director in the world today. . . . And when I saw [Josey] for the fourth time, I realized that it belonged with the great Westerns.”*

Even before Josey Wales was released, he was back in San Francisco at work on the third Dirty Harry movie in six years. “Warners want me to do it very much,” he joked with the press, “and I hate to see grown men cry.” The Enforcer was another effort to straddle the line between humanizing Harry and staying true to the audience that made the first two films so successful. It was an action movie, yes, with Harry once again running afoul of superiors who inevitably need him to bring down a deadly nemesis, in this case a radical group of violent social revolutionaries inspired by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which had kidnapped San Francisco heiress Patty Hearst two years prior. That storyline, which seemed a logical next step in the franchise, was welded to a plot involving Harry being assigned a female partner in an initiative to increase diversity in the police force. The climax involved the radical group kidnapping the mayor and Harry attacking their hideaway on Alcatraz Island, complete with a bazooka (his handgun having reached maximum useful size, apparently).

With the sour taste of his quarrels with Ted Post during the production of Magnum Force still palpable, Clint had intended to direct the film himself. But he eventually handed the duties off to James Fargo, who’d worked as an assistant director on several Malpaso movies, proving himself a quick, reliable hand with action and scene-setting footage. Promoting from within would become a common practice at Malpaso. “If you draw from within the ranks of the company,” Clint explained, “it is much better for morale. . . . You promote a guy and he’s dying to do good work for you. I believe in incentives.”

He didn’t, though, cast Sondra Locke as Harry’s female partner. Instead, he offered the part to Tyne Daly, a thirty-year-old veteran of dozens of TV appearances and a handful of films. She didn’t jump at it. She saw the character as an underwritten token, and she rejected three offers. Clint asked to meet with her. As she recalled, “He said, ‘What are your objections?’ We started talking about the script. I said I had had interesting talks with policewomen. And I said, ‘Let me confront one little bad guy.’” He agreed to give her character more substance, and she signed on.*

The Enforcer started shooting in June 1976 and was in theaters by the end of the year. It was met with the usual mix of derision (Variety and the New York Times) and delight (particularly from Clint’s more reliable champions, Kevin Thomas in Los Angeles and Roger Ebert in Chicago). Audiences loved it, spending more than $46 million on tickets, making it the most successful film in the series to date, even if it was, down the line, the least inspired yet. Pauline Kael gave up her moratorium on writing about Clint’s work to snipe at it—and, of course, at him: “Eastwood has lost the ominous sensuality he had in the spaghetti Westerns. The machinery has tightened up. He looks stricken—he hisses his lines angrily, his mouth pulled thin by righteousness. . . . He looks ready to drool and climb the walls.” She had kind words for Daly, but for Harry and the audiences that paid to see him, she had nothing but contempt.

(Not for nothing, but a month or so later, Clint wrote a letter to Andrew Sarris, chief film critic of the Village Voice and Kael’s on-and-off-again nemesis, thanking him for what he considered a fair-minded review of the film. Groping for an understanding about why the coastal elites seemed so ill-disposed toward him, he wrote, “I came into American films via Europe, without the acceptance of the eastern media and the Hollywood film community. I guess that leaves me somewhere in the middle—maybe that’s why I always seem to be riding in from middle America. Thanks for understanding.”)

In early 1977, Clint came to Sondra with a new script. The Gauntlet was a chase picture about Ben Shockley, a rumpled, alcoholic, slightly dim Phoenix cop sent to Las Vegas to fetch a witness named Gus Mally for a mobster’s trial. Shockley’s been given the job because his bosses are counting on him to screw it up; corrupted by the mob, they want the witness dead. Turns out Gus is Augusta, a hard-boiled high-end call girl who no more respects her police escort than his bosses do. When Shockley realizes that she’s a target and that he, too, is expendable, he teams with her in an effort to save their hides and get to Phoenix and the trial. A lot of running around and shooting ensues.

The script had passed through the hands of Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen before falling to Clint. He liked the part, which seemed to him an anti–Harry Callahan, and had decided he’d direct it. For a time, Barbra Streisand considered playing Gus; she had been attached when McQueen was involved, and she continued to discuss it with Clint and Malpaso. But her people dithered over the script for so long that the film nearly died. Warner Bros. wanted Clint to wait on Streisand, but he instead offered the part to Sondra. She’d never played anything like the character, never played coarse comedy or action scenes, and hadn’t had such a prominent part since her debut. She dove in.

The film wasn’t really an opportunity for anyone to stretch their acting chops. A lot of the energy in the production was given over to action sequences, such as a helicopter chase, a motorcycle chase, and a pair of spectacular shoot-outs—one at Gus’s house, one involving an armored bus—that each involved literally thousands of simulated bullet impacts. Sondra watched dutifully as Clint supervised all of this. And she was impressed, as well, with the depths of him—both good and bad. “We’d been putting in fourteen-hour days,” she said, “and he hadn’t had a chance to work out in weeks, so he had a quick fuse. Anyway, [a] knob broke off as he was opening [a] door, and it cut his hand. He got so furious he bashed the door to smithereens. We went out to dinner later, and a palm reader came up to us in the restaurant, looked at Clint’s open hand—the back of which, mind you, was all bloody from bashing in the door—and said, ‘You’re a very tranquil person.’ That story tells me two things. First, that Clint has a real need to work out. And second, that he projects a sense of calm even when he’s boiling over inside.”

Sondra’s husband, Gordon, came to Phoenix to visit, accompanied by his current beau, and Clint was a perfect, affable host, in Sondra’s eyes, evincing no discomfort around them while coyly revealing that one of his first mentors in the business, Arthur Lubin, was a gay man with whom he’d spent a lot of time. It was as cozy as could be. Even when Clint and Sondra’s affair threatened to go public, the reports never got lurid: They appeared side by side on the cover of People magazine, defiantly staring into the camera as they flat out denied the reality of their situation. “Everybody would love for us to say, ‘It’s all true, we’re madly in love,’” Sondra said. “Even if it were true—which it isn’t—I certainly wouldn’t talk about it.”

The movie that came out of their on-screen coupling wasn’t much to speak of. It’s a weird mix of a bland rom-com and a bland thriller. The leads weren’t particularly likable and didn’t really project any sexual chemistry. And the climax, in which a phalanx of cops unleashes a blizzard of bullets at a moving bus but never tries to shoot the tires simply beggars credulity. Some reviews were surprisingly soft on it: “It’s a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it’s impossible not to pay attention,” wrote Vincent Canby of the New York Times. Most critics, however, dismissed it as a lifeless money grab, lazy in conception and execution. But Clint’s audiences didn’t really read the critics. The Gauntlet opened to huge business, en route to a total haul of more than $35 million, anchoring what was declared to be Warner Bros.’ biggest-ever-yet week (their slate also included The Goodbye Girl and Oh, God!).

Three films—and less than two years—into his new deal, he had sold more than $100 million in tickets for the studio, and along the way he had, apparently, fallen in love. In a certain light, he found himself as if sitting on a throne, incapable of putting a foot wrong. In another way of looking at things, he found himself in a position so secure that he could throw everything into the air and see how it all landed. And that was what, to the amazement of most everyone around him, and not a few people in the outside world, he chose to do next.

Sixteen

Steve McQueen did it, Gene Hackman did it, his buddies James Brolin and James Garner did it, Paul Newman really did it, and he had probably wanted to do it since he was a kid in Piedmont: He started to race cars—like, professionally race cars (or, at least, train to). In 1976, he took lessons at the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving near Sonoma, California, and he began to compete in time trials and celebrity driving events and even a couple of low-level competitive races at the Riverside International Raceway east of Los Angeles. In 1977, in partnership with the acting half-brothers David and Robert Carradine, he invested in a top-level Ferrari—a six-figure deal. The car was entered in the famed 24 Hours of Daytona endurance race, and it was announced that the owners would take turns at the wheel (CBS planned to broadcast their shifts live), but only a single Carradine showed up, and the car was driven solely by professionals throughout the race.

The next year, Clint and the Carradines committed to not only entering the car at Daytona but driving it, in a team composed of three Ferraris and a group of drivers including Newman and comedian Dick Smothers. The racing community wasn’t tickled. Hurley Haywood, who’d won the 1977 Daytona, said, “There are already enough bad drivers in sports car racing,” though he made an exception for Newman, who, he said, “is serious about racing and . . . works at it.” (Newman had driven at Daytona in ’77 and would race there six times over the years.) In the end, none of the professional drivers’ frustrations mattered. En route to Florida, the truck carrying two of the team’s cars (including Clint’s) was in an accident on a highway near San Francisco and the race cars were damaged. By then, the entreaties of Maggie, the folks at Warner Bros. and Malpaso, and perhaps even Sondra Locke, who was photographed with him in his spiffy racing suit at Riverside, prevailed, and he gave up the dangerous game of high-speed racing. He was still a car nut, and he would collect vintage cars, sports cars, restored trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles for the rest of his life. But henceforth he left the high-end stuff to the pros.

He was, however, still keen to break new ground. Having failed to create a new screen identity for himself with The Eiger Sanction, and having noted the box office bonanza Burt Reynolds had enjoyed with the comedy Smokey and the Bandit, he began to wonder if there wasn’t a way for him to create a character that blended his brand of on-screen physical menace with something less uptight, something less self-important, something . . . looser. Warner Bros. had asked him to consider playing the lead in Richard Donner’s upcoming Superman, which made some sense, at least visually, but which he couldn’t—correctly—picture himself doing well. He had also passed on the role of an army captain sent to assassinate a renegade colonel in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Both Coppola and Steve McQueen, who almost took the role of the colonel, tried to lure him into the film, suggesting that he’d need to be on location in the Philippines for only sixteen weeks. Turned out the shoot would run some sixteen months, with Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando playing the captain and the colonel, respectively, and the cost ballooned from $14 million to $31 million. “With Francis Coppola’s budget,” Clint quipped, “I could have invaded some country.”

He skipped or passed on so many movies in these years and in the next few. You could fill a pretty good weekend with the ones that were made with someone else in the role he was offered, going back to the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby and including The Eyes of Laura Mars, Force 10 from Navarone, Romancing the Stone, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, and I, the Jury—and, later still, The Bodyguard, Die Hard, Dick Tracy, Payback, Three Kings, Men in Black, and even, it was rumored, John Wick. As for the never-made pictures: a movie about the pioneer Jedediah Smith; a film of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; a film about the Seventh Cavalry; a remake of the adventure movie Golden Salamander; a version of Moby Dick; a version of Atlas Shrugged; and, perhaps most tantalizing of all, an adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s Western novel The Hawkline Monster, to star Clint and Jack Nicholson and be directed by Tim Burton. He was even asked if he was interested in playing James Bond (which, like Superman, would’ve worked only as a photo shoot, not as a film).

Instead of any of that, some of which would have been disastrous, the next step he chose, as random and radical as could be, revealed itself in a script that arrived over the transom. “The Coming of Philo Beddoe” was written by a bodybuilder from Brooklyn (via Denver) named Jeremy Joe Kronsberg and, like its author, had been kicking around Hollywood for a while without making very much impact. Kronsberg had written the story of a truck driver who boxes bare-knuckle and has a gorilla as a best friend in hopes that Burt Reynolds would consider it. But he didn’t have a means to get it to him, and everyone who looked at the thing passed. Kronsberg did have a string of connections that led to Malpaso, however, and the script made its way there. And Clint, whom the writer had never imagined would be interested in such a thing, read it and decided that he would make it his next picture.

The number of mysteries and cautions surrounding this choice was uncountable. The film was a flat-out comedy, acres away from anything he’d attempted since Francis in the Navy. It involved working with an animal, and it called for several musical numbers, and not, as one might expect from Clint, jazz, but country and western, which was, in 1977, a choice of its own sort—a declaration of allegiance to the flyover states derided and ignored by the coastal elites who didn’t respond well to Clint or his movies. Hell, even co-starring with a simian seemed like a manifesto: It was hard to picture Clint working with a primate and not think of the former governor of California (and rising Republican presidential contender) Ronald Reagan, who had acted with a chimpanzee in 1951’s Bedtime for Bonzo—the difference being that Reagan was then at the nadir of his film acting career while Clint was the world’s top star and nobody’s idea of a lightweight comic leading man.

The people at Malpaso and Warner Bros. couldn’t figure out why he wanted to do it, nor, for that matter, could they talk him out of it. Clint said he was hoping to reach a youth audience (to be fair, Kyle and Alison could watch almost none of the movies he’d made to date) and that he thought there was something “hip” about the project (he used the word “hip” in connection with the film so often one had to wonder if he knew what it meant). He told the studio he’d shoot fast, cheap, and on location, with James Fargo as director. And he said he would need only $5 million—a slightly cheaper than average budget for the time. Warner Bros. shrugged and agreed.

The best explanation of his choice, perhaps, lay in that letter he wrote to Andrew Sarris: “I guess that leaves me somewhere in the middle—maybe that’s why I always seem to be riding in from middle America.” He saw himself not as a Hollywood guy (he barely lived and hardly ever worked there) and certainly not as a New York guy. He was, in his mind, an everyman American, who’d grown up in the Depression, served in the army, and worked tough, physical jobs before any inkling of fame came his way. He reckoned that his audiences could recognize the honest, grounded reality of his values (even as he flew above them in Warner Bros. corporate jets) and saw in him a reflection of themselves: decent, hardworking, wary of cultural and political extremism (left or right), and looking to the movies not for edification but to forget their troubles. (He loved to tell the story of a personal appearance he’d once made for a screening in Italy: “The audience was almost all male. They had calloused hands. They were all factory workers. These guys wanted to escape.”) And this project certainly had no connection to anyone’s real-life woes.

As for his own woes, specifically those at home, Clint had continued to uneasily balance his marriage with his increasingly serious relationship with Sondra. The complications ran deeper than they might seem to the probing eye. According to Sondra, in the summer of 1978, she revealed that she was pregnant. Prior to meeting Clint, she had seen to birth control with an IUD, but, she said, he told her early on that he found it uncomfortable. She had it removed. He told her as well that he was against her taking birth control pills, and he suggested she visit a clinic that taught a version of the rhythm method. But despite practicing the techniques she learned and undergoing regular pregnancy testing, there they were. As she recalled, she and Clint agreed to terminate the pregnancy, and he “arranged for a doctor at UCLA.”

Clint continued to deflect public inquiries into the nature of his relationship with Sondra. But they were constantly together, and Maggie pressed him. He confessed: He was in love. Maggie insisted that they take steps to try to save their marriage, asking Clint to take her to Hawaii for a vacation during which they could try to rescue what they had. He agreed, but talking things out didn’t solve them. Maggie started meeting with lawyers about structuring the terms of a separation. They had been together a quarter-century, and they had started with nothing, but things had changed unimaginably since then, and their shared lives constituted an estate that nobody could mistake for that of an ordinary working family. The process on which they were about to embark would be protracted, hurtful, and, for Clint, very expensive.

And the film that Clint had decided to make was precisely none of those things. Under the title Every Which Way But Loose, it shot through the spring and early summer in locations in the San Fernando Valley (including the famed honky-tonk the Palomino Club, where Clint once drunkenly “entertained” the crowd with Sheb Wooley) and farther afield in Colorado and New Mexico.* The principal difficulty involved working with his co-star, Manis, an orangutan (an animal far more tractable for filming purposes than the gorilla in the original script) who “played” the role of Clyde and who, per Clint, was a disciplined performer, at least for one or two takes—which was all Clint wanted, anyway. Clyde was the most colorful of Philo’s motley, makeshift family, which also included a sidekick named Orville (Geoffrey Lewis, by now a Malpaso staple), Orville’s mom (Ruth Gordon), and, midway through the film, Orville’s sweetie (Beverly D’Angelo). In a sense, this ragtag crew echoed the ad hoc community of Josey Wales, right down to the presence of Sondra in the role of Lynn, an aspiring country singer who seems sweet on Philo but has something going on that he can’t see.

Lynn’s story opened the film to a number of opportunities for country songs, and Malpaso brought in the likes of Eddie Rabbitt (who would write and perform the title tune), Charlie Rich, Mel Tillis, and Phil Everly (the latter singing a duet with Sondra) to appear on the soundtrack and, in some cases, as themselves in the film. This opened a possible new revenue stream in the sale of soundtrack recordings and a new sideline for Clint, who got chummy with Snuff Garrett, a longtime producer and record label executive who’d worked with Frank Sinatra, Cher, Bette Midler, and Carole King, among many others, and whom he’d met in passing in the days when he was still Rowdy Yates, sometime singing cowboy. Garrett was relatively new to movies, but he was able to provide a steady, familiar hand at the console for the musicians involved with this one. Furthermore, Clint entrusted him with turning Sondra into a plausible singer. With coaching from Garrett and Everly, as well as some recording studio enhancements, she passed as a wannabe in the finished film, but when she performed live one night at the Palomino she laid an egg: A relatively kind review said, “She was probably no more off-key than many of the others in the audience.”

Nothing about this film or shoot taxed anybody in the least, and it wrapped in about ten weeks. In that time, Clint began two new projects. The first to be realized was a tremendous purchase. In anticipation of a potential divorce that would result in Maggie taking possession of the Pebble Beach house and property, he began looking for a spread of his own. He had already bought a 5,700-square-foot house in Sun Valley, Idaho, that came furnished down to the linens and a car in the garage, and he used it for skiing trips, particularly around the New Year’s holiday, when many of his Hollywood friends vacationed in the area and he and Sondra would join in. He bought a house of his own in Carmel, a place that became his permanent residence, close to Maggie and the kids but private enough for him and Sondra to treat as theirs. But he longed for something bigger and freer. He began to look for properties in Northern California and learned that the estate of singer/actor Bing Crosby, who’d died the previous October, was selling off Rising River Ranch, a 1,000-plus-acre chunk of wilderness about forty-five miles east of Lake Shasta. Clint kept an eye on the property, and in November 1978, he bought it at public auction for $1.9 million. Soon afterward, he allowed Sondra to begin remodeling and furnishing the ranch house for the two of them to live in together—their first home that felt to her like it wasn’t prefab or somehow connected to Maggie and the kids. In many ways, it would become his most rooted home, a feeling that was evident when he would arrive at the ranch after time away and stoop to pluck and sniff the wild sage that grew near the gate.

The second project was a throwback of sorts. Don Siegel, whom he hadn’t worked with since Dirty Harry, approached him with a new film, Escape from Alcatraz. It concerned Frank Morris, a career criminal who managed to break out of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in 1962 and may have succeeded in fleeing back into the world: No definitive trace of Morris or his cohorts, brothers Clarence and John Anglin, was ever found, and even sixty-plus years later their escape would be listed as an open case by the U.S. Marshals Service. Siegel had come across a script by newcomer Richard Tuggle, who based it on a 1963 book by San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Campbell Bruce. Having made one of the great prison movies, Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954), on location at Folsom State Prison, Siegel had a feel for the material, and he knew that Clint would be perfect in the role of the intelligent, taciturn Morris. There were two wrinkles, though: One was that Siegel had bought the script from Tuggle outright before Clint and Malpaso had a chance to do so; the other was that Siegel would set the film up not at Warner Bros. but at Paramount. When Clint asked the director why he was making the film with Paramount, Siegel cannily reminded him that Warner Bros. had done no promotion for Dirty Harry during Oscar season—something that he knew rankled his star. Clint decided to tolerate Siegel’s initiative, at least for the time being. He recognized the quality of the script and knew that Siegel would make a good film of it. But he didn’t like his collaborators making decisions without him, and he resolved, without saying so out loud, that he wouldn’t work with Siegel again.*

Production of Escape was set for the end of 1978, which meant that they’d be working during one of the coldest times of the year, in the middle of a windy bay, in an abandoned cement fortress where the water, heating, and electrical systems hadn’t functioned in nearly two decades. Clint had shot bits of The Enforcer there, but those were brief action sequences. For this film, the crew had to refurbish an entire wing of the prison, bring in a new heating system, ship in thousands of gallons of potable water, and rewire the electricity (“The people in San Francisco saw lights in Alcatraz for the first time in about seventeen years,” crowed production designer Allen E. Smith). At the same time, they had to maintain the underlying decay, as the site was now operated by the National Park Service, which insisted on retaining its historical qualities. Permission to film in the prison included the stipulation that the crew preserve the graffiti left by Native Americans who had occupied Alcatraz in protest nearly a decade earlier; Paramount’s workers had to use paint that could be washed away and leave the graffiti unaltered.

But there was no way to fight off the freezing air for which the island was famous. Clint was sniffling and grumpy for the length of the shoot. “It was like working inside a meat locker,” he said. “It got right into your bones.” It didn’t help that many of his scenes, including one in which he is paraded naked through the cell block upon arriving at the prison, had to be shot late at night so as to avoid another obstacle of filming at Alcatraz: tourists. Throughout the production, the Park Service kept the island open to paying visitors, and they had the run of the place, often making enough of a racket to disrupt shots and even wandering into the camera’s view. Clint sometimes agreed to sign autographs and stand for photos if the lookie-loos stayed quiet and let the crew work. But Siegel ultimately decided to shoot most of the interiors after nightfall, when the parade had stopped.

And so Clint—and the cast of largely unfamiliar faces (including Fred Ward, Paul Benjamin, and, in his big-screen debut, Danny Glover)—worked through the bitterly cold nights. Conditions were so harsh that studio executives avoided the set, and even friends of Malpaso didn’t want to visit. According to Siegel, screenwriter Ernest Tidyman “came out one day to see us. ‘Why don’t you stay for dinner?’ I suggested. ‘How much longer will you be?’ he asked. ‘Just a few hours,’ I told him. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.” In time, the production moved to Paramount’s soundstages in Hollywood, which allowed more flexibility—and better circulation in the actors’ fingers and toes. It wrapped in early 1979, after a break for the holiday season.

And what a holiday season it was. Every Which Way But Loose opened a few days before Christmas on more than twelve hundred screens—the largest opening any of Clint’s films had ever received. The reviews were universally dismissive, calling it “sloppily made” (Chicago Tribune), “slapdash” (Los Angeles Times), “blundering” (Washington Post), “moronic” (Newsweek), and “the slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood’s recent movies” (New York Times). “It’s almost as if Eastwood is using it to find out how far he can go—how bad a film he can associate himself with,” said Variety.* And, decades on, those reviews ring not only true but generous. Little about the witless, dreary movie ignites pleasure, not even the guilty kind. The tedious plot lines about cops and a motorcycle gang out to get revenge on Clint’s character could be taken from a sitcom; the musical sequences—and not only Sondra’s—are listless; the filmcraft is sophomoric. There’s a certain charm in watching Clint play with his usual relaxed ease alongside an orangutan, granted, and his bare-knuckle (and bare-chested) boxing is impressive, but the film is terrible, just terrible. Its creators had been aiming for a Burt Reynolds thing, and instead they showed just how much skill it took to make one of those seemingly offhand comedies. You’d have to forget everything you ever knew about movies, art, or life to enjoy it.

So, naturally, it took the top spot on its opening weekend, with a gross of $10.27 million*—another record for Clint (and for Warner Bros., which also had the Superman film that Clint had passed on in theaters and wound up with its biggest-ever week). Every Which Way would be near the top of the box office charts for several months, ending its theatrical run with a take upward of $104 million—again, his all-time best. And because of the way his deal with Malpaso and Warner Bros. was structured, he would walk away with about $14 million for himself*—and that was before re-releases, TV/cable revenue, home media sales and rentals, and his piece of soundtrack sales, which included not only the hit song that Eddie Rabbitt enjoyed with the title track (a country number one and a Hot 100 number thirty) but a popular LP that included hit singles by Mel Tillis and Charlie Rich.

Obviously, Warner Bros. wanted a sequel right away, and Clint was happy to oblige, hiring a little-known writer named Stanford Sherman to put one together. He had found his new niche, and he was going to dive into it as completely as he had Rowdy Yates, the Man with No Name, and Harry Callahan. He was now Clint Eastwood, American goofball, and he would laugh about it all the way to one of his impressive homes. As Fritz Manes suggested, the new level of success that he was enjoying relaxed the part of him that was still afraid that he would somehow wind up digging swimming pools again: “He’s never spent money on toys. It’s only recently he’s opened up and bought sports cars and ranches. But he uses them.”

And something else seemed to shift in him as well. Nobody, not even the orangutan, was stretched much by Every Which Way But Loose. But in the spring, when that film was still playing out the end of its immense theatrical run, the world got to see something it hadn’t seen—or, perhaps, noticed—before: Clint Eastwood, actor. In June, almost every mainstream critic who wiped his or her feet on Every Which Way came back to praise Escape from Alcatraz for Don Siegel’s bullet-hard direction, for the tight storytelling, and, especially, for Clint’s flinty, intelligent performance, easily the best thing he’d done on-screen in the eyes of most reviewers: “perfectly matched for the role” (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times); “a fine, subdued performance” (Janet Maslin, New York Times); “Eastwood proves that less really can be more” (Frank Rich, Time); “there’s simply no one better for this type of role” (Variety); “Movie stars can speak symbolically in broad strokes, and . . . Eastwood excels in doing just that” (Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune); “Eastwood fulfills the demands of the role and of the film as probably no other actor could. Is it acting? I don’t know, but he’s the towering figure in the landscape” (Vincent Canby, New York Times). Even Siegel, interviewed on the set of his next film, had high praise for his star: “I thought he was marvelous,” he said, “but I know he didn’t believe me. . . . I think he’s been treated shabbily by some reviewers over the years. They don’t seem to realize that to apparently do nothing on the screen is very difficult. Personally, I can’t think of anyone who’d have been better in that picture—can you?”

It’s a tough question. The film is sharp and hard and lean and terse, and Clint is as well, in every way, all positive. The slow, methodical opening, with Frank Morris arriving at the prison at night in a pouring rain, creates a sense of transition for the viewer; we are in a stark, harsh new world, and there’s no place to rest comfortably after that. The plotting is dead straight, with characters and incidents familiar from other prison movies but so purely distilled as to feel not like clichés but like archetypes: the pompous, sneering warden (Patrick McGoohan, best known, ironically, for the surreal TV series The Prisoner), the kindly old cons (Frank Ronzio and Roberts Blossom), the alpha of the Black prisoners who takes Morris under his wing (Paul Benjamin), the predatory rapist (Bruce M. Fischer), and the hard-luck small-time crook who lacks the wherewithal to survive (Larry Hankin).

Much of the film is dedicated to the arduous preparations the hopeful escapees engage in to enable their flight, a focus on labor akin to such classic crime movies as Rififi or Pickpocket. Little is done to prettify the atmosphere. When a fire hose is turned on Morris during his time in solitary confinement, you can practically feel the human filth and brute pain of his situation. And the film is as raw and blunt and plain as any Hollywood studio movie ever made. It’s tight too: At just under two hours, it seems to fly by much faster than that.

Clint matches Siegel’s intensity, energy, and thrift at every turn. He conveys Morris’s calculating nature with silent glances that cover a range of meanings, intentions, and emotions—a full human gamut rendered with the fewest possible words. Take this exchange between Morris and a garrulous new convict:

Butts: I turned thirty-five today. Some birthday! When’s your birthday?

Morris: I don’t know.

Butts: Geez! What kind of childhood did you have?

Morris: Short.

Morris speaks only when spoken to or when he’s got a scheme in the works, and he only utters more than a sentence at a time when he’s discussing the details of the escape plan he’s devised. He very much seems a bespoke fit for Clint. But the hardness, resilience, calculation, and guts that are apparent in Clint’s most iconic previous roles—the Man with No Name (and his spin-offs), Harry Callahan, and Josey Wales—are distilled here into a more familiarly human form and scale. With Siegel guiding him in a way on which he could comfortably rely, Clint absolutely reaches deeper and more thoroughly into himself than ever before.

Escape opened on about half as many screens as Every Which Way, but it did similar business, at least at the start: a $5.3 million opening weekend and $12.25 million in the first ten days. It wasn’t as crowd-pleasing, nor did it try to be, but its final box office tally—more than $43 million—stood handsomely next to its $8 million cost. At the end of the year, the film appeared on several “Best of 1979” lists, including that of the New York Times, but even with Paramount making sure to placate the star and director with campaigns for awards, the industry didn’t recognize it as anything more than a genre film; not even the Golden Globes showed it any love.

In February 1979, reports started to emerge in the press that he and Maggie had separated and that he was living full-time with Sondra. Maggie retained San Francisco attorney Jack Miller, who made it clear to Clint’s legal representatives that Maggie would be seeking half of everything—the money, the houses, the land, the businesses. Printed estimates of his net worth ranged from $40 million to $60 million, so it was clear that a gigantic settlement was looming. Miller told the press that Clint wasn’t seeking a divorce—“All he seems interested in is a legal separation”—and that Maggie would stay in the custom-built dream home near Pebble Beach while Clint would retain Rising River Ranch, the Sherman Oaks house, and his new place in Carmel. But even if they were speaking nicely, this was clearly just the opening act of what would become a long and costly saga.

That summer, with Warner Bros. keen on a sequel to Every Which Way, Clint chose to take a side trip. Sondra had alerted him to a script that was another significant departure for him—albeit one within the same middle-American universe. Bronco Billy, by Dennis Hakin and Neal Dobrofsky, was the story of a down-on-its-luck troupe of Wild West entertainers, led by the title character, that runs across a snippy New York heiress whom the world believes is dead: a classic screwball romantic comedy formula with a tenor even lighter than Every Which Way. The plan was to shoot in Idaho and eastern Oregon through the fall, with Clint directing and playing the title role and Sondra appearing as the heiress.

But there was something to deal with before they began: Once again, Sondra announced that she was pregnant. As they had the previous year, they discussed the matter and chose to abort the baby. This time, Sondra claimed, Clint steered her into a more significant solution to their fertility situation. He told her that Jane Brolin had undergone a tubal ligation and that she should do so as well. She was frightened, she said, but he made it clear to her that he didn’t want any more children and that if she wanted them to stay together forever, as, she said, he repeatedly told her he wished to, they would have to do something permanent. She agreed to undergo the procedure. As she would write later on, “Funny how it never even crossed my mind to ask him to have surgery. I was in my early thirties.* And the die was cast.”

Years later, when Sondra aired her claims about her abortions and tubal ligation in court proceedings, in the press, and in her memoir, Clint vigorously denied having any influence on her reproductive choices, much less compelling or coercing them in any way. In legal papers filed in 1989, he declared, “I adamantly deny and deeply resent the accusation that either one of those abortions or the tubal ligation were done at my demand, request or even suggestion. . . . As to the abortions, I told Locke that whether to have children or terminate her pregnancies was a decision entirely hers. . . . With regard to the tubal ligation, I encouraged Locke to make her own decision after she had consulted with a physician about the appropriateness of and the necessity for that surgical procedure.” Eight years later, interviewed in Playboy, his explanation of events was unchanged: “She never wanted children, so she had a tubal ligation, which women opt for mostly after they’ve had children. I’ve been accused of forcing that on her—if anybody believes that.” And then, three years later, in TV Guide: “I have never asked any woman to have an abortion—that was a pure lie.”

At the time of the events, though, Sondra and Clint were still comporting themselves like a couple committed in all things. After her surgery, she said, Clint doted on her completely. Still, as she convalesced in his Sherman Oaks home, she found herself increasingly uncomfortable in a house that was technically Maggie’s. She expressed her unease to Clint, who told her that he considered the house to be theirs—that is, his and Sondra’s—and showed her an updated will that, she said, bestowed the property to her. That didn’t quell her discomfort, and so, she said, he encouraged her to find a new house, one that would truly be theirs together. After a few months of searching, she found it on Stradella Road in Bel-Air, a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom house of 6,136 square feet, built in 1931 in what was known as the Monterey Revival style, with an appearance that bore notes of Spanish and New England colonial architecture. In September, Clint bought it for $1.125 million* and gave Sondra a free hand in restoring, decorating, and altogether transforming it into their forever home.* He’d never imagined that he wanted a house alongside the rich and famous of Hollywood; now, his life and career soaring in directions he hadn’t dared to dream of as a younger man, he would command a place high among them, with views of a horizon to which he happily laid claim. And, unknown to Sondra—who accepted his word that the house belonged to the two of them, that they would retire and grow old there—the paperwork involved in the purchase made it completely, legally, his.

Part IV

Pulling All the Strings

A BATTLE OF CULTURES

THE SECRETS OF LIFE

HIS HOMETOWN IN HIS IMAGE

DARK SONGS AND ADULATION

A HIDDEN FAMILY

TO TURN TOWARD ART

SOME UGLY CHOICES SPILL INTO THE LIGHT

His reign atop the movie world was absolute, and he would shift to other types of rule: civic and artistic. But as he became a symbol, he also turned into a target. And the fairy tale of yesterday would decay into a public spectacle of broken promises.

KEYSTONE Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo

Seventeen

He’d never been deemed important by American critics or intellectuals, but there were times—in the Leone films; as Harry Callahan—when he seemed more than just a man making movies: He was an emblem. And the overwhelming and unexpected success of Every Which Way But Loose coincided with social changes that put him in the center of a new way of understanding the culture around him. He hadn’t changed much. He was still a fitness junkie with a strong preference for organic foods. He was still a Hollywood star who mistrusted the system that had made him rich and famous and in which he worked as independently as possible. He was still a man who felt entitled to define his own time and liberty when it came to sexual relationships and life partnerships. And he was still a political Libertarian, voting Republican in accord with his views on economic and defense issues but holding laissez-faire attitudes toward matters like abortion, gay rights, and legalized marijuana and even repeatedly speaking out in favor of stricter regulation of handgun ownership. None of that had changed since the early 1960s.

But as he stood stock still, things around him had shifted in a way that made it seem as though he had moved. There had been a time, not very long before, when you could walk into college dorm rooms and see posters of him in his poncho and beard stubble alongside images of Jimi Hendrix and Che Guevara—icons of rebellion and resistance. But as the ’80s dawned, he seemed like a standard-bearer for what had become known, in an increasingly common phrase, as “traditional values.” The center of American culture had shifted to the right, and the new standard-bearer of its dicta in the political arena, Ronald Reagan, was the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. And it might as well have been Clint himself, for the way conversation conflating him and his fellow conservative and actor became so common. Somehow, he’d taken a side in a partisan war in which he hadn’t enlisted.

In that context, Bronco Billy looked like a statement when, really, it was a movie about dreams and wishes—an effort to evoke the starry-eyed social-commentary comedies by Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. The sitcom-ish plot wasn’t what attracted Clint to it. It was the vibe: communitarian, optimistic, dreamy, even slightly goofy. In gathering a ragtag team of circus performers, and playing shows in small towns in the inland Northwest, and conveying lessons of hard work and decency and milk-drinking to kids, Bronco Billy was an old-timey cornball, yes, but he was also an emblem of the values with which Clint had been raised and in which, in large part, he still believed.

And, too, there was a clear connection between Billy’s roving band of big-top performers and the film crews with whom Clint had been bouncing around the world for the past decade and a half, which echoed, as well, the whole national enterprise around him. “I wanted to say something about everybody being able to participate,” he told the New York Times. “America is the maddest idea in the world, put together by madmen. So, here comes this tent. I suppose other people see America as a collage of crazies. Well, maybe we are kind of hard to fathom.” And, too, he was keen to play a role so distinct from any he’d tried before. Billy, he said, was “more open and vocal, and being expressive of his feelings, he’s vulnerable.”

The cast around Clint and Sondra was fleshed out with Malpaso regulars and one noted newcomer, Scatman Crothers, just back from England, where he’d appeared in The Shining for another of Warner Bros.’ totemic in-house directors, Stanley Kubrick. You couldn’t imagine a starker contrast in directorial styles: Kubrick, a notorious perfectionist, could subject his casts and crews to literally scores of takes of a single shot, taking days to get a moment on film as he saw it in his mind; Clint, who had amassed enough titles as a director to have certain auteurist tendencies in his work identified by critics, was so determined to work with speed and thrift that he often declared himself happy with first takes or even rehearsals, which he sometimes filmed without the actors knowing the cameras were rolling. A repeated bit in Bronco Billy’s circus act involved him throwing knives at his assistant while blindfolded, and after one particular take of the trick, with his eyes still masked, Clint declared, “I’ve got a feeling that was terrific. Let’s print it.” Crothers, so battered by Kubrick’s meticulous technique over so many months, arrived in this fast-moving environment, did a take of his first scene, and heard Clint declare that the shot was good and that they’d be moving along; the veteran actor, observers said, literally broke into tears of relief.

There were other tears—or nearly were. Clint remembered forcing a moment out of Sondra with a technique Kubrick surely always had wanted to try.

I just kept saying, “Come on! Come on! Concentrate now! Think!” I’d been coaxing and coaxing and coaxing and it wasn’t coming out quite the way I wanted it, so I kicked her—I had rubber shoes [on]—underneath the table, and I pounded my fist on the table and I said, “C’mon now, God damn it!” My veins were all popping out and she was going “Wa-wa-wa-wa.” Finally, she came through terrific.

That startling moment aside, the picture wrapped—yes, ahead of schedule and under budget—in the fall. (Clint’s handshake deal with Warner Bros. was becoming so comfortable for both parties that he rarely heard from production executives during the shoot or editing; instead, when he was done with the shoot, he’d call Frank Wells and ask him to guess how much ahead of schedule and under budget he was, then he’d call a little while later and invite Wells and his people to come see the cut that he proposed to release.)

Having learned that audiences would buy film soundtracks consisting of individual songs, and country songs at that, Clint got Snuff Garrett to go about creating one. Garrett wrangled Ronnie Milsap into performing two songs,* and he also enlisted the great Merle Haggard, who not only appeared as himself briefly (and unbilled) on-screen but sang a duet with Clint, “Bar Room Buddies,” that featured in the film and on the soundtrack and was released as a single that, son of a gun, became the number one country hit on the Billboard charts in July.

With a hit song on the air—and noticing that his soundtracks were making money for others—Clint went back into character as Philo Beddoe for the sequel to Every Which Way But Loose, titled Any Which Way You Can. But this time he wasn’t going to let any ancillary money slip away from him. He paid special attention to the soundtrack, a revenue stream that he wouldn’t have to share with Warner Bros. He and Garrett founded a new record label, Viva Records,* that would debut with the soundtrack to Any Which Way. This time, Garrett rounded up a crew that included Glen Campbell, Jim Stafford, and Fats Domino—on camera as themselves, as well as on the soundtrack—and, in a duet with Clint, none other than Ray Charles. Clint, who’d felt a sort of kinship with Merle Haggard, confessed, “It was a little intimidating singing with a guy like Ray Charles.” Their collaboration, “Beers to You,” managed to poke a toe onto the Billboard country charts when it appeared in advance of the release of the film, but it didn’t have anything like the success of “Bar Room Buddies” and vanished, blessedly, from memory.

The film itself seemed a secondary consideration: the further adventures of the nitwit crew (heroes and villains) from the previous film, with a different orangutan playing Clyde (Manis, having aged out, was replaced by a critter named C.J.). James Fargo, whose work on Every Which Way was, in Clint’s view, occasionally slipshod, requiring reshoots that cost Malpaso money, was replaced as director as well, by Buddy Van Horn, Clint’s longtime stunt double and a fellow who knew his way around movie animals, having been literally born and raised on the Universal lot where his father worked as a veterinarian. Van Horn, who initially made his way into the business as a stunt rider, wasn’t a lenses-and-lighting kind of guy, but this wasn’t a movie on which that made much difference. The picture would shoot in late spring and early summer in real-world locations, mainly in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and aimed at a Christmas release. It was quick and cheap—and if Van Horn knew anything it was how to get action scenes done right the first time.

Bronco Billy garnered some of the best reviews of any of Clint’s films, positively jolting many critics who’d felt they’d had him pegged. Variety opened its notice with an outright ode: “Oh how good it is to have a comedy around for the summer as genuinely funny as Bronco Billy, which is sophisticated enough and common enough to appeal to a broad audience.” In Newsweek, David Ansen called it “[at] once sentimental, arch and harmlessly good-natured.” The Washington Post touted the arrival of “the new, improved Clint Eastwood—relaxed, funny and refreshingly human.” And the ever-dependable Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times sang its praises highest of all: “He’s never made a movie so blissfully sweet and funny . . . thoroughly delightful and spirits lifting,” he began, going on to compare Clint and Sondra to Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard and declaring that the film’s “most important appeal is to the dreamer in us, suggesting we’d all be better off being whatever and whoever we want to be.”

This was heady stuff, and while it’s hard to say that Bronco Billy lives up to all of it, it’s a significant film in a number of ways. For a start, it’s an explicit satire of the whole idea of posing as a cowboy to make a living. Clint was a guy who grew up building hot rods and going to jazz shows, just as Billy is in reality a shoe salesman and ex-con from New Jersey. Clint’s whole cowboy persona is a show, and with all the behind-the-scenes headaches and disappointments and close calls, Bronco Billy seems to make light of the whole business of show in which he’d made his living for some twenty-five years. What is Billy, after all, but a director/star with a troupe of loyal collaborators hanging on with him and trying to turn a buck with a bit of razzle-dazzle? And what was Clint, as Warner Bros.’ Joe Hyams put it, but “a lifeguard from Oakland who became a cowboy”?

There are echoes of Capra and Sturges and other masters of the blend of social satire and romantic comedy that thrived in the 1930s and ’40s, but they’re really only echoes. Clint isn’t as swift or sharp a director as any of those master craftsmen, and the script leans more nitwit than screwball (Sturges, say, didn’t have fart jokes in his films, as Clint does in Bronco Billy). And while Sondra and Clint both stretch, she’s especially stiff and brittle and, finally, syrupy. Clint has a far steadier grip on what he’s doing: making fun of his signature grimace, spouting corny homilies to children, even chickening out when faced down by a malicious lawman who wants to prove he’s a faster draw than the famed Bronco Billy. He takes all the things he’s done on-screen and savvily deflates them with a wink. It’s charming. There’s something airy and free and fresh about the whole thing, and if it isn’t a classic American screwball comedy, it nonetheless has respect for its genre and its audience, something that can’t be said for Every Which Way But Loose. The morals and lessons of the film aren’t subtle, nor are they subtly played, but they’re sincere. Some part of Clint honestly believes in the homilies and verities of the American dream, and the fact that Billy recites them as part of his brand of hucksterism doesn’t make them any less heartfelt.

Alas, audiences didn’t take to this particular whim. Warner Bros. had big hopes, particularly on the heels of Every Which Way, opening Billy at the start of the summer on more than thirteen hundred screens (then a studio record) and with an ad campaign that recalled old Wild West shows. They expected a $12 million opening, which would surpass Clint’s previous record, and wound up grossing only $3.7 million, first place but hardly a blockbuster. The film petered out with just over $25 million, Clint’s weakest performance in half a decade. For Clint, it was a real disappointment. He considered Bronco Billy to be his best and most personal film, and he was proud of the reviews. Some months later, he said, “I always knew it wouldn’t be an Every Which Way kind of grosser. But I knew it meant something to my career. . . . I’ve heard a lot of theories on why Bronco Billy didn’t do well, and one of them is that you can make fun of anything else, but not yourself.” And a few years on, he told the Chicago Tribune, “That’s as good as I can do in terms of a character. It’s not the kind of picture that will bring you to your knees and make you cry, but it’s what I like and what I can do.”*

It wasn’t much noted at the time, but Bronco Billy had been released just a week after Clint reached a life milestone: his fiftieth birthday. And if there was something craggy and weatherworn about his aura, he sure didn’t behave like he was middle-aged—at least according to the stereotypes of the time. Some of that was, surely, down to the fact that he was still a bona fide fitness freak. He remained dogged about his daily workouts, his low-fat, organic-whenever-possible diet, and his refusal to consume anything much stronger than beer, wine, or the occasional shot of whiskey or tequila. “You’re probably talking to one of the few people who has never tried cocaine,” he once said. “Never. I don’t think I’ve even seen it.” (As he put it another time, “Beer and a couple other things were about as good as I wanted to know about. . . . If it got any better than that, I wouldn’t want to know about it.”)

But he did want to see—within certain limits—if there was a way to stave off the effects, visible and internal, of aging. He began looking into vitamin therapy and other ways to increase his stamina, alertness, fitness, and longevity. His pal Merv Griffin had featured on his talk show a pair of researchers, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, who claimed immense benefits from regimens of vitamins and of a supplement called choline, which they said promoted the release of growth hormones and antioxidants. (Pearson and Shaw, though touting their credentials as scientists, presented themselves as woodsy hippies and enjoyed showing off their buff physiques in promotions for their consulting services.) Clint and Sondra met the pair over dinner at Griffin’s Carmel home, and Clint began adding their proprietary supplements and vitamin diet to his fitness routine. He told friends and colleagues about the wonders of the treatment, about the decay caused on the body by poor diet and inactivity. He was, he said, more alert and energetic and even—wonder of wonders!—talkative than ever. And he convinced others, including Sondra, to start their own routines.

At the same time, he was rumored to be using the services of a plastic surgeon, a Dr. Steven Zax of Beverly Hills. If he was, it was hard to see the profit from it. His teeth had been fixed since the Rowdy Yates years, sure, and he experimented with hair transplants and with dyeing his gray hairs, but he was aging into a wrinkled specimen in a way that rather enhanced his on-screen image. The squint of the Man with No Name or Harry Callahan now seemed to grip his whole face so as to express even more intensity, focus, and rage. It was, in many ways, his meal ticket, and he didn’t want to fuss with it. His lawyers made gossip columnists who “reported” his alleged cosmetic surgeries issue retractions, and he joked about his aging face in interviews:

Clint: If somebody wants me to play an eighteen-year-old kid, well, they don’t have enough Gunite around for my face.

Interviewer: Gunite?

Clint: That’s what they use to plaster swimming pools with.

(He always loved technical knowledge.)

The disappointment of Bronco Billy was immediately erased by giving the public what it seemed to want, at least at that moment in time: i.e., country music, bare-knuckle brawls, and lowbrow antics with a primate. Any Which Way You Can premiered six months after Bronco Billy on over fifteen hundred screens, yet another high for Warner Bros., pulling in $3.8 million on its second day (a single-day record for the studio) and ending its first week at number one with an $8 million haul en route to a $71 million total, not the bonanza of the first film, but plenty good for a $15 million budget—and good enough for the number five spot for the year.

The reviews were strangely accepting. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin called it “better and funnier” than its predecessor. Gary Arnold of the Washington Post deemed it “a generous entertainment of its kind.” Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times declared it “amiable and boisterous . . . [and] welcome as just plain fun.” Even Roger Ebert’s two-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times seemed to pull its punches, saying Any Which Way “is not a very good movie, but it’s hard not to feel a grudging affection for it.”

Well, actually: No. It’s plenty easy to be chagrined, appalled, dismissive, and despairing by it and of it. Any Which Way is poor even by the low bar set by Every Which Way—sloppy, crude, shapeless, lazy, unsightly, insultingly stupid. There are poop jokes and sex jokes and jokes carried over from the previous film and beaten to death with a leaden, repetitive hand. The original had, if nothing else, a folksy, homemade quality that could catch you by surprise. The forced levity here makes you feel as if you’re stuck with a drunk who insists on telling the same joke over and over and telling it more loudly each time. The highlight is a mega-sized bare-knuckle brawl between Philo and an East Coast ringer (longtime film and TV stuntman and villain William Smith) that ranges all over Jackson Hole. But by then you’re depleted by the witless “comedy” and “plotting” that make up the rest of the unending two-hour film. A picture like this ought to be light and spry, and Every Which Way had those qualities, if only modestly. Its sequel was dull and dumb. And even though it would earn money, it didn’t outdo the original (as, say, For a Few Dollars More and Magnum Force had, in their day), and it would, gratefully, spell the last screen appearance of Philo Beddoe and Clyde. It would mean that 1981 would be the first year since 1966 not to feature at least one new Clint Eastwood movie on American screens. He hadn’t stopped working—indeed, he had two new films in various stages of production—but it was as if he knew that he’d raced into this new guise with no idea how to sustain it. He’d gone further with Philo than anyone at Malpaso or Warner Bros. reckoned he could, but he sensed, too, that he’d hit a cul-de-sac and needed to back out and start anew.

At home—at homes—he was still trying to find a way to transition out of his marriage to Maggie and to life as a single man, albeit one with a committed partner who was spending significant time (and, he assiduously noted, money) perfecting the new Bel-Air house. The emotional cost of any divorce is heavy, and this one involved not only more than a quarter-century of marriage but two school-age children. It also, however, involved tens of millions of dollars in money, land, businesses, investments, and who knew what else. Maggie, it was clear to anyone, was due half of everything, having been with him since he was pumping gas. She was said to be dragging her feet because she wished to reconcile and make things work. Clint, though, was taking his time as well, reluctant to open the lockboxes of his financial life to her lawyers and maybe even to his. He was a strict and skilled compartmentalizer, and he and his advisers had built his career and his fortune in such a way that salaries were diverted into property and investments, many luxuries (such as new cars and clothes and posh travel) were built into film budgets, taxes were deferred, and so on. But divorce meant that all of these strategies, which were legal, would be laid bare. The longer that day could be delayed—and the longer that the impending divorce could be conducted peaceably—the better for Clint.

In the meantime, he and Sondra lived as common-law spouses, making movies together when there were parts for her, vacationing together, and cohabitating in the Sherman Oaks house, the new Carmel house, the ranch house near Mount Shasta, and the house in Sun Valley. Their arrangement suited them both. For Clint, there was clearly real affection for the woman for whom he was openly (and expensively) ending his marriage; Sondra, for her part, loved him and trusted his professions of love for her. (She said that he was fond of singing a country-style ditty of his own composition: “She made me monogamous.”) And, too, she could understand his slow divorce because she was still married to Gordon Anderson, with whom she maintained daily (often several-times-daily) communication and whose romantic relationships could occasion more drama for her than did her own. The situation was nobody’s idea of straightforward, but nobody was being forced into it. If the outside world was taken aback, it was a sign of Clint and Sondra’s (and, for that matter, Gordon’s and even Maggie’s) commitment and independence that they persisted as they pledged to one another that they would.

Their connections were deep and complex. Sondra always made it clear that she and Gordon shared a special bond, that there had never been anything physical between them, that she thought of him more like “a sister” than a lover. And Clint accepted this truth of her life, apparently at ease around Gordon and his boyfriends and respectful of the fact that Sondra’s connection to him was different from the one he himself shared with her. He wasn’t a fan of the frequent tumult around Gordon, which often resulted in long telephone conversations and Sondra rushing out to help him through some romantic or emotional crisis. But he recognized that the two nourished one another in ways that were beyond him. And he may have been grateful that she had an emotional connection to someone other than him.

In 1982, the crisis of the moment was that Gordon needed to move. He’d been living in the apartment that he’d once shared with Sondra since the time of their arrival in Hollywood, and he felt it was haunted with memories of broken relationships and maybe even spirits. Sondra, having finished with the costly upgrades and decorative touches at Stradella Road, asked Clint to help Gordon get a house of his own. As she recalled, Clint agreed to flat out buy a house and make a gift of it to Gordon—remarkable largesse but, per Sondra, not out of character for the man who told her that everything that was his was hers as well.

After a lengthy search, Sondra and Gordon found a three-bedroom, terra-cotta–colored cottage on Crescent Heights Boulevard in the hills of Laurel Canyon, with a thatched-style roof and the fantasy-world vibes on which Gordon thrived. In May 1982, Clint paid $300,000 for it. Just as Gordon was taking possession of the place, however, Clint’s business manager showed up with a one-page agreement between Clint and the Andersons, as Gordon and Sondra still were, legally. For tax purposes, they were told, the house was to be purchased through a holding company, and Gordon would pay that entity $1,000 a month for utility bills, taxes, and other such considerations. It was explained that this wasn’t a lease so much as a nicety of financial fine print. The business guy had been handling Sondra’s finances for a couple of years now, so she believed him, but the ask still caught her by surprise, so she questioned Clint. “Don’t be silly,” he told her. “It’s Gordon’s house. It’s just a business thing for me.” Accepting that at face value, she and Gordon signed the agreement.

As he got back to work after an unusual hiatus of more than a year, Clint learned that his turn toward country-inflected comedies had sharpened his image as a right-wing standard-bearer. Ronald Reagan, with his cowboy manner and Hollywood smile, had been elected president, and part of his appeal was his tough talk about America’s Cold War nemesis, the Soviet Union. Clint had voted for Reagan (as of 2020, he had only voted for Republicans for the White House), and he liked him personally. But he didn’t consider himself a blind adherent to the president’s policies; he insisted on his own liberty and independence as a citizen, making decisions about people on an individual basis and, in general, demonstrating more compassion for racial, social, and sexual minorities than Reagan ever did. At the same time, the film for which he was visiting Europe was absolutely red meat for the Commie-hating voters who had put Reagan in office. Firefox, a techno-thriller about a retired air force major who is called back into action to steal a dangerous experimental jet before the Soviets can deploy it, was based on a 1977 novel by a high school English teacher from Wales named Craig Thomas. Fed by Cold War enmities and clichés, jingoistic and self-righteous, it marked for Clint a new type of film, one using digital effects and emphasizing a man’s relationship to a machine. (And, given Thomas’s impressive prolificacy—he published seven novels, using two names, between 1976 and 1981*—it even seemed like another bid to launch a new film series.) To his critics on the coasts, though, it looked like a pledge of allegiance to Reaganism: In their minds, the rise of a lousy Hollywood actor with great hair to the White House paralleled the career of another actor of finite range and perfect coiffure; that he would make something like Firefox only proved that they’d been right about him all along.

There was a change at Malpaso. Without any announcement in the trade press, without any fanfare, Robert Daley, who had been credited as a producer on every film of Clint’s between Play Misty for Me and Any Which Way, was out of the company. Later on, Clint would complain that Daley had begun to pay more attention to his hobbies than his work (his home had a library with more than four thousand volumes, many of them rare and valuable, and he was an avid collector of Mark Twain’s personal belongings). The reality was that Clint trusted very few people in business, and if that trust disappeared, so did the person in whom it was placed.

The first film without Daley’s name on it was small and kindred to Bronco Billy—one last go at a back-roads, country music film. Honkytonk Man was based on a novel by Clancy Carlile, whom Malpaso had hired to adapt the script. It was a melancholy story set in middle America during the Great Depression and concerning a never-has-been singer, Red Stovall, hobbled by booze and tuberculosis but determined to drive himself to Nashville, where he’s being granted a shot on the Grand Ole Opry. Clint would play Red, direct, and sing alongside such country legends as Marty Robbins, Porter Wagoner, and Ray Price. And playing Red’s nephew Whit, sent along by the family to serve as Red’s driver and minder, would be fourteen-year-old Kyle Eastwood, a budding musician in his own right and, technically, an actor, having played brief uncredited roles in The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bronco Billy. The plan was to shoot a bit of Firefox at Clint’s ranch before bolting off to Austria, Greenland, and London for the rest, then come back to make Honkytonk over a span of six weeks the following summer, with the area around Stockton, California, standing in for Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The hiatus was over.

“I don’t seem to have the gift it takes to enjoy fame the way it should be enjoyed,” he confessed. “Sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. and ask myself why I’m not enjoying it now—the adulation, the fancy cars and stuff.”

There was more to it than just a nagging voice in his head, a little case of impostor syndrome that anyone with a functioning brain could experience. (It was true, though, that sometimes he simply couldn’t believe that he was who he was. Sondra Locke recalled, for instance, that they were once on their way to see a movie on the Warner Bros. lot and Clint panicked because he didn’t have his studio ID on him, “as if they wouldn’t let him in to the screening without it.”)

There had been some costly side effects of fame: the crackpot death threats that could accrue to any celebrity and even, in 1978, a threatened kidnapping that authorities investigated (and dismissed). And, too, there were the practical inconveniences—having to sport a ball cap, fake mustache, and eyeglasses to go see a movie at an ordinary theater; having family outings interrupted by autograph seekers; the certainty that one was on whenever one stepped into a public space, even a golf course or his own pub.

And the press. He understood its function and its symbiosis with his profession, and he had empathy for people who were doing the job. But he could be thin-skinned about it (fed, no doubt, by the long-lived animus of Pauline Kael), and he had clear ideas of what he considered to be the acceptable limits of journalistic intrusion into and speculation about his life.

In May 1982, he brought a $10 million lawsuit against the National Enquirer over its front-page story “Clint Eastwood in Love Triangle with Tanya Tucker,” which claimed he’d complicated his already complex romantic life—wife, longtime girlfriend—with an affair with the twenty-three-year-old country singer. (The claim was amplified by TV ads promoting the issue and the story.) His lawyers argued that the supermarket tabloid had invaded his privacy and used his name to promote sales without permission. The Enquirer replied: “The evidence to support the story is more than enough to meet any legal standard. . . . Mr. Eastwood knows it, because he has not sued for libel.” A trial court favored the Enquirer’s position, but an appellate court reversed its findings and the Enquirer, cowed, settled the matter out of court.

Later that year, a more discreet published account that seemed to be about him surfaced, and this time he didn’t sic his attorneys on the authors. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, the folks who’d prescribed his vitamin and supplement regimen, released a book about their theories and practices, Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach. Amid its more than eight hundred pages was a string of accounts of the experiences of “Mr. Smith . . . a professional movie actor known for his physically vigorous roles,” who was known as “a man of few words in his public appearances.” The book claimed that Smith and his romantic partner, an actress dubbed “Miss Jones,” used Pearson and Shaw’s proprietary cocktails as well as ordinary vitamins (in extraordinary doses) and experienced a variety of positive benefits: vitality, stamina, fewer colds, less susceptibility to allergies, even “a new facility with the spoken word.”

Quickly after publication, “Mr. Smith” and “Miss Jones” were pegged as Clint and Sondra in the mainstream press. Although it could be argued that there was a greater invasion of privacy in Pearon and Shaw’s characterization than in anything the Enquirer published, it was important, in his view, that Life Extension at least tried to keep his name out of it. He let the matter die, and even, in time, admitted that Mr. Smith was he. It amazed him, though: Even the stuff he put into his body had a way of becoming public fodder.

Eighteen

The terms of his divorce from Maggie were still taking shape slowly, painfully, particularly for her. “I think I’m coping with it fine now,” she told Us magazine, “but at first I found it shattering.” She admitted that she’d long suspected that Clint had been unfaithful. “He had this thing about being a loner, like I kind of didn’t exist,” she said. “I was never very realistic about some things. . . . I wondered about it, but I didn’t dwell on it because it probably would have driven me insane. . . . I just preferred to hang in there and not worry too much about it.” She outright refused to answer questions about Sondra Locke. And she had begun to date. She’d started seeing Henry Wynberg, a self-dubbed playboy from Holland who had squired Elizabeth Taylor between her two marriages to Richard Burton (he managed to finagle a financial settlement when he and Liz broke off) and who advertised himself as a millionaire real estate investor.* According to him, “Maggie never speaks of Clint.” But Clint claimed that he and his estranged wife were “probably better friends now than we have ever been, and neither of us is unhappy with that.” They continued to raise Kyle and Alison in tandem while their attorneys sorted out a financial settlement. And Clint continued to work as if anticipating that half of each dollar he earned would vanish from his pocket.

And so a big, dumb movie like Firefox, which, if nothing else, challenged him to work with special effects. He had realized he needed a common language with his effects team, so, for the first time in his career, he storyboarded at least part of a movie—that is, sketched out specific shots and sequences on paper in advance. It was a learning experience, and he expressed admiration for the magicians who helped make it possible. But there’s little magic in Firefox. It doesn’t engage as espionage, as war-machine porn, as PTSD psychodrama. Its special effects sequences are derivative of similar bits of the Star Wars films and would soon be overshadowed by the far more electric Top Gun. (Clint had no feel for special effects, and he wouldn’t attempt another movie reliant on them for almost two decades.) Clint does look convincingly lost and paranoid in the undercover-in-Russia scenes (his one spoken line in Russian—in which his character is said to be fluent—is choked out laughably). The film’s two chief points of interest have nothing to do with what’s on-screen. One is the opening sequence, shot at Rising River Ranch, giving a glimpse of the majestic and isolated setting that was Clint’s favorite home. The other is the film’s corps of English character actors, including the great Nigel Hawthorne, Warren Clarke (best known as Dim in A Clockwork Orange), Freddie Jones (the evil circus operator from The Elephant Man), and Ronald Lacey (the melting Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark). They do their bits, but nothing at all in the movie captures a place in the imagination, heart, or memory.

The film opened in June 1982, six months after it was shot. Critics were unimpressed. “A burn-out,” said Variety, calling it “at least a half-hour too long” and “a particular disappointment.” “It’s a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor,” declared Vincent Canby in the New York Times. And Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times opened her pan by announcing, “The very best thing about Firefox is its spectacular billboard across the street from the Burbank Studios.” Ouch. Firefox opened in a marketplace that included E.T. and new films in the Rocky and Star Trek franchises. Its first weekend was positive—$8 million. But it topped off under $46 million, technically profitable, but not the bonanza for which Warner Bros. and Malpaso had hoped.

His feet were more comfortably back on the ground with Honkytonk Man. In some ways, it resembled the Philo Beddoe movies—a ne’er-do-well and his cronies on a road trip, set to a soundtrack of country music, with a high-stakes test waiting at the end of it. The usual Malpaso crew was on hand, both in front of and behind the camera. And Kyle was able to get back to Pebble Beach for the start of the school year. The film wrapped before Labor Day and was ready for theaters in time for Christmas.

A great push was prepared for the soundtrack. On the tail of the hits that had emerged from Every Which Way But Loose, Any Which Way You Can, and Bronco Billy, Viva Records planned to spend $250,000 in promotion for an album that featured two tracks of Clint singing, two of Ray Price, one each by Linda Hopkins and Porter Wagoner, and an ensemble of Clint, Marty Robbins, David Frizzell, and John Anderson crooning “In the Jailhouse Now.” The first single off the album would be Robbins’s version of the title track, written and performed by Red Stovall in the film but in reality composed by Dewayne Blackwell (who would later write “Friends in Low Places”).

Reviewers were respectful but not impressed. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin called it “well-intentioned but weak” and recognized that Clint was trying to do something new but decided, “It’s something that doesn’t quite suit him.” Variety also praised the film’s intentions but declared that Clint was “done in by the predictability of the script and his own limitations as a warbler.” In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert called it “a sweet, whimsical, low-key movie, a movie that makes you feel good without pressing you too hard,” and concluded that Clint “seems to have a personal stake in this story, and we begin to feel it, too.”

Whatever the film was, it wasn’t catnip for moviegoers. Honkytonk Man opened on 677 screens in mid-December (less than half of, say, Any Which Way You Can), and it sold only $667,727 worth of tickets in its opening weekend—claiming thirteenth place on the box office charts. It dropped from there, wheezing to a gross of some $3.7 million, the lowest return for one of Clint’s films since The Beguiled.

It’s a shame, because Honkytonk Man holds up remarkably well. It’s a departure in ways that seem obvious and an ascent in ways that couldn’t have been predicted. The film is human-scaled and modest and plain, with an eye for beauty and for small, telling details—and not a stitch of Hollywood vanity. His hair sporting a subtle coppery sheen, his cough increasingly wracking him, and his decidedly uncharming unreliability (the truest thing about him), Red fits Clint like a second skin. If there was a part of the star that thought he wasn’t particularly special, that he didn’t deserve his fame and wealth, that his talents were smaller than his luck, it emerges in this, his third substantial performance in three years. There’s a delicacy about Red and a cockeyed optimism—authentically winning qualities. And there’s modest talent for singing and musicianship. (Clint’s guitar work is clearly dubbed, but he plays piano a couple of times, and the camera proves it’s really him.)

The real revelation, though, is how much of the film is entrusted to Kyle as Whit. He’s in practically every scene, including bits in a brothel, a gambling den, a holdup, and several saloons. He drives, he plays guitar, and he essays a range of emotions and states of mind with plausibility: fear, lust, self-pity, hero worship, resourcefulness, wonder, grief. Clint would come to rely greatly on the performances of non-actors in key roles in many of his films, but here he gives a substantial portion of an entire film to a near-amateur teenager who happens to be his own son. It’s a daring bit of casting, and it comes off as a treat. A treat, too, are the musicians, including Linda Hopkins, Ray Price, and especially Marty Robbins, who has a lovely turn filling in on a recording session for the failing Red and who died, age fifty-seven, between the preview screening of the film and its public debut.*

In Bronco Billy—which, too, was a story of an ordinary man reaching for the extraordinary in a homely artistic milieu—Clint stumbled into sentimentality, sugar, and cliché. Here, with ample opportunities to make those same slips, he hardly does. There’s a softness to Honkytonk Man, but there are edges to it as well. (It is, after all, only the second time that Clint’s character dies on camera, an event that’s handled with a clear, unblinking eye.) Whether it’s the martyrdom and botched dreams of Red, the coming-of-age of Whit, or the fates of as many as half a dozen minor characters, there’s intelligence, sympathy, and care for and with the humanity of everyone we see. Asked over the years what his favorite among his films was, Clint often mentioned Bronco Billy. But, really, Honkytonk is his first authentically superior work as a director/star, and it’s a shame that its poor reception by audiences may have clouded his view of its merit. He didn’t make anything like it for many years.

With Firefox helping to keep the Cold War warm and his string of country-flavored movies, it was taken as a given that Clint was a super-patriot. In the summer of 1982, he was approached by people acting on that supposition and hoping to engage him—financially, at least—in a scheme that could have been (and, they hoped, would someday be) right out of a movie.

James Gordon “Bo” Gritz was a retired Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel decorated several times for his combat experience in Vietnam. He was among a number of military and former military personnel who believed that there were hundreds of American servicemen still being held prisoner in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and he had begun to organize a string of missions into Laos to prove his theory and force the U.S. government to work to free those captives. The government and military refused to engage with these operations, so Gritz was forced to fund them through private donations. He got the idea that there were people in Hollywood who might be amenable to contributing to his efforts. And among the people he thought he’d tap up was Clint, to whom he’d been introduced by Fritz Manes.

In the fall of 1982, Gritz was planning his third incursion into Laos, and he and an associate were flown by private jet from Southern California to Rising River Ranch. They gave Clint a tour of their Northern California training camp and briefed him on their scheme—Operation Lazarus—to cross from Thailand into Laos and traverse some hundred miles to a spot near the Vietnam border. The raiding party would consist of four American Special Forces vets plus a party of a dozen or so anti-Communist Laotian commandos, with plans to join forces with antigovernment forces operating within Laos. They would be equipped with Uzis, tactical jungle gear, and devices referred to by Gritz as “nuclear fire plan boxes”—high-tech radios that could communicate across the globe in short bursts of encrypted messages—that had been donated by the defense contractor Litton Industries.

Gritz brought one of these gizmos to Rising River to enhance his pitch, but he didn’t know how to work it. (“It was like a monkey fucking a football,” said Fritz Manes of the demonstration.) Nevertheless, Clint was sufficiently impressed to make a donation of $30,000 to Gritz’s “Never Forget” foundation (only after, according to one of Gritz’s colleagues, checking to see if the contribution was tax deductible). What was more, according to the Los Angeles Times, Clint took the initiative to phone Ronald Reagan at his ranch near Santa Barbara and let him know about Gritz’s mission and his own personal belief that the government should be helping to find MIA servicemen. Reagan returned to Washington and discussed the matter with his advisers, who assured him that Gritz’s mission was based on rumors and that the White House, the Pentagon, and the official intelligence community had repeatedly tried to discourage it. That was the end of Clint’s lobbying for Gritz and of the Reagan administration’s connection to the operation.*

In November, Gritz and his team began their foray, which was a comical disaster. The four Americans had only three Uzis among them; the Laotians were underarmed and undisciplined; the rebel warlord with whom they rendezvoused showed up drunk and alone and also unarmed. Before they made it to their destination, they encountered Laotian forces; a close-contact firefight ensued, with one of Gritz’s Laotian comrades being killed, three others injured, and one of the Americans being taken captive. The survivors fled back to Thailand, where authorities had learned of their activities and sought to arrest them for a number of serious charges. Gritz and his two American colleagues escaped, then, a few months later, paid a ransom of $17,500 and a cache of medical supplies to liberate their captured colleague.

The story of this fiasco—complete with the details of Clint’s financial support—broke in the Los Angeles Times in January 1983. It emerged that Gritz had also gotten a donation (of $10,000) from the actor William Shatner, who believed he was paying for an option on a potential film about Gritz’s life. (According to one report, Clint also believed he was securing an option on the story of the raid.) Shatner, who was developing the Gritz story for ABC Television, was said to be “shocked” at Gritz’s apparently selling the same life rights twice and by his use of the option money to fund an illegal military operation. “When you pay a man,” he told the Times, “it’s not my custom to ask him what he’s going to do with the money.” Clint stayed tight-lipped throughout the entire embarrassing episode. He thought that Gritz and his people were inept (“like Laurel and Hardy or the Marx brothers go to Cambodia,” he later said) and that they had sabotaged their own mission by talking about it so much that it wound up in the Thai newspapers. When he spoke about the matter more than a decade later, he sounded as if he felt equally justified and burned: “It wasn’t The Dirty Dozen. I think they ended up spending most of the dough hanging around Bangkok. They brought back a bunch of bones—some of them weren’t even human. Remains weren’t worth risking lives for.”

On the heels of a wobbly streak at the box office, and with Philo Beddoe no longer a viable option, he set himself on a path to a sure thing: a fourth Dirty Harry movie. Sudden Impact, as it came to be known, was based on a script by Charles B. Pierce and Earl E. Smith, exploitation filmmakers from Arkansas who had written a revenge drama that was originally acquired by Malpaso as a vehicle for Sondra Locke. Once Clint realized that it could be reshaped into a Dirty Harry film, he commissioned a rewrite from yet another green screenwriter, Joseph Stinson, who had helped assemble the trailers for Bronco Billy. (There were other drafts, including one by Malpaso’s reliable Dean Riesner, who had last worked with Clint on The Enforcer.) All of the revisions retained the basic storyline—a victim of sexual assault hunts down the men and woman who years before had raped her and her sister. But Stinson’s draft included one apparently inconsequential line of dialogue for which everyone who touched the script even once would later claim credit.

Having burned through trusted directorial hands Ted Post and James Fargo on the previous Dirty Harry films, Clint chose to direct this one himself, which guaranteed the pace he demanded. The film was shot in the spring and early summer of 1983 in San Francisco and, mostly, Santa Cruz, and it was ready to release by Christmas. The nation’s critics wanted no part of it. Newsweek’s David Ansen wrote, “It has the makings of a fascinating, multi-leveled melodrama, but settles for crude, comic-book detail.” The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold reckoned, “Eastwood the director . . . misjudges the pace.” In the New York Times, Vincent Canby declared, “The screenplay is ridiculous and Mr. Eastwood’s direction of it primitive.” And even Clint partisan Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times balked: “Sudden Impact is the exploitation picture at its most nakedly manipulative.”

And the heckles were apt. Sudden Impact is garish to look at, silly to think about, lazily imagined, crudely built, and altogether—save for one line—forgettable. Once again: rape, misogyny, summary execution, vengeance, contempt for social change and legal praxis, and gratuitous cruelty. Once again: a string of Malpaso (even Rawhide) veterans,* a jazzy Lalo Schifrin score, moody photography from Bruce Surtees, and a lot of gorgeous Central California scenery. And, alas, once again Sondra Locke playing beyond credulity as a revenge killer. The film’s sole memorable moment is in a scene with no connection to the central plot: Harry pointing a gun at a robber and taunting him to try to resist arrest with Stinson’s immortal line, “Go ahead, make my day,” a quip that would feature (conservatively) 16 million times in jokes and news headlines about the actor who said it.* Other than that, it’s like the fourth entry in most long-running movie franchises: enervated, derivative, pandering, and absurd.

The scary thing about Dirty Harry is that Callahan seems a plausible instance of a man with a badge and a gun; the scary thing about Sudden Impact is that there was such a sizable public for something that had devolved from solid genre work to brutish baby food. And the public for it was massive. The film opened at number one with $9.7 million of tickets sold at more than fifteen hundred theaters, holding off Brian De Palma’s Scarface. It held the top spot for three weeks and claimed a place in the top ten until mid-February, ultimately grossing some $68 million, more than double what the first Dirty Harry film had earned twelve years prior and by some margin the most profitable film in the series to date. (Clint’s take was estimated to be in the range of $30 million. Day: made.)

Like any big movie star, especially one who’d been at the top of the trade for fifteen years, he had a fair bit of hooey written about him. But in Parade magazine in October 1983, a new bar was set. Consider:

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. . . . I rarely liked a man so much on first meeting. . . . 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. . . . 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. . . . What an American was Clint Eastwood! Maybe there was no one more American than he. What an interesting artist.

And what goggle-eyed star-fucker wrote these words? No less than Norman Mailer, who chatted with Clint a couple of times during a visit to the Santa Cruz set of Sudden Impact and had a meal with him and came away utterly smitten. The gushing went on for thousands of words, with Mailer praising Clint’s boxing, his crew’s love of their boss, his understanding of the American frontier mentality, even his beer drinking. It was . . . astonishing.

But it wasn’t unprecedented. For a while, intellectuals had begun positing Clint as something more than just a movie star. He was, it seemed, a symbol—of what depended on how you felt about, oh, contemporary America or whether or not you were nostalgic for a prior incarnation of it. It was no longer enough to take a stand on his acting or directing or the roles he chose or the dialogue he spoke or the way audiences received his work. He became someone you talked about when you wanted to talk about something bigger than him.

Mailer’s frappé of an interview followed a lengthy, abstruse think piece published in the New York Review of Books a year and a half earlier, by poet and essayist Robert Mazzocco. Titled “The Supply-Side Star,” the article attempted to place Clint (and, especially, Harry Callahan) in the context of the ascent of Ronald Reagan, the rekindling of the Cold War, and the scapegoating of the disenfranchised in American society. Like Mailer, Mazzocco found Clint a far deeper and more revelatory figure than his chief box office rival, Burt Reynolds. He admired the “economy of speech and . . . economy of movement” of Clint on-screen, acknowledging the power of his silence and what he called his “fluently nerveless style.” But he saw in Harry’s simultaneous antipathy toward his bosses and toward criminals (many of whom explicitly represented leftist impulses in American culture) the seed of “the politics of resentment” and a nascent fascism that later flowered explicitly (if more sugarcoated) under Reagan. Mazzocco had far more on his mind than a single movie, and the essay considers a wide swath of American culture. But the very fact that Clint was the jumping-off point for it signaled that he’d reached a new plateau in the American mind. A decade or so prior, Life magazine teased the world by declaring him, with a who’da-thunk wink, the world’s biggest movie star. Now that status was taken for granted, and he was seen as a unit of meaning, complete with a series of stated (or at least embodied) stances on some of the hot-button topics of the day. Pauline Kael may have been overzealous in seeing him as a Brownshirt. But she was spot-on, if early, in seeing in him something more than just a popular star.

And the highfalutin thumbsucks were only getting started. After Sudden Impact’s theatrical run, the Los Angeles Times carried an article by film professor Tom Stempel arguing that Clint “may be not only one of the best, but the most important and influential (because of the size of his audience) feminist filmmaker working in America today [emphasis added].” Stempel made a thorough survey of the women in Clint’s films: hippies, murderesses, rape victims, cops, young girls, old women, even two Native Americans (in The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bronco Billy), all depicted and cast with detail and care and performed, in many cases, with more power and authority than the male roles in the same films. But few acknowledged this truth about Clint’s work, said Stempel, because he “suffers from the same lack of intelligent criticism that faced major American directors like Henry King and Howard Hawks during their careers, and for the same reasons: Eastwood is working in the popular genres with a non-flamboyant directorial style.” He concluded that getting mostly male audiences to pay money to see Sondra Locke’s victim character turn the tables on her abusers was a feminist statement. And he specifically called out Kael for failing to see what was so patently obvious to him and to audiences.

It was hard to believe that these articles were about the same guy. And equally hard to believe you hadn’t been slipped some psychedelics when reading them. All great movie stars transcend not only their mortal selves but the roles they play; their iconography is greater than the parts that comprise it. Clint was entering a rarefied realm that few ever reached, where the business of being a movie star seemed the seed of a bigger identity. And, at the moment, at least, nobody in movies inhabited that stratosphere with him.

At around this same time, remarkable accounts of Clint’s importance to Warner Bros. surfaced. It was said that he had earned the studio some $800 million in box office receipts, TV and cable revenue, and home media rentals and sales in the seven years since Malpaso’s arrival on the lot. The more than $2 million his films brought in each week accounted for somewhere between 15 and 17 percent of the studio’s gross income. It was no wonder that executives didn’t wander onto his sets or screen his dailies or even ask to see a cut of his movies before he deemed them ready for release. After a gap of ten years, during which time he never fell out of the list of the nation’s top ten ticket-selling stars, he was once again Hollywood’s number one box office attraction. He had survived Bronco Billy, Firefox, and Honkytonk Man with his appeal intact. And the very next thing he would do would be to test that popularity yet again with a film that seemed an explicit critique of pictures like, say, Sudden Impact.

Tightrope, an original script by Richard Tuggle, screenwriter of Escape from Alcatraz, followed a New Orleans homicide detective trying to catch a serial rapist and killer who was targeting sex workers. It sounded like familiar ground, but Tuggle’s script was filled with fresh touches. For one, the detective is the single father of two young girls, having been abandoned by their mother. For another, he’s working alongside a woman who runs a rape counseling and prevention program. And, most important, a number of the killer’s victims are prostitutes with whom the detective has recently had sex, often involving bondage. Yes, it’s another story about a cop meting out justice, but it’s also a Hitchcockian thriller about the perforated line over which criminals and cops sometimes waltz. It was altogether dark and seamy, deliciously so, and it represented a departure in mood and image from even his most violent Dirty Harry films or Westerns. As Clint said proudly, “John Wayne would never have done Tightrope.”

Tuggle hadn’t directed anything before, and this was only his second filmed script, so he worked with the usual Malpaso crew and on Clint’s usual low budget and brief schedule. Additionally, he faced the wrinkle of directing one of Clint’s children: Alison, age twelve, would be playing a feature role as the cop’s eldest daughter. So he was directing not only his boss, who had made ten films of his own, but his boss’s daughter as well. Swell.

The film would shoot on location in New Orleans, which meant that there was yet another way for Clint to get involved: music. He went so far as to compose a little melody that he wanted used as the motif for Alison’s character. Much of the film would be shot in the old, touristy, tawdry parts of town, and Clint had an idea of how the sound of those streets should influence the sound of the film. He hired his old army buddy Lennie Niehaus, who’d arranged and orchestrated music on previous Malpaso films, as composer. As Niehaus recalled, “[We] went for a walk down Bourbon Street. Clint pointed out the cacophony you hear as you walk down the street. On one side of the street, you hear the music from one club. Then on the other side, you hear another band in another club. You keep walking and the sounds behind you start to fade as the clubs you are approaching get louder. And that was exactly what he wanted the film’s music to sound like.”

Warner Bros. had floated Jane Fonda for the role of the rape counselor, who both challenges and attracts the detective, but Clint didn’t care for her personally (or, perhaps, politically). The part was offered to Susan Sarandon, but she was troubled by the amount and tenor of violence toward women in the script; when she approached Clint about it, she said, he wouldn’t budge. “I was completely broke,” she recalled, “and I was desperate to work. And I think that Clint Eastwood is actually a pretty interesting guy. And I met with him, and I said, ‘Aren’t you worried, especially you, who everybody thinks is like Man Personified, [that] when your character starts to do some of this stuff, that it’s going to have a link between sex and violence and treating women badly?’ And he said, ‘I don’t think that it’s my job to worry about that, I’m an actor.’” She passed. At the suggestion of Sondra Locke, the part went to the Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold, another appealingly offbeat leading lady with the on-screen mettle to stand up to Clint.

Shooting began in October and was scheduled to run through mid-December, but Tuggle quickly found himself lagging behind—and drawing Clint’s squinty scrutiny. Before too many weeks, by which time several days had been lost to Tuggle’s work methods, Clint simply slid into the director’s chair. He didn’t, as in The Outlaw Josey Wales, fire Tuggle or usurp his name in the credits. He let Tuggle continue to work while he subtly suggested ideas for filming that the novice director would quickly embrace. And Tuggle admitted that he was especially deferential when it came to the scenes involving Alison, letting Clint take full charge of them. But to the crew there was no doubt who was running the show. It was Clint’s picture in all but name.

Tightrope was a risk, but the next thing he had his sights on looked like a sure bet. And it came to him indirectly. As Sondra Locke told it, writer-director Blake Edwards, then at the height of his popular success on the back of three Pink Panther movies, 10, S.O.B., and Victor/Victoria, approached her with a script titled “Kansas City Jazz,” a comedy about a police detective and his former partner, now a private eye, wrangling with gangsters in the 1930s. Edwards indicated that Sondra would be great in the female lead—a hoity society dame like the one she played (however stiffly) in Bronco Billy. When she responded positively to the script, a dinner was arranged between her, Clint, Edwards, and Edwards’s wife, Julie Andrews. Edwards said that he thought Clint would be great as the cop and that Burt Reynolds, with whom he had just made The Man Who Loved Women, would be brilliant opposite him as the private eye. Clint was intrigued.

In the coming weeks, Sondra was edged out of the picture, and she realized that Edwards had approached her only to get to Clint. In fact, Julie Andrews was being talked about for the role Edwards had dangled before her.* In any case, Clint had taken to the project, which superficially resembled an old-time Warner Bros. gangster picture, and he agreed to make it as a joint production of Malpaso, Warner Bros., and Reynolds’s company, Deliverance Productions. He would be paid his going rate—now a hefty $5 million—and he would have a number of the usual Malpaso crew in key production roles: Fritz Manes producing, Edward Carfagno as production designer, and Lennie Niehaus as composer among them. (A similar number of Reynolds’s regular collaborators would work on the film as well.)

The picture was set to shoot from February to April 1984 on soundstages and backlots at Warner Bros., which would make it the first film that Clint had appeared in that would be shot entirely in Hollywood—a remarkable milestone considering that he’d appeared in twenty-five films for Hollywood studios since his trilogy with Sergio Leone.* And that wasn’t the only unusual thing about the production. Clint had never made a broad comedy, and it had been more than a decade since he’d worked for the first time with a director like Edwards who had a strong personal vision, style, and track record of his own. Edwards was Hollywood’s premier visual prankster, and he had firm ideas about the scripts he wrote and directed. He insisted on meeting after meeting to discuss rewrites—a process that Clint abhorred—and he further had strong ideas about how Clint should approach his role, which struck Clint as absurd and even offensive: One hired Clint to perform as Clint, after all.

The rewrites and conferences and icy rapport showed no signs of letting up as the shoot approached, and Clint and Edwards were still at odds. After one torturous meeting, Clint and Reynolds left the production offices together and Clint broke an uncomfortable silence by saying, “I guess this won’t be the film we do together.” But when the actors told Warner Bros. that they didn’t see a means to resolve their differences with Edwards, studio executives, salivating at the thought of a late-year release featuring two of the world’s most popular stars, did the unimaginable: Just weeks before shooting began, they fired Edwards, giving him a golden handshake and incensing him into writing a sequel to his scabrous Hollywood satire S.O.B.*

The job was handed off to actor-turned-director Richard Benjamin, whose feature debut, My Favorite Year, was also a period comedy with a leading man who had to be handled just so, Peter O’Toole. Benjamin assured Clint and Reynolds that he was on board with the script as it stood (most of Edwards’s tweaks had been untweaked in rewrites by Joseph Stinson of “Make my day” fame). The picture, retitled City Heat, went before cameras on time and progressed smoothly save for one incident—Reynolds either was hit by a chair in a fight scene (his version) or fell out of a chair in the makeup room (Benjamin’s version) and suffered a jaw injury that led to the onset of a life-altering addiction to painkillers. Clint escaped harm and managed to further expand his influence on his films’ musical components. As Lennie Niehaus recalled, the climax of the movie involved a big nightclub musical number. Having already recruited old-style players Mike Lang and Pete Jolly into the band, he said, “I had the idea to use three pianos. Clint asked, ‘Who’s going to play the third piano?’ I replied, ‘What about you?’ He said he’d give it a try. Clint’s playing worked out great and ended up both in the movie and on the soundtrack album.”

The divorce that Clint and Maggie had been working toward since 1979 came through in the spring of 1984, and in April of the following year, Maggie and Henry Wynberg were married quietly in a small ceremony in Hawaii. As was expected, Maggie was given the custom-built Pebble Beach house and one half of Clint’s earnings, investments, and holdings, with a value somewhere in the $20–25 million range. The two stayed connected on some business affairs and, of course, on the raising of their children, and in time they came to rely on one another as old friends. Looking back on their time together, he acknowledged, “I wasn’t always the good guy I could have been.” But, he said, “I haven’t run away from members of my family, either. I’m a very integral part of their lives. . . . My ex-wife and I are still business investors, and when she needs something, [my partner] and I are the first ones there.” But after more than thirty years of being legally wed, they were no longer.*

It takes so much time to develop and plan a feature film that you can’t really pivot from a disappointment to a reliable formula overnight, even though it can seem that way to audiences or to someone skimming a filmography. So, yes, City Heat had taken on the vibe of a looming catastrophe, and the divorce was costing him a dizzying sum, but it was nonetheless impossible for Clint to have chosen his next film as a reaction to an impending flop or financial blow. In reality, it had been simmering for a few years.

He was off to Idaho in the early fall to shoot a Western, his first since The Outlaw Josey Wales, the story of a mystery man who rides into a remote mountain mining village and helps the struggling families there defend themselves against the ruthless corporate mining company that wants to drive them from their claims. If the character sounded like the ones he played for Sergio Leone or in his own High Plains Drifter, and if elements of the plot resembled George Stevens’s beloved 1953 Western Shane, those weren’t necessarily bad things. The Leone films had, by 1984, accrued the patina of classic respectability, and Clint was developing a taste for revisiting established themes and tropes with a sharper, more interrogative eye. The new project, titled Pale Rider, was written by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, the team behind The Gauntlet, and had been under option at Malpaso since 1978 or so. Now the time was right.

The usual Malpaso crew, plus actors Carrie Snodgress, Michael Moriarty, Richard Dysart, and Chris Penn, were among the throng of a hundred or so who would make the picture in Idaho’s Sawtooth Range, some thirty miles from Clint’s ski chalet in Sun Valley. The production ran into some resistance from local conservationists, who declared that no promise from the movie studio to leave the setting as it was found could be trusted. But Malpaso took its brief stewardship of the land seriously—the story took the side of hippie-ish mom-and-pop miners against industrial miners with land-scarring hydraulic equipment—and so an agreement was reached and a bond was posted. The shoot ran from late September into November, imparting an appealing autumnal feel to the jagged peaks of the surrounding mountains, a look completely distinct from Clint’s other Westerns as director or actor. (The natural look of the film wasn’t something he stumbled upon: In a rare bit of seat-of-your-pants directing, Clint impulsively delayed one day’s scheduled work for a few hours and scurried up a peak with a camera crew because he felt certain that the weather was changing and the autumn foliage around him might not see another day. While the full cast and crew sat around, he went off to get the shot; that night it rained, and, according to associate producer David Valdes, “The next morning, every leaf was off the trees.”) And while Clint’s title character may have superficially resembled roles he’d played previously, he took care to make him distinct. For one thing, this character has communitarian concerns. Further, his character’s past, which is never spelled out but is clearly the root of his actions in defense of the mining village, is visible in his body, which carries bullet wounds, and in the way Bruce Surtees’s camera catches him. “I wanted him to be scarred up,” Clint said, “not just with physical scars but with emotional ones. I probably lit myself a lot more harshly than another director would have dared.”

After a premiere at the Montreal World Film Festival, Tightrope opened in mid-August. It got the best reviews of any of Clint’s movies since Escape from Alcatraz. Variety picked up on the Hitchcockian elements of the script and praised the acting, the cinematography, and the scenes involving Alison. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, “Tightrope may appeal to the Dirty Harry fans, with its sex and violence. But it’s a lot more ambitious than the Harry movies,” and concluded, “I admire it for taking chances; Clint Eastwood can get rich making Dirty Harry movies, but he continues to change and experiment, and that makes him the most interesting of the box office megastars.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote about it twice, declaring that it “isn’t quite top-level Eastwood, but it’s close,” and calling it “a suspenseful, involving detective drama with one of the screen’s most durable tough-guy heroes doing what he does best and still managing to show something new.”

Tightrope is a daring and creepy film, deeply committed to darkness, uncertainty, terror, kink, and an overwhelming fear of seeing one’s most deeply buried impulses come horrifyingly to life in the world. There’s a temptation to see it as the mea culpa of someone bent on sexual compulsion. But even that aspect of it, which is considerable, seems weak next to the film’s obsessive anxiety about rape, prostitution, bondage, S and M, homosexuality, and sexual violence against the protagonist’s children. Even though it’s only a movie and not a psychiatric portrait of its creator, it’s the frankest and most self-damning thing he’d done since The Beguiled.

The film repeatedly doubles Detective Wes Block with the serial killer he’s chasing: They wear the same sneakers, use handcuffs in sex, and frequent the same prostitutes, and Clint even provides the voice for a taunting telephone message from the murderer. (That Clint took the reins of the production from Richard Tuggle is, in a sense, another type of doubling: There is a sense in which only Clint the director can lead Clint the star/icon into such hellish waters.) We know before too very long that Block isn’t the killer, but there are enough flashes of that possibility early on to make the very thought that he might be an ongoing, tantalizing prick of the mind.* Block even has a nightmare in which he himself is unmasked as the murderer; it’s all very close to the skin.

It’s strange to say, but such is the iconography of Clint in the early 1980s that it’s possible to accept that he might be a sex-driven serial killer in a way that no other major box office star could pull off. There had been a sufficient thread of sexual violence and sadism around his characters that the audience needn’t stretch to see in him the worst kind of predator, pervert, and murderer. Try to imagine painting the likes of, oh, Burt Reynolds, Sylvester Stallone, or Harrison Ford with the colors that Clint wears in Tightrope and it becomes laughable. On him, though, they seem to blend with not only his galaxy of characters but with the man himself. It’s a fascinating, terrible kinship.

In the course of the film, Block engages in kinky sex, suggests that he may have had sex with men, confesses that his ex-wife preferred rough sex, has frank conversations about sex with a psychologist, and even banters about sexual matters—with a priceless look of horror on his face—with his prepubescent daughter. And while we are not being asked to believe that Clint has personally experienced all of this, the film allows us to believe that these things have crossed his mind and to believe that there is a strain of Puritanism in him that seeks punishment for such thoughts and deeds. Among his films, only Misty and The Beguiled come so close to depicting him as a purely sexual creature—but in those films the peril comes not only from outside but from women, the other. Tightrope is more striking because the threats are ambiguous and because there is a sense that the danger emanates not from spurned women but from the man himself. It’s a film of such raw, self-lacerating confusion, condemnation, and revelation that it could have been made by David Cronenberg.

As it stands, although Tuggle’s name is on the film, it’s clearly a Clint/Malpaso production through and through: the cast of regular faces, the jazz-laced score, and the sense of speedy production, a casual air that sometimes makes the film feel like it was made for television. The decision to shoot in New Orleans (again evocative of The Beguiled) is a brainstorm: the fetid air, the suggestions of vice, the stew of jazz music—it all gives the film a sometimes suffocating authenticity.

And even in a film that includes a fine performance from Geneviève Bujold, Clint’s commitment to the part, his plausible embodiment of a man confronted by his worst and most frightening impulses, is extraordinary. When he was acting for Don Siegel in the early 1970s, he regularly grew in credibility. But for many subsequent years, he seemed to coast. After reuniting with Siegel for Escape from Alcatraz, however, he leaped forward in his ability to dig into himself, discover his vulnerability or even despicability, and render it for the screen. Along with Escape, Bronco Billy, and Honkytonk Man, Tightrope marks a fourth deeply lived performance in just four years. And it’s the most bracing of the bunch because it’s the first time, maybe ever, that he gives us a sense that he has mixed feelings about the work that has made him rich and famous and allows us to consider that he may, in real life, be a heel—or worse. It’s gripping. And it did well with ticket buyers. Despite its well-deserved R rating and its unsettling subject matter, it opened on over fifteen hundred screens, held the number one spot for five weekends, and grossed an eventual $48 million—a remarkable success and his fourth-highest-grossing film to date.

City Heat, which rolled into theaters in early December, just as Tightrope was finishing its run, was another matter entirely. The reviews were scandalously bad. “It evaporates from the mind instantly,” said Variety, no doubt with fingers crossed in hope. “Cumbersome and slight,” noted the New York Times. And Roger Ebert flat out asked, “How do travesties like this get made?” (In accordance with the motherly advice that one should say nothing at all if one has nothing nice to say, nothing more will be said about City Heat. Clint’s piano playing is worth seeing. But: Good lord, what a lousy picture!)

The public sniffed it out for what it was straightaway. It opened at number three, with $6.3 million, less than half the weekend’s other big debut, Beverly Hills Cop. And it shrunk from there, eventually petering out at $38 million against its bloated $25 million budget—at that level, and given the star power of the two leads, a flop. Clint and Reynolds had often talked about someday working together. After City Heat, neither one of them considered the idea again. As Reynolds said decades later, “If you could just release the announcement for City Heat and not have to look at the film, it’d be the most successful picture I’d ever been in.”

Nineteen

In his midfifties, he had reached the stage where honors started to accrue to him. In December 1984, he marked the premiere of City Heat by having his handprints put into the cement in the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, a traditional stunt in which, surprisingly, he’d not yet indulged.* (Inevitably, he signed his square of concrete, “You made my day!”) The following month, still sporting his Pale Rider beard, he went on an extended jaunt around Europe in one of Warner Bros.’ jets to receive recognitions in Paris, Munich, and London. A New York Times Magazine reporter was invited along, resulting in a lengthy profile titled “Clint Eastwood, Seriously” that dubbed the trip “the Clint Eastwood Magical Respectability and European Accolade and Adulation Tour.” It duly reported on a retrospective at the Cinémathèque francaise, which was highlighted by Clint’s introducing Tightrope and being named as a Chevalier des arts et lettres, a significant cultural recognition only slightly sullied by the failure of the national minister of culture, Jack Lang, to be on hand for the ceremony. In Munich, there was a retrospective at the Filmmuseum; in London, at the National Film Theatre. He spoke with respectful interviewers before enthusiastic audiences and, in general, seemed delighted that the tide of critical opinion seemed to be favoring him, even if it was, for now, only overseas.

His newfound reputation as a French icon, coupled with the upcoming summer-season release of Pale Rider, gave the combined minds of Warner Bros. and Malpaso the idea of debuting the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Clint had never attended the event,* but he liked the idea of returning to France; “It’s nice to come to Europe. It’s nice to hear people say nice things, isn’t it?” he’d remarked on his winter jaunt.

Things were starting to turn his way back home as well. A group of critics, especially in Chicago (Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Dave Kehr, Michael Wilmington), but also in New York (Vincent Canby), Los Angeles (Kenneth Turan), and at national magazines (Richard Schickel), were starting to grant him high standing among working Hollywood directors. He saw it as evidence of a changing of the guard at the film critics’ desks at various publications. “There’s a whole new generation of reviewers now,” he said, “and a lot of those people have grown up on my films. . . . When I came in out of left field—European films and everything—to the old generation of critics, Kael and those people, I was a real oddity because my performances were stylized in a way they didn’t understand. But to the newer generation I’m more of a familiar thing.”

And so: Cannes. Warner Bros. and the festival organizers thought it would be appropriate to have him present the film as a special screening-slash-premiere, an event, as Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and Peter Weir’s Witness would be treated. But Clint decided that he wanted the film entered in the official juried competition for the Palme d’Or. “It seems to me part of the fun of being here is to be in competition,” he said. That meant he would be vying against films by the likes of Nicolas Roeg (Insignificance), Alan Parker (Birdy), Peter Bogdanovich (Mask), and Paul Schrader (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters), as well as an array of diverse films from around the world including István Szabó’s Colonel Redl, Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Detective, which was dedicated, in typically inscrutable Godardian fashion, to directors Edgar G. Ulmer, John Cassavetes, and, um, Clint. The ten-member jury sitting in judgment would be presided over by director Miloš Forman.

From the moment his trip to Cannes was confirmed, he created headaches for the festival. Having the single biggest box office star in the world on hand for the duration of the event would be a logistical challenge.* The festival and the studio didn’t want Clint walking around the waterfront and the festival’s main venues and hotels amid the paparazzi, autograph hounds, and film biz bottom-dwellers. So Warner Bros. rented a large yacht for him—the Broka, out of Southampton, England—and moored it at the very outer end of the pier. It would be his home for the duration of his stay.

Aside from attending the gala premiere of his film and sitting for a press conference, his only obligation was to be one of a string of actors from the United States and Europe to formally launch the festival, with the announcement, before the very first screening, “I am Clint Eastwood, and I declare the 38th International Film Festival open.” After that, he was trapped on his yacht. He had a passel of his Malpaso cronies with him and Pierre Rissient, the publicist and Cannes staffer who was orchestrating his recent French excursions. When he asked Rissient if he could take a stroll out on the famed Croisette, the boulevard between the beach and the festival hotels and venues, he was told, “It’s impossible. You’ll be mobbed. You’ll start a riot. . . . They would tear you apart.” He stayed on the Broka, drinking beers, ducking under the uncomfortably low ceilings and bulkheads, ogling bikini-clad (and sometimes unclad) starlets on a neighboring vessel, and sneaking off at night with his posse to some of the celebrated restaurants in the area. Once—once—on the way home from dinner he stopped at the Carlton Hotel bar in the wee hours for a beer. Other than that and his official duties with Pale Rider, he was confined to the boat.

Although audiences at Cannes cheered for Pale Rider, the international press was mixed. But when the film opened in the States at the end of June, many reviews were rapturous. There were quibblers who acknowledged the craft and Clint’s stature as a Western star but complained about the story being familiar and the genre itself being exhausted. But the raves were much louder. Variety, reviewing from Cannes, called the film “satisfying on all levels” and declared Clint “one of the top actor-auteurs in the business.” In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert spent a long time praising Bruce Surtees’s photography and Clint’s staging, then concluded that it was “a classic Western of style and excitement.” In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington, a bona fide historian of the Western, mused that “novelty isn’t always a sign of talent. Sometimes it’s the way a filmmaker brings new inflections and shifting viewpoints, modern variations to old stories that reveal his highest qualities,” and concluded that Clint “proves that his own acting and directing are among the treasures of the present.” And in the New York Times, Vincent Canby made the most remarkable case yet argued in any mainstream American publication for Clint’s body of work:

I’m just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it’s also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a filmmaker. . . . He’s a master of minimalism. The camera does not reflect vanity. It discovers the mythical character within.

To see what’s great about Pale Rider—and it’s a great film, even with caveats—it helps to understand its place in the long history of the Western movie. But even if it were to be the first Western you ever encountered, its qualities would be plainly evident: the production design, which is richly detailed and lived in; the score, which manages to be stately and menacing at the same time; the photography, which is both epic and intimate. (Ebert was right: The film’s play with extreme darkness and blinding light is so powerful that it becomes a theme of its own.) The acting is fine, from the magnetic and haunting lead character to the humbly human community that he comes to help to the rogues’ gallery of villains of varying degrees of perfidy and danger. The action is vibrant; the moody passages absorb and provide depth. The pacing, from shot to shot and sequence to sequence, zips and lingers just as it intends—even at just under two hours, the film breezes along. Any filmmaker would be happy with the way it’s put together, never mind the fact that it happens to have been made by its star.

Yes, the story is derived from Shane, but the finished film isn’t smothered, as Shane is, by stolid, black-and-white morality; and while many scenes in Shane feel as perfect as museum tableaux, there’s something darker and earthier going on here that more resembles real life. True, the bad guys in Pale Rider are completely bad and the good guys completely good. But where Shane is a chaste tale of an almost accidental angel, Pale Rider involves an avenging angel, maybe even a devil, with an appetite for the flesh. (The idea of replacing the cloyingly innocent lad of Shane with a teenage girl who is both subject to her own desire and the desire of others is a stroke of brilliance.) Moreover, it’s worth noting that when Clint spoke about the Westerns that most informed him as a young filmgoer, he never mentioned Shane but rather films with more complex moral shading, such as The Ox-Bow Incident and High Noon. If anything, Shane feels more akin, as storytelling, to Rawhide than it does to the Man with No Name trilogy or Clint’s own previous Westerns.

Pale Rider is steeped in its settings: the mining camps, both human-scale and industrial; the town of LaHood, which exists only to accommodate a robber baron’s needs; and the autumnal and wintry mountainscapes. It’s a film that explicitly evokes religion: The Preacher, as Clint’s character is known, literally appears in answer to a girl’s hopeful prayer for salvation. But it also delves into the supernatural: The Preacher carries the scars of bullet wounds that ought to have killed him, and he has the uncanny ability to turn up just when and where he’s needed. It’s a film that honors honest labor and the respectful husbandry of natural resources. And it’s a film in which—and in this it is different from many of Clint’s previous films—rape is threatened but thwarted and the only sex is consensual and discreet.

Among the cast are a number of stalwarts from Malpaso productions past, including, most prominently, John Russell, whose wicked marshal sports a duster coat like those worn by the bad guys in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and whose cheekbones and neat gray mustache powerfully resemble Lee Van Cleef’s. But it’s the newcomers who most impress, particularly Michael Moriarty as the ineffective but determined spokesman for the mining community; Carrie Snodgress as his common-law wife, who knows the gap between what she has and what she wants; and Sydney Penny as her petulant, blossoming daughter (like Tightrope, this is a film made by someone with a teenage girl in his home, and, as in that film, Clint composed a little musical theme for the character). When he casts beyond the Malpaso stock company, Clint often turns up gems.

The heaviest presence is, of course, Clint’s, and it’s far more interesting and nuanced than anything he’s done in a Western—and maybe anything he’s done period, save Tightrope. His natural tools—his height, his gaze, his stillness—have evolved from a posture to something more like a trope. He is intimidating, yes, but he is also intimating—that is, conveying meanings and suggesting emotions and clearly living an inner life that he refuses to share with other characters (and maybe even with himself) but that obviously informs him and defines his moral compass. He isn’t an empty vessel, but he is, deliberately and knowingly, an opaque vessel, with depths that can only be surmised. It takes time to build that rapport with the camera, with the viewer, with oneself. But after thirty years of living Jack Kosslyn’s dictum “Don’t just do something; stand there,” Clint has evolved a classic screen presence that is also a substantial vehicle of acting.

Inevitably, given that it is built along the lines of a classic Western formula, the film wends toward a climactic shoot-out (which, again, more resembles High Noon than Shane). And the showdown between the Preacher and the villainous marshal reveals that there is a story outside the frame of this narrative—and perhaps outside this realm of existence—involving the two of them. Justice, of a kind, is provided to the mining community, but a greater justice seems to be dealt to the marshal. As the Preacher leaves town, his personal score evened, it seems that he no longer needs to inhabit a bodily form. He fades into the landscape just as he apparently materialized from it, a spirit of the West, not necessarily a human manifestation of it. It’s a beguiling and satisfying coda, more poetic than the similar finales of High Plains Drifter or Josey Wales (or, for that matter, Shane) and more reflective of the moral worldview of the director/star who created it and who makes it impossible to ignore.

The film opened very wide—more than seventeen hundred screens—and overtook Cocoon atop the box office, only to get knocked out itself the following weekend by Back to the Future. Pale Rider continued in the top ten through July and continued to draw audiences through the early fall, topping off at $41 million. It wasn’t a blockbuster by Clint’s standards, but it was his most commercially successful Western yet and a healthy return on Warner Bros.’ $6.9 million budget. Even after the debacle of City Heat, he remained the studio’s most reliable bet.

On paper, Malpaso had begun as a production company that could do more than just Clint’s movies, but he quickly found that he wanted the people who worked for him to work for him only. Almost twenty years into the company’s existence, though, he began to produce a movie not his own without taking credit for it—but also without ceding authority. And the film that would mark Malpaso’s first effort neither starring nor directed by Clint would be an unlikely one indeed.

Though she had a lead role in Sudden Impact and was paid for discovering the material, Sondra Locke didn’t sound overly grateful for her situation when she spoke about the film with the New York Times soon after its release. “You get into a rut being associated with Clint,” she said. (Later still, she was blunter: “My starring in films with Clint didn’t make me toast of the town. I became his appendage. Everything I did was in his shadow.”) And so she began to seek new opportunities, developing scripts of her own and considering acting jobs outside of Malpaso.

In 1982, she played the title role in Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story, a made-for-TV film about the life of the great American singer. The project had come to her via Clint’s chum Merv Griffin, who told Sondra that Clooney had admired her performance in Bronco Billy and wanted to know if Sondra would appear in an adaptation of her memoir about recovering from a nervous breakdown. It would be Sondra’s first work without Clint in more than six years, and she sensed that he had mixed feelings about her taking the part. But he was immersed in Firefox and Honkytonk Man, films that offered no viable roles for her, so she did it.*

In 1985, Clint and Sondra worked together for the first time since Sudden Impact. He had accepted an invitation from Steven Spielberg to direct an episode of Amazing Stories, a Twilight Zone–inspired anthology series he was showrunning for NBC Television.* “Vanessa in the Garden,” the twenty-five-minute short film Spielberg had written and offered him, was an old-timey Gothic tale of a painter whose wife has died in an accident and whom he believes he can bring back to life with his art. It was an odd choice of material for Clint—a supernatural romance set at the turn of the twentieth century. And for his leading man he had chosen (or had had chosen for him) Harvey Keitel, another unlikeliness, an actor whose aura and process were so far from Clint’s métier.

But casting Sondra as an ethereal presence, perhaps even a ghost, was entirely apropos—not only because of her screen presence but because, in his mind at least, she and he were drawing apart. Not only had he strayed from his self-avowed monogamy with her, but the cast of “Vanessa,” Sondra later said, included “a woman he’d met on Tightrope—someone he was having an affair with. . . . I’m repulsed by how comfortable he was working with both of us side by side.” The episode—stilted and silly and not romantic or spooky or authentic for a second—aired in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and fared notably poorly in the ratings.

After, when Sondra once again found that Clint was working on projects for which he explained she wasn’t suited, she resolved to find something for herself. She came across Ratboy, by screenwriter Rob Thompson, an allegory or fairy tale about a journalist who discovers a boy who is part rodent and exploits his story despite his reluctance. The script reminded Sondra of E.T. and The Elephant Man, and she decided that not only did she want to play the journalist, but she wanted to direct the film, despite never having directed even so much as a one-act play.

She initially conceived Ratboy as a completely independent project, but Clint stepped in, getting the film financed by Warner Bros., putting the Malpaso banner on it, giving her an office inside Malpaso’s bungalow, and insisting she use Fritz Manes as producer—as well as other key Malpaso colleagues such as Bruce Surtees, Lennie Niehaus, editor Joel Cox, and production designer Edward Carfagno. His name wouldn’t be on it, but his spoor was everywhere, and Manes, in particular, made it clear to Sondra whenever she made a major creative decision that Clint should be asked to sign off on it. As she recalled, everything she did was run past Clint, and he disapproved of most of her inspirations, even with Manes pitching them.

Clint was especially upset by how much Gordon Anderson was involved in Sondra’s creative process. Gordon rewrote chunks of the script, consulted on costumes and sets, and—worst of all, in Clint’s eyes—cast himself in a supporting role. Sondra presented all of his ideas to Clint, who rejected them out of hand, leading to vivid arguments. On her own, she decided that Gordon would provide the voice of the title character off camera (the former Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeer Sharon Baird physically acted the part on film). She arranged for Clint and his Malpaso casting associates to listen to audition tapes of various anonymous candidates for the gig; when they all selected Gordon, she revealed who it was, and Clint seethed.

His public comments about his involvement in the film were a picture of easygoing equanimity. “I was going to try to be available,” he said, “in case there was any kind of difficulty, but it never happened. Once, while I was driving up north, I stopped by while they were shooting in Marin. I hung around for a while and just watched, and then I thought, ‘Well, they certainly don’t need me around here.’” But to hear Sondra tell it, she had journeyed into Hell to make the movie and dragged it back with the last bit of strength in her body.

That she chose to go up against him at all was notable. She had seen evidence of his temper, his need to dominate, his consternation when having his judgment questioned. She had seen Bob Daley simply erased from Malpaso, and she knew well Clint’s moods, turns of humor, and need to even scores. Even at a happier time, she told Cosmopolitan, “Never do anything you want Clint Eastwood to forget, because he remembers everything. . . . People can know him for years and never know what he’s thinking. . . . He’s always unapproachable to some degree.” Maybe she thought she was immune.

Ratboy premiered in September 1986, at the Deauville American Film Festival in France, which was a canny choice for a picture that needed delicate handling. But it was clear that Warner Bros. had no idea what to do with it. They opened it the following month at two theaters in New York, where Janet Maslin of the New York Times deemed it “energetic but skittish . . . aimless and sentimental, not to mention disorganized.” The studio waited a full month before debuting it on a single screen each in Seattle and Chicago. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune called it “an intriguing curiosity” and praised Sondra’s direction for its “strong personality.” It would be another four months before the film debuted in Los Angeles, but again, it was shown on only a single screen, and only briefly. It had caused a stir in France, predictably, but in the United States it never grossed more than about $3,000 in a given week—and most weeks far less than that. She had done what she wanted to, independent of Clint, and the enterprise had lost money. And whether she knew it or not, those were both strikes against her.

In its dozen years of existence, the Hog’s Breath Inn had become a Carmel institution, but its fame could cut more than one way. Yes, it was profitable, but it had become synonymous with a loutishness that felt a little, well, un-Carmel. For instance, the annual PGA Pebble Beach golf tournament had become a kind of Mardi Gras weekend for the Hog’s Breath crew, to the point where some of the professional competitors blanched at their presence. “Trying to concentrate with Dirty Harry’s gang moving around is disconcerting,” said PGA veteran Hale Irwin during the 1984 event. “Some of the people act like they don’t even know a golf tournament is going on.”

But many of them had come to watch Clint and not the world’s best golfers. The previous year, when he drove a ball into the ocean, the crowd cheered. It had become common knowledge that the tournament was one of the few ways anyone could count on seeing him around town. (He’d acquired the nickname “the Phantom of Carmel” for his pattern of being spotted only when leaving an establishment.) The crowds who filled the Hog’s Breath in hopes of glimpsing its famous owner had all but chased him away. The homey joint had morphed into a tourist attraction, with autograph hounds and photo snappers and groupies. And while Clint may have enjoyed the attentions of that latter variety of guest, the bar that was once his clubhouse had turned into someplace where he couldn’t relax.

So when he felt like grabbing a beer, he visited the bar inside Bud Allen’s La Playa Hotel, an old-fashioned drinking joint that once a day, at the bartender’s whim, hosted a ten-minute happy hour during which you could get a drink for ten cents only if you had exact change. By 1984, Allen was seeking to open a stand-alone spot that he wanted to call It’s Bud’s Pub. But when he faced Carmel’s town planning commission, he was grilled about the name, which they believed overly emphasized alcohol use. The panel rejected his licensing request at that first hearing, despite the testimony of the chief of police—himself a sitting member of the planning commission—that the site was already a cocktail lounge.

Allen faced this unpleasant reception despite being the town’s favorite publican and happy-go-lucky honorary uncle. But Carmel didn’t really do happy-go-lucky. It seemed a relic from a buttoned-down time, zealously intent on preserving quaint ways that had long lost currency elsewhere. It was a town with perhaps a thousand times as many trees as residents, with a venerated past of rejecting change (one mayor had campaigned with the boast, “If you want progress, don’t vote for me”) and a 1929 charter that declared, “The City of Carmel-by-the-Sea is hereby determined to be primarily, essentially, and 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.”

Carmel’s homes had no street numbers and, thus, were ineligible for home delivery of U.S. mail; folks had to go to the post office—the only building in town with an address complete with street numbers—to collect correspondence.* Outside of the small downtown there were no sidewalks. There was no town cemetery or courthouse; there were no parking meters or neon signs. It was against the law to hold a live music performance in a venue that served alcohol. You couldn’t throw a Frisbee on the beach or in a park. It was illegal to sell take-out food; a grocer could sell you two slices of bread, some meat and cheese, and a packet of mustard, but not a sandwich. There was even an ordinance on the books (unenforced, but still) that prohibited wearing high-heeled shoes in the city center.

If all that gave the town its patented charm, it also ran up against the reality of Carmel’s allure as a tourist destination. Over the decades, tourism had caused traffic and parking issues and put a strain on the city’s resources, including its water supply. By the early 1980s, the town of 4,800 residents boasted an array of businesses catering to visitors rather than residents: more than fifty hotels, motels, and bed-and-breakfasts; sixty dine-in restaurants; sixty art galleries; and forty jewelry stores. And this in a town without a dry cleaner or cobbler.

For some people, including the incumbent mayor, Charlotte Townsend, a sixty-something former librarian who rented rooms in her home to help pay her mortgage, the tug-of-war between quality of life and commercial interests was a holy war. She and like-minded civic authorities made a principle of discouraging businesses from innovating or expanding. One restaurateur complained that she had been forced to submit photos of pasta dishes for a proposed Italian restaurant to prove she wouldn’t be opening a pizza-slice joint; the owners of a retail shop had to operate under the sign for the previous occupant of the premises because they couldn’t get permission to raise a new sign of their own.

By the time It’s Bud’s (without “Pub” in its name) passed muster and opened, and Clint heard Allen’s stories of what he’d been put through by the city government, things had gotten worse. The town’s only ice cream parlor had closed, and the planning commissioners had denied an application to replace it, saying that they feared that such businesses taxed the local water supply, created litter, and, in particular, fostered an environment of food being consumed on public streets. It was such a laughable stance that the headline of an article about the matter in the Los Angeles Times referred to Carmel as “Scrooge City.”

At around this time, Clint and his partners at the Hog’s Breath were drawing up plans for a two-story commercial and office building on the vacant lot they owned adjacent to the restaurant. In the style of the day, the exterior would be constructed of glass and plaster—not traditional for Carmel but hardly some postmodern fantasia. The Hog’s Breath’s architects worked with city regulators in conceiving the design, but when the planning commission met to take up the matter, with Clint in attendance, they rejected the plan without making any specific requests for revision.

Clint was infuriated. According to Sondra Locke, he seethed: “They don’t know who they’re fuckin’ with! I’ll build that damn building the way I want even if I have to run the fucking city council to do it.” In public, he was more diplomatic—slightly. “I stood before the city council, hopeful of tearing down a rat-infested building and putting up a new one,” he said. “I stood there and watched these people sort of crap on me.” But there was more at stake than his fury, he told the Associated Press: “There have been hundreds of people who have been sent away in tears or in shambles due to the cruelty of this administration. If they could put me through this, somebody who has a fairly high profile and has access to a certain amount of media attention if I wanted it, then imagine some poor person whose whole life savings is put in a small project.” He and his partners filed suit against the city for imposing “vague, subjective, ambiguous, unintelligible, and obscure” standards on developers.*

In October, he appeared before the Carmel Business Association to speak out against what he saw as a gap between the business community and city government. And he began talking to his chums around town about what he perceived as a rotten situation, where a handful of capricious “killjoys” could impose their opinions willy-nilly. The way he saw it, “We just got a big-city government in a small town.” His grousing became so common during his visits to It’s Bud’s that the proprietor challenged him: “Why don’t you do it?” (As Clint later put it: “After a few glasses of wine, I said I’d do it. Being a very determined person, I decided to win.”)

He liked to call himself “a political nothing,” but he didn’t shrink away when he saw something he didn’t care for. Take the Screen Actors Guild. He’d been a member for decades, but he’d never been particularly engaged (as compared to the Directors Guild, where he at least once served on a strike-preparation committee). But in the early 1980s, with two-time SAG president Ronald Reagan in the White House and liberal firebrand Ed Asner atop the union hierarchy, things changed. Asner was an outspoken critic of Reagan and his policies, and he sought to strip Reagan of his lifetime membership in SAG because of the way his administration had crushed a strike by the nation’s air traffic controllers in 1981. Clint was, per a Variety account, “incensed” by SAG officials’ efforts to punish the president. “How the government solves the legalities of a strike is its business,” he said, “not some screen actor’s.” He called the union’s potential expulsion of Reagan “strictly bullshit” and declared himself to be “embarrassed” to belong to a union that would even consider it.

A couple of years later, when Charlton Heston, another former SAG president, gave a speech in favor of right-to-work laws that would make it illegal to force workers (including screen actors) to join a union, a faction that included Asner voted to censure him, and Heston’s allies, Clint included, protested loudly. “I think we could be entering a dangerous area,” Clint wrote in an open letter to his fellow union members, “where people could be censured for being Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians or whatever. In fact, it wasn’t too many decades ago that many members of our industry suffered from another kind of censure called ‘blacklisting.’” In middle age, he had grown more comfortable with voicing his discomfort, as Carmel—and the world—would soon learn.

He began to actively consider running for mayor. In November 1985, he attended another White House state dinner, this time in honor of Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana, with the latter of whom he was photographed dancing and chatting.* Were politics discussed with anyone that night? Perhaps. Not long after he came home, he paid a campaign consulting firm $7,000 to look into what Carmel’s voters thought the important issues facing the town were, whether they thought the current mayor and administration were up to the task of addressing them, and what they thought of a celebrity running for office.* The firm found that 52 percent of voters favored sticking with the incumbent mayor, and considerably more didn’t want any Hollywood influence on the running of their town. But he didn’t consider himself an outsider or even much of a Hollywood guy: He’d been living in Carmel eighteen years, and his children went to school there. He was one of them.

Still, he knew he couldn’t change the town alone. The mayor of Carmel represented but one of five votes on the city council; he would need at least two allies if he wanted to operate effectively. It happened that two council seats would also be up for grabs, and he found two like-minded citizens willing to seek those spots. The only question left was whether he would pull the trigger and run.

In the last week of January 1986, he was due to make his regular appearance at the PGA’s Pebble Beach tournament. On Wednesday, he stopped by Carmel city hall to get the papers necessary to declare his candidacy. On Thursday, he completed his round in the tournament and appeared at city hall, just forty minutes before the filing deadline, with the paperwork, a petition with thirty signatures supporting his candidacy (ten more than he needed), and the requisite fees. He was officially running for mayor.

Well. Clint’s annual appearance on the links could occasion predictably starstruck press coverage, but this was another thing entirely. The top box office movie star in the world was running for a public office that paid $200 a month. This was news-news. The comparisons with Ronald Reagan were inevitable—the California roots, the right-wing associations, the primate movies, the hair—as were the tedious “Make my day” jokes in headlines and ledes. Commentators speculated that he was using the office of mayor of Carmel as a first step toward Sacramento or the U.S. Senate or even the White House. But Clint insisted that he wasn’t interested in anything other than helping his hometown. And he proved it by giving interviews not to the national press but to the two newspapers that regularly covered Carmel: the daily Monterey Herald and the weekly Carmel Pine Cone, with which he spoke prior to filing his paperwork, claiming that his motive for seeking office was entirely civic. “There used to be a great deal of camaraderie, a great spirit in this community,” he said. “Now there is such negativity. I’d like to see that [old] spirit come back here. . . . I’m doing this as a resident. This is where I live; this is where I intend to spend the rest of my life.” Badgered by reporters from the nation’s media capitals—and, indeed, the globe—he repeatedly begged off, saying, “This is between my neighbors and me.”

In particular, it was between him and three of his neighbors: incumbent mayor Townsend, who had been elected to a second term in 1984, when she ran without opposition and only 25 percent of registered voters bothered to turn out; Paul Laub, an entrepreneur who operated a T-shirt shop downtown, drove a vintage Bentley with personalized license plates, and was once described in a local newspaper as “just rich enough to be a pain in the ass”; and Timothy Grady, a twenty-six-year-old classically trained singer who worked as a dishwasher, lived in a tent on the edge of town, and was campaigning on a platform of depaving the city’s streets and encouraging wildlife to roam the town center.

Laub and Grady, who had no hopes of winning, were delighted by Clint’s entry into the race. Laub began selling pro-Clint T-shirts and started doing handsome business straightaway; Grady was happy to grant an interview about his pet environmental issues to anyone who could track him down. But Townsend was deeply displeased with the hoopla and with Clint’s ideas. “Poor little town,” she moaned. “We don’t need this.” She complained that the ceaseless requests for interviews and media access were interfering with her normal duties; she griped about having to dress carefully each day so that she would be presentable to news photographers who stopped by unannounced; and she groused that Clint, whom she called “a disgruntled real estate developer,” didn’t know anything about civic affairs and wasn’t—as she had always been—available to constituents. “He’ll be the only politician in town who has an unlisted phone number,” she pointed out.

Clint’s campaign consultants suggested that he present himself as just-folks, so he met voters close-up in an effort to downplay his fame, becoming more visible than he’d been at any time since moving to town, but in a homey style. “A high profile might not have made it with the community,” he said. “I gave speeches two, three times a day for nearly three months. Met people at teas, as many as 75, as few as 15. I enjoyed it. Didn’t think I would.” He went door to door to meet constituents, and the media carried stories of housewives who had their hair and makeup done every morning in case he should come knocking.

At the same time, he availed himself of his built-in advantages. His war chest was estimated to be as high as $34,000 (in comparison, Townsend had $6,300, an otherwise record sum for a Carmel mayoral race, which was typically run for about a tenth of that). He opened a campaign headquarters downtown. And he was canny enough when stumping to pull out an old actor’s trick, changing the order of his policies when listing them in speeches and conversations so as not to sound robotic.

The response to his candidacy was electric. Voter registration increased almost 10 percent, meaning there would be 4,142 potential ballots cast in a town of some 4,900 souls.* The rise was so sharp that the nonpartisan League of Women Voters investigated it, assuming that many of Carmel’s downtown business owners, who generally lived outside of town, were using their commercial addresses as home addresses so as to vote for a man who supported their interests. (It turned out that verifying voting eligibility in a town without numbered houses is virtually impossible, and the League found only seventeen cases of potentially false registration.)*

And the media presence was astounding. Reporters and TV crews from all over the United States, Europe, and Asia descended on Carmel, requiring that the largest auditorium in town be converted into a media center. Us and People and Time and Newsweek and the Christian Science Monitor and Spin and dozens of newspapers ran stories. Garry Trudeau spent a week mocking Clint (and the swooning media) in his Doonesbury comic strip. It got to the point that news crews were reporting sightings of other news crews interviewing yet other news crews. If people thought that having a movie star as mayor would bring in floods of unwanted, unsustainable tourism, the election granted them a taste of it. Clint was chagrined: “I never in my foggiest notions thought it would gather as much attention as it did,” he said. “I thought it would attract nothing more than a small mention on the wires. Instead, it put me exactly where I didn’t want to be—on the eleven o’clock news.”

There were only a small handful of bona fide campaign events to cover. The candidates faced off in two forums. During one, Townsend’s microphone failed and Clint fixed it for her. In another, Townsend was being questioned by an aggressive journalist when her campaign chairman interceded, standing chest-to-chest with the reporter. Clint, again, got involved. “You don’t have to intimidate him,” he told Townsend’s manager. “Just shut your face and let her talk. The least you can do is let your client talk.”

The campaign lasted nine weeks. Townsend repeatedly characterized Clint as pro-business and pro-development, which in the crazy calculus of Carmel meant that he was the radical leftist. She insisted that he wouldn’t be sufficiently dedicated to what was, in her experience, a full-time job, and he rebutted her by giving his word that he would put in the hours, cut down his film work, and do what needed doing. Laub kept pumping out and selling tacky souvenirs, including panties emblazoned GO AHEAD, MAKE MY NIGHT. Grady spoke on just about anything to just about anyone who would listen, and now and then he slept on the floors in the hotel rooms of journalists who took pity on him in foul weather.

And Clint continued to express his ideas calmly, clearly, and, by all accounts, thoughtfully to everyone he met—save the media: “What do you all care about this?” he asked a scrum of reporters on election eve. “You’ll all be gone after tomorrow.” His typical message was that he wasn’t seeking to remake the city so much as to restore commonsense comity. It was an echo of Ronald Reagan’s frustration with federal bureaucracy but on a smaller, gentler scale, and it proved popular. A week before the election, a poll gave Clint an anticipated 61 percent of the vote, and Laub dropped out, offering his support to Clint, his fellow businessman. It seemed a sure thing.

On the morning of Election Day, Clint showed up at All Saints Episcopal Church at 8:45 in a dirty yellow Volkswagen convertible to cast his vote. And as soon as the polls closed, Townsend conceded. Almost 77 percent of Carmel’s registered voters had chimed in: 2,166—more than 72 percent of them—voted for Clint, with Townsend claiming 799 votes (or 26 percent), Grady 31, and Laub 6. And both candidates on Clint’s slate of allies were elected as well. The biggest little election on earth turned out to be a romp. He had an actual mandate.

The following morning, he got a phone call from the White House. “What’s an actor who once played with a monkey in a movie doing in politics?” Ronald Reagan joked. (Jimmy Stewart, one of Hollywood’s other highest-profile Republicans, also rang.) He sat in the sun holding up a copy of the Carmel Pine Cone with the banner headline “CLINT WINS” for photographers. He held a press conference for 120 members of the media, speaking mostly in campaign platitudes: “We intend to remain primarily residential. There aren’t going to be any radical changes at all. . . . We’re going back to more personalized service.” Then he excused himself, citing a big learning curve ahead of him, and got about the work of being a small-town mayor.

The whole world had watched the race (in Rome, where Italy’s first McDonald’s was under construction, protesters posted signs reading CLINT EASTWOOD, YOU SHOULD BE OUR MAYOR!). And a good portion of it was still tuned in when he was inaugurated a week later. An estimated thousand people (including some 150 members of the press) showed up to witness the swearing-in of Carmel’s twenty-ninth mayor. But rain drove the event indoors, so that only 10 percent of them could watch in person, while the rest listened on outdoor loudspeakers. He was joined for the occasion by his mother, Ruth, and his sister, Jeanne Bernhardt. After taking the oath of office, he presented Charlotte Townsend a potted redwood seedling, made a few anodyne comments, and, in his first official act, moved to adjourn the meeting. According to the Los Angeles Times, the audience “cheered when Eastwood arrived, when he took the oath, when he spoke, and when he left.”

Two weeks later, he presided over his first public session of the city council. In anticipation of another mob of journalists and tourists, he insisted that all but a half-dozen seats in the fifty-five-person capacity meeting room be reserved for Carmel residents; an overflow crowd of around two hundred, watching a closed-circuit telecast, was accommodated in the city hall parking lot. The six-hour-long meeting addressed an agenda of forty-three items, including, as promised, a resolution to consider applications for an ice cream parlor in the town center. “I hope I never read about ice cream cones again,” Clint quipped.

In June, he turned to the issue that many of his detractors had always assumed had truly driven him to seek office. The council voted 4–1 to expel four of the seven sitting members of the planning commission and replace them with a slate of locals seen as more friendly to change. The ousted parties voiced umbrage. “The way Clint did it stirred up the most resentment,” said Thomas Nash, “especially considering that one of his big issues was bringing politeness back to city government.” “He’s a vindictive man,” said Sandy Swain, one of the planning commissioners who had thrown hurdles in front of Clint’s building proposal and Bud Allen’s pub. “You don’t want to get on his hit list.” (Nor on hers: She was soon complaining to the press that Clint’s ascent to the mayoralty had filled the city with “tacky-looking tourists . . . infinitely lower than we’ve ever had before. They’re T-shirt, ice cream–looking people.”) His response? “There are a few of the old guard who are disenchanted because they were thrown out of office, who would still like to drive a wedge in between residents and business.” He was elected, in his view, to work, and, as ever, he carried on with the job in front of him.

Neither his ex-wife, Maggie, nor his current partner, Sondra, had been visible during the election, and neither was present for the swearing-in. Maggie might not have wanted anything to do with it all, but Sondra still considered herself his partner, and she felt that the time he was devoting to Carmel was time taken away from them as a couple. As she would later remember it, when she was preparing Ratboy, he began to spend more and more time away from their shared home in Bel-Air. She didn’t relish being apart, but she never felt entirely at ease in Carmel, where Maggie had long held the title of Mrs. Eastwood and continued to live actively and visibly with her kids. And some locals spoke frankly about their dislike for Sondra: “She looks at you like she’s expecting you to ask for her autograph,” a saleswoman at a shoe store told People. But if he continued to go there as a condition of his need for independence, she was grudgingly willing to accept it.

What she didn’t know—what wouldn’t be known for some years—was that he had taken up with another woman. Sondra had been wondering about the amount of time Clint was spending with Jane Brolin, who had divorced her husband, James, in 1984 and who often seemed to be buzzing around Clint. But she had no idea that he was involved with Jacelyn Reeves, a sparkly thirty-three-year-old flight attendant living near Carmel whom he’d met at the Hog’s Breath Inn and whom he immediately tried to sweep off for a tryst. Reeves initially demurred, but a few weeks later she and Clint consummated their mutual attraction and began an ongoing affair. As with Sondra, as with Roxanne Tunis, and as with at least one young woman in Seattle back in the ’50s, his sexual exploits resulted in a pregnancy. In March 1986, less than three weeks before Carmel’s mayoral election, Reeves delivered a baby boy, Scott Clinton Reeves, at a hospital in Monterey; the space on the birth certificate in which the child’s paternity would normally be ascribed read simply “father declined.” Some two years later, in February 1988, Reeves had another baby by Clint, Kathryn Ann Reeves; as in the case of her older brother, the birth certificate did not name a father.

Twenty

While he was mounting and running his campaign and learning the ropes of his mayoralty, he kinda-sorta kept to his word about cutting back on film work. But he had a project in the pipeline that he would have to finish—and, ironically, it hearkened back to his first experience of Carmel, when he was an army enlistee up the road at Fort Ord.

Heartbreak Ridge was written by James Carabatsos, a Vietnam veteran with a couple of credits in a decade of screenwriting. It came Malpaso’s way in 1984 and had gone through revisions by some of Clint’s usual writers. The story concerns a hero of the Korean and Vietnam Wars who has never risen above the rank of sergeant because of his anti-authoritarian attitude. Staring down mandatory retirement, he’s assigned to a base where he once served, ordered to oversee a motley platoon that he must lead into combat during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. Clint loved the notion of an accomplished man of action who couldn’t curb his disgust with his bosses, but he liked, as well, the opportunity to explore the idea of a man facing the end of his professional prospects. “I’ve always been infatuated with military guys who come to the end—who face mandatory retirement,” he said. “Nowhere to go, nothing to do. They may have saved enough to open a bar or maybe make a down payment on a small farm.”

He wanted to shoot at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, and thus needed the approval of the U.S. Army. In April 1985, he visited the Pentagon to pitch the project. And the Defense Department was keen on working with him, at least at first. “A film with Clint Eastwood in uniform,” said a spokesman, “would be great.” But the script was filled with profanity and behavior that violated standard military procedures and decorum, so it was denied approval.

“They’re playing down the regular army and playing up the ‘Be all that you can be’ end of it,” Clint said. “Since I wasn’t making an army training film, I stuck with what I wanted to do.” He turned the protagonist into a marine and had Fritz Manes, a former marine himself, petition the Marine Corps for approval. Manes got the green light to shoot at Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego (with combat sequences to be shot in Puerto Rico), and production was scheduled for the summer of 1986. (The use of a West Coast location made it easier for Clint to attend to mayoral duties during the shoot.)

Still, the production was riddled with hassles. The Marine Corps assigned a compliance officer to the production (as did the army, even though it had passed on the film) and objections arose over small details, plot elements, dialogue, even whole sequences. Clint had depended on Manes to smooth things over with the military liaisons, but Manes, at least in Clint’s view, demonstrated more respect for and allegiance to the Marine Corps than he did to the film. Clint began to feel frustrated with Manes’s work and, despite having known him since boyhood, found increasingly that he didn’t want him around.

But there were grace notes to the shoot. Marsha Mason played Clint’s character’s ex-wife, and she remembered a scene in which they slow danced. He led her around the floor in ways that differed from rehearsal. After the shot, when she asked about it, he told her, “I was watching the light play across your face and wanted to make sure it was good.” She was impressed: “The man can act, dance, and direct all at the same time.”

Heartbreak Ridge debuted in December, the Department of Defense and the Marine Corps both having publicly withdrawn their endorsements, citing the profanity and the distortion of historical events surrounding the invasion of Grenada. Perhaps more damaging, it hit theaters seven months after Tom Cruise’s smash hit Top Gun, and while the two films have very different ambitions and messages, it’s also clear that the success of Tom Cruise’s blindly jingoistic bros-and-bombers movie, virtually an ad for the navy, made Clint’s more clenched film seem superfluous or, at least, out of style. Heartbreak opened at number two and remained in the top ten for six weeks, but it grossed only $42 million, compared to more than four times that amount for Top Gun—another hit on paper for Malpaso and Warner Bros. but hardly a juggernaut.

Critics appreciated some aspects of it (Clint’s performance, the focus on the lot of the military wife) while dismissing, by and large, the story. “It requires a certain crazy vision to transform the American invasion of Grenada into the equivalent of Iwo Jima,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times. Among major reviewers, only Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune was unreserved in his praise, concluding it was “a film of genuine substance and courage.” The most curious aspect of all of this was that even the largely negative reviews seemed to hedge, as if Clint had become respectable in a way that made critics think twice before slamming him. Where he was once a butt of humor and his pretension to filmmaking a joke in and of itself, it was now taken for granted that his movies—and his acting—had significance and weight.

But, really, Heartbreak Ridge didn’t merit so much respect. Most every character is a walking cliché, the redemption tale is dubious, the action sequences are crudely built, the humor is cruel and infantile. Clint obviously revels in the role of Tom Highway—a near-parody of his middle-aged persona, with his scowl and rasp and contempt—and there’s a rather sweet and grown-up thread connecting him and his ex-wife (he reads women’s magazines to court her). But the main trunk of the narrative, about a renegade platoon whipped into shape and then going off to war, is lousy with silliness and never remotely involves significant stakes. (The idea that victory over a vastly outnumbered and outgunned enemy makes up for Highway’s experiences in Korea and Vietnam trivializes everything the film wants to ennoble.) The chief interest is the spectacle of Clint transformed into a square-jawed, muscled leatherneck—a parade-float version of his off-camera image. (Mario Van Peebles amusingly spoofs his sergeant/director’s voice a couple of times.) But we know early on, when Highway stands monumentally beneath an American flag rippled by the wind against a pure blue sky, that this is a film without a mirror or a calendar: a John Wayne World War II movie, at heart, made in the same year as Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Good luck with that . . .

Back on the battlefield of Carmel politics, Mayor Clint was making good on his campaign promises. In October, by which time the city council meetings had been moved to a 250-seat auditorium to allow for the crowds that never seemed to wane, a new downtown ice cream parlor was approved, as were new public bathrooms, a new staircase down to the main city beach, and an annex to the town library. He introduced stricter laws about art fraud within the city’s active gallery business. A city body charged with enforcing architectural uniformity was shut down, and a new general plan for the city, envisioning ways to provide for both preservation and growth, was commissioned. He had promised to make things happen; he delivered.

His authority wasn’t absolute. His former campaign opponent Paul Laub had turned the basement of his downtown T-shirt shop into a business he called “Clintville,” with T-shirts, mugs, posters, and other items inscribed with goofy versions of Clint’s most famous movie lines and tropes. Clint, who considered the business “a blight on the community,” tried to shut the thing down, citing zoning violations, but Laub merely moved the junk upstairs to be in compliance. So Clint negotiated a deal for a portion of the profits on items related to him, sold by Laub or anyone else in town, to be allocated to the Carmel Youth Center, a local institution he had long supported with personal donations. He also endured a testimonial dinner, later aired on CBS as All-Star Party for Clint Eastwood, which raised money for his efforts to fight teenage drug addiction in the Carmel area. A galaxy of Hollywood legends, some of whom he’d worked with or was friendly with, some not, turned out, including Lucille Ball, Sammy Davis Jr., Cary Grant, Merv Griffin, Bob Hope, Don Rickles, Jimmy Stewart, and Clint’s family, including his mom, sister, kids, and Sondra Locke.

One insoluble issue continued to loom over Carmel. At the south end of town, on a twenty-two-acre site with a history dating back to the mission era, Mission Ranch, a onetime dairy farm that had morphed into a sprawling bed-and-breakfast resort, was falling into disrepair, and the owners wanted to raze it and build condominiums. The city and the property owners had been back and forth in court and in the local newspapers, and the development seemed likely to go through unless somebody bought the site. Carmel officials had offered $3.75 million, approximately three-quarters of the city’s annual budget, but the owners were asking for $5.5 million. In December 1986, Clint solved the dispute in a way only he could: He flat out bought the place himself, vowing to preserve the historic buildings and pristine pastures as they were, to perform essential upgrades to the plumbing and electricity, and to refurbish the hotel rooms and the kitchen and bar in the main building. “Maybe the world doesn’t allow you to keep things the same,” he told the Carmel Pine Cone, “but we can try.” The property relaunched in 1992 as a deluxe resort with an old-timey feel and was featured in the travel sections of newspapers and in the pages of Architectural Digest, where Clint waxed semi-poetic about the pleasures of traditional decor.

It wasn’t his first significant act of conservancy in the area. Three years prior, he and James Garner donated a parcel of three hundred and fifty acres that they’d bought in 1968 to Monterey County. And buying Mission Ranch wasn’t entirely altruistic. With the purchase, conducted through Tehama Productions, a company his financial advisers had constructed for his real estate holdings, he stood to become a significant hotelier in the city and expand his restaurant business. Significantly, however, he didn’t add to or alter the site, and even his political enemies tipped their caps: Sandy Swain, one of the planning commissioners he’d fired, acknowledged, “It was a magnificent thing that he did.”

He stayed in Carmel to see after his mayoral duties for most of 1986 and ’87. As a result, he fell out of the box office top ten for the first time since he entered the list in 1968. But he still had film projects bubbling up. He was considering another Dirty Harry movie, based on a script idea by his vitamin-and-enzyme gurus Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. And he had in mind a far more ambitious venture, one that would take him well beyond anything he’d tried on-screen and would satisfy a lifelong itch.

He had always hated the way Hollywood films depicted jazz music. Take, for instance, 1950’s Young Man with a Horn, starring Kirk Douglas as a brilliant but alcoholic musician, loosely inspired by the life of the doomed Bix Beiderbecke. As Clint remembered, “The breathing was off, the dubbing was terrible, and the plot line—I thought, ‘Oh, God, what have they done?’ and went out of the theater dejected.” He had championed jazz explicitly in Play Misty for Me and in several other film scores. He wanted to make a movie focused on the music, and he was aware that just such a project was under development at Columbia Pictures. Written by Joel Oliansky for producer Ray Stark, it was the story of another doomed real-life horn player, legendary bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker (aka Yardbird, or just Bird), who had blown teenage Clint’s mind when he had seen him perform some forty years prior.

The film had most recently been worked up as a vehicle for Richard Pryor, whom Clint felt was wrong for the part. (“He’s done some wonderful things,” he explained later, “but you’d see Richard Pryor, not Bird. People would be expecting a lot of gags.”) He had a different vision of the movie, and he thought he could get his hands on the script. It turned out that there was a project at Warner Bros. titled Revenge, a thriller-slash-romance by the novelist and poet Jim Harrison. It had been offered to Malpaso, and Clint hadn’t been especially interested in it. But he learned that Stark was keen on making the picture with Kevin Costner, then still ascending as a star. Clint asked Warner Bros. if they’d be willing to trade the Harrison script for the Charlie Parker script.

It turned out that Warner Bros. was interested in the notion as well; it had enjoyed a critical and commercial success in 1986 with Round Midnight, writer-director Bertrand Tavernier’s film about a (fictional) jazz legend, a film that Clint, whom Tavernier had long championed in his days as a critic and publicist in France, had encouraged the studio to finance and distribute. The idea of a jazz film with Clint’s name on it was intriguing, and the bargaining with Columbia began. (According to Clint, when Ray Stark learned of his interest, he asked, “Now how is Clint Eastwood going to play Charlie Parker?”) In mid-1987, it was announced that Clint’s next film would be the Charlie Parker story, titled Bird, and it would be the first film since Breezy that he would direct but not appear in.

Also not appearing, on-screen or in the credits, would be Fritz Manes. Despite their four-plus decades of friendship, despite Manes’s work as producer or production manager or assistant to the producer or some such title on every one of Clint’s films from The Outlaw Josey Wales to Heartbreak Ridge—fourteen movies in all, in half of which he appeared on-screen in cameo roles—he was canned. The struggles around Heartbreak Ridge, on top of Manes’s working as troubleshooter-slash-liaison for Sondra on Ratboy, had made Clint feel that Manes had exhausted his usefulness. In time, the two men would disagree specifically about how this reversal had happened. Clint stated bluntly in a 1997 interview, “I promoted him into a position, and he didn’t perform.” Perhaps stung by that public rebuke, Manes spoke with Patrick McGilligan for his 1999 biography of Clint and declared, in an interview he would come to regret, “With this guy, if you got any credit for anything it was a miracle. He used to choke on the word ‘producer.’”

Whatever the cause, the manner of the dismissal was notably harsh. As with the ouster of Bob Daley from Malpaso five or so years earlier, Clint didn’t confront the matter head-on. Instead, with the excuse that he wasn’t making movies while serving as mayor, he had his secretary tell Manes that the company was shutting down and that he was no longer needed or even on the payroll. Oh, and could he return his company vehicle and the audio and video equipment that he’d been using? Manes soon learned that Malpaso was still functioning, if hibernating, and that he was the only person being let go. He never understood why he was exiled. “My friendship with Clint was one of the most beautiful things in my life,” he said. “I don’t really know what happened, but I don’t have a harsh word for him.” He would set up as an independent producer, and he would serve on the California Film Commission, but he never got another screen credit. He would continue to live in the Sherman Oaks home that Clint had sold him, its walls and shelves adorned with mementos of his time working with his childhood pal. And he would, memorably, appear one more time in Clint’s story.

Even if Clint himself wasn’t going to appear in his next movie, making it would still entail being pulled away from his duties as mayor. By September 1987, he was treating the position more as a ceremonial matter than as a wholly consuming responsibility. That month, he welcomed the world to Carmel in the person of Pope John Paul II, whom he greeted at the airport in Monterey and to whom he loaned the mobile trailer that served him as his home and bolt-hole when he was on location making movies. (“He blessed it for us,” Clint recalled.) The pontiff visited the historic Carmel Mission, where Clint attended a brief ceremony in which the Pope celebrated the life of Father Junipero Serra. The following month, King Juan Carlos I of Spain dropped by, joining Clint in the dedication of the Clint Eastwood Youth Program for young people fighting drug addiction, and meeting with a group of Native Americans who were protesting the treatment of their ancestors at the hands of Spanish missionaries and soldiers.

That same month found Clint on a movie set for the first time in more than a year, directing Bird. True to his word, he didn’t cast any familiar faces in the film. Parker would be played by Forest Whitaker, a tall, bulky, twenty-six-year-old actor who was known at the time for supporting roles, sometimes in just a single but strong scene: The Color of Money, Platoon, and Good Morning, Vietnam. He had a musical background: He had once studied voice with an eye toward an opera career, and he knew his way, at least a little bit, around a horn, albeit the trumpet. But he had never carried an entire picture, not even close; it was a gamble.

And Clint rolled the dice equally on the part of the leading lady, Chan Parker, Bird’s common-law wife,* on whose memoir Joel Oliansky had largely based the script and who was consulting on the production. As he recalled, he’d asked casting director Phyllis Huffman to throw out a wide net and bring him videotape of the best candidates. (His own experience of being rejected in casting offices—as well as his aversion to delivering bad news—made him loath to attend auditions. “I just can’t put actors through that,” he said, “and I hate to build up people to think they’re really close to something and then have to turn them down.”) For Chan, he said, “Phyllis brought in a bunch of tapes of actors, and Diane Venora was the first one to read on the tape. And Phyllis says, ‘OK, now do you want to look at any of the others?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. I’ll cast her.’ And she says, ‘Well, don’t you want to look at the others?’ I said, ‘No. No, I don’t want to look at the others. Cast her. We’ll look at the others on the next film.’”*

Other key parts would go to Michael Zelniker, Samuel E. Wright, and Keith David: not a big-name actor anywhere in sight. And the film was going to include lengthy musical passages, Clint said, to satisfy his personal desire to see the music represented properly on film for once. As he put it, “Jazz buffs . . . say to me, ‘Is this going to be another of those pictures where they play four bars and then everyone starts talking?’ I told them it wasn’t going to be that kind of movie.” So, for the record, he had no real star-stars, a likely two-and-a-half-hour-plus running time, and a story about not only jazz but experimental 1940s jazz and an addict protagonist who self-destructed at age thirty-four. A perfect formula, in short, for Warner Bros. to lose every penny of the money—anywhere from $8 million to $11 million was reported at the time—it would cost to make.

Of course, he had leverage with the studio. “Warners might not have done that for someone else. . . . I said, ‘I don’t know if this thing will make any money—it’s about jazz, it’s not very commercial, it’s a tragic story. But I can guarantee you that I’ll try to make a film you’ll be proud to have your logo on.’”

As part of this great experiment, Malpaso replicated Manhattan’s famed 52nd Street of the bebop era, the jazz mecca that young Clint had dreamed of one day visiting, on the Warner Bros. backlot. There would be some location shooting in Parker’s hometown of Kansas City and in Los Angeles, but Bird, like City Heat, would mainly be made in the studio. Jack Green, serving as Clint’s cinematographer—the job long held by Green’s mentor Bruce Surtees, whose health had taken a turn—was charged with maintaining the director’s favored dark palette, a look that would be pushed in this noirish tale of the jazz nightworld to a nearly monochromatic array of black, white, and gray. And the jazz music would be the occasion of another of the film’s audacious innovations. Malpaso had acquired many hours of unreleased tapes of Bird playing live, recorded in clubs by, in many cases, amateurs with hidden tape decks; sound engineers isolated Bird’s solos from these tracks and used them as the foundation for new recordings, with contemporary drummers, bassists, and trumpeters playing alongside in period-appropriate style. (Whitaker was also put through a very specific boot camp under Lennie Niehaus, a saxophonist by trade, so as to convincingly portray the breathing and fingering.)

All of this delighted Clint, who loved the music and was deeply fond of the idea of making a movie without being in it. As he frequently explained, “As an actor, I’m constantly being fiddled with. . . . Here, I come to the set in my T-shirt and jeans and sneakers, and nobody cares what I look like.” There was no fiddling on Bird, and the result was another speedy shoot. A reporter visiting the set overheard two crew members discussing the schedule one afternoon: “What’s the first shot for tomorrow?” “We’re doing it now,” was the only half-kidding reply. As Green recalled later, he had never seen his boss so happy on a film set. “One time we were sitting behind the camera after a scene with Forest, and Clint said, ‘You know, Jack, I don’t care if anybody sees this movie. I love it.’”

As with Heartbreak Ridge, more than a year prior, he had to balance filmmaking and mayoral responsibilities, and he flew back to Carmel regularly. It didn’t always go smoothly: He went to Sacramento to lobby for more state funding for counties and accidentally expressed the argument that was opposed to his own ostensible position. (He could have pled exhaustion: Joking about a Hollywood studio boss who’d griped, upon being relieved of his post, that the job ate up his weekends, he said, “If David Puttnam really wants to give up his Sundays, let him try being the mayor of a small town.”)* As production of Bird was winding down and he felt the itch—if not the financial incentive—to return to the screen, he was mindful that his two-year term was winding down as well, and the time for filing for reelection was approaching. (He would certainly win a second term handily, so anyone who wanted the job had to wait for him to make a decision.) Just before the filing deadline, he called the Carmel Pine Cone and the Monterey Herald and told them that he was done. He was proud of what he’d accomplished, he said, citing in particular a successful effort to secure more and cleaner water for the city from the regional water management district. But, he said, it was time to move on. In the Pine Cone, which had granted him the privilege of publishing occasional columns, he named his preferred successor (who won). And he presided over his final council session in April 1988, a low-key event that prompted a number of “riding off into the sunset” headlines. “I’ve enjoyed it very much,” he said, “but I have to take care of the personal stuff for a while. If you miss time with your family, you wonder if it’s retrievable time. Sometimes it isn’t.”

In the aftermath of his political adventure, he spoke of his aversion to continuing in public service. “I don’t have any further interest in politics,” he said. “I like being involved locally in my community, but the state of politics right now is so loaded with negativity that I don’t want to get into that plane.” That didn’t stop the George H. W. Bush campaign from short-listing him as a possible vice presidential candidate in the summer of 1988, an honor that he certainly would have refused. By then he was blunt when asked what he thought about politics: “It’s fucked.”*

In an amusing coda to his two years in the belly of Carmel politics, county health inspectors issued a shut-down order for the Hog’s Breath Inn just a few months after he left office, citing violations “too numerous to miss” and leading to a lot of “Really Dirty Harry” jokes and headlines; the problems were addressed and the restaurant reopened after two weeks. It sounded like a routine, if rather acute, safety check that had no political implications or basis, but given the overheated tenor of small-town politics, one couldn’t be fully certain.

While postproduction work on Bird carried on, he donned the tweed jacket, big holster, and San Francisco PD badge again for what would turn out to be the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool. Shooting in San Francisco, with Buddy Van Horn directing, it was as routine as an episode of Rawhide. The story involved a ghoulish game being played by the crew of a low-budget horror movie: drafting a roster of local celebrities with the aim of winning points if one of the folks on your list dies. When people around the film start dying, one in possession of the “dead pool” score sheet, in which Harry is named, Harry goes all Harry to track the killer down.

The Dead Pool wrapped after six weeks of shooting, which meant that Clint could turn his attention back to Bird, which would have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, once again in competition. This time, he would be housed not on a yacht but at the famed Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, about twenty-five miles east of the bustle of Cannes, the preferred hotel of Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, John F. Kennedy, and Clint’s old chums Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. With Sondra Locke along for the trip, he came for the final days of the festival, which saw Bird up against a field that included new films from Claire Denis (Chocolat), Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror), Krzysztof Kieślowski (A Short Film About Killing) and, as with Pale Rider, Paul Schrader (Patty Hearst) and István Szabó (Hanussen).

It wasn’t a knockout lineup, and Bird, the story of a musician deeply valorized in France, could legitimately hope for a warm reception. In the main it was admired. Variety’s review of the Cannes premiere deemed it “most impressive . . . sensitively acted, beautifully planned visually,” and reckoned it “certainly will surprise those stragglers who believe Eastwood’s talents lie strictly with mayhem and monkeys.” But even though most of the reviews were respectful and admiring in this way, they also agreed that the film was long and dark and slow.

When the jury met, Bird didn’t survive the first round of voting for the top prize. Clint had some support for Best Director, but the jury president, Italian writer-director Ettore Scola, unilaterally decided that Forest Whitaker would win Best Actor, and, as Cannes liked to spread the prizes among multiple films, that pretty much sank Clint.* In the end, Pelle the Conqueror took the top prize, and Scola declared that the competition included “no masterpieces in the history of cinema.”

There was one sweet coda to the trip. For years, there had been ice between Clint and Sergio Leone. In 1984, when Leone released Once Upon a Time in America, a gangster movie starring, among others, Robert De Niro, he gave an interview that disparaged his quondam star. “Clint Eastwood,” he said, “throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang. It’s exactly that lowered visor which composes his character. . . . Eastwood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same—a block of marble. Bobby [De Niro], first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers. Clint yawns.”

But that May, Leone phoned Clint at the Hôtel du Cap and asked him to dinner. As Clint recalled, “We went out together one evening and got along better than in all the times we had worked together. I left, and he died. It was almost like he had called up to say goodbye.” Almost. Leone passed, age sixty, the following spring in Rome, still trying to get a picture made, still hoping to catch lightning by the tail as he and Clint once had on the dusty plains in Spain.

The Dead Pool opened in July at number two, just behind Coming to America, with $9 million in ticket sales, and it stayed in the top ten for a month en route to a $37 million take, a slight return for a Dirty Harry movie, perhaps because the character and the concept had grown threadbare after seventeen years.

Critics were generally dismissive, though the Chicago press went for it, particularly Roger Ebert (“smart, quick, and made with real wit”) and Gene Siskel (“easily the second best of the series”), both of whom gave it three and a half stars in print and a thumbs-up on TV. Variety had absolutely no patience for the thing, calling it “exceedingly lame” and declaring that if anyone who made it took it seriously then “the failure is monumental.” And in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington, an outright Clint fan, compared it to a “juggling act with sledgehammers” and deemed it “shallow” and “styleless.”

The Dead Pool is not a good movie, not even by the wobbly standards that Clint had led audiences to expect in the late 1980s, but it does have the virtue of brevity. At ninety-one minutes, it’s the shortest Dirty Harry picture. It’s principally notable for the appearance in the cast of actors who would go on to bigger things: Liam Neeson, still not a star; Patricia Clarkson, always classy, in only her second film role; and, memorably, Jim Carrey, still billed as James and doing contortions and lip-syncing the Guns N’ Roses hit “Welcome to the Jungle” in a sort of satanic rock video scene.* There’s a bit of extracurricular relish taken by the filmmakers in the stabbing death of a film critic who isn’t necessarily Pauline Kael but has a notable physical resemblance to her. There’s a nifty chase scene involving a remote-controlled car filled with plastic explosives—a clever parody of / homage to the famed chase scene in 1968’s San Francisco cop drama Bullitt. And there’s the anomalous spectacle of the members of Guns N’ Roses—including Axl Rose, Izzy Stradlin, and Slash—mourning at a gravesite and turning up as extras in an exploitation movie shoot. But the sad truth is that Harry seems old: Clint doesn’t have the spring required to make the action scenes credible, and the lines on his face seem to come less from the patented squint than from sixty years of wear and tear. It’s an apt farewell to the character because he seems to have run out of gas. But that isn’t to say you ought to watch it.

Twenty-One

In September, Bird had its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, which didn’t award prizes but was a considerable platform for media exposure and, especially, the run-up to Oscar season. Clint had felt overlooked in the past, even with Warner Bros. fulfilling his wish to get attention from awards-granting groups. Surely this film about art and passion would be noticed and rewarded.*

The reviews were largely respectful, if not fond. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin acknowledged the film’s “earnest and immense” nature and the “enormous reserves of energy and affection” in it, but she found it “less moving as a character study than it is as a tribute and a labor of love.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson concluded that “even though, thematically, the movie won’t come clear, Eastwood has succeeded so thoroughly in communicating his love of his subject, and there’s such vitality in the performances, that we walk out elated, juiced on the actors and the music.” And Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune positively gushed: “A brilliant achievement, a biography in which the author and the subject finally merge as fellow artists.” Pauline Kael, on the contrary, who didn’t write a full review, felt prompted, according to the Los Angeles Times, “to go on the road discrediting colleagues who had liked it.”

She was dead wrong. Bird is an altogether astonishing movie, even if you’re not one of the Clint partisans who’d championed the likes of Pale Rider or Honkytonk Man. It’s a subtle but deliberate refiguring of the traditional Hollywood biopic, messing around with time, point of view, and tone in a way that can only be compared to a lengthy jazz solo (if not by Charlie Parker, whose style was far more kinetic than Clint’s familiar cinematic grammar, then perhaps by the more approachably melodic Lester Young). It moves with grace and fluency, it’s handsomely staged and detailed and shot and edited and scored, and it’s built on performances that can be eerie in their immediacy, presence, and verisimilitude. Yes, it’s long. Yes, it’s dark. Yes, it’s hardly uplifting. But it’s powerful and haunting and daring and singular. During the ’80s, Clint enjoyed the support of a group of critics who could praise his movies in ways that seem overmuch decades later. In the case of Bird, it’s almost the opposite: Even the people who raved about it rather undersold it.

For starters, we have Forest Whitaker, who’s on-screen in virtually every scene (and, when not, is often doubled by his younger brother Damon, who plays the teenage Parker). Called upon to embody charm, passion, grief, intoxication, and, of course, genius-in-flight, he demonstrates convincing realism and profound versatility. (He also, in the later passages of the film, when booze, drugs, and illness have ravaged his character’s ability to speak clearly, speaks in a rasp that sounds rather like his director’s famous breathy hiss.) There are no moments of obvious contrivance in his performance, no shortcuts, no good-enoughs; Whitaker would go on to become a familiar name and an Oscar winner, but at this moment in his rising career, you could be forgiven for forgetting that he’s an actor playing a part and thinking instead that you’re watching the actual Parker’s actual words and behavior.

Diane Venora is equally fine as Chan, feisty and loving and strong and brokenhearted and too devoted to hipness to take sufficient care of herself. She’s a fascinating presence in her own right, with her proto-beatnik attitudes, mien, and style (“I was born to drive men crazy!” she delightfully declares, and the way she regularly calls her husband “man” is impossibly charming), but she also provides the film’s moral and social anchor. We can appreciate the glory of Parker’s art on its own, but the more we can see him alongside or through the eyes of Chan, who loves him for who he is, the more we can appreciate his humanity. And while his arc is mainly a downward tumble, hers is a series of twists and ascents and crashes: Even though he’s the center of the film, she’s the heart of the dramatic structure—and, indeed, the heart of the film’s heart.

At the heart of Clint’s heart, most surely, is Parker’s status as a loner dedicated to his artistic vision in the face of audience confusion, vulturous commerce, and societal expectations. It’s a stretch to imagine that he sees himself in Parker—he can only, for instance, imagine the racial struggles the film plainly depicts, the drug use from which it never shies, and the Olympian grandeur of Parker’s musical virtuosity and genius, continually on display. But he emphasizes the tug-of-war between Parker’s work and his domestic life because that’s where he feels most connected to the material: When Bird is onstage or in the recording studio, Clint is watching him; when he’s dealing with his marriage, his sexual conquests, his children, and his personal responsibilities, Clint is clearly sharing at least some of his struggles with him. The verisimilitude of this material humanizes both the subject and the creator.

The look and feel of the film are plausibly antique and lived-in. The pace and flow are seamless and transporting. The dark, dark photography, so often punctured with flashes and splashes of red, is gorgeous. And the music is both shot and played in a way that transcends the phony quality of so many previous biopics about jazzmen; not only did the technical wizards bring Parker’s playing back to life, but Niehaus and a cadre of contemporary players (including Charles McPherson, who doubled Parker’s solos whenever the restored tapes proved unusable) give us a sense of music being created right in front of our eyes and ears. It’s kind of miraculous.

And it’s astounding, too, as a step in the progress of the man who willed it into being. Twice before, Clint, however obliquely, commented on a life in art: Bronco Billy, a mickey-take on the idea of pretending to be a cowboy, and Honkytonk Man, about a man (literally) driven to death by an urge to put his art in the world. Here he gives us a hero who first appears to us onstage and who is most alive and appealing onstage, a man whose very existence hinges on his ability to express himself in his work. Very late in the film, Bird explains the genesis of his art, how he found himself “going inside the melody” of a tune he was improvising and discovering a completely new way to comprehend and perform music. Clint was never a manifesto guy—and he would never remotely claim any relation to Parker—but he could be talking for himself here: In Bird, he transcends for the first (but not the last) time the constraints that life, commerce, Hollywood, and even his own ideas about the possibilities of moviemaking had placed on him. He can’t always go the limit, for any number of reasons, but henceforth he would know that he is able to go the limit; as Parker says, speaking about heroin, “They can get it out of your blood, but they can never get it out of your mind.” Clint would have missteps ahead of him, but he had a new concept of what he could do, of what he wanted to do, because he had conceived and executed Bird.

Warner Bros., too, knew they had something unusual on their hands. Its running time meant that many theaters were reluctant to book it because they could have only a single screening per night. So it was handled like an art film, opening at the end of September on one screen in New York. In the coming weeks, it never played on more than forty or so screens nationwide at any one time and never in more than fifteen or so cities at once. By the end of the year, it hadn’t yet earned $2 million—not even a quarter of its budget. Its best hopes, financially, lay in the possibility of multiple Oscar nominations, which always resulted in a boost at the box office. Fingers crossed . . .

So Clint went off to do something commercial, a movie about another renegade law enforcer (this time, a bounty hunter), another sassy dame (the unhappy wife of a fugitive, who is herself also on the hook for an unmet bond), another road trip through the West (Sacramento, Reno, Utah, and the Sierra Nevada mountains), and another country soundtrack—not a Philo Beddoe movie, but kindred. The twist was that the bad guys in this one were really bad: a right-wing, white supremacist militia espousing anti-immigrant hatred and civil uprising. You know, the stuff of comedy. Pink Cadillac it was called, after a vintage car driven by the fleeing woman, and it would shoot in the fall and early winter on location, with Buddy Van Horn once again directing and Bernadette Peters aboard as the irascible fugitive who, inevitably, becomes romantically involved with the hero.

There wasn’t much to it. But there was a small part, the sister of the heroine, that called for an actress who could match Peters’s red hair. The part fell to Frances Fisher, an English-born American who began her career onstage in New York and appeared in more than two hundred episodes of the daytime soap opera The Edge of Night before transitioning into film, where she was still a new face at age thirty-six. As she later recalled, she didn’t meet Clint during the casting process, but they chatted at a party held at the beginning of the shoot. (“My first impression,” she said, “was ‘He doesn’t look so tough.’”) She, on the other hand, was very much his type: petite and fair and fiery and fit. Before the shoot was over, they became intimate, and they continued to be involved after her brief part wrapped.

But, of course, he was, at least nominally, already involved with an actress.

“I love Sondra,” he told Ladies’ Home Journal in June 1989. “Ten years of being together: Isn’t that proof of love?”

But by the time he asked that question, their troubles had surfaced in the media and even in courthouses.

The rift had been slowly building. First they stopped working together. Then they would be separated by his trips to Carmel. Then he would go off on location to make such films as Tightrope, Pale Rider, and The Dead Pool. There were his affairs, some of which she suspected, and his second set of children, about which she knew nothing.

And there was Jane Brolin. She had always made Sondra nervous, and she was now around more than she’d ever been, visiting Clint and Sondra regularly as she went through a divorce from James. Sondra found Jane a puzzle and a nuisance. Just a few years prior, Jane had created trouble, according to Sondra, by telling tabloid newspapers that Clint had given Sondra a massive engagement ring, which (a) wasn’t true and (b) was seen by Clint as an unacceptable exposure of his private life. Jane became not only a regular visitor to the Bel-Air house but a frequent third wheel on their trips to Rising River Ranch and Sun Valley. Sondra was deeply chary of her—Jane was always insinuating herself into her life, even reaching out to Gordon for gossip, and seemed to share private confidences with Clint increasingly over time.

Sondra still held domain over the Stradella Road house, but Kyle Eastwood had started to attend USC and was staying there occasionally. Kyle was more serious about music than his father had ever roused himself to be, and the massive home offered ample space for him and his bandmates to practice, eat, and hang out. He had a place nearer to campus, but he often crashed in Bel-Air without warning, which Sondra found intrusive. At the same time, she never felt truly at ease in Carmel, and even though she was part of the Hollywood world of Sun Valley, where she and Clint socialized with Dick and Lili Zanuck, Frank and Luanne Wells, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, and Bud and Cynthia Yorkin, she felt that Jane had longer and deeper roots with that crowd, and she was increasingly uncomfortable in that milieu as well.

In late 1988, Sondra had begun work on a second film as director, a thriller called Impulse that had come to her from producer Albert Ruddy and was set up at Warner Bros. with Theresa Russell and Jeff Fahey as the leads. Notably, no one in the cast or crew had Malpaso connections; she was doing this one entirely on her own.

At Christmastime, she, Clint, Kyle, and Alison flew in one of Warner Bros.’ private jets to Sun Valley for their annual skiing trip and the traditional New Year’s Eve party with their Hollywood gang, and Jane was, inevitably, along with them—and, frequently, locked in private conversation with Clint. The holiday season had begun with an odd note when Sondra discovered that her Christmas gift from Clint, a sweater, was identical to one he gave to Jane. In Sun Valley, there was a strain in the air, and she found herself literally ditched by Clint and Jane one afternoon: While she was in the shower, the two of them raced off to a party that Clint had previously told her he wasn’t interested in attending; she only learned where they’d gone when Lili Zanuck phoned from the party asking why she wasn’t there. When Clint returned, she confronted him, but he denied and deflected, then told her he needed to meditate and tuned her out.

The following morning, December 31, Sondra and Jane launched into a sharp-edged conversation, each accusing the other of claiming primacy with Clint. He walked in and made himself breakfast, not saying a word while talk between the two women grew more and more heated. Finally Jane shouted, “Face it, Sondra, Clint doesn’t want this relationship anymore!” Sondra turned to Clint for clarity, and, as she recalled, he launched into a series of accusations about her negativity toward Kyle and toward some of their mutual friends. The angry talk got louder and shriller, and Clint snapped: “I want you both to get out of here and leave me at peace with my children. The Warners plane is going to L.A. tonight, and I think both of you should get on it.” Stunned, Sondra packed her things and got a ride to the airport, where she did not see Jane. The next day, she called folks in Sun Valley to wish them a happy New Year and learned that Jane had never left and was still with Clint, whom she had accompanied to the Hollywood crowd wingding the night before.

And that wasn’t the only beef in which he was involved. In December, before the Sun Valley trip, Clint had pulled up to the Malpaso offices on the Warner Bros. lot only to find that there was a Nissan sedan in his clearly marked personal parking space right outside his front door. So he did what anyone might: He rammed the car with his pickup, moving it into another space and doing some damage to the passenger side. And then he parked, did whatever he’d come to do, and left. The Nissan’s owner, Stacy McLaughlin, was an animation producer with legitimate business nearby; when she returned to her car, she saw a small group of folks gawking at the damage. She went into the Malpaso offices to ask if they’d seen or heard anything, and she was told there’d been an accident and that Malpaso and/or Warner Bros. would take care of her. But when she followed up, she was laughed off. And so she tracked down the people who’d witnessed the smash-up—and who believed it was deliberate—and got affidavits from them, some of which said that Clint had gone into his office and fetched a hammer and had to be restrained from smashing the Nissan’s windows. She filed a suit against Clint in Burbank Superior Court for $1,000 to repair the car . . . and $100,000 in punitive damages.*

Came the winter movie awards season, and Warner Bros. got powerfully behind Bird, which was something, considering that they’d hardly released it into theaters. The studio took out “For Your Consideration” ads—meant to sway Oscar voters—in the trade papers, with blurbs from as many as thirty critics, reaching as far as the University of Texas student newspaper. The film and Clint had been recognized by the NAACP at its Image Awards in December, but that didn’t move ticket buyers the way Academy Award nominations did. And Clint sincerely had reason to believe that this film, with its classic story of tormented genius, its brilliant craftsmanship, and its lack of violence, would appeal to the tastes of awards voters.

They did okay with the Golden Globes, which nominated Forest Whitaker for Best Actor in a Drama, Diane Venora for Best Supporting Actress (which combined the Drama and Comedy/Musical categories), and Clint for Best Director. When the awards were given out in late January, Clint went to the ceremony stag, stopping by the house on Stradella Road to grab his tuxedo and sneak out without Sondra. That night, Dennis Hopper read off the list of directing nominees, which also included Barry Levinson (Rain Man), Sidney Lumet (Running on Empty), Mike Nichols (Working Girl), Alan Parker (Mississippi Burning), and Fred Schepisi (A Cry in the Dark). And when he opened the envelope, Clint’s name was in it.

“I’m not supposed to get this,” Clint joked, beaming with his prize in his hand. He thanked Charlie Parker and David Valdes, who’d taken up Fritz Manes’s old job, and Whitaker and Venora (who both went home empty-handed), and “the very best crew,” and then . . . he ran out of gratitude. He looked around for a bit with a slightly confused gaze, then smiled, said, “Huh!” and walked off. He had the air of a man who’d enjoyed a small taste of something and had a strong suspicion that more was to come.

It wasn’t. When the Oscar nominations were announced on February 15, Bird and Clint were all but ignored. Forest Whitaker and Diane Venora were shut out of the acting categories, Clint from directing. The film’s only nomination was for sound. Clint skipped the ceremony. Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart gave out the sound prize, which the crew from Bird won; they thanked Clint. And Bird was done as a commercial prospect.

In the months after the blowup in Sun Valley, Clint and Sondra rarely saw one another. She was still living on Stradella Road, though, and she began to speak with attorneys to see what options she had to protect herself and her interests. And she went to work on her film. Clint would occasionally visit the house when she was there, unannounced, and often, as she learned from landscapers tending the grounds, when she was out. She began to get questions from acquaintances who mentioned that Clint knew that she had visited places that she hadn’t told anyone she’d be visiting or that Clint had asked them about things that they had discussed with Sondra on the phone; she began to suspect that Clint was having her tailed and that the phones in the house were bugged. They were speaking with each other primarily through intermediaries. It was clumsy and ugly and sad and unsettling.

In early April, his office contacted her to announce that he was coming by the house that evening. He arrived and, standing in front of her uneasily, delivered a bombshell: “It’s come to my attention that you . . . uh . . . and Gordon are sitting on my only real estate in Los Angeles.” He acknowledged that it was an uncomfortable topic and that the fact that she was in the middle of shooting a film only made it worse, but he wondered if she wouldn’t be willing to move in with Gordon. She was stunned, and he seemed to retreat. “Well, maybe you could just put it on the back burner until you finish your film,” he said. And then he left.

One week later, on the set of Impulse, she got a call from Gordon. A letter had been delivered to his house addressed to “Mrs. Gordon Anderson.” It declared that she was not to return to Stradella Road, “where you have been allowed to stay free of rent on a non-exclusive basis. . . . Mr. Eastwood has asked you to vacate the premises. You have refused to do so. This is to let you know that in view of your intransigence, the locks on all the entrances have been replaced.” It went on further to declare that her personal belongings had been packed up and shipped “to where you have resided for nine years with your husband Gordon Anderson.”* (The letter was delivered by movers wearing Warner Bros. T-shirts and driving a truck filled with boxes, but Gordon hadn’t answered the door and thus her belongings wound up in storage.)

When Sondra heard this news, in front of the cast and crew of the film she was directing, she fainted. She left the set to find her things (including her pet parrot and her vintage Mercedes) and to try to get explanations from Clint. She was barred entry to Stradella Road and the personal effects that had been left behind by the movers: A guard at the gate to the property had been instructed to keep her out. Not three weeks later, her attorney approached Clint’s camp with an offer to end any dispute between the parties with a settlement that included the Stradella Road and Crescent Heights Boulevard houses, a $250,000 lump sum payment, and approximately $1.3 million to be paid in installments, starting at $15,000 per month for four years and winnowing down to half that by the seventh and final year. The proposal was rebuffed outright. Two days later, Sondra filed what was known as a palimony suit against him in Los Angeles County Superior Court, asking for both houses again and for a reported $70 million.

The press went mad. Wire services and newspapers carried stories filled with Sondra’s accounts of her abortions and sterilization, of Clint’s promises that the houses they’d bought together belonged to the two of them, of the seizure of her belongings, of her fainting episode. The Los Angeles Times reported that Sondra had asked the court to reinstate her at Stradella Road and have Clint formally excluded from the property “because I know him to have a terrible temper . . . and he has frequently been abusive to me.” Clint had previously been cast in the media as a mystery man, a loner, a rebel, a quiet and determined workhorse, even, after Pale Rider and Bird, an underappreciated artist. Now, despite his lawyers’ continuous denials of Locke’s charges, he looked like the worst kind of bully.

In late May, with no settlement in sight, depositions were taken, during which Locke denied (1) having any sexual relationship with Gordon Anderson, (2) residing at Gordon’s house for more than the occasional overnight stay when Clint was out of town, and (3) having any romantic or sexual relationship with anyone besides Clint since they had become lovers on the set of Josey Wales. Clint, for his part, claimed that Sondra was attached to Gordon at the expense of being with him. (As he put it a few years later, “She spent 98 to 100 percent of her time coddling Anderson. . . . At some point you go, ‘I want a normal relationship in life. I want a girl for me.’”) He characterized his relationship with Sondra as “going together” and called her his “part-time roommate.” He admitted to having the phones at Stradella Road wiretapped because, he said, he had received threatening phone calls for the past few years; he believed—although he could not prove it—that Gordon was behind the harassment. (He would later claim that the phone tap revealed Sondra telling Gordon she would shoot Clint if he came to her film set.) Clint’s attorneys tried to prove that Sondra actually resided with Gordon and had nothing to do with the renovations and decor at Stradella Road, contentions easily rebuffed by witnesses who had performed work at both houses under Sondra’s direct supervision.

Clint had two witnesses meant to bolster his contentions that Sondra didn’t really live with him, but they backfired: Jane Brolin testified that Stradella Road was filled with Sondra’s clothing and personal effects; and Kyle Eastwood testified that he didn’t really live full-time at the house until Locke had brought her suit, at which point his dad asked him to move in.* Clint’s main contentions against Sondra were that she was overly enmeshed with Gordon and that she had tried to put herself ahead of Kyle in claiming her place at Stradella Road. And while those claims may have been true emotionally, the evidence presented in the depositions clearly seemed to favor Sondra’s position legally.

And there was a bombshell bubbling just beneath the surface. On the very day that the court was considering Sondra’s request to be reinstated in—and have Clint barred from—Stradella Road, a tabloid newspaper journalist reached out to her. He wanted her to know that he had learned of, and was on the verge of reporting on, the existence of Scott and Kathryn, Jacelyn Reeves’s children, who were living with their mother in Carmel in a house that Clint owned and were, apparently, Clint’s biological offspring. Sondra thanked him for sharing the news with her and staggered through the day’s legal proceedings in a daze. She had literally, per her account, had herself sterilized because he had told her he wanted no more children. At that moment she felt that nothing in her life past or present could be trusted.

At the end of May, Pink Cadillac was released, the third, last, and least of the films that Buddy Van Horn directed for Malpaso. Its plot is inane, its pacing is flaccid, it’s bloated and torpid and witless and dull: There is literally nothing to recommend it. And the reviews were harsh. The New York Times called it “the laziest sort of action comedy,” the Washington Post deemed it “pretty much negligible,” and Roger Ebert, in a one-star review, was outraged by the comical treatment given the white supremacists. Audiences could tell what it was from afar: It opened to $5.3 million, miles behind the weekend’s champion, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And it only lasted in theaters until July 4, ending its theatrical life as one of the very few films Clint ever appeared in that earned less at the box office than it cost to make.

But such was the pace of his workload as he passed his fifty-ninth birthday that he took no time to lick his wounds. He was off to London and the borderlands of Zimbabwe and Zambia to make a new movie, a curious production based on another script that he had wrested away from Ray Stark and Columbia Pictures. White Hunter Black Heart was adapted from a 1953 novel by Peter Viertel, who’d written screenplays with Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston and was hired by Huston to write the script for The African Queen, an experience that became the basis of his book.* The novel concerns a rakish, swashbuckling director named John Wilson, closely modeled on Huston, who sets off to make a movie about a riverboat captain and a lady missionary trying to outsmart hostile Germans but who endangers the production with his obsession to shoot an elephant, a “big tusker.” Clint would direct and play Wilson; Jeff Fahey, whom he discovered in Sondra’s thriller Impulse, would play the novelist; and the thing would be shot on location.

He was drawn to the project, he said, because he felt a strong kinship with the main character. He described Wilson as “a serious filmmaker who, at the same time, wants to live another life—and there’s a bit of him in my nature, too. You want to break out of what you’re doing and live differently sometimes, to prove something to yourself. It’s really quite difficult to explain if you’re successful at what you do.”

The prospect of Clint playing Huston was startling. Huston had died in 1987 after making, aside from The African Queen, such masterpieces as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, The Man Who Would Be King, Prizzi’s Honor, and The Dead. He was also the only one among the other directors of his era (save Alfred Hitchcock, who was a famous brand) to be familiar to audiences as an actor, most memorably as the predatory water baron in 1974’s Chinatown. If Wilson was to resemble Huston, then Clint would have to perform an impression, a task far outside his normal skill set, and he would have to be wordy, which Huston famously was and Clint famously wasn’t. He’d never met Huston, but the director’s voice had become familiar to him when he was a G.I. at Fort Ord and operated the projector for repeated screenings of the World War II documentary The Battle of San Pietro, which Huston filmed and narrated. He met with Huston’s daughter Anjelica, and with Peter Viertel, and they agreed that he could pull off the trick.

As for the shoot itself, Clint really wanted to rough it. He had heard stories of John Ford shooting on location with the whole cast and crew living in tents, and he wanted to re-create that atmosphere in Africa. “I thought we could camp out in the jungle or something like that, but it’s actually more expensive to do that than to get more conventional lodgings.” The principals were housed in a luxury resort on the western edge of Lake Kariba, which would feature in the movie, as would Victoria Falls, farther east on the Zambezi River. Clint and some other principal cast and crew members were ferried to the filming locations by helicopter, with Clint taking the opportunity to learn how to pilot; it became a life’s passion for him. He would acquire a helicopter of his own at an air show in France. “There’s great freedom to it,” he said. “It’s sort of the last seat-of-your-pants flying. You can actually go places and land places and not be obliged to have an airport. . . . There are no phones, you just kind of relax and think. You’re just a number in the sky.”

According to Viertel, Clint was more autonomous than Huston, with whom he’d worked on three films. “I found Clint to be a very solitary operator,” he said. “He doesn’t take advice and isn’t easily influenced. He isn’t like Huston, who was much less convinced of what he wanted and would often ask, ‘What do you think of this?’” But Clint believed that Huston was collaborative because he was so easily distracted. “Katharine Hepburn,” he said, “tells how she was doing a scene with Bogart at the back of the boat, and Huston was sitting on the bow, fishing. ‘John, you’re not watching,’ she said. And he replied, ‘I can hear you, darling. I can hear you.’ Maybe just keeping that partial attention was what his talent was—an ability not to get too wrapped up.” (Takes a compartmentalizer to know a compartmentalizer . . .)

The posturing and maneuvering between Clint’s and Sondra’s legal camps continued into the new year. And, uncharacteristically, Clint even spoke about it—or, at least, was quoted speaking about it—in the press. In an account of a party at Merv Griffin’s house, he was said to have revealed, “I felt so disappointed. And the disappointment was with myself. How could I have spent so many years with Sondra? How could I have been such a bad judge of character?”

Not, it turned out, as uncomfortable as Sondra was being made to feel. There were voices in the media accusing her of gold-digging, of leeching off a great man, of being a no-talent who had her eyes on the purse from the moment she took Clint into her bed. That, sadly, might have been expected. But what she never expected was that people in Hollywood who had shared her life with Clint, people whom she had counted as friends, would freeze her out. The Shriver-Schwarzeneggers, the Yorkins, the Zanucks: To a one, even if they consoled her in private, they refused to speak up for her in legal proceedings or in public, finally refusing to speak to her at all. And worse: Bud and Cynthia Yorkin had let her move into their guest room and use their basement to store the belongings she managed to retrieve from the Warner Bros. movers (she never did retrieve the parrot, which animal-loving Clint insisted had bonded with another bird in the Stradella Road house); in the midst of the string of depositions, however, and while she was still working on her film, they gave her a day’s notice to remove herself and her things from their home. In the calculus of Hollywood, no matter what anybody knew or had witnessed, Clint was the star, Clint had the clout, and Clint’s was always going to be the side that people eventually took.

And, truth be told, he had a way of describing the end of the relationship that made sense. He would remind people that she had been married to Gordon since they met—and was still married to him during all of this legal commotion. He explained that her ongoing involvement in the daily dramas of her lifelong friend and current husband took a toll on her relationship with him. As he said, “She was constantly getting drawn into [Gordon’s life] all the time. She was constantly on the phone and couldn’t go anywhere, and pretty soon we just grew apart. She was busy trying to solve his problems, and we didn’t spend that much time together.” Furthermore, he claimed, she had tried to get in the way when Kyle started to spend time at Stradella Road. “She didn’t like my son living with me,” he said, “and it just got messy. It just wasn’t the kind of existence I wanted.” As for the houses, it was obvious that he had bought them: His name was on the deeds. He complained that she was more interested in a payday than going out on her own and having a career. He was dug in. And most of their Hollywood chums chose to bunker with him.

White Hunter Black Heart premiered in May 1990, in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won no prizes (the Palme d’Or went to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart) and was modestly well received. Variety called it “an intelligent, affectionate study of an obsessive” and said that Clint “is more than just a fine craftsman, and his willingness to tackle difficult, even unfashionable, subjects is commendable.”

In September, Warner Bros. rolled the film out slowly, as it had Bird, on just twenty-four screens nationwide in its first weekend, hoping for positive reviews, and, in the main, they got them. “A gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood,” wrote Janet Maslin in the New York Times. In the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington called the film “the biggest gamble of [Clint’s] career” and concluded that it was “a good, solid, admirable, deeply felt movie.” And Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader called it “a devastating portrait of self-deceiving obsession, and a notable improvement on Viertel’s book in terms of economy and focus.” That didn’t, however, lure audiences. The window of opportunity never opened, Warner Bros. never released it on even eighty screens, and it died on the vine.

The shame was that the audience had turned its back on a very good, very entertaining movie that was also a fascinating examination of what it means to be an artist. In Bird, Clint refrained from calling attention to any sense of joint professional or artistic experience he might have felt with his main character. In White Hunter, we’re looking at something that pretends to be a (fictionalized, partial) biopic but is the nearest thing to a moment of self-reflection in the mirror of art that Clint has given us. Clint could read about Parker and talk to folks about him, but he knew in his bones what John Wilson, the thinly disguised John Huston, was all about. And when Wilson talks about art, life, and the movie business, Clint’s identification with him is almost explicit.

It’s more than just a movie about making a movie. It’s a movie about a man whose ego is so enormous that he’s using the very expensive occasion of making a movie to indulge an appetite that he can’t excuse in himself, one that goes beyond his hunger for women, booze, cigars, fisticuffs, fast horses, high living, or even art, which, by the way, he takes very seriously. As Wilson explains it, shooting an elephant is “the only sin that you can buy a license and go out and commit.” And he can’t even explain what about it appeals to him: “Do you understand me? Of course, you don’t. How could you? I don’t understand myself.”

In the face of this moral confusion, a mere movie seems very small, and Wilson willingly endangers the production with dangerous behavior and flagrant delays. But lest anyone think he’s ambivalent about his work, he has strong feelings about that as well. He excoriates a British production executive, and it’s a remarkable speech to hear, even from within the confines of a character, out of the mouth of a man who has made five Dirty Harry movies:

People say “Hollywood” when they want to insult you. Well, really, Hollywood is just a place where they make a product. It’s a factory town, like Detroit or Birmingham or Schaffhausen. Because the cheap element of the town has been so overly advertised, it becomes an insult to remind a man he’s from there. They’re not talking about the people who work there and try to do something worthwhile. They’re talking about the whores when they mention Hollywood. . . . There are whores who sell words and ideas and melodies. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve done a little hustling in my time. A hell of a lot more than I’d like to admit to. And what I sold when I was whoring I’ll never get back.

If that’s Clint Eastwood talking, that’s some frank self-reflection, particularly appearing, as it does, in the midst of the only film he’s directed that’s adapting a piece of literary (as opposed to genre) fiction and one that has only modest commercial prospects. He’s telling us he’s heard the jokes, he’s paid the tab, and he’s going to carry on regardless.

There are other little bits of self-exposure in the script: “You [can’t] let eighty-five million popcorn eaters pull you this way and that way. To write a movie, you must forget that anyone’s ever going to see it”; “Things are always great if they’re left simple”; and, most famously, “They’ll name a special Academy Award for me, and you know something? All the wrong guys’ll get it and I’ll be in Hell laughing my ass off.” Did John Huston ever say these things? Maybe. But Clint arranged to say them on film, and they are as true as anything that Bronco Billy, Red Stover, or Charlie Parker said about their own relationships to art, commerce, and themselves. He might never have copped to it, but White Hunter is the nearest thing to an artistic autobiography that Clint ever created.

His performance as Wilson isn’t an imitation of Huston but rather an impression of a man of Huston’s gravitas, drollery, moxie, panache, jauntiness, and midtwentieth-century macho. And it is at once tongue-in-cheek and completely sincere, comic and grave, which is a hell of a trick of acting. The location footage, as in The African Queen, is worth the trouble taken to capture it, and the texture of hard life in the bush, even as experienced by the most privileged of tourists, is vivid. And the film has palpable emotional heft: When Wilson finally faces down his elephant, when he sees the cost of his hubris, when he folds back into his proper station in the world, humbled, shrunken, and hisses “Action!” to start his film (and end Clint’s), we feel absolutely as if we’ve been alongside him on a physically, psychologically, and morally exhausting journey. And we also know that in Hollywood, or Carmel, in his heart of hearts, it doesn’t matter to the man who made this film whether the popcorn eaters turn out; he has accomplished what he set out to do, and it’s remarkable.

In the course of making Bird, Malpaso had hired several jazz documentarians and archivists, including Bruce Ricker and Charlotte Zwerin, who were at work on a documentary about Thelonious Monk, the bebop pianist and composer who sometimes played with Charlie Parker. Ricker and Zwerin had been scrambling for years to realize their project and were still short of completion funds and had no prospects for theatrical distribution. Clint brought the film under the Malpaso umbrella, slapped his name on it as executive producer, and got Warner Bros. to provide the remaining funding. The studio released Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser to the New York Film Festival in October 1989 and in art house engagements thereafter. The filmmakers hoped for an Oscar nomination, but the movie ran into what Clint saw as the national prejudice against jazz, saying of the documentary branch of the Motion Picture Academy, “They have a rule that after ten minutes, if more than two hands go up in a screening room, they stop the film. So in ten minutes, Monk was out of there. And I know that if it had been a film about Beethoven or Bach, even if people didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have put their hands up. That’s high culture, and jazz somehow is not. It’s frustrating.” But he and Ricker would find other projects to work on together.

In April 1990, just before White Hunter had premiered at Cannes, Sondra Locke’s second film as a director, Impulse, was released (or, more properly, given Warner Bros.’ begrudging efforts, it escaped). The reviews were mostly positive. Variety called it “well-directed” and praised her handling of the action and sex scenes. And the new deans of American film criticism, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, gave it two thumbs up on their televised review show and called it one of the best-directed films they’d seen in a while. “The movie is good to look at and painfully intense at times,” said Ebert, and Siskel declared: “Watch out for Sondra Locke.” But Warner Bros., loath to rile their franchise star, opened it on just 155 screens.

Having once again delivered a film that, however admired, failed to turn a profit, having run low on friends in town and in the business, having spent untold thousands on lawyers working on a ticking clock on her palimony case, Sondra found herself in a position of isolation. It had been a year since she’d filed her lawsuit, and Clint and his camp were happy to string the matter along until they depleted her financially and morally. She phoned Malpaso and asked if she could come talk with him.

They met at the same office where they’d first spoken fifteen years earlier when she came to see him about The Outlaw Josey Wales. As she related it, it went very poorly. She asked him to settle the suit and he refused, accusing her of milking him, of lying about him in public, of refusing to recognize what was his and what was hers. “You just want something like everybody else,” he snarled at her. “How much do you want for each time we did it, huh?” Amazingly, in the midst of this overheated tussle, she claimed that he tried to smooth talk her, sat beside her and took her hand, and kissed her cheek. She recoiled, and the chilly talk resumed. After a lot of back-and-forth, she said, he told her that if she dropped the lawsuit and promised that there would be no strings attached, they could get back together. She was appalled, humiliated—and left.

A few weeks later, she was developing a script that had been offered to her by Orion Pictures, a story about a male scientist who develops a formula to make himself pregnant (she had offered the role to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said he loved the idea). There was a long road before her if the thing were ever to be made, and as she pondered that, she received awful news: She had discovered a suspicious lump in her breast; her doctor had it biopsied, and it was determined to be cancerous. She opted for a double mastectomy, followed by chemotherapy.

In November, when she had recovered sufficiently to start thinking again about her pregnant-man movie, she got a call from Albert Ruddy, the producer of Impulse and a longtime friend of Clint’s and hers. He had an offer of settlement from Clint. The two had recently spoken, and they agreed the struggle had gone on too long. The deal was, more or less, ownership of Gordon’s Crescent Heights house, a lump sum of $450,000 (which was expressly described as compensation for services to Malpaso), and—and this was the biggie—a three-year development deal at Warner Bros. worth $1.5 million.* She was exhausted, and she asked her lawyers to get the deal done. In January 1992, Warner Bros. issued a press release about its new relationship with the woman who had made her acting and directing debuts with the studio and listed the films she had made there; the name “Clint Eastwood” was conspicuously absent from the notice. But he still hovered over her life and career in ways that she couldn’t yet fathom.

He had gone back in front of cameras in the spring of 1990 to make The Rookie, an action movie about a tough old veteran cop, his smart-aleck new partner, and a gang of master car thieves. If it sounded like a Dirty Harry movie, it was really more like The Gauntlet—full of big car chases and shoot-outs and very low on logic or humanity. It was shot mainly in San Jose and Los Angeles, creating a stir in the latter when one of its major stunts—a Mercedes flying out of the fifth floor of a warehouse—resulted in an explosion that shattered windows and triggered alarms for a several-block radius, leading the city to reevaluate how it approved permits for movies.

The brass at Warner Bros. might have held a similar inquest when they saw the thing. The Rookie plays like the afterbirth of the Dirty Harry franchise, a nincompoop story about car thieves who seem more like satanists or terrorists than ordinary felons (for some reason, the leaders of the thieves have German names and are said to come from Europe, but they are played by the Puerto Rican Raul Julia and the Brazilian Sonia Braga). The script and execution are subpar, and some of what’s meant to be gripping is laughable, such as the scene in which Braga’s dragon lady rapes the tied-to-a-chair Clint.* Nothing about it, not even the car chases, is convincing or even juicy. Of the dozens of films Clint would ultimately direct, it’s easily the most bereft of ideas, drama, inspiration, craft, allure. The sole memorable thing in it is a shot of a crew member clearly visible for a split second standing around during a fight sequence set in the hero’s girlfriend’s living room: a mistake. The film is thoroughly dismissable.* And audiences dismissed it, sight unseen. It opened in December 1990 to $5.5 million in ticket sales but stalled after that, reaping only $21 million. Its commercial failure marked a string, going back to Heartbreak Ridge four years prior, of four out of five Clint Eastwood movies that lost money. The one exception had been The Dead Pool, and even Clint knew that he couldn’t keep playing Harry Callahan. Something had to change.

Part V

A Higher Level Yet

LIFE AND DEATH AND WHAT THEY COST

A TRIUMPH NO ONE SAW COMING

A RUSE EXPOSED

ART OUT OF SCHMALTZ

A SECOND FOREVER

A MUSICAL SUMMIT

A HOME REIMAGINED

Again on horseback, he achieved levels of accomplishment and respect he’d never imagined, and he used his new status to stretch what was possible, in art, in life, even in music. But although he built a new world around him, the ghosts of the old one wouldn’t let go.

Moviestore Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

Twenty-Two

In 1976, the TV journalist and aspiring screenwriter David Webb Peoples, under the influence of Martin Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, wrote a dark Western about a band of prostitutes seeking revenge on the men who’ve disfigured one of their number by posting a bounty, attracting, among others, a famously violent outlaw who has given up his murderous ways for the hardscrabble life of a hog farmer. Peoples named the proposed film, with its vicious themes and language and outbursts of sadism and cold-blooded executions, “The Cut-Whore Killings” (you certainly couldn’t accuse him of sugarcoating). It sat on a shelf. In the coming years, Peoples was involved with some very successful films, receiving writing credits on the atomic bomb documentary The Day After Trinity and the classic sci-noir Blade Runner. His bloody Western was optioned by Francis Ford Coppola, and he was hired to do a rewrite on the medieval fantasy Ladyhawke.

As these things happen, Peoples became a rising star whom producers wanted to work with, Clint among them. In late 1983, his Malpaso colleagues got him a copy of “The Cut-Whore Killings” to read as a sample of Peoples’s work, and Clint was stunned by it. He’d had the first look at just about every Western of quality in the past fifteen years, and this was, he later said, easily the best of the bunch. He was deflated when his team told him that it was under option, but when they called Peoples’s representatives to find out if he was available for them, they learned that Coppola’s rights to the material had expired. Clint snatched it right up.

As was the practice at Malpaso, Sonia Chernus, whom Clint had known since before Rawhide and who was still reading scripts for him at age seventy-four, gave it a once-over and typed up her formal response for him. She was deeply unimpressed:

We would have been far better off not to have accepted trash like this piece of inferior work. It is completely lacking in believable and valid characterizations. . . . I skimmed most of it. . . . I don’t know what the resolution of the plot it [sic], and I don’t care. Neither would you. It is really an insult to this company which has always had high standards even to accept a property like this, which isn’t worth your time. . . . I can’t think of a good thing to say about it. Except maybe, get rid of it FAST.

Clint felt differently. He saw something unique and galvanizing, a tale about the toll that the act of killing takes on a man. “I’ve done as much as the next person as far as creating mayhem in Westerns,” he said later on, “but what I like about [this one] is that every killing in it has a repercussion.” Considering the violent swath he had cut through the movies, the idea of a protagonist haunted by his misdeeds and yet forced by circumstances to add to them seemed profound. But the story also had an autumnal, valedictory air to it. At the time, he was preparing Pale Rider, and though he loved “The Cut-Whore Killings,” he wasn’t ready to make it. “I put it in a drawer and kind of forgot about it,” he said. “It was like having a little gem, a little cupcake or something that you’re going to savor before you eat it.”

In 1991, on the heels of a string of poor box office performances that dated back to 1986, he decided the time was right. “One day I took it out and re-read it, and I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’” he recalled. In 1990, at the Telluride Film Festival, where he received an honorary tribute, he announced that he would be making a new Western. Just as he had returned to the genre with Pale Rider to put the brakes on a run of flops, he would saddle up for what was now known as, after the name of the lead character, “The William Munny Killings.”*

A few things needed sorting out before he got underway. He called Peoples at his home in Berkeley and asked for a few scenes to be changed, including the ending, which Clint envisioned as a little more hopeful and tied with a neater bow. He asked Peoples what he thought about casting Morgan Freeman as the hero’s partner. And he asked what Peoples thought of Unforgiven as a title.

Morgan Freeman, as Clint had indicated, was an old Western fan who’d grown up riding horses in Mississippi, and he would often joke to Clint when he bumped into him, “If you need somebody to ride along with you, give a yell.” For the role of a sly, sadistic sheriff trying to keep killers out of his town, Clint had his eye on Gene Hackman, who wasn’t, Clint recalled, interested at first. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t want to do anything with any violence in it.’ . . . I said, ‘Gene, I know exactly where you’re coming from. . . . But I would love to have you look at this because I think there’s a spin on this that’s different. I don’t think this is a tribute to violence.’” Hackman gave it a read and agreed.

For the role of a foppish British gunman who comes to town to collect the bounty, Clint placed a call to Richard Harris, the voluble and bibulous Irish actor. “He was in the Bahamas somewhere,” Clint recalled, “and he says, ‘Who is this calling, anyway?’ And I says, ‘Richard, it’s Eastwood, it’s me.’ And he says, ‘Is this Al?’ He says, ‘Is this Joe?’ He says, ‘You guys are pulling a damn . . .’ And the reason he said that is because he was downstairs in the basement watching High Plains Drifter! And I said . . . ‘I’ll send a script out to you.’ He said, ‘Oh, you don’t need a script. . . . I’ll be there!’”

And in the role of the senior of the group of prostitutes whose search for vengeance leads to the reward that kicks off the story, he cast Frances Fisher, who had just played Lucille Ball in a TV movie and was firmly established in his life as his new partner. He and Fisher were practically living together in his various homes, where she kept duplicates of essentials, including her running shoes. She still maintained a place near Los Angeles that she shared with her younger brother, but she was Clint’s full-time partner (he gave her a set of golf clubs for Christmas: “Isn’t that romantic?” she cooed). Sondra Locke had been permanently replaced.

Clint and production designer Henry Bumstead found a location some forty miles or so south of Calgary, Alberta, where they would build the fictional town of Big Whiskey, and Clint flew Fisher to the location in his helicopter, a pleasant three-day journey, stopping to enjoy the scenery along the way. (Throughout the shoot, he took cast members for rides. As Richard Harris recalled, “During a lunch break, he took me for a spin in it. And he took me all over the countryside and up the valleys, up the mountains. And all of a sudden, I looked at my watch. I said, ‘Christ! Look, we’ve got to land this plane quick. I’m going to be late for shooting. We’re ten minutes late.’ And he said, ‘How late can you be? The director is here beside you.’”)

The fifty-two-day shoot went off smoothly even by Clint’s standards, even for a picture being made in late summer and early fall in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. (It was rolling along so well that Clint allowed the film critic Richard Schickel to visit the set and make a documentary about the production, resulting in a relationship that would lead, before long, to Schickel writing a full-scale authorized biography of him.) He pushed cinematographer Jack Green into new extremes, insisting on lighting interior scenes, of which there were many, only with the natural light of lamps. “I want it to look like it’s coal-oil lit. . . . I want it the way the light would pool,” he explained. “If you go back and look at some Westerns that were made by some of the most beloved directors of the 1930s and ’40s . . . you wonder, ‘Where did they get all that electricity back in 1850?’” He pushed this pursuit to an arresting degree, as witnessed one day by a visiting journalist, when Green declared that he wanted a second take of a particularly dark shot:

Clint: Am I in the frame?

Green: Yeah.

Clint: Can you hear my voice?

Green: Yeah.

Clint: They know who I am. Let’s print it and move on.

One reason Clint was able to deliver films ahead of schedule was what his crew was fond of calling “Malpaso weather”—the elements always seemed to conspire in their boss’s favor. But near the end of this shoot, they were told an early winter storm was coming in, which would have covered the location in snow and made shooting impossible for an untold number of days. Reprising the mad scramble he’d put Michael Cimino through on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, Clint had the crew work all night, a twenty-one-hour shift approved by the on-site union representatives. They finished not long before dawn broke and watched the next day as Henry Bumstead’s custom-built town was slowly buried under snow.

In April 1992, as he was finishing work on Unforgiven, he was granted relief in a matter that had been dogging him for about a month. The FBI had arrested a thirty-year-old Baltimore man named Brian Keith Neun and charged him with making more than forty obscene and threatening phone calls to Clint’s Malpaso offices, demanding that he be paid $5 million for three films and saying that he would kill Clint, Kyle, and Alison if his demands weren’t met by April 11. “You kept trying to keep the lights out of my life,” one of the taped calls said. “I will kill you.” Helpfully, he’d left his return phone number and street address on a couple of the calls, so it didn’t call for any crack work of detection to find and arrest him. Charged with extortion and other crimes, Neun was held for psychological evaluation.

That same month, Clint showed his new film to Warner Bros. executives, and they were astonished. “If that had been our picture, we would have ruined it,” one said. As David Peoples explained, it was the ultimate payoff for the independence the studio had afforded Malpaso: “It’s hard to imagine anyone making it as straightforwardly and uncompromisingly as Clint. No studio would have made it that way—dark, moody. With a lot of voices, these things generally end up becoming blander and more accessible. Unforgiven was Clint Eastwood saying, ‘This is what I’m going to do. . . . Get out of my way.’”

Peoples himself was jolted by the finished film. He saw it for the first time at a screening on the Warner Bros. lot that also marked the first time he met Clint in person. “As he ushered me into the theater,” Peoples recalled, “he told me he’d thrown out the two scenes I’d rewritten, said it was better the way I’d written it the first time.” (Frances Fisher told him that “this was the first time she saw a shooting script that was entirely in white. Most of them are multicolored, full of blue and red pages or whatever, representing various changes.”) The only thing that was changed, he said, was the title. And, he had to admit, “The new title was perfect.”

The other person who might have been surprised was a woman named Megan Rose, who had worked at Warner Bros. as a story analyst—a reader of and scout for scripts and other possible movie sources—and who claimed not only to have been Clint’s lover in the early 1980s but to have been the person who brought “The Cut-Whore Killings” to his attention. According to her, their trysts were conducted in the apartment off of Malpaso’s offices and in Clint’s production trailer (yes, the one the Pope had blessed), where she brought him homemade desserts, and she and Clint worked on improving drafts of Peoples’s script, honing it to the version that eventually went into production.* She said that Clint had promised her a finder’s fee if the film ever got made, then changed his tune, suggesting that she’d shown him the script not as a possible project but as a sample of Peoples’s work. She left Warner Bros. in the late 1980s, debilitated by a lingering case of Lyme disease, but resurfaced when Unforgiven was released, demanding the payday that Clint had told her she had coming. Malpaso and Warner Bros. both struck back at her. In an article in the New York Post, a studio executive, admitting that Rose had given Clint the script as part of her ordinary salaried duties, added that “she once told another exec here that she’d had an affair with Eastwood 600 years ago in a previous life.” Clint offered her a $10,000 gig editing the script of another film, but she rejected it and walked away with nothing. In interviews she gave in the late 1990s to The Independent newspaper of London and Clint biographer Patrick McGilligan, she claimed to harbor no ill will about the episode: “I have totally forgiven him. My life is not about money. I still like him and believe in him.”

Uncharacteristically, Clint promoted the film with a blizzard of interviews—there were feature stories in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, Rolling Stone, Premiere, Variety, Vogue (!), Psychology Today (!!), and a story in Parade with his own byline on it—and an appearance on The Tonight Show. There was a gala premiere in Westwood in early August, with an after-party at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, to which he was escorted by Fisher and his daughter Alison. The public debut, on just over two thousand screens, was August 7, and the response was rapturous. Unforgiven took the number one spot at the box office with a haul of $14.5 million—a record opening for a Western. It barely dropped the following weekend, still holding the top position, and slipped only slightly in its third week, also at number one—all of which indicated strong word of mouth. The film only dropped out of the top ten in late September, by which time it had grossed more than $70 million.

The reviews were swoony. “A classic Western for the ages,” said Todd McCarthy in Variety,* “a tense, hard-edged, superbly dramatic yarn.” “A most entertaining Western that pays homage to the great tradition,” said Vincent Canby in the New York Times, “while surreptitiously expressing a certain amount of skepticism.” “An adult Western that can stand with the great accomplishments of the genre’s golden age,” wrote Dave Kehr in a rave (no surprise) in the Chicago Tribune. (Across town, Roger Ebert gave it four stars and eventually gave it a spot in his Great Movies series.) In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan called it “simultaneously heroic and nihilistic, reeking of myth but as modern as they come . . . a neat piece of revisionism, a violent film that is determined to demythologize killing.” In Time, Richard Corliss wrote, “Eastwood knows that his face, profiled against the gray plains sky, is one of the movies’ great monuments. He also knows how to dynamite that monument. The movie takes its time letting you watch Clint turn into Clint. And when he does, it’s not thrilling but scary.” (For the record, the very few naysayers in the critical community included Gene Siskel, who didn’t review it in print but gave it a thumbs-down on TV; Stanley Kauffmann of the New Republic, who hardly ever liked Clint’s work; and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, who told readers, “Don’t expect the new, soul-searching Eastwood to be any more dramatically convincing than the old.”)

Well, this is one of those times when the groupthink is spot-on. There is no way to say this except plainly: Unforgiven is a masterpiece. Not only is it in the running as Greatest Western Ever, but it’s one of only a couple of dozen Hollywood studio films that you can’t imagine improving. Watch it again and again and what you might once have thought of as a rum choice—a music cue, a shot of landscape, a moment of acting—blends in more seamlessly each time. Is it a perfect movie? Perhaps not. But its imperfections live in choices, not lapses, and are thus matters of taste, not competence. It is thoroughgoing, potent, real, and true.

Unforgiven is crafted by a company of professionals at the heights of their powers and acted by a troupe that feels born to their roles and completely immersed in them. The cinematography, decor, score, editing, and even costumes and makeup are superb. It is cast to a tee, and each actor convinces. And, my God: the script. Is there another Western so filled with memorable quotes, or one with such a surfeit of rawness and horror and drollery and outrage and regret and anger? It is a powerfully human story, essaying a gamut of emotions, and yet it feels chiseled out of stone like a fable or allegory. There’s coarseness and cruelty and ugliness and loss in it, and yet it is uplifting and consoling, not only because at its center is a man trying to keep his demons buried but because the art in it is so magnificent as to inspire. People sometimes complain about a movie or novel not having anyone in it for whom they can root, and Unforgiven, in which almost every single character is guilty of something, might be such a film. But it is so expertly made that they are all ennobled. If the devil does get the best lines, this is a film filled with devils, made by angels, depicting Hell with heavenly gifts.

Where even to start? The script, obviously, as frank about sex and grief as it is about violence and wickedness. There’s such an array: the hotheaded volubility of the Kid; the snooty persiflage of English Bob; the prideful hauteur of Little Bill; the spiked wrath of Strawberry Alice; and, especially, the various sides of William Munny: fatherly, faithful, determined, enraged, vicious. Every one of these characters—and others—feels fleshed out and alive, and they are gifted with lines that any sane actor would relish. Some of them are positively immortal, such as nearly everything Munny says in the final twenty minutes. To quote just a few of the ones that aren’t etched in movie lore:

Strawberry Alice: You just kicked the shit out of an innocent man.

Little Bill: Innocent? Innocent of what?

* * *

English Bob: Why, if you were to point a pistol at a king or a queen, sir, I can assure you your hand would shake as though palsied.

Barber: I wouldn’t point no pistol at nobody, sir.

English Bob: A wise policy. But if you did, I can assure you, the sight of royalty would cause you to dismiss all thoughts of bloodshed and stand . . . in awe. Whereas, a president . . . I mean, why not shoot a president?

* * *

Fatty: Jesus, Clyde, you got three pistols an’ only one arm for Christ’s sake.

Clyde: I just don’t wanna get killed for lack of shootin’ back.

* * *

Munny: A man like me . . . A man like me can’t get no woman but one he’s gonna pay for . . . an’ that ain’t right . . . buyin’ flesh. Claudia, God rest her soul, she wouldn’t have wanted me doin’ nothin’ like that, me bein’ a father, an’ all.

Ned: Whattaya do, just use your hand?

Even an opening title card shines: “She was a comely young woman and not without prospects. Therefore it was heartbreaking to her mother that she would enter into marriage with William Munny, a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition.” And it goes on from there, just as fine and bejeweled as you like. You can quote almost every scene, and what other Western can you say that about?

And as for other Westerns, in particular Clint’s other Westerns, this is the one in which he is most human and empathetic and real. We know nothing, really, of the men he played in the Leone films, in Hang ’Em High or High Plains Drifter or Pale Rider; of Josey Wales we know only that he’s lost the family he loved. For William Munny, we have an entire biography: a life of shootings and abusings of man and beast alike, of alcoholism and whoring and wrath. He met a woman, Claudia Feathers, who tamed him of his wildness and evil and bore him two children and died at age twenty-nine, leaving him alone on a hog farm in Kansas. He takes the job of killing the cowboys not out of wickedness but because he needs to provide a life for his kids. He turns down booze and sex and cruelty until he doesn’t—and at that moment he reaches the point of vengeance where Clint’s previous Western heroes have started. But where those other men are mysterious, Munny is transparent, rational, even justified. His fury isn’t pretty, and it’s not entirely right, but you can see the sense of it.

Munny is a crucial character in Clint’s lineage in another way. He follows John Wilson as a man who understands that killing is a sin. But where Wilson speaks in theory, Munny speaks from beyond the grave of experience. He may wish he were, as he declares, “just a fella,” but he suffers nightmares of his myriad victims, of even his wife, returned from the dead, and he knows that the evil he has sown will reap his soul. “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man,” he famously says, and then adds, when told his victims “had it comin’”: “We’ve all got it comin’.” And when a man he’s about to blow away curses him with “I’ll see you in Hell,” all he can say is “Yeah.” Where the Man with No Name and Harry Callahan mete out death with a blank stare or a quip, Munny does it with a grimace that tells us he knows that he is raising the price he will have to pay for his choices. There’s not a drop of levity or cool in it. He is a doomed man compounding his fate. And Clint plays him with such haunted gravity, such human frailty, and such unstudied naturalness that we believe everything that he goes through, everything that he says about his past, his reformation, and his ultimate reversion to form. William Munny repeatedly confesses for what he’s done, and in immersing himself in the role so powerfully, so does Clint. It’s easily the best performance he’s given to this point.

No previous Western, with the possible exception of Clint’s beloved antilynching film The Ox-Bow Incident, has ever been so frank about the cost paid for the taking of a life by the person doing the taking. Clint became famous playing characters who not only didn’t look back at the people they killed but often didn’t bother to look at them while doing the deed. Munny is death-haunted and self-excoriating and rueful. And the killings in which he engages are messy, gory, and, in multiple senses of the word, mean: One of the cowboys bleeds out while wailing in pain; another is shot while sitting in an outhouse. The Kid, Munny’s hot-to-kill colleague, breaks down in tears after just the one shooting. And when Munny reemerges in all his monstrous, blood-shedding nature, he does so in a shot that frames him below an American flag waving limply in a rain-drenched night, as if to tell us, in the vision of a director often mistakenly viewed as blindly patriotic, that Munny isn’t the only one in this country for whom killing is second nature.

The film’s conception of human evil is visible in just about every character, and they are all played exquisitely: Gene Hackman as the jauntily sadistic and verbose Little Bill; Morgan Freeman as Munny’s affable but once deadly partner; Frances Fisher as the righteous and vindictive den mother of the whores; Richard Harris as the insouciant and condescending English Bob; and Saul Rubinek as a bumbling, sycophantic writer of Western lore. You expect them all to be powerful—it’s a stellar roster. At the same time, you couldn’t possibly have the same expectations for Jaimz Woolvett, making his feature film debut as the Kid, opposite Clint and Freeman in every scene, sneering and cocksure, holding his place solidly. That’s surely down to Clint’s direction.

As for his other responsibilities—overseeing the production, choosing shots and angles, selecting the music, choosing the pace and cuts in the editing room: It’s a master class. Much of the film is spent outdoors and in the daytime, where Clint’s eye for wide-screen composition has never been so painterly or powerful. But the deepest impression left by Jack Green’s cinematography is of dark rooms where oil lamps provide the only light, illuminating the merest wisps of faces and giving an impression of doom all around. Henry Bumstead, who’d built the town in High Plains Drifter, creates another frontier settlement that feels like it could blow away in a stiff breeze—if it isn’t razed by a vengeful Munny first. It’s possible that Lennie Niehaus’s score is a little too sweet in spots (the most affecting tune, “Claudia’s Theme,” a delicate lilt meant to evoke Munny’s dead wife, was written by Clint), but that impression is erased by the stern tenor he provides through much of the film. Clint’s longtime reliance on a handful of regulars pays off handsomely here: A $14 million budget and ten-week shooting schedule look like triple that on-screen.

And also on-screen, dearly, is an inscription of sorts—a rarity in Clint’s work. At the end of the credits, the screen reads, “Dedicated to Sergio and Don”—that is, Leone and Siegel, the two directors who liberated him from television and helped make him a star and taught him the value of independence and the nuts and bolts of the craft. In High Plains Drifter he seemed to need to kill off his artistic daddies by putting their names on tombstones. Here, with both men having recently died, he humbly acknowledges what they meant for his trajectory, his life, his art. Unforgiven distills the visions and praxis of each of those masters through the vessel that they helped create, if not necessarily by plan: the film director, the master film director, Clint Eastwood. There were other highlights in his career, but this would be the peak of peaks, and it’s very fitting that it should end with acknowledgment of the fellows who first showed him how to climb.

With a hit Western—and a superb one, at that—in theaters, he went off to do something else he hadn’t done in more than a decade, namely star in a movie not developed by Malpaso, for a studio other than Warner Bros., and directed neither by himself nor a longtime colleague. In the Line of Fire is a thriller about an aging Secret Service agent who has carried the scars of failing to protect John F. Kennedy for thirty years and who’s being targeted by a deranged, ingenious assassin who plans to murder the current president and finds some twisted poetry in luring the old agent back into failing once again.

The film was the property of Castle Rock, a semi-independent company founded three years earlier by, among other partners, director Rob Reiner, whose films When Harry Met Sally . . . , Misery, and A Few Good Men were among its notable hits. The company had already developed the script, which was credited to veteran screenwriter Jeff Maguire, and offered it to Clint to direct and act in. But he’d found making Unforgiven a little tiring—and he noticed how his co-stars (and coevals) Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris seemed to be having a lark while he worked doggedly. So he told Castle Rock he would only act in it (for a new record price for him: $7 million), and they gave him the right to approve their choice of director. That turned out to be the German Wolfgang Petersen, whose fine U-boat drama Das Boot had brought him to Hollywood in the late 1980s. Clint would play the melancholy, boozy, out-of-shape agent, Frank Horrigan; Rene Russo and Dylan McDermott were cast as his partners, Gary Cole and John Mahoney as his superior officers. The role of the assassin was tricky to fill—in front of a goggle-eyed Maguire, Clint picked up a phone and called Jack Nicholson to see if he was interested—but the inspired final choice of John Malkovich would provide some real salt and vinegar.

Filming took place mainly around Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, and involved some CGI technology: images of a young Clint would be inserted into historic footage of John F. Kennedy, and contemporary footage of a Bill Clinton campaign rally would be altered to include the film’s fictional president. Clint made it clear to Petersen that he respected his authority and wouldn’t make suggestions. “He requested once to put the camera on the other side, because that morning he had bumped his head,” Petersen said. “That was the only time.” Malkovich, an actor who couldn’t be more different from Clint, found the experience of working alongside him fascinating. “Clint is very self-contained, very silent,” he said. “Some people get in the way. Eastwood is not like that at all. Oddly enough, he reminds me of my dad.”*

As year’s end approached, with Unforgiven still doing business, it was clear that the film was going to be a serious awards season contender. There were naturally other films that critics and audiences had come to admire: Howards End, The Crying Game, The Last of the Mohicans, The Player, A Few Good Men, A River Runs Through It. But Unforgiven had virtually unanimous critical support, was one of the top twenty box office performers as the year closed, and had that certain thing that some films accrue as the Oscars and other prizes approach, a combination of star power, respectability, popular success, and a sense that the people (or, in this case, person) who made it have earned a moment of recognition.

In December, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave it prizes for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman), Screenplay, and, most surprisingly, Actor, for Clint. The New York Film Critics Circle anointed Hackman, with the film and its director coming in second to The Player and its creator, Robert Altman. In January, the National Society of Film Critics echoed the Los Angeles group in the Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, and Screenplay categories (Clint finished second to The Crying Game’s Stephen Rea as Best Actor). As Warner Bros.’ marketing department started to mount its drive to get the film Oscar nominations, it took out ads noting that 194 critics nationwide had put Unforgiven on their year-end top ten lists.

The Golden Globes, which had been supportive of his work in the past, nominated the film for Best Picture (Drama), Director, Supporting Actor, and Screenplay, and the BAFTAs, often seen as Britain’s version of the Oscars, matched those and added a Best Cinematography nomination. And things went well on those nights: Golden Globes for directing and for Hackman, who also won the BAFTA. All this helped at the box office: By early January, the film was down to fourteen screens nationwide, but as prizes and Oscar buzz started to mount, it reclaimed screens and continued to add to its impressive gross.

That all exploded in February when the Motion Picture Academy released its list of nominees. Unforgiven tied Howards End for most nominations with nine: Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, Screenplay, Editing, Art Direction, and Sound. Clint’s triple-nomination as producer/director/star was exceedingly rare; only Warren Beatty for Reds and Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves had ever scored the same hat trick. But he was so blasé about the whole thing that he didn’t even wake up for a call from Warner Bros. with the news. The nominations were revealed at 5:30 a.m. Los Angeles time, while Clint was sleeping in at his home in Sun Valley; he learned of his good fortune hours later on his answering machine.

In the weeks leading up to the March 29 Oscar show, Clint won the top prize from the Directors Guild—“I don’t know what to say,” he said as he accepted the award. “I’m not a blabbermouth.”

And so to Oscar night, Monday, March 29. Clint showed up—for the first time since that Charlton Heston debacle twenty years earlier—in a black Nino Cerruti tuxedo and a slim red bow tie, sitting in the front row with his mother, Ruth, and Frances Fisher as his dates. He smiled through host Billy Crystal’s musical salute to the Best Picture nominees, during which the host sat in Clint’s lap while crooning Unforgiven to the tune of Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable.” He watched as Joel Cox took home the editing prize and Gene Hackman was named Best Supporting Actor, accepting their thanks with a big grin.

Near the end of the night, Barbra Streisand took the stage to present the Best Director award, reading off the list of nominees that included Robert Altman (The Player), Martin Brest (The Scent of a Woman), James Ivory (Howards End), and Neil Jordan (The Crying Game). Opening the envelope, she smiled and called out Clint’s name. He stepped up to the stage amid a standing ovation, shared a hug and a few words with Streisand, and approached the mic. “I just, uh . . . this is pretty good, this is alright,” he began. “I’ve been around for thirty-nine years, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve been very lucky. I heard Al [Pacino, who’d won Best Actor for Scent of a Woman] say he feels that way, but everybody feels that way when you’re able to make a living in a profession that you really enjoy. That’s an opportunity that I feel a lot of people don’t have.” He started to thank his colleagues—David Valdes, Jack Green, the camera crew—and then, stymied, said, “The trouble is with living this long is that you know so many people and you can’t remember their names. You get a little flustered.” Acknowledging that the Academy had deemed it The Year of the Women, he thanked “the women of Big Whiskey,” naming the actresses in the film. He thanked David Peoples, Warner Bros., and “the film critics, for discovering this film—it wasn’t a highly touted film when it came out, but they sort of stuck with it—the French film critics who embraced some of my work very early in the game, the British Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and some of the people who were there long before it ever became fashionable.” And then, admitting that he couldn’t remember everyone he wanted to thank and that he’d regret it, he said, “Thank you,” and walked off stage.

Backstage, he received a standing ovation from the assembled members of the press, then hurried back to his seat for the presentation of the Best Picture prize. Jack Nicholson came out to read off the nominees, including The Crying Game, A Few Good Men, Howards End, and The Scent of a Woman. And then he, too, opened an envelope that contained Clint’s name. Clint once again rose to the stage, joking with Nicholson by faking a golf swing with him, and once again started thanking people, including his publicists Joe Hyams and Marco Barla, the Warner Bros. marketing team and executives, and “the greatest woman on the planet . . . my mother, Ruth” (a camera caught her blowing a kiss to her boy). He ended his remarks by invoking Steve Ross, the much-loved Warner Bros. CEO who had succumbed to cancer the previous December: “Steve did get to see this picture and he predicted this outcome, so I’m gonna dedicate this to Steve Ross. Thank you.”

Once again called backstage, he answered questions about the movie, his career, and his legacy. “If you win early in your career,” he mused, “you might wonder, ‘Where do I go from here?’ Maybe at that time in life, you might not be mature enough. You might get carried away with yourself and start wearing a monocle and leggings and walk around thinking you’re a great genius.” As for his four decades in the saddle, he said that when he was making movies like The Outlaw Josey Wales, “the Academy wasn’t ready to embrace an art form like the Western. This is vindication for not winning before.” He admitted, though, “It’s easy to look down on my earlier work, and some of it deserved to be looked down on.” And he even claimed he wasn’t as happy for himself as he was for someone else: “I invited my mother. She’d bought a new dress at eighty-four, and I didn’t want her to come all the way down here and come up empty. So I was delighted.” Excused from his obligations, he hit the after-party circuit with Ruth and Fisher before returning to Stradella Road.

At Warner Bros. and Malpaso, executives could delight not only in the Oscars but in the additional attention they drew to the film. On January 1, Unforgiven stood at approximately $72 million in total gross. With its Oscar boost, it added another $29 million to that sum, making it, at the time, Clint’s second-biggest hit, trailing Every Which Way But Loose by about $2 million.* It was one of the very few times when critics, Oscars voters, and audiences agreed on a film that was justly worthy of their approbation. And as for the big winner? He was happy to have won, sure, but he was sincerely glad it was all over, too. “I was never so glad to see a Tuesday morning come in my life,” he said. “It gave me a chance to kind of come back to sanity.”

Twenty-Three

He found himself with an enviable professional dilemma. He wanted to take some time off, but his stock was so high that to do so would mean forsaking some great opportunities. He had found a compromise with In the Line of Fire by choosing to act only. But while he was making that film, a script came his way that he wanted to direct. A Perfect World is the story of a manhunt for an escaped convict who’s taken a seven-year-old boy as a hostage and is leaving a trail of mayhem in his wake as he crisscrosses Texas—the Texas of early November 1963, weeks before John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. That setting gives the film an elegiac quality, as well as making it a curious cousin to In the Line of Fire as a meditation on the ways Kennedy’s assassination changed the world. Written by relative newcomer John Lee Hancock, the project had been with Steven Spielberg for a while and was currently being shopped by producer Mark Johnson, who thought Clint would be ideal as director and in the role of the veteran Texas Ranger tracking the fugitive.

Clint said he only wanted to work behind the camera, but Johnson and Hancock tweaked the script to give it an interesting twist: Years before, per the new version, the Ranger had asked a judge to issue the maximum sentence to the fugitive, then a teen on trial for joyriding, so as to remove him from an abusive home; the ensuing punishment sent the young man down the path to becoming a career criminal. That, according to Clint, made him eager to play the role, yet another character with a history for which he hopes to atone. Clint had an idea of an actor to play the fugitive and asked Hancock to come by Malpaso’s offices to meet him. Hancock got lost on the Warner Bros. lot and was late to the meeting. “And I walk in the door,” he recalled, “and there’s Clint and Kevin [Costner, then at the height of his commercial success] sitting on the couch. . . . I thought to myself, ‘Boy, if this isn’t a dollar waiting on a dime, I don’t know what is.’”

Warner Bros., drunk on the idea of the two stars appearing opposite each other, green-lit the film with a $30 million budget. The usual Malpaso crew saddled up, and the cast included Laura Dern as a criminologist, Bradley Whitford as an FBI marksman, and seven-year-old T. J. Lowther as the kidnapped boy. Filming took place in Texas in the spring and summer, and it was complicated by Clint’s reliably efficient standards. There was a clash of styles between Clint and Costner, who also had Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for a Western, his 1990 Dances with Wolves. Clint was by this time famous for filming first takes and even rehearsals, believing that the spontaneity of those moments read like realism on-screen. Costner preferred a slower process for finding his way in a scene, especially in the case of this character—a stone villain, if good-humored and charismatic, and unlike any role he’d previously played. As he recalled, he told Clint that “because I don’t traditionally play heavies, there would be times when things don’t bubble for me as easily. And that it was going to require that we spend a little bit more time than he was used to.”

The actor in Clint was, on the face of things, sympathetic. “He’ll come to me and say, ‘I’ve never done a scene like this, and I have certain anxieties about it.’ But that’s all part of directing. You’re supposed to say, ‘Well, look, it’s going to be great. We’ll just play with it until it works out.’” But as the film started to fall behind schedule—the equivalent of a natural disaster on a Malpaso production—Clint had his fill of dallying. Ironically, it was Costner’s frustration with another actor, a day player who couldn’t get his cue right, that brought matters to a climax. Costner stormed off the set, and Clint asked Costner’s stand-in to step into the frame so that he could get the shot and move on. When Costner came back, he was stunned to learn that the scene had been completed without him and sought an explanation from his director. Clint happily obliged, saying that Warner Bros. “pay me to shoot film. If you walk off, I’ll shoot close-ups of this double. Because I’m going to shoot film.” Costner said Clint wouldn’t dare. “You watch,” came the reply. “This guy’ll play the whole movie. It may not match anything, but, you know, that’s what I’m here for. I’m not here to jerk off.” After that, per Clint, Costner was quicker to find his groove and was never again missing when needed.

In Clint’s view, his preference for speed and diligence was a matter of how he learned the business. “I started out with moderate-budget pictures,” he said. “I didn’t have the luxury of big budgets. Kevin was very fortunate: He had a lot of time on his first picture.”* (As a Warner Bros. executive was fond of saying of Clint, “He’s more careful with our money than we are.”) More pointedly, when he was asked about how much it cost Warner Bros. to get Costner for the film, he said, “I don’t know what Costner gets. I don’t want to know. If a person has a string of films that have done well, they can come in and . . . more power to them.” The two stars also bumped heads a few times over the staging of scenes and over camera angles—the prerogatives, of course, of the director. Costner admitted that “there can only be one vision, but there can be a lot of good ideas.” And Clint, sounding a bit magnanimous, agreed: “I used to do it with Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. I’d come up and say, ‘Why don’t you put a shot in over there?’ . . . If a guy comes up with an idea, that’s great. It doesn’t have to be another director or another actor. It can be the crafts services [i.e., catering] guy. I’ll steal anything.”

In the Line of Fire opened in July 1993, after a gala premiere in Westwood that Clint skipped. The critics liked it for what it was and then some. In a notice more or less defining the consensus, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised it as “a smart, tense, well-made thriller” and went on to commend the lead actors: “Eastwood is perfect for the role, as a man of long experience and deep feelings. He is set off by an inspired performance by [John] Malkovich, who is quiet and methodical and very clever.” In the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film “a suspense melodrama so satisfying that its clichés, which keep it zipping forward, become epiphanies” and declared that Clint “has a way of inhabiting his roles so completely that it’s never easy to tell where the writing leaves off and he begins. . . . This is the richest performance yet by an actor who, among other things, keeps getting better with age.” And everyone lavished encomia on Malkovich: “venomously funny and scary enough to freeze the blood” (Rolling Stone); “so wonderfully over the top (imagine William Shatner playing Bruno in Strangers on a Train), you swallow all the implausibilities” (Washington Post); “his relish in playing such a creep is contagious” (Variety). (He would get an Oscar nomination, his second, as Best Supporting Actor, losing to Tommy Lee Jones for The Fugitive.)

Like Unforgiven, In the Line of Fire is a film about the cost of violence, this time not on the soul of the perpetrator but on that of a man who was unable to stop it. Frank Horrigan is doomed by his past, and it shows in everything about him: the lines on his face, the whiskey in his glass, his cynicism toward his work, the space between the notes he plays on the piano. He is cleaner and more purposeful and better fed than William Munny, and he’s no killer, but he is equally haunted and filled with regret. He swore to take a bullet for a man but had failed, and everyone knows it, no one more than himself.

The killer played by Malkovich, a former assassin who has been twisted by his work and by the lies of the people whose bidding he did, resembles Horrigan in his despair over the country’s and culture’s corrosion, and he, too, resembles Munny, or at least Munny before he was reformed by his wife: cold-blooded and unstoppable and comfortable with the idea of bloodletting as its own end.

But Malkovich acts (splendidly) to make his mark, while Clint just is. His careworn face, his lanky body (passing for out of shape, which is a trick given his devotion to fitness), his resentment of authority, his commitment to his job: It’s very fair to ask how much of this is in the script and how much in the man. And when Horrigan declares, “A good glare can be just as effective as a gun,” you wonder if the thing wasn’t written with Clint in mind from the start. As it happens, real-world Clint declared that he wouldn’t take a bullet for the president: “I figure, what the hell, that’s what you have vice presidents for,” he said, perhaps only half-jesting. “One thing we’re not short of is politicians.” But it’s just a tiny flip of a switch for a man who grew up admiring his father’s work ethic and sense of duty to play someone with Horrigan’s devotion. The theme of a fallen man finding salvation in his profession has always been one of Clint’s most obsessively scratched itches. The glory of this film is that he explores it with a script he didn’t develop under someone else’s direction. He’s so good that you can regret he didn’t choose to act for other people all the time. (Despite the high quality of his films as a director, that’s a compliment.)

The film debuted in third place with $15 million and stayed in the top ten all summer against a field that included Jurassic Park, The Firm, Sleepless in Seattle, and The Fugitive, tapping out at $102 million. Clint didn’t own it—it was the first film he’d made in more than two decades that didn’t have Malpaso’s name on it—but he was paid $7 million flat to appear in it, and the film burnished his already rising reputation as a serious star and actor. Based on the combined performances of this film and Unforgiven, he ended the year atop the Quigley poll of box office stars for the first time since ceding his spot in 1985, a remarkable return to tip-top form—and at age sixty-three. It was clear that just as Unforgiven had become a lens through which many people in Hollywood and the public revised their impressions of Clint as a director, he was also now seen as a screen presence of classic, iconic gravitas.

As he finished work on A Perfect World, Clint reveled in the opportunity to include old-time country music on the film’s soundtrack, much of which was heard on car radios within scenes. Vintage tracks by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Marty Robbins, and Perry Como appeared, as did another of Clint’s little melodies, fleshed out by Lennie Niehaus, who scored the film. This little ditty had a curious title, “Big Fran’s Baby,” and it was, like the tunes he’d written in previous movies, a melody for a young girl. In this case, though, it wasn’t a character in the film he had in mind but a flesh-and-blood girl: Francesca Ruth Eastwood, who was born to Clint and Frances Fisher on August 7, in Redding, California, near Rising River Ranch. A visibly pregnant Fisher had visited the set during the shoot in Texas, which served, in effect, as Clint’s sly way of telling the world that he’d become a father again at age sixty-three. They spent the weeks after the baby’s arrival in privacy at the ranch, where, according to Fisher, Clint cooked meals and helped with diapers and, in general, “became the person I always knew was in him.” It was idyllic.

But he had another baby that year, in a way. During that summertime shoot, Malpaso was contacted by a woman named Laurie Alison Murray who lived in Washington state. She had been adopted soon after birth by Clyde and Helen Warren, raised near Seattle, and had enjoyed a happy life: Her husband, Thomas, was heir to a timber industry dynasty, she had worked as an elementary school teacher, and the couple had two children and vacation homes in the Southern California desert and Maui. She had recently hired an investigator to look into her adoption, and she was startled to see the name “Clint Eastwood” listed as the father on her birth certificate. She reached out to her birth mother, who didn’t wish to meet or speak, and then she reached out to Clint. At first he was chary, suspecting that he was being hit up for money. He remembered the girl in Seattle whom he’d gotten pregnant and had offered to help with an abortion, and he sincerely believed that that had been the end of it. He was startled to learn that he had a brand-new thirty-nine-year-old daughter to go along with his newborn baby girl. He agreed to meet Laurie and her husband for dinner, and they got along. They were all grown-ups, they had their own lives, and while Clint wasn’t about to start writing wistful melodies about her, he acknowledged her as blood kin and eventually met her son and daughter, his instant grandkids, Lowell (who went by L.T.) and Kelsey. He’d acquired a whole new family overnight.

In advance of the release of A Perfect World, Clint was feted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which launched a series of his movies—“New Acquisitions: 10 Years of Clint Eastwood Films”—with a gala black-tie, $1,000-a-plate dinner, only the fifth such in the museum’s history.* He attended with Frances Fisher, made a few remarks, and helped raise more than $750,000 for the museum’s film preservation initiatives.

Warner Bros.’ hopes for A Perfect World were very high: They planned to open the picture wide at Thanksgiving, meaning they saw it as both a potential box office hit and a contender for major awards. But the reviews were mixed, and even the positive ones couldn’t make it sound like a fun time at the movies. Roger Ebert said it was “a film any director alive might be proud to sign” and compared it to Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands. Janet Maslin of the New York Times deemed it “a deeply felt, deceptively simple film that marks the high point of Mr. Eastwood’s directing career thus far” and declared Costner’s performance “absolutely riveting.” But Newsweek’s David Ansen said that it “feels like a breather” and complained that the length deflated the drama. Audiences didn’t even seem willing to take part in the debate. The film opened on almost two thousand screens with an $8 million gross, taking third place beneath Mrs. Doubtfire and Addams Family Values. But its returns plummeted steadily each week, and it wheezed through the holiday season, ending its run with a $31 million gross. Adding insult to injury, it got zero notice from anyone during the awards season. (It was a big hit overseas, grossing over $100 million in foreign markets.)

The film remains a powerful work and a real milestone in Clint’s progress from movie-star-who-directs to outright master director. After a jailbreak that echoes Escape from Alcatraz and a harrowing home invasion scene (one of two), the plot is basically a chase. The themes, however, are anything but simple. Each of the three main characters is complexly built and broken in a way that connects them. Costner’s Butch Haynes is charming but a bona fide psychopath, a fact that isn’t diminished by our knowledge that he was propelled into his life’s course by a fractured childhood; Eastwood’s Red Garnett is an authoritarian good ol’ boy with deep regrets about past deeds, the cost of which he is still paying; and the kidnapped child, Phillip (played beautifully by little Lowther), is torn between wishing for the safety of his home and relishing the wild adventure on which he’s embarked. Clint balances the three of them so delicately that even when they make poor choices we want them to succeed.

But it’s darker than that. The film is focused on the legacy of failure by adult men and the price that legacy exacts from young men. It’s explicit in the backstory connecting Red and Butch, the stories of Butch’s and Phillip’s fathers, and the doomful setting, with the (perfectly imperfect) world about to be shattered by an act of violence perpetrated by a confused, Butch-like young man against the symbolic daddy of the entire nation. There’s a clock ticking throughout this film, and the time that is slipping away has as much to do with the manhunt as it does with the imminent and permanent loss of American innocence.

On the level of craft, we’re again in a realm of confident mastery. It’s a beautiful film and fluent, capable of breeziness, sneaky comedy, a bit of steamy sex, and harrowing tension (the second home invasion sequence, coming near the end and inciting the climax, is hair-raising). It’s got a dusty, earthy look and feel and a subtly evocative score. The performances of Costner and Lowther are remarkable: the former reveals his familiar homespun magnetism and flashes of lethal viciousness; the latter is completely believable and surprisingly complex.* Clint is comparatively under wraps, his hair tinged with auburn notes to match Red’s nickname, his man of action trapped inside an Airstream trailer as if doomed to witness events rather than instigate them.

It ends badly—it has to end badly—and that, too, feels real: The legacy of violence in the American story is impossible to tally. Hancock’s script wrestles with things we know about ourselves as a nation and a culture but don’t care to admit. A Perfect World is just as relevant to the self-examination of the American psyche as Unforgiven, Bronco Billy, and Dirty Harry. Audiences may not have found it entertaining, they may not have enjoyed looking into this particular mirror, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reflect real truths.

In March 1994, Clint was in Sun Valley for a weekend of skiing. Frank Wells, his former lawyer and “boss” at Warner Bros., currently president and COO of the Walt Disney Company, was turning sixty and throwing a bash for himself and all the Hollywood ski bums. A few weeks later, on Easter weekend, Wells convened a smaller group in the Ruby Mountains near Elko, Nevada, for some heli-skiing—that is, getting dropped off by a chopper in the backcountry so as to ski virgin slopes and not maintained resort trails. Once again, Clint was along, as was Mike Hoover, the mountain climber who had trained him for The Eiger Sanction and had survived the fatal rockslide on that set. The party spent Saturday and Sunday skiing, and as the second day grew shorter, Clint split off; he’d flown himself up from Carmel in his own helicopter and would fly himself home. Wells and three others—Hoover, his wife, Beverly Johnson, and the group’s ski guide—planned to leave an hour later in the chartered chopper that had taken them to the summit. But when they took off, bad weather set in. The pilot tried to make it back to Elko, just a few miles away, but the copter went down in a remote canyon. He, Wells, and Johnson died at the scene; Hoover and the ski guide were rescued with serious injuries. A week later, Clint was one of the eulogists at a memorial on a soundstage at Disney, attended by more than two thousand mourners. He spoke of Wells’s tenacity, daring, and competitiveness, recalling how they once settled a point of dispute on a film deal by playing tennis: “His eyes narrowed and his eyes squinted, even more than me, and I knew that I was in for the tennis match of my life.” Along with other speakers, including Roy Disney, Robert Redford, and Candice Bergen, he joined the entire assembly in singing “Hey Jude,” Wells’s favorite song. He’d lost a friend and a kindred spirit.

In May he was back at the Cannes Film Festival, not with a film but to preside over the festival jury, which also included Catherine Deneuve, with whom it was said he’d had a fling decades prior; Lalo Schifrin, who scored so many of his films; and the novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (On the festival’s opening night, Clint lingered on the famous stairs outside the main theater to wave to fans, and Deneuve nudged him to get inside so that things could start.) Cinema purists complained that Clint was there solely for his star power, and they were positively incensed when the jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction rather than Zhang Yimou’s To Live, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Rouge (Red), or Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees. It was the third win in six years for an American movie, and there were voices suggesting that Clint had leaned on his fellow jurors to sway their votes. But he insisted it was “a democratic decision,” and the festival organizers stood by him.

In 1991, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment paid $25,000 for an option on a short, yet-to-be-published first novel by a business school professor from Iowa. It was a romance, not the sort of thing for which Spielberg was known, and it had been passed on by several other production companies (as well as a number of publishers). The book was published in April of 1992 with a first printing of fifteen thousand copies. And by the spring of 1994, when Spielberg was considering directing it and asked Clint to star in it, it had sold more than nine million copies in the United States alone* after three uninterrupted years on the New York Times bestseller list.

Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County is the story of Francesca Johnson, an Italian-war-bride-turned-Iowa-housewife who has a passionate four-day encounter with Robert Kincaid, a man traveling through her rural community shooting pictures of covered bridges for National Geographic. It’s a simple love-and-loss story about two disconnected souls who find one another and then part. The book proved to be a phenomenon in a number of ways: its unexpectedness, its vertiginous success, and its, um, literary quality. Take this bit of a morning-after chat between the lovers: “Robert, when we were making love last night, you said something that I still remember. I kept whispering to you about your power—and, my God, you have that. You said, ‘I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.’ You were right.” Yeah . . .

Spielberg recognized that he might not be the guy to do justice to this material, so he approached director Sydney Pollack, who thought his frequent collaborator Robert Redford would fit the role of Kincaid. But two screenwriters Pollack hired couldn’t get the thing right. Spielberg stepped in, saying that he’d direct it, and he hired screenwriter Richard LaGravenese to have a go. This script seemed more plausible, and on its merits, Spielberg asked Clint if he would play Kincaid. Clint hadn’t taken note of the book, but he’d gotten a call from Lili Zanuck, who suggested that he read it “because,” as he recalled her saying, “you’re in it.” That certainly wasn’t obvious to the world’s moviegoers, who couldn’t imagine the Man with No Name or Harry Callahan or Will Munny as wanderers with the hearts of poets. But to people like Zanuck and Spielberg, it made sense. “It was not based on the other characters Clint has played,” Spielberg said. “It’s because I know Clint personally—the part of Clint that friends of his know well but have never seen acted.” Clint could see the connection: Echoing William Holden when he hired him for Breezy, he admitted, “I’ve been that guy.”

And, too, he could see the value of the story, “the idea that life isn’t over, that the love that never happened isn’t behind me, or maybe it is behind me and I never realized it at the time,” as he put it. In fact, he said of the novel, “If you take out all the flower and puff, he had a pretty good idea. . . . These people were mature. . . . They had to decide. They had to be responsible.” He appreciated the way LaGravenese had pared the book’s most florid excesses: “For an actor to say that stuff you might have to do it during a saloon scene when he looks like he’s had about ten beers.”

With Clint aboard, buzz heated up as to who would play Francesca. The most obvious candidate was Isabella Rossellini, a bona fide Italian and a star, but the likes of Anjelica Huston, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, and Cher were touted for the part. As the casting process unfolded, Spielberg decided that he still needed time off from directing (he’d released both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List the previous year), so Amblin brought Bruce Beresford aboard to direct. And even though there was a start date just two months out, Beresford asked yet another screenwriter to try to adapt the novel and insisted that the role of Francesca be played by a European actress, and a young one at that. That made one creative difference too many, and he was soon taken off the picture.

Spielberg called Clint with two questions: Was there a version of the script that he liked? And would he consider directing? Clint expressed a preference for the LaGravenese version that he’d first agreed to act in. And he said that he’d go out to Iowa to see what the crew there had done so far and decide if he could do it. When he came back, he had two bits of news: He had cut the budget by $1.5 million by scuttling the plans to build a new covered bridge for the shoot, and he’d be willing to direct. The start-up date of mid-September suited him just fine. He’d bring in his Malpaso crew to fill the key production slots. And as for his leading lady, he asked Spielberg, “Why don’t we just get the greatest actress in the world?”

That, of course, would be Meryl Streep, famous for her accents, her immersion in her roles, and her associations with the highest levels of film art. Not, in short, an obvious choice to play opposite Clint. And not, it happened, remotely a fan of the novel. “I’m not going to let you read it,” she had told a personal assistant who wanted to borrow the book. “It’s a crime against literature.” She had already told her agents she wasn’t interested in it. But Clint phoned her and asked her to read the script by LaGravenese, whom he considered “the only writer who actually liked the book.” When she did, she found that “all that florid stuff from the book [was] gone.” She was in.

Clint went off to Iowa with his crew to get started. (They had to change one key location because the farmer whose property they had selected didn’t want a movie about adultery filmed on his land.) And Streep prepared herself. She had grown up in New Jersey, down the street from a family whose mom was a real Italian war bride, and she immersed herself in memories of that woman’s accent. That might have been expected. But her other choice was notable for Hollywood: She ate what she wanted and cut back on exercise. She had just played an Olympic-caliber athlete in The River Wild, in which she was as lean and ropey as Clint. But she knew Francesca wouldn’t have looked like that, not in Iowa in 1965, and not being an Italian woman who’d survived a war. “I thought it added certain reality, her rootedness in the farm,” she explained. “I felt she was fully who she was at her age. It was sort of freeing, letting it all out. . . . I had seconds whenever I wanted. I took that dessert.”

The film was scheduled to start shooting on September 15, and Warner Bros. had originally slated ten weeks for the production. When Clint climbed aboard, he cut that down to eight. Streep was anxious about what she’d heard about Malpaso’s pace, thinking it would mean a noisy, busy set with little room for the delicate organic creativity on which she thrived. And, worse, when she arrived and met Clint face-to-face (there had been no rehearsal period, another unnerving experience for her), he said in his famous whisper, “I hope you aren’t going to do a big accent thing.” The next day, filming her first scene, “I ignored him like I do with most directors,” she said. “He laughed.” But, she said, he didn’t give her a lot of feedback, which felt strange. After a few days, he told her, “You know, if I don’t say anything, that means it’s good.”

She was amazed at the speed of things, at Clint’s willingness to shoot first takes only, at the nearly surgical hush of the set. She found it a little eerie at the start, but then she fell into the rhythm and loved it:

His set is the quietest I’ve ever worked on. But it didn’t feel still; it felt full, at full attention. . . . Maybe it’s an actor’s ultimate revenge once he becomes the boss that everything is subservient to that little fragile thing in the center, the spontaneous moment, the thing, as Clint says, that “only has to happen once.” . . . I felt respect for the process, the simplicity of it when it was working right, the pared-down motions of what was necessary, and only what was necessary, to make the story seem like it was really happening.

He pared it down, all right. Even though he shot the film in chronology, as opposed to the usual puzzle-piece process, which is meant to keep things moving speedily, the Malpaso machine was so well honed that he could shoot the story’s timeline and give himself and Streep an almost theatrical foundation on which to play the relationship. That sparked magic, he recalled: “When Meryl saw Bridges of Madison County, she said, ‘You know what I love? You used all my mistakes, too.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but they were genuine mistakes.’ They were human mistakes, not an actor’s mistakes.” And it didn’t slow the production down. On the contrary: The ten-week schedule that Clint had been given and had cut down to eight was completed in six, well under budget.

The film was scheduled for a summer season release, which meant that he had ages to edit it and get the music right. He was careful but not fussy in the editing suite, putting immense trust in Joel Cox, who’d been his lead editor since The Enforcer (that said, a lot of the editing choices were made on Clint’s fast-paced set; Cox had very few takes to select from for most scenes). But music was, as ever, his pet. This time he’d chosen some of it before he’d shot a frame. As he was reading the script, he heard in his head the great jazz balladeer Johnny Hartman’s version of “I See Your Face Before Me,” and that song, along with some other moody numbers by Hartman, Dinah Washington, and Irene Kral, comprised the soundtrack, which was built on Lennie Niehaus’s score and another of Clint’s small melodies, a tune called “Doe Eyes” that he liked so well that he had the telephone system at Mission Ranch use it as hold music. The anthology-style soundtrack was bundled and released by a new venture, Malpaso Records, which would be dedicated only to jazz and to the music from Clint’s films but wound up doing only the latter. In this case, its release of the Bridges soundtrack, especially the Hartman tracks, would prove massively popular, reviving interest in that tragic and forgotten singer, who’d died in 1983, and creating a significant profit stream for Clint.

Twenty-Four

I’m always appalled, just knocked out, by disloyalty,” he’d once told an interviewer. “I never think it’s coming.” His surprise came, no doubt, from a sense that nobody would dare double-cross him. Whether he knew it or not, he could trust people because they feared him—as a physical specimen, as a Hollywood power broker, as an icon of action and violence.

But Sondra Locke trusted people because she was basically an innocent, even despite her experience of show business and her acrimonious split from Clint. She really did have a fairy tale playing in her mind. And that’s no mentality for somebody trying to forge a career making movies.

To wit: In 1994, as her three-year deal at Warner Bros. was winding down, she had nothing to show for it. The studio had seemed only mildly interested in the scripts and projects she proposed, and they let one of her ideas get away. The pregnant-male-scientist movie that she had pitched to Arnold Schwarzenegger wound up at Universal, with Arnold in the lead role, as Junior, a poorly received comedy by director Ivan Reitman. In March 1994, with no prospect of getting anything into production, she took the remarkable decision to sue Warner Bros. for “sex discrimination, breach of contract, tortious breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and fraud.” Her argument was that she had previously given the studio two films with which they were pleased and that several of the projects she’d brought to them were plausible: witness Junior.* According to her attorney, “There was evidence that upon entering into the agreement, Warner Bros. had not intended to do anything with her and wanted only to placate her and to divert her from the original action against Eastwood.”

But it was one thing to contend that she was owed something by Clint after more than a decade as his lover, partner, co-star, and even home contractor and decorator. It was another to claim that a Hollywood studio owed her a movie deal because it had given her an office, a yearly payment, and the promise to consider any film she might wish to make. Movie studios made a standard practice of ignoring people in her precise situation. She may have been treated a certain way when she was Clint’s partner, but that was over, and Warner Bros. felt that their part of the deal—giving her a reasonable hearing—was being met. Locke’s attorney described their position as “We don’t discriminate—we screw everybody.”

The matter went before a court, and in early 1995 her suit was dismissed in a summary judgment that held, in essence, that Warner Bros. owed her nothing other than consideration, and that they had considered her proposed movies and rejected them. Nothing could be more ordinary in Hollywood. Them’s the breaks.

But there was a little thread left for her to pull. During the discovery portion of the lawsuit, the studio had turned over a significant number of documents, and in that pile of papers an odd little detail screamed out to a sharp-eyed member of Sondra’s legal team. In February 1992, the studio had charged $975,000—Sondra’s fee for the first two years of her deal—to Malpaso as part of the budget for Unforgiven, and the notes on the ledger seemed to indicate that the money was a repayment for the studio’s outlay to Sondra. The impression was that Clint had, effectively, washed his hands of a troublesome ex by using Warner Bros. as a conduit to pay her to develop movies that wouldn’t be made. The studio was, it seemed, bearding for Clint, reducing his legal exposure from the $70 million she had sought in her original suit to the $1.5 million that “Warner Bros.” was “paying” her. Not only had Sondra’s team discovered what they believed to be a fraud on Clint’s part, but they also had a new case against Warner Bros., which had been caught charging costs against a movie that had nothing to do with that production. In June 1995, Sondra sued Clint again, this time for fraud and contractual interference, to the tune of $2 million. And this time she was the one who wouldn’t hear any talk of settlement.

That wasn’t his only legal imbroglio or court appearance of the year. The other went back to the release of Pink Cadillac. In January 1990, The Globe, the even raggier sister publication of the National Enquirer, published a story by a Los Angeles journalist named Tony Castro titled “Nazi Thugs Put Bounty on Clint Eastwood—but Dirty Harry Won’t Lay Low.” It claimed that neo-Nazi groups, incensed by their depiction in the film and by Clint’s refusal to speak at a gathering of Aryan Nations, had put Clint on a kill list. According to the story, Clint wasn’t only uncowed by the threats but emboldened. “I’ve never shied away from a fight, and I won’t start now,” it quoted him as saying. The story was illustrated with a photo of the star as seen in the crosshairs of a rifle scope. It was, even by The Globe’s standards, hot stuff.

It was also patently and thoroughly untrue. There was no threat on Clint’s life, no invitation from Aryan Nations, and, perhaps most damning, no interview with Clint. Castro had invented the story out of whole cloth, as, it would soon be discovered, he had done with many stories for tabloid newspapers going back a few years. In February, Clint’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against The Globe for $2 million in general damages and $20 million in punitive damages, alleging that the story created the possibility of actual danger for Clint and his family and caused them significant mental anguish—as well as reputational damage arising from the notion that he would have spoken with The Globe at all.

After various legal maneuvers, the path was cleared for the matter to head to court. Before that could happen, a settlement was reached. But there was still Castro’s history of journalistic and financial fraud to deal with. The process of discovery in Clint’s case revealed the writer’s history of invented sources and quotes, and his financial shenanigans against the tabloids had “earned” him more than $200,000. In April 1993, during a federal trial of Castro and his wife for mail fraud and tax evasion, Clint testified about the ways that the false article had affected him. “I was furious that any kind of publication could print an article like that. I had no idea where it had come from, because I had never heard of any of these people involved in this, I had never heard of any of the quotes stated in the article, and [the photo] obviously isn’t a real picture but is a mock-up picture of me in the [crosshairs of a rifle] scope.” Castro was found guilty and sentenced to five months in federal prison and five more of house arrest.

You would think that Clint’s willingness to see these sorts of things through to the bloody end would make tabloid editors shy away from further stories about him. Ha. In December 1993, the National Enquirer ran a story with the headline “Exclusive Interview: Dirty Harry Lifts the Lid on His Private Life” that was filled with quotes about Clint’s relationship with Frances Fisher, their lives with baby Francesca, and his fondness for scotch whiskey. The article had originally been published in a British tabloid called Today, and the Enquirer was relying on the word of that publication’s freelancer that he had spoken with Clint; the guy even said that he had taped the conversation. But when Clint’s attorneys filed a lawsuit for $10 million, declaring that no such interview had ever taken place, the writer told the newspaper that he had accidentally erased the recording and refused to come to the United States to participate in the proceedings.

It wound up going to trial. In October 1995, a federal jury in Los Angeles sided with Clint, awarding him $150,000 (which he said he would donate to charity) and ordering the Enquirer to pay his attorneys $650,000 in legal fees. The paper appealed the verdict and, two years later, lost in a unanimous 3–0 decision in a U.S. district court of appeals. And, for a while anyhow, the Enquirer and its sister publications eschewed all but the most anodyne stories about the star.

He had decided to take a year or so off from making movies, as he had intended but failed to do after In the Line of Fire. And so, in 1995, outside of courtrooms and law offices, his most significant public appearance was something celebratory. At that year’s Oscar ceremony, which was dominated by Forrest Gump and host David Letterman’s gaffes, Arnold Schwarzenegger presented Clint with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given by the Academy every few years to honor excellence in producing. It was often given as an unofficial lifetime achievement award to people who might never have won a competitive Oscar or hadn’t done so in some time, but more recently it had been awarded to people still in the flush of their careers, including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Clint came to the stage in a tuxedo with a white bow tie and spoke without notes, thanking the board of governors and his family, and ending, a bit hesitantly, by declaring that “if Dirty Harry . . . if I was [in] his sights and he said, ‘Do ya feel lucky?,’ I’d say, ‘You’re damn right I do.’”

And he was busy producing. Malpaso had done next to nothing but Clint’s movies or movies with which he had some personal connection since its founding some three decades prior, but in the mid-1990s, for a tiny spell, there was a flurry of ancillary projects. Warner Bros. was ramping up its new broadcast network, The WB, and one of its ideas was a reboot of the hip private eye series of the late 1950s and early ’60s, 77 Sunset Strip. Clint must have been a fan, because he and Malpaso agreed to produce a pilot that would star Jim Caviezel and Maria Bello as the private eyes and Timothy Olyphant as Kookie, the sidekick who, as played by Edd Byrnes in the original series, became a breakout teen heartthrob star. But, as Olyphant recalled, when he showed up for the first readings for the pilot, “I was looking for Clint everywhere. He’s nowhere to be seen. So when we finished the reading I asked, ‘Where’s Clint,’ you know. They said he quit. Apparently, you know, after about three–four days of television network executives he pretty much decided, ‘Ah, you guys go ahead without me.’ And so, that was it.” The pilot was a washout, and the series—Clint’s only stab at a made-for-TV project—never happened.*

And the feature film he produced that year didn’t have much more of a life. The Stars Fell on Henrietta was a saga about a Texas family during the oil boom of the early twentieth century, directed by the actor and sometime filmmaker Stacy Keach. Frances Fisher, still nursing Francesca, was offered a part alongside Robert Duvall, Aidan Quinn, and Billy Bob Thornton, and she agreed to work if her daughter were along, and so Francesca made her screen debut in the role of a baby. Fisher shared the script with Clint, who found it charming enough that he agreed to put his name on it and get Warner Bros. to fund and distribute it. But the studio didn’t think much of the delicate little film, releasing it at the end of the summer on three screens total in New York and Los Angeles, then expanding to a whopping seventeen screens, before letting it starve to death. It was no wonder that Clint would once again decide to rein in Malpaso and focus exclusively on his own work henceforth.

Not that he himself didn’t wander. He was such a ubiquitous cultural figure at the moment that he agreed to appear in a cameo in Brad Silberling’s big-screen version of Casper, the story of the friendly ghost famed from cartoons and comic books. When a ghost therapist (Bill Pullman) is besieged by evil spirits, he stares into the bathroom mirror only to find his face morphing, into, in succession, Clint, Rodney Dangerfield, and Mel Gibson, with Clint threatening him, “I’m gonna kill you, your mama, and all her bridge-playin’ friends.” Audiences responded with laughs of surprise, but Clint shied away from any further such antics.

He wasn’t, however, averse to novelty. In 1995, Starwave, the interactive media company of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, issued a two-disc CD-ROM called Eastwood, an interactive compendium of film clips, behind-the-scenes interviews, trivia games, photos, filmographies, and so on. (Many of the textual components were written by Richard Schickel.) It was early days for that short-lived medium, and it was a robust package, retailing for $50* and making the case that his remarkable forty-year career was not only worth studying but worth immersing oneself in. Clint himself promoted it by appearing in a live Q and A session on Starwave’s Mr. Showbiz website. He was nothing if not game.

His Casper cameo had been amusing audiences for a week when it was joined at the multiplex by The Bridges of Madison County, which was obviously the film that Clint wanted people to see. And, encouraged by surprised and even rapturous reviews, they did just that.

Critics recognized not only the quality of (most of) the film, but the sheer heroism that Clint and his collaborators achieved in adapting the novel into something worth seeing. In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan suggested that “LaGravenese ought to get the Croix de Guerre for doing battle with Waller’s fatuous prose,” adding that “Eastwood’s sturdy utilitarianism, the spareness and efficiency that characterize his style, are actually what this kind of material, which is susceptible to being as overheated as Waller’s prose, most needs.” Variety’s Todd McCarthy praised “a considerable job of alchemy” and deemed it “a handsomely crafted, beautifully acted adult love story.” In the New York Times, Janet Maslin declared it “a moving, elegiac love story,” adding that “the movie has a leanness and surprising decency, and Meryl Streep has her best role in years.” To no one’s surprise, the praise for Streep was universal, but so, too, was acclaim for Clint, who, many critics noted, was the only actor whom they could imagine in the part.

The film opened the week after Memorial Day, claiming the number two spot behind Casper with a gross of $10.5 million. It continued to do respectable business through July 4 and hung on in theaters until late August, grossing some $71 million domestically. (It did even better overseas, garnering more than $103 million, much of it in China, where its depiction of forbidden, stoic love struck a cultural nerve. At the time, fewer than ten Western films a year played widely in the country, and those were usually action films; Bridges played for months, becoming one of the highest-grossing Hollywood films in Chinese box office history.)

The Bridges of Madison County is, really, two films, one superior, one mediocre. The main body, the stuff that the movie posters and your imagination promise, involves the meeting, romance, and parting of Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid over four days in 1965. The frame, which derives from the novel and serves as the opening and closing of the film and periodically interrupts the story, involves the 1995-ish discovery of (the late) Francesca’s secret past by her now adult children.

The central film, played almost entirely as a two-hander by Clint and Meryl Streep, is spare and focused and emotionally rich and sometimes experimental in its technique. The story that frames it is dull and flat and even groan inducing, and it invariably sucks the air and momentum out of the film. The material about Francesca’s children does little more than pad the movie, which, at two hours and fourteen minutes, is overlong by . . . more or less the length of those scenes.

The strength of Bridges lies in the things we expect from Clint as a director at this phase of his career: beautiful photography, judicious use of music (it’s a long time into the film before we hear anything other than what’s on the radio), casually careful staging and pacing, and a deep respect for the lived-in, acted moment. In this plain, quiet, often still, and always solid setting, Streep hits like a wonder of nature, so naturalistic and complex and fluid and real that you honestly forget who the actress is and believe you are watching someone you’ve never seen before. (Not for nothing did she receive the film’s sole Oscar nomination, her tenth overall, for Best Actress.)* And Clint holds his place opposite her, an achievement in itself. A great deal of their time together is spent in the flow of conversation: asking and answering questions, flirting very slightly, then becoming increasingly connected, luxuriating in a profound passion, and discussing a possible future together. And Lili Zanuck was right: Even pared down from Waller’s ludicrous demigod character, Kincaid seems written for Clint to play.

To understand just how good these performances are, consider a crucial scene toward the end. In a candlelit dining room, the lovers have their final meal together, with Francesca sitting at the head of the table, screen left, and Robert at her side, screen right. Clint sets the camera a little bit back from the table; we can see the top of the chair that’s opposite Robert. (Importantly, there is no music in a scene that many Hollywood directors would be dying to emboss with strings or slowly played piano.) In a five-minute uninterrupted take, the two engage in a talk in which the profundity of their love is acknowledged but Francesca makes it clear that she cannot leave her family. Most of it consists of her speaking in monologue, and it’s a bravura performance by Streep, who seems to invent the plain, persuasive, truthful words as she says them. And Clint exemplifies the lesson that the best acting is listening and reacting; we can see that he wants to interrupt her, but he holds back, often dropping his eyes and then returning his gaze to her, wincing when she makes a sharp point, and sinking as she carries on. But here’s the amazing thing: About two minutes into the shot, a housefly walks along the top of the unoccupied chair in the front of the frame. When Streep pauses her speech and Clint makes one of his attempts to persuade her, the fly lands on her sleeveless right shoulder, the one closest to the camera, and walks down to her bicep before flying away. She doesn’t swat at it, she doesn’t break the scene, and she doesn’t stop listening; she merely gives a little shrug with her right arm, which reads as a gesture indicating that she understands the truth of his plea but isn’t swayed by it—but also shoos the fly away. She stays in the moment. You can imagine another actress breaking character with a swat or a shriek; you can imagine another director thinking the shot had been ruined and shutting the scene down until any and all flies were eliminated from the set. Instead, you get a hyper-real moment within an already agonizingly real moment, a perfect heightening of the immersion of the actors in the scene, a reverence for the emotions being captured and rendered. It is the smallest of things, and it is immense.

Much of the Francesca-and-Robert material is of similar quality: their little stolen glances and accidental brushings-against, their moments of taking each other in without speaking, the delicate relationship of the music to the action and emotions. It’s all photographed gorgeously by Jack Green, who makes humble farmscapes and an ordinary kitchen look like the settings of Old Master paintings. There is very little strain or quote-unquote “art” on display, a spareness shared by the screenplay, which Richard LaGravenese has heroically stripped of Waller’s hogwash, and by the streamlined (in the senses of both time and craft) filmmaking.

But: the framing story. The actors playing Francesca’s children, Annie Corley and Victor Slezak, aren’t remotely as resonant as the central pair, nor are their dilemmas in learning their mother’s truth and facing their own marital issues particularly compelling. Had they been presented only at the start and finish of the film, the flatness of their sequences might not have been so harmful to the whole. But the way the film continually returns to them is infuriating. It’s like going to a concert to see a brilliant duo perform only to have them continually interrupted by toddling music students.

The unfortunate result of this mishmash of two different levels of acting, writing, and emotional absorption is that the powerful, masterly core of the film is diluted significantly by ordinary material that begins, ends, and continually punctuates it. Clint and LaGravenese did so much to rid the script of the wretched excesses of language in the novel; would they had chosen to be similarly cold-eyed toward the tale-within-a-tale structure. As it stands, Bridges is three parts great Hollywood romantic film, one part run-of-the-mill TV drama. You can legitimately lament the dilution of the movie’s quality, but you shouldn’t forget the material with which its makers started out. A picture based on that book had absolutely no business being as good as this one is.

And if the world was surprised that Clint had a romantic side, that was because the world hadn’t been keeping up with his private life.

After a couple of years of playing coy about his relationship with Frances Fisher, he was equally mum about a blossoming new relationship. In April 1993, just after Unforgiven’s Oscar triumph, Clint sat for an interview for KSBW-TV, the NBC affiliate in Salinas that provided local news coverage for the Carmel and Monterey Bay community. The interviewer was Dina Ruiz, the anchor of the station’s evening news broadcasts, a Bay area native who’d been working as a TV newswoman since graduating college. Dina was about to turn twenty-eight, and different, to the eye, from the spritely, elfin blond women whom Clint usually fell for: darkly beautiful, of Hawaiian, Japanese, African American, Irish, and German heritage. As they chatted, there were sparks. Clint told Carmel Magazine, “We got along really well, and I guess we flirted a little bit, because she took the film back to KSBW and one of her associates said, ‘You’re going to marry him.’”

Not so fast, but good call. About eighteen months passed, and baby Francesca had been born, and Clint and Fisher had had some issues, and Clint went stag to a charity event at the Inn at Spanish Bay, a posh hotel at Pebble Beach. The organizers approached him, as he recalled, and asked, “ ‘Would you mind sitting next to Dina Ruiz?’ And I said, ‘Not at all!’ She was in a red dress and lookin’ kind of foxy, and I thought, ‘Well, this is kind of nice.’ And we just started talking. We’d talked on a few occasions, but nothing heavy, and we weren’t talking about anything heavy there, except that we ended up with a little handholding under the table.”

She remembered it slightly differently: “Within five minutes we were holding hands under the table and never let go.” They could banter playfully when describing those first encounters:

Her: It was really old-fashioned. You meet and know you like each other. The boy asks for the girl’s phone number and then the boy calls her the next day. And then we’d go out on dates for about a month. He’d call me and we’d meet for a glass of wine or a tea. It was old-fashioned courting and dating. It was really nice.

Him: It wasn’t quite that old-fashioned, but we’ll skip that part. We drove down the coast to Big Sur, had a great dinner, and then just hung out.

Her: We talked until about five in the morning—and I mean just talked.

Him: It was perfect.

Later on, more reflectively, he filled in the details of that first-date date:

My wife and I had our first legitimate date at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur. I remember we were having dinner, looking out at the ocean, and she says, “Why don’t we go down to Esalen?” For locals, they’ll let you in after one [a.m.] for five bucks or some ridiculously low price, and you can go sit in the hot tubs. . . . So there was a couple sitting in one of these big tubs at one end of the room, and we went down to the other end where there was nobody. So I took off my clothes and jumped into the tub. And she was all embarrassed. She said, “You’re not putting on a bathing suit or anything?” And I said, “Hey, when in Rome . . .”

That was in late 1994. A few months after that, Fisher and Clint had started to drift so far apart that, according to the New York Post, he had brought matters to a head by reviving a familiar parting strategy: locking both Fisher and Francesca out of his homes in Bel-Air and Carmel. If there was strife between them, though, it was staying private. Fisher had rarely spoken to the press about their relationship, and when she was profiled in the Los Angeles Times in late 1995, when she was moving into a new home, she spoke about their parting with tact and class. “You’re attracted to somebody for a reason,” she said, “and if you can’t get past the honeymoon stage and get into the deeper meanings of why you’re together . . . you’re doomed to just stop when things start getting tough. . . . I’m not bitter, I’m not jaded.”

And Clint, too, spoke in fond terms of their time together, stating plainly, “We were just having a rough time getting along. I love the child, she loves the child. We had a nice relationship, but it was never meant to go to marriage.” In his eyes, their problems were to do with their shared profession. “If you’re with an actress,” he said, “especially if you’re a director with a certain amount of control, there’s sometimes a resentment if you hire somebody else. The attitude is, ‘Am I not good enough for you to hire me?’” When an interviewer pressed and asked if he was thinking in particular of The Bridges of Madison County, Clint bristled but admitted, “She would have loved to play the part Meryl played. . . . Enough said.”

Fisher didn’t seek legal redress like Sondra Locke, and she would continue to thrive professionally, soon to play her most famous role, the mother of Kate Winslet’s Rose in James Cameron’s Titanic. She would even appear in another of Clint’s films. But she didn’t have to pretend to be entirely happy about what had happened. In October 1995, when O. J. Simpson was acquitted in his criminal trial, Fisher was quoted on the verdict by the gossip columnist Marilyn Beck, saying, “Once again, the illusion of stardom has overshadowed a man’s infidelity and cruelty.” Asked by Beck if she were thinking of Clint, she replied, “I wrote specifically about O.J., but if the shoe fits . . .”

Fisher may not have been his ideal lifemate, but he was clearly interested in settling down. In 1994, he paid $3.7 million for a new forever home in Pebble Beach, a six-bedroom, 6,900-square-foot Spanish Colonial mansion, originally built in the 1920s, with a cobblestone courtyard and ocean views. He dubbed it “Hacienda Este Madera”—literally “East Wood House”—and clearly hoped to fill it. The following year, he gifted Dina with a large ruby ring that she showed excitedly to girlfriends and work colleagues, insisting that they weren’t engaged. That soon changed. “We went together four or five months,” he explained later. “Then I knew I could get married again. Instinctively, I knew she was the right person. I was never a guy on a white horse. She’s a self-feeder.” As he put it another time, “I liked her self-sufficiency. I admired her work ethic. And she never seemed to want anything. . . . This was somebody that I liked and then I loved. I found those two elements together. And then respect. By maintaining respect for the person, you maintain self-respect. And that was easy to do with her. It was easy to maintain a monogamous relationship.”

In late December, they made the annual New Year’s ski trip to Sun Valley, where they applied for a marriage license but didn’t seal the deal. On March 31, 1996, they were in Las Vegas, where they obtained another marriage license. They then went to the home of casino magnate Steve Wynn, where six of Dina’s girlfriends had gathered to stand alongside her as bridesmaids and Wynn served as Clint’s best man. The bride and groom both wore Nino Cerruti (white and dark blue, respectively), Wynn dropped the wedding rings at the crucial moment, and one Reverend Judy, who normally plied her trade at Wynn’s Treasure Island hotel and casino, formally married them. (Ever the romantic, Clint had come up with the perfect gift to mark the occasion: “My wedding present to her was paying off her credit cards. . . . I told her it was a one-time deal.”)

They returned to Carmel, where Dina had some work waiting for her, and then flew to Hawaii for a lengthy honeymoon, during which they visited with Jacelyn Reeves and Scott and Kathryn, her children with Clint. And there was a surprise. “After a few weeks,” Clint recalled, Dina “said she felt a little nausea. She asked me to stop at a gas station so she could buy one of those sticks. She came back and said, ‘We’re pregnant.’” In November, Dina quit her news anchor job to prepare for the baby’s arrival and for life as a stay-at-home mom. On December 12, Morgan Colette Eastwood was born in Los Angeles. With her birth, Clint had sired eight children some forty-two years apart by six different women . . . that he knew of, which, in his case, isn’t entirely a punchline. (Maui would become another home; in 1999, Clint paid $7.5 million for 1.5 oceanfront acres in the gated community of Palauea Beach, near the town of Wailea, eventually building a house among the many celebrity houses in the area.)

Honors and recognitions continued to pile up—including some that ranked among the greatest that anyone in the movie business could accrue. In March 1996, he was awarded the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award at a banquet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel attended by more than 1,100 people (at about $800 a plate). In a tribute that was later broadcast on ABC-TV and the A&E cable network, Jim Carrey and Rene Russo played host as a series of old friends, colleagues, and fans (including Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Quentin Tarantino, and Warren Beatty) lauded him as an artist and a man, complete with many film clips. Kyle Eastwood and his group played a set of jazz standards and Clint’s own soundtrack melodies. His old chum Don Rickles roasted him mercilessly: “I say it—nobody else will say it—and I say it from the bottom of my heart: You’re a lousy actor. . . . Mother Eastwood is laughing, knowing damn well she never had so much money in her whole life. . . . Your son played the bass; we sat through that.” Clint, seated in his tux between Dina and Alison on one side and Ruth and her husband John Wood on the other, howled. Clint accepted the honor—previously won by the likes of John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor, and Spielberg—with self-deprecating humor. “Watching my career flash before me was like waking up with an orangutan. You say, ‘How did I get here?’”

Two months later, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, it was the turn of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In another pricey gala ($1,500 a plate), the likes of Donald Sutherland, Eli Wallach, Diane Venora, Sonia Braga, and Jane Alexander paid tribute in between airings of clips from twenty-three of his films. Once again, Dina and Alison were by his side. Once again, gleaming and tuxedoed, he accepted the honor with words of gratitude.

And if you couldn’t afford to attend those events but still wanted to celebrate him, you got the chance for $27.50 in December, when Knopf published Clint Eastwood: A Biography, by Richard Schickel. Clint had cooperated with writers previously, notably Stuart Kaminsky in 1974 and Christopher Frayling in 1992, but those books were based on independent research and one single interview each, which the authors presented in transcription format.* Schickel’s book was a full-on authorized biography, with Clint walking through his entire life from boyhood to the present moment, touching on his upbringing, his military service, his early days in Hollywood, the Rawhide years, the Leone films, and everything he’d done in the business for the past three decades, as well as his marriages, his children, his extramarital sexual affairs, and his relationship with Sondra Locke.

Schickel’s access to Clint was unparalleled. But it gave the pages the glow of hagiography (a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times suggested that each time the author used the word “he” to identify the star it should have been capitalized). The book was widely but not charitably reviewed, with critics generally acknowledging Schickel’s savvy as an observer of the movie business but finding his portrait of his subject as a man too favorably biased.

Clint was approving enough of the book to grant interviews in support of it, and he showed up for an evening of chatter and a Q and A with Schickel at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y. It was a fiasco. The moderator directed most of her questions to Schickel while Clint sat silently onstage. So many ticket buyers complained about the lack of words from the star that the Y sent attendees free ticket vouchers for an upcoming event of their choice.

But while he enjoyed the bounty of a new wife, a new baby, an authorized biography, and the approbation of the nation’s most prestigious film societies, he still had a past with which to contend. The first round of Locke vs. Eastwood had been played out six years prior with an initial public splash and a long, drawn-out, secret finale. Round two was the opposite. Few media outlets noted Sondra’s filing of a fraud lawsuit against Clint, but the whole world showed up in September 1996, when the matter went to trial before a civil jury in Burbank Superior Court. Reporters for mainstream and tabloid media outlets vied for seats in the courtroom; Clint was escorted into the building through a back door by a trio of bailiffs; and Judge David Schacter warned jurors: “Don’t look at that tabloid stuff when you go through the shopping line.”*

Clint appeared in starchy business attire, appropriate to the situation, and was described by observers as sitting “with his chair cocked toward the jury, rarely breaking eye contact.” (He and Sondra, on the other hand, never acknowledged one another, not even when they once found themselves sharing an elevator.) On the opening day of testimony, Sondra described herself as “amazed . . . embarrassed . . . humiliated” by the discovery that her deal with Warner Bros. was no more than a means for Clint to wash his hands of her. “I remembered . . . all those meetings with all those executives, all the hope and expectations. I felt horrible, completely defeated.” She referred to Clint as “The Unfightable One” and said that by funding her development deal he ensured that nobody in Hollywood would take her seriously. (A [female] reporter for the Los Angeles Times observed that male tabloid reporters snickered throughout Sondra’s time on the witness stand.)

When Sondra’s lawyers called Clint as their last witness, he spoke in the fewest possible words (his longest response in his five-minute appearance on the stand was “Part of it, yes”). But he did admit to the central points of Sondra’s allegations: that he covered the cost of Warner Bros.’ deal with her, that the deal brought an end to her palimony suit against him, and that he never told her or her representatives that his backroom deal with the studio meant that he was, effectively, her employer.*

The following day, he appeared on the stand again to answer questions posed by his own lawyers, and he found his voice, often speaking in an animated and stern manner. “I never intended to defraud anyone,” he declared. “I didn’t discourage them from making movies with Sondra Locke.” He said that he felt that the palimony suit was “an assault on [his] children’s inheritance” and that the publicity around it made him feel that Sondra and her lawyers “were holding a gun to my head, like it was social extortion.” He claimed to have “prevailed” in that lawsuit (which claim was struck from the record when Sondra’s attorney pointed out that the matter had been settled, not decided). He said that he had conceived of getting her a development deal and funding it himself as “icing on the cake” of his settlement offer, and he felt that by committing his own money to it he could get the studio to agree. And he didn’t tell Sondra about his part in the deal, he said, because “I didn’t want to grandstand and say, ‘Here, I’m getting you this deal, and I’m standing behind it.’ That wouldn’t be very complimentary.”

When he left the stand, he spoke to reporters outside the courthouse for the first time during the trial, his dander still high. “They are trying to make it into a dime-novel plot,” he said. “I did nothing but spend my time and efforts on her behalf.” The whole thing, he admitted, was an ordeal: “It’s dragging up some bad memories.”

There were a few other witnesses for both sides, but the gist of the matter was right there in the paperwork: Clint and Warner Bros. had deceived Sondra; her deal wasn’t an opportunity to make movies but a bone tossed to her to keep her from pursuing her much larger suit against the studio’s biggest star. The matter went to the jury on a Friday, and the foreman straightaway asked a question of the court that made it evident that they agreed that Sondra had been defrauded. Over the weekend, Clint’s team reached out to settle, and an agreement was forged and signed on Monday. Sondra would receive a reported $2 million and the world would know what they’d done to her.

When the jurors were reached by reporters after they’d been dismissed, they revealed that they were of a mind that Sondra had been wronged and disagreed principally over how much she should receive—some favoring as little as $100,000, some favoring millions more than she was seeking. A few of the jurors indicated that Clint’s comportment had set their minds against him. “[His] blowup on the witness stand had a lot to do with it,” one noted. “It was already decided that she had won. It was only a matter of damages.”

Sondra, of course, saw Clint’s capitulation as “loud and clear” proof “that people cannot get away with whatever they want to just because they’re powerful.” Clint, of course, took other lessons from what he continued to see as an act of generosity gone haywire. “I would have been better off if I hadn’t done anything and had let her go ahead and file the palimony suit against me,” he told Playboy the following year. “Even if it had worked out, it would have come back to haunt me.” He was particularly bitter in speaking of Sondra: “She plays the victim very well. Unfortunately, she had cancer and so she plays that card. But every time these things come up, it makes me knock on wood that I’m here and not there.”

Aside from vindicating her and revealing some awful aspects of Clint’s behavior and thinking, the trial made it possible for Sondra to revive her suit against Warner Bros. An appellate court allowed her to proceed, and she sued them for $100 million. In the spring of 1999, with a civil trial about to commence, the parties settled; one published account suggested that Sondra got between $12 million and $15 million from Warner Bros.

By then, Clint was finished with the entire business. Asked about Sondra Locke by a journalist reporting on his days as a new husband and father, he spoke in terse monosyllables: “I’ve moved on with my life.”

Twenty-Five

Fame—especially at his level of it—had perks. Clint wasn’t much of a joiner, but he was always game for laddish antics, and in 1996 he accepted an invitation to attend the annual summer gathering at Bohemian Grove, the campground operated by San Francisco’s Bohemian Club in rural Monte Rio, about eighty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Grove was both mythical and infamous as a place where the wealthiest, most privileged, and most powerful white men in America (including the presidents Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan) mixed with artsy Bay area types for a week of drinking, merrymaking, lectures, amateur performances, and, it was widely rumored, the company of prostitutes. In his only visit to the Grove (he was never a member), Clint took part in the ritual known as “The Cremation of Care,” in which members are encouraged to forget their outside worldly concerns for the duration of their stay. Alongside Walter Cronkite and George H. W. Bush, he took the stage to recite the mantra “cre-MA-tion” like a bullfrog with a few Budweisers in his belly.

He appeared in a more dignified live performance later in the year. The Bridges of Madison County soundtrack had accrued a remarkable fringe benefit. Documentarian Bruce Ricker got a call from George Wein, the New York impresario who’d helped found the Newport Jazz Festival, asking if he and Clint might be interested in taking part in a tribute concert for Johnny Hartman, the breakout star (albeit a decade-plus dead) of that recording. Ricker countered with a different idea: How about a tribute concert in honor of Clint, who had made such a prominent place for jazz in his films for so long? Not only did Wein like the idea, he immediately offered a venue for it: Carnegie Hall.

Ricker wrangled musicians and planned a film of the evening under the Malpaso banner. The event would mark the opening night of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band’s fifth season, and a galaxy of talents came together for it: pianists Kenny Barron and Jay McShann; saxophonists James Moody, Joshua Redman, and James Carter; and singer Little Jimmy Scott. Lennie Niehaus wrote arrangements of a slew of jazz standards and composed a suite of melodies from various moments in Clint’s career, including the theme of Rawhide and several of the tunes Clint had written for soundtracks. And Kyle Eastwood would be on the bill with his quartet. On an October evening, the tribute played to a packed house that included the likes of Liza Minnelli and Woody Allen. Clint, flanked as ever by Dina and Alison, perched in a box seat, beaming. At the end of the regularly scheduled program, he took to the stage to join in the ovation and then approached the microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I’m Clint Eastwood, and I love jazz.” He recalled listening to records of the famed Benny Goodman 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert. Then, a surprise: “I’m not gonna leave this stage—’cause I may never be back here—without playing at least one chord, so you’re gonna have to bear with me just a second.” He sat at the piano and started to pick out a boogie-woogie tune. He had no ambitious plans for his bit, and he’d arranged an exit strategy. “I picked a tune I played in an assembly when I was in high school—Avery Parrish’s ‘After Hours’—and I told Jay McShann, ‘Look, I don’t know how much of this stuff I remember, so . . . I’ll kinda motion to you when I’m running out of ideas here.’” McShann agreed.

He played a steady, rocking beat with the left hand, filigrees with the right; the players on the stage began to clap along with the beat, followed by the audience. Soon the full band started playing with him, and he started to feel the weight of playing that room with those musicians. “So I look over at Jay,” he recalled. “He’s not paying attention to me. I’m waving like crazy, I’m motioning like crazy, and he’s not coming out.” Finally, McShann took over the keyboard. Later, Clint asked what took him so long. “He said, ‘Well, you seemed to be doing just fine. I thought I’d let you go ahead and play.’”

By then, he had already released a new feature film, Absolute Power, based on the debut novel of lawyer David Baldacci, a sleek thriller about an aging jewel thief who accidentally witnesses a murder by the president of the United States and must avoid being framed for the crime. The script was adapted by William Goldman (who, incidentally, had written the Moses jokes that Clint had tried to deliver at the Oscars decades before), and a powerhouse lineup of actors signed on: Gene Hackman as the president, Judy Davis as his chief of staff, Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert as Secret Service agents, Ed Harris as a homicide detective, E. G. Marshall as a billionaire political kingmaker, and Laura Linney as the jewel thief’s estranged daughter, a prosecuting attorney. (Clint’s daughters Alison and Kimber were given tiny parts as an art student and a White House tour guide, respectively.) Malpaso partnered on the film with Castle Rock, the folks who made In the Line of Fire, meaning that Clint would be directing for Sony Pictures—his first-ever film behind the camera for any studio besides Warner Bros. or Universal. The film was shot in the summer of ’96 in the Washington, D.C., area and showed up in theaters eight months after production began.

Critics found themselves balancing praise for the film’s high-quality craft with a side-eye for the plot (some felt that the depiction of sleaze in the Oval Office was a symptom of Clint’s right-wing contempt for Bill Clinton, then mired in the Paula Jones scandal). In a typical notice, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times acknowledged some absurdities in the narrative but found that “there is so much pleasure involved in seeing how beautifully old-fashioned movie machinery can be made to work that it seems churlish to object.” Todd McCarthy of Variety called it “a high-toned potboiler, a reasonably engrossing and entertaining suspenser . . . [with] some whoppingly far-fetched developments in the home stretch.” In the Washington Post, however, Desson Thomson couldn’t look past the improbabilities of the plot, saying the film “devolves into such utter ludicrousness, the best response (other than avoiding the thing in the first place) is to laugh.” Audiences seemed willing to go along with it, though. It opened with $16.7 million in its debut weekend and went on to gross just over $50 million, approximately its budget, which meant it would go into profit with overseas box office and various ancillaries.

It’s not a perfect potboiler, but Absolute Power is, for much of its running time, a crackerjack picture. It loses momentum toward the end, but it offers great pleasures along the way, not the least of which is a collection of impeccable performances. Clint builds the film around a series of tightly wound set pieces, some of them wordless, verging on pure filmmaking: storytelling using only moving pictures. They range from the theft-and-killing to a potential execution-by-sniper to a dance sequence in which the president spins his chief of staff around the floor at a state dinner while informing her through a cold smile that she’s literally wearing the evidence of his crime in the form of a necklace. Like a Don Siegel film, it’s a B-movie story requiring significant momentum so as to keep the audience from falling into the holes in the plot. There’s a poetry to Clint’s playing the role of an aging master burglar and part-time art student, and a poignancy in the depiction of a father estranged from a daughter whom he loves, which would become an ongoing trope for him. It’s not as compelling as In the Line of Fire, but it’s solid and spry.

He promoted the film with an interview on 60 Minutes, the acme of journalistic establishment comfort for the celebrities it profiled. So when correspondent Steve Kroft came around for a chat, everyone assumed that it would be a glad-handing, soft-gloves affair. Dina and the kids would be included in the piece, as would Clint’s mom, Ruth, still vital and sparkling nearing her nineties. A lovefest.

And then Kroft brought up something that no one expected. Sitting opposite Clint with the cameras rolling, he said, “You’ve had seven kids with five women, not all of whom you were married to.”*

Dead. Silence.

Clint glared, immobile.

Kroft later remembered that “the temperature in the room [dropped] to about 40 degrees. He just stared at me for about thirty seconds.”

Finally, Clint said that that was correct.

Kroft asked if he had relationships with all his kids.

Again: ice.

“I told him,” Kroft said, “ ‘That’s a pretty awesome expression—no one has ever shot me [one like it] in all the years I’ve been doing interviews. You’re certainly letting me know I better approach with caution.’”

Clint said that he had active relationships with all of his children, adding: “I can protect myself. They can’t.”

And that was true, for the most part. At the time, his children ranged in age from about eleven months to forty-three years, and they had a variety of lives and experiences and relationships with their dad. Kimber, thirty-three, was on her second marriage, was the mother of a thirteen-year-old son, Clinton Eastwood Gaddie, and was still finding her way professionally, living near her mom in Denver but spending time as well in Southern California, working sometimes as a waitress but thinking of a career in the makeup departments of films and TV shows.* Kyle, approaching thirty, also had a child, a three-year-old girl named Graylen Spencer Eastwood, and had done the work to build a serious career as a jazz bassist; by the late 1990s, he was leading his own band and getting ready to record his debut album for Sony. The kids Scott and Kathryn were still in school, at ages eleven and nine, respectively, in Hawaii. The littlest, Francesca and Morgan, four years and eleven months, respectively, were being raised, often under the same roof, in Carmel, often under Dina’s care as Frances Fisher, who was a full presence in her daughter’s life, traveled for work.

And then there was Alison, age twenty-five. Alison was, by all accounts, including her own, the wild child. She went to private schools in Monterey and Pebble Beach and ran with a fast crowd and partied and got into not only mischief but trouble-trouble. “I was hell-bent on enjoying myself,” she said. “Obviously I went a little bit beyond the call of duty.” Maggie had a hard time corralling her, and she would occasionally have to bring in Clint to lay down the law. “Only when things got really ugly would the brigade be called in,” Alison said. She went to college in Santa Barbara but dropped out to go to Europe and try for a career in modeling. She was tall and willowy and fair-skinned and -haired and striking, but she didn’t like the vibe of the fashion business: “They do treat you like a piece of meat.” She came back to California to get involved in movies. She had appeared in Tightrope—after her mom saw it she called Clint and demanded to know, “What kind of movie did you put her in?!”—but hadn’t acted since. But her dad gave her a bit part (and a generous close-up) in Absolute Power, and she got an agent and started looking for work.

In late 1996, Clint handed Alison a script in which he was interested, an adaptation of John Berendt’s nonfiction bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, concerning a murder and trial in the colorful underworld of Savannah, Georgia. He wanted to know what she thought of it, and she said that she liked it. She didn’t, she later claimed, tell him that there was a part in it that she fancied for herself: a florist who has a romance with the main character. And then Clint cut a deal to make the film for Malpaso and Warner Bros., directing only, with Kevin Spacey as the murder suspect, John Cusack as the journalist covering the trial, and Savannah and Savannahians playing themselves.

Alison knew that there was a strict line between Clint’s work and his family—partly to protect them, sure, but partly due to his compartmentalizing nature. And that could hurt to admit. “[Filmmaking] is his world, his life,” she once said, “and a lot of times it has meant more to him than his family.” She didn’t think he was particularly interested in her career, so she didn’t give much thought to the role she’d noticed. But then her agent phoned to say she’d been called for an audition for the film. There were three readings altogether (Clint, predictably, was present for none of them). And then another call: Come in for wardrobe fittings. And that was how she learned that she would be in her dad’s next film.

The movie shot on location in Savannah, in particular at the historic Mercer House, the site of the murder that was central to the plot and also, coincidentally, the family home of the great songwriter Johnny Mercer, the Savannah native whose songs (“Skylark,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and many more) would appear in the film in cover versions. The filmmakers and cast settled in town in May 1997. Screenwriter John Lee Hancock was along for the duration, and a few of the actors, including Kevin Spacey, arrived weeks before the shoot to work on their coastal Georgia accents. (Clint asked Cusack to delay his arrival until just before his first scenes, to enhance the sense that he was an outsider parachuting in.) The crew made the rounds of local bars and got into a series of friendly but heated softball matches with locals. And they endeared themselves to the community by participating in a benefit to restore the aged Lucas Theater, a gala evening at which Spacey revealed that he was personally donating $200,000 to the cause.

But nobody enjoyed the shoot more than The Lady Chablis, aka The Doll, a local performer (“I hate the word ‘drag queen,’” she said) who had appeared in the book and would play herself on-screen. “I met Clint Eastwood and I charmed him,” she said. “Needless to say, if they want an Academy Award, they got to have me!” On her last day on set, she recalled, there was a pause after she shot her last scene: “Clint made an announcement. He said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention. Unfortunately for us, that was The Doll’s last take. She’s brought us a lot of joy and laughter. She’s been very professional, and we’re all going to miss her. Would you all help me thank The Doll for being The Doll?’ Everyone stood up and started applauding, and I just lost it. . . . Because that man, one of the most powerful anywhere, he took a chance on me.”

But that warm feeling didn’t make its way to the screen or the audience when the film appeared later that year. Everything about the film of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil hit differently from the surprise success of The Bridges of Madison County. For one thing, Berendt’s book (shockingly misidentified in the film’s on-screen closing credits as a “novel”) was considered a work of literary value that didn’t need tempering or rethinking. For another, the blend of Clint’s feet-on-the-ground style with wide-eyed grinning at the quote-unquote wackiness of Savannahians trivialized the material.

Kenneth Turan absolutely lambasted the film in the Los Angeles Times: “uninvolving . . . cobbled together . . . listless, disjointed and disconnected . . . meandering . . . flat . . . glacial . . . formidably unconvincing.” Manohla Dargis, writing in the L.A. Weekly, deemed it “phlegmatic, a slow fizzle.” Audiences weren’t sold. The film was released as part of the Thanksgiving crop and opened in sixth place with $5.2 million. It hung on in theaters until the new year, grossing a total of $25 million, well short of its $35 million budget.

It’s a measure of just how little movie studio executives can understand the art and craft of directing that somebody thought Clint was the guy to make Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Perhaps they reckoned that the fine work he’d made of The Bridges of Madison County proved he had a special touch for massive bestsellers.* They were wrong. The film never compels, convinces, or engages. It’s a tedious, joyless, dispiriting slog, dull in its writing, acting, and craft. At a full two and a half hours, it’s the most torturous experience of Clint’s directorial career. Even the reliable craft of the longtime Malpaso crew seems washed away by the sheer flatness of the venture. The one bit of light, and it’s far from enough to recommend the film even as an exercise, is The Lady Chablis, who brings a louche, raunchy sparkle to her every appearance—the only moments that feel at all threatening or intoxicating or sexy. Otherwise, it’s a murder mystery without intrigue, a travelogue without exotica, a celebration of place without any sense of festivity or terroir. The magic that sparked Bridges demonstrated that Clint understood the material, that he had, in his own words, “been that guy.” But it’s clear from this film that he had never been—or met—anyone like any of these characters. If you’re looking for a Clint Eastwood film to skip, skip this one.

“This is it, win, lose, or draw.” He was talking about his married life. He and Dina and their honeymoon baby settled into a routine in Carmel, and he professed loudly and often that he was delighted to be domestic, to be a frequently stay-at-home dad, and to be with Dina in particular. No doubt thinking of Sondra Locke and Frances Fisher, he said of his new wife, “There’s no agenda, no work thing. If I introduce her to friends who are producers, there’s no work in that for her. They’re just friends.” Dina expressed her own satisfaction, speaking often of how gentle and solid her husband was, and giving him a bit of praise that few men of his generation ever got. “He’s a good diaper guy,” she said. “He does all that stuff.”

There was a balance to their days. He would rise and make breakfast—smoothies were his specialty—and check in on the pets (the menagerie included Penelope the pig, three chickens, the rats Whiskers and Norbert, and Paco the parrot). He and Dina would spend the morning with Morgan, then maybe take a few hours for a round of golf, or take the baby with them out shopping and to lunch. (He was worth more than $400 million, but he liked to shop at places like Marshalls and Ross Dress for Less, and he was satisfied with simple meals like salads or grilled fish at Mission Ranch or a golf course clubhouse.)

They saw a lot of Francesca, who lived with them when her mom pursued her career. “Dina has embraced everybody,” Clint said. “She brought the whole family together, with no territorial demands, no big ego, none of that. Francesca and Morgan are great friends. The kiddies—and their mothers—visit each other regularly. I take some of the kids, and Mumsy,* too, on our vacations, to Sun Valley or Hawaii, wherever. That’s the way Dina feels it should be.”

Had this marriage, this household, changed him? Or had age? On the one hand, he said, he was simply happy: “You come to realize that marriage is not just about love. It’s about like as well.” And it was also true that he saw himself, as if in a mirror, at the end of a long and not always positive phase of his life. “I’m living in my state of monogamy quite happily,” he said. “I never thought I’d get there, but I did. It feels good. . . . I like myself better for doing that. . . . I think when you’re young, you’re driven by a lot of hormonal effects. . . . It’s like Everest: ‘Because it’s there.’ . . . And you’re young, and you’re kind of stupid. But I certainly don’t feel that way now. Though certainly the leopard spots don’t go completely away.”

Nor did his work ethic desert him. (He was prolific enough to receive the Producers Guild of America’s Selznick Award for his body of work that spring.) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil hadn’t yet gone to home video when he was at work on True Crime, a thriller about a roguish journalist who has a single day to save a man whom he believes to be innocent from being executed at San Quentin. Once again, he rounded up a solid cast: Isaiah Washington as the condemned man, LisaGay Hamilton as his wife, Denis Leary and James Woods as newspaper editors, Bernard Hill as a sympathetic warden, Michael McKean as a foolish prison chaplain, Diane Venora as the journalist’s beleaguered wife, Frances Fisher (!) as the prosecutor who convicted the doomed man in the first place, and even little Francesca, playing a not-insignificant role as the journalist’s daughter. Woods called it the best experience he’d yet had making a movie: “Every actor, after like thirty years in the business, should always, like just as a present, get an honorary Oscar and a week on a Clint Eastwood film set, just to see that there is a Heaven somewhere in the film business. I said, ‘Clint, and I honestly mean this: Any time you ever want me in a movie of yours, don’t even send the script. Just tell me where to show up and when.’” And Denis Leary saw something he hitherto couldn’t possibly imagine: “There was a mirror on the set. And [Clint] looked into the mirror, and he put his hand up as if he was going to touch his hair. From about seventy yards away, you could hear this woman scream, ‘Don’t you touch your damn hair!’ And Clint just froze in place. And his hair woman, who has been his hair woman for years, ran over and said, ‘What’s wrong with you, touching your hair? Put your hands down.’ And he was like a little boy. He put his hands down, and she took care of his hair. And I was like, ‘Wow: There’s somebody in the world who can yell at Clint Eastwood.’” The film was shot in Oakland and at San Quentin from May to July 1998, and was ready for release the following March.

By now, critical responses were predictably divided between those reviewers who appreciated the Old Master tenor of his work and those who demanded the same of a septuagenarian as they would any other director. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, representing the former group, wrote that “experience has given [Eastwood] patience . . . and as a jazz fan, he also knows about improvising a little before returning to the main theme.” Wesley Morris of the San Francisco Examiner, though, declared the film “plays like a lost Rockford file.” Most everyone praised Washington, and not a few critics enjoyed the spectacle of Clint interacting with Francesca (he sweetly calls her “you little goon”). Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post could stand for a lot of critics in saying, “It’s quick and snappy and it’s over.” The film was over with audiences, though, before it debuted, opening with a $5 million weekend and panning out at $16 million—a huge loss on its estimated $55 million budget.

True Crime is decent enough—a B-movie, really—but there’s an uncomfortable truth hanging over it from the very first scene: It ought to have been made with a leading man closer to fifty, not seventy. No matter the physical specimen Clint was in real life at the time he made it, he is simply too old on the eyes to be playing a sexual carouser with a preschool-aged daughter, an active journalism career, a cigarette habit, a taste for twenty-three-year-old girls, and the reflexes to pull off some stunt driving. It’s just impossible to buy. The film nevertheless offers pleasures. There are diverting conversations between Clint’s character, Everett, and his colleagues (particularly Leary and Woods), there’s a nice scene of Everett being chewed out by the district attorney (Fisher seems to delight in berating him), and there’s a clinical depiction of the mechanics of an execution by lethal injection, which suggests that this film was made by someone who likely doesn’t support the death penalty. Washington is the heart of the film, the condemned man who tries to pass from the world with grace but crumbles upon having to say goodbye to his daughter, and there are fine, small performances by Hill as an (almost) sympathetic warden, Venora as Everett’s (rightfully) exhausted wife, and McKean as a (despicably) vain chaplain. The film doesn’t feel like it’s got a ticking clock in it, though: Like the miscast leading man, it feels slower than it should. And, more personally, there’s little feel for the Oakland of the 1990s in it; yes, Clint had left the town more than forty years prior, but a son of the city might’ve celebrated its glories, however faded. Then again, that’s much of the impression the film makes: a missed opportunity.

Not long into True Crime’s theatrical run, Clint was at the Malpaso bungalow when he was summoned to a gymnasium-sized sound scoring stage on the Warner Bros. lot. He’d worked there a million times: sound edits, scoring, orchestra sessions from Josey Wales to just a month or so ago. He had nothing going on that day, though. When he arrived, he was met by some studio brass and a ceremony. The building was being renamed the Eastwood Scoring Stage. He was caught by surprise and touched, and he spoke about how the music for Casablanca and Rebel Without a Cause had been recorded there. “This is a real piece of history,” he said, as was he.

Part VI

A Pantheon of One

DUELING LIFE STORIES

OWNING THE GREEN

A DARK, SHINING GEM

AND ANOTHER

AMAZEMENT

A SEAT ABOVE THE THRONG

REMAKING THE PAST AS AN EPIC OF DEATH

Filmmakers don’t as a rule pick up big, new challenges in their seventies. His reach unsatisfied, he dared himself more and deeper and harder with each passing year. No icon of Hollywood acting had ever become a major director. Until this one.

Atlaspix / Alamy Stock Photo

Twenty-Six

He was as venerated a figure as Hollywood had, both in front of and behind the camera, a paterfamilias, a mogul, a cultural icon. And he had quietly and deliberately become a land baron. For more than thirty years, he had been purchasing property all around Carmel, Pebble Beach, and the Monterey Peninsula. “I never bought any real estate I didn’t really like,” he told The New Yorker. “I like land, the land out here. . . . When everybody was going crazy with stocks and investments not long ago, I stayed with the land. I like the tangible.”

And while he hadn’t really done much with most of his holdings, that changed in the mid-1990s. About fifteen years prior, he had acquired an undeveloped chunk of two thousand acres on a mountain ridge about five miles northeast of Carmel proper, with views of Monterey Bay. The parcel came complete with a plan to build 139 homes on the site, which didn’t appeal to him at all. But he did think it would make a nice location for a golf course, and in 1996 he and a business partner named Alan Williams petitioned Monterey County for permits to build Cañada Woods North, a development consisting of a golf course and clubhouse, tennis courts, an equestrian center, thirty-four estate sites, and a few guesthouses and caretakers’ residences.

This was hardly a preservation project, even if it was smaller than the original plan. It passed through various county commissions, but it faced pushback from conservation groups. In February 1997, there were protesters at the local premiere of Absolute Power, and the Sierra Club and others brought a lawsuit against the project. In the summer, a judge sided with the preservationists and ordered work be halted, and Clint, though fuming, chose not to pursue the residential development. Instead, in 1999 he built just the golf course—named Tehama, a Native American word meaning “abundance of nature”—for the time being.

In the years since Richard Schickel’s hagiographic authorized biography, another full-length book about him was in the works, by film historian Patrick McGilligan, an author of excellent bios of Fritz Lang, Robert Altman, and Jack Nicholson, among many other books, and someone who had interviewed Clint occasionally over the years. Clint: The Life and Legend appeared in London in 1999, where one of Clint’s previous biographers, Iain Johnstone, reviewed it in the Sunday Times with the declaration: “Not content with a portrait of the man warts and all, [McGilligan] seems intent in giving us one that is all warts.” Where Schickel’s book seemed to blink at—if not blindfold itself to—anything off-putting in Clint’s personal or professional life, McGilligan’s highlighted every slight, every trespass, every overreach, every shortcut that it could document. There was remarkable research in it. It marked, among other reportorial coups, the first public revelation of the existence of Laurie Murray, Clint’s Seattle-born daughter, and it chronicled Clint’s ancestry with impressive detail. But there was a lot of venom, too. In particular, Fritz Manes, the childhood-friend-turned-producer who had been dismissed from Malpaso, spoke to McGilligan about a number of distasteful incidents he claimed to have witnessed, including Clint striking Maggie: hair-raising stuff.

The book had appeared in the UK because the American publishers who’d commissioned it had backed away from its negative tone. After McGilligan agreed to take out an insurance policy indemnifying his publishers from a defamation suit, St. Martin’s Press brought forth an American edition in 2002. As soon as it appeared stateside, the book created sensational headlines and rifts among reviewers. Some were glad to see the icon they’d always suspected of being awful brought crashing down to earth; some saw relentless condemnation that refused the least acknowledgment of Clint’s worth as a man, actor, or director. McGilligan underscored those views in interviews such as one in the Chicago Tribune in which he said, “Clint is not a great actor or a great filmmaker,” and he went on to describe Clint’s pattern of “petty behavior.” (Schickel, whose bio came in for serious side-eye in McGilligan’s book, said of the latter, “It’s a scurrilous book that goes beyond the pale.”)

The book had been out in the United States for four months when Clint sued for libel, a $10 million claim against McGilligan for “setting out intentionally to destroy [his] reputation—both as a maker of motion pictures and as a man.” His objections to the book included its contentions that he had abused Maggie, that he had finagled a way out of active combat duty in Korea, that he had been a juvenile delinquent, that he was an atheist, and eight or ten other points. Somebody had read the thing very carefully. McGilligan appropriately stood by his work, which he had fastidiously sourced, but his position was shaken when Fritz Manes signed an affidavit disavowing several of the things he’d previously said on the record. After two years, a settlement was reached. The publisher was permitted to sell any remaining copies of the book, McGilligan would alter a dozen or so passages for future editions, and neither he nor the publisher was forced to admit any wrongdoing or pay any penalty. The episode showed something about Clint, adding to the many revelations in the book: He would defend himself, and he had the resources to do so down to the tiniest detail.

Meanwhile, a new movie. Malpaso got its hands on a script concerning four onetime hotshot pilots, now in their AARP years, called upon by NASA to rescue a crippled satellite. Clint would play the team leader, and he rounded up a cast of likely lads as his cohort: Tommy Lee Jones as the best pilot among them; Donald Sutherland as a crack engineer; and James Garner as a top navigator. The casting itself could make a good movie. Garner, who knew Clint before his Rawhide days, recalled running into Clint at a country club and telling him, “You know, it’s been over forty years. We’re going to have to work together again sometime.” A month or so later, he got the call. Sutherland said that when Clint phoned him up and said there was a role for him and the pay was $150,000, he replied, “Gimme a few days to raise the money.”

The film, titled Space Cowboys, was shot in the summer of 1999, mainly at NASA headquarters near Houston and at Cape Kennedy in Florida. The cast also included James Cromwell as the longtime antagonist of Clint and his team, Marcia Gay Harden as the mission director, and William Devane as the flight director. George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic supplied the film’s various effect sequences, while Clint focused on putting together the film’s old-timey soundtrack, with Willie Nelson and Joshua Redman covering such songs as “Still Crazy After All These Years,” “Young at Heart,” and “The Best Is Yet to Come.” It was a loose, happy experience, as Garner recalled. He told a story about the scene in which the four seniors stood bare-assed in front of the camera for their flight physicals. “That’s really us,” he said, explaining that Clint tricked them all into appearing naked on-screen. “He went to Tommy Lee Jones and said, ‘The other guys are doing it, will you do it?’ Then he came to me and said, ‘The other guys are going to do it, will you?’ And then he went to Donald Sutherland. Same thing. We didn’t have the good sense to talk to each other.”

The picture took a little longer in postproduction than was Clint’s usual preference, appearing in August 2000. Critics were largely in a generous mood when they delivered their verdicts. Nobody was terribly excited by the story, but they delighted in the spectacle of these veteran actors having a lark together. Todd McCarthy’s take in Variety was typical, admitting that the film had “breezy charm and [a] disarmingly devil-may-care attitude toward plausibility,” but finding that “Eastwood the director would appear to have had great fun here making the incredible believable . . . and the effect is ingratiating.” Similarly, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “There’s an abundance of charm and screen presence from the four veteran actors.” In the Washington Post, Rita Kempley wasn’t swayed, calling it “an implausible action adventure with the most geriatric payload since a community of retirees lifted off in Cocoon.” Surprising everyone, the film was a big hit, opening with a strong take of $18 million and lasting more than two months in the top ten. Its ultimate $90 million gross occasioned a number of trend pieces in Hollywood trade papers about the public’s thirst for films about and for older audiences.

In the main, Space Cowboys is a big special effects movie in service of a little joke: old guys in orbit. And yet it’s got pep to it and even a wisp of poignancy. It’s the first film in which Clint allows himself to play a role that acknowledges advancing age as a limitation, even as he insists that old guys are capable of a lot. After a prologue set in 1958, in which his character, Frank Corvin, watches his team of high-caliber pilots being replaced in NASA’s newly mounted space program by a chimpanzee, we jump forward forty years to find his cohort living out their days as a retired aerospace engineer (Clint), a pastor (Garner), a roller-coaster architect (Sutherland), and a crop duster (Jones). There’s a tiresome lot of old-fogey humor and a subplot involving some subterfuge on the part of the NASA administrator. And there’s a wee love story between Jones’s widowed character and the mission director played by Harden. Clint once again plays a guy who resents authority and isn’t a “team player” (as is said aloud at least three times), but it’s a true ensemble cast, with each of the main quartet getting a chance to shine in a bit of character color. It’s not always riveting, but it more than holds its own against the likes of, say, Michael Bay’s not dissimilar Armageddon, and it’s somehow gratifying that Clint manages, eighteen years after Firefox, to craft a movie that is both full of special effects and feels like it has a relationship to human life on—and orbiting—Earth.

He brought Space Cowboys to the Venice Film Festival in early September, not to try to win a prize with it but to host a gala premiere and accept an honor: the Golden Lion for Career Achievement. He was forty-five years into his acting career, and thirty into his directing career, and recognitions like this were seemingly becoming routine. While he was in Europe, he stopped in Paris, where he was awarded a bronze plaque representing, according to Mayor Jean Tiberi speaking at the ceremony, “the highest honor the city of Paris has to offer.” He was becoming a living cultural monument.

That was made explicit in December, when he was accorded the United States’ highest arts award, the Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that consisted of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Chuck Berry, Placido Domingo, Angela Lansbury, and Clint. In a several-day gala including a White House reception and a formal dinner at the State Department, he and his fellow honorees were feted by President Bill Clinton, who said of him, “He’s actually done pretty well for a former elected official.” Clinton praised Clint for taking risks in his roles and film subjects and for “quietly building a second career as one of our best directors.” And he thanked him for “giving us a lot to cheer about and, lately, a lot to think about.”

In the big show at the Kennedy Center later that night, Donald Sutherland came out to speak about his friend, co-star (twice), and director, whom he praised as “sublimely cool.” He introduced a career-spanning film montage, stretching from Rawhide to Space Cowboys, touching on Clint’s love of jazz and golf, and demonstrating definitively his range and longevity. Out came Don Rickles, another Kelly’s Heroes veteran, for a couple of minutes of patter. Then a trio of actors—Morgan Freeman, Tommy Lee Jones, and Forest Whitaker—spoke about working with and for him. The jazz pianist Dr. Bill Taylor was introduced and played Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and the trio of Rickles, Freeman, and (the impressively voiced) Whitaker sang verses. In the audience, the likes of Dennis Hopper, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Gregory Hines looked delighted, as were Clint and Dina, high above in the honorees’ box.

And he was continuing to expand his footprint on the physical world, particularly the world near his Carmel home. He had first wandered onto the Pebble Beach Golf Links some fifty years prior, a green G.I. crashing a party. Now that golf course was the centerpiece of a corporate monolith, the Pebble Beach Company, a privately held corporation that owned three championship courses—Pebble Beach, Spanish Bay, and Spyglass Hill—as well as a collection of five-star hotels and resort properties and large swaths of undeveloped land.

The company had been through a series of owners in its eighty years of existence, once belonging to 20th Century Fox, which paid $81.5 million for it in 1979. Eleven years later, the studio sold it for $841 million to a Japanese entity that handled the business so poorly that it was forced to sell after only three years, at a $350 million loss, to other Japanese interests. In 1999, Pebble Beach was on the market once again.

This time there were several American investor groups eager to take the reins. One was led by Peter Ueberroth, organizer of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, former commissioner of Major League Baseball, and, before all that, a travel executive who had grown up in nearby San Jose. He believed he could put together a group to buy the company and polish its properties into even more sparkling gems than ever.

The first person he solicited to join his effort was Clint. Ueberroth wanted to put together a bid of $820 million—not the highest expected to be on the table, but one that would be nearly all cash and could close very quickly. He and Clint each agreed to put up somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million, as did Arnold Palmer, the immortal golf champion, and Richard Ferris, a travel and golf executive. The remaining millions were cobbled together with investments from the General Electric Pension Trust and 132 private investors who bought shares costing from $2 million to $10 million each. In May 1999, their bid was accepted, and two months later the deal closed.

There was relief in the Pebble Beach area and the larger golf world at the thought that two local guys, Clint and Ueberroth, now owned the company, along with a living legend like Palmer. But there were concerns, too. Like the Cañada Woods North property that Clint had acquired a few years earlier, the Pebble Beach properties included a development plan, this one for a large parcel of the Del Monte Forest, the wild, wooded space just north of Carmel. It called for 316 homes, a new golf course, and the expansion of two existing hotels. As with Cañada Woods, Clint and his partners pared it down, asking to build a golf course, 38 homes, new employee housing, and rental cottages alongside the new golf course.

Although five hundred acres would be protected as wild space, this, too, was no conservation plan, and it met with heated opposition. Opponents estimated that the project would destroy more than seventeen thousand trees, many of which were rare and prized Monterey pines, and that it would threaten endangered bird and frog species and precious wetlands. Clint had legitimate claims to being a mindful steward of the land, but his personal advocacy for the project at various commission hearings made him an easy target for protests and headlines. The plan went before county voters in 2000 and was approved, but the conservationists began an appeal process. Six years later, having suffered one delay after another, the Pebble Beach Company withdrew its request for approval.

His interest in the land—not only in developing it but in husbanding its beauty and resources—took an unexpected turn. History and popular impression would have him a die-hard Republican, but in 2001, he was nominated for a four-year term on California’s state Parks and Recreation Commission by Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat to whose campaigns Clint had made financial contributions, including hosting a fundraiser for him. His various donations of acreage to conservation land trusts around the Carmel area were cited in his nomination. He was readily confirmed to join the nine-member panel by the state senate, and he was, at least at first, modestly active in the role, occasionally visiting state parks, nature preserves, and other sites falling under the commission’s scrutiny.

Busy with this gig and with his land projects and with two young girls running around his house, he took most of 2001 off from film work. But the year ended with a scene that could have been out of a movie. On Christmas morning in 2001, he was awakened by a phone call with alarming news from Vancouver, British Columbia, where Frances Fisher was working and eight-year-old Francesca was visiting for the holidays. During the predawn hours of Christmas Day, a fire broke out in their rented house, engaging the entire structure. Fisher opened an upstairs window to allow Francesca an escape, suffering burns on her hands in the process. The girl was atop a garage roof, screaming for help, when neighbors came rushing out. They fetched a ladder, but it wasn’t tall enough, so they urged her to jump down into their arms, which she did, knocking them all to the ground. Firemen arrived and rescued Fisher, then brought mother and daughter to a nearby hospital, where Fisher’s burns were seen to and both were treated for smoke inhalation. Clint chartered a private plane and got there in the late afternoon. Francesca was released from the hospital the following morning, her mother the following day. And Clint visited the neighbors who came to the rescue to offer his thanks. As it turned out, they had no idea who the woman and girl living next door were, much less that they had such a famous relative. He had made their Boxing Day.

There were some truly strange lagniappes that came with the gift of being an icon. In the late 1970s, there was a trend among musical artists in Jamaica of taking the monikers of characters from spaghetti Westerns as their stage names. A reggae DJ and vocalist named Robert Brammer started to call himself Clint Eastwood and recorded at least eight albums and a few dozen singles under that name through the late 1980s. Soon after that, Michael J. Fox, as Marty McFly, visited the Old West in the convoluted Back to the Future Part III, and he needed to hide his identity, and it went like this: “What’s your name, dude?” “Uh, Mar . . . Eastwood. Clint Eastwood.” “What kind of stupid name is that?” In 1989, the Beastie Boys tipped their hat to him on their classic album Paul’s Boutique with a track titled “High Plains Drifter” that repeated that film’s title in its chorus and explicitly referenced Dirty Harry (along with Taxi Driver, Steve McQueen, the Ramones, and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry).

But none of those name drops was as compelling as the one that popped up in March 2001, when the English band Gorillaz released its eponymous debut album, which included the track “Clint Eastwood.” The song pulses moodily, like a slow amble on horseback. It alternates rap-style verses about the singer’s liberty and daring and determination to live on his own terms with a strangely menacing chorus that assures, “I ain’t happy, I’m feeling glad. . . . The future is coming on.” (That “coming on” is repeated like a promise and a threat.) The song says nothing about Clint or his movies, but, according to Damon Albarn, lead singer of the group, it was meant to have the feel of the Dollars trilogy. Asked about whether he’d ever heard from Clint about the song, Albarn said, “I’m sure [he] would like it. He’s an intelligent man.”

He was on a film set yet again, shooting a thriller called Blood Work, based on a novel by Michael Connelly as adapted by Brian Helgeland (who had done the honors for, among many other films, L.A. Confidential). It was a mystery about a former FBI profiler, a recent recipient of a heart transplant, who ignores his doctor’s warnings and jumps into work after a woman appears to tell him that the heart that saved his life belonged to her sister, who was murdered in an unsolved crime. Feeling a debt to his donor, he finds himself confronting what he believes is a string of serial killings.

Anjelica Huston was cast as the agent’s cardiologist and Jeff Daniels as his layabout neighbor (they live on boats in Los Angeles’ Marina Del Rey). It was filmed entirely in Southern California, which Clint initially believed would make it a relatively easy shoot, until he had a similar realization to the one that struck him the night before his first day as a director on Play Misty for Me: “When I got into it, I realized that I was in every single scene.” Still, he worked it the way he’d become used to. Daniels had heard the stories about Clint’s famous quick pace, but when he met the seventy-one-year-old director he figured that they couldn’t be true. They were. “If you’re on take three with Clint,” he said, “he’ll turn to you and apologize for it taking so long, and he means it.”

Shooting ended in April 2002, and it debuted in August. As with Absolute Power and True Crime, with which it seemed of a piece as part of an informal geezer trilogy, Blood Work was met by critics with a mixture of respect for Clint’s well-honed technique and frustration with its simple storytelling and loping pace. Roger Ebert was one of those who saw quality in it, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times that “the film establishes a muted, elegiac tone in its early scenes, and sticks to it. There is no false bravado.” Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times didn’t go for it: “The flip side of classicism is lethargy, and Blood Work can be so complacently paced you may want to give it a shot of Red Bull.” At the box office it proved a disappointment, grossing $26 million after a $7 million opening and casting doubts on the truism that Clint’s movies were reliable moneymakers. Space Cowboys had been his only significant hit since The Bridges of Madison County. And Warner Bros. must have been wondering what Clint could do to reverse a concerning downward trend.

Throughout his career, Clint had explained that he took up directing at least in part as a pension plan: When he got too old to act (or to stand the sight of himself on-screen), he could simply carry on behind the camera. “As an actor,” he knew, “there will come a day when you look at yourself on the screen and say, ‘I don’t know about this.’” But it’s only in Blood Work that he accepts his age as a factor in his status as a leading man. His character, Terry McCaleb, is a legend of a bygone age, living on a docked boat, getting around in taxicabs, regularly monitoring his temperature and heart rate. But his codes of adherence to duty and doing the right thing nag him into action, and he won’t rest until he closes a case. It’s refreshing to see him play a guy of something like his own age (if far less able-bodied), though it’s eyeroll-inducing to watch him become romantically involved with a woman decades his junior (even as his real-life wife, also decades his junior, appears as a news reporter). The mystery underneath the story is satisfying—Connelly is a pulp master, and Helgeland knows just how a film like this works. But the film is at once too slow and too fast. Several characters, such as an antagonistic homicide cop (Paul Rodriguez), are cartoonishly drawn, and some of the staging feels hurried. There’s a bravura Steadicam shot through a crime scene to open the film, and there’s a climax that feels like it comes from an unmade Dirty Harry movie. Otherwise, the one chief novelty is the sight of the director/star eating not one but two bites of a Krispy Kreme donut, a scene that health food maniac Clint must have dreaded in advance and that was almost certainly completed in one take.

Twenty-Seven

To the classic inane question “Where do you get your ideas?,” he could have, as of early 2001, given a simultaneously facetious and true response: Costco.

“I read a review of it in the paper,” Clint said of a novel he adapted into a film, “and I thought, ‘That sounds good,’ and I went out to Costco and got a quick copy of it. . . . And I read it and two weeks later I owned it and we had a screenwriter working on it.”

Mystic River, a wrenching melodrama by novelist Dennis Lehane, leaped out at Clint because the murder mystery at its heart was informed by strands of issues that had long fascinated him: child abduction and abuse; the legacy of violence on both its victims and its perpetrators; the power of community and family bonds; the love of a father for an absent daughter; the sickening lure of vengeance; the distrust of authority; and the influence of a place on the souls of the people who inhabit it.

Lehane didn’t want to write a screenplay for Malpaso. And, even more, as he explained, “I wouldn’t sign the contract until we’d agreed on a screenwriter.” He was gratified when Clint suggested Brian Helgeland, the New England native who’d adapted Blood Work, for the job. Lehane agreed to participate to the extent of taking casual meetings with the cast to answer any questions they might have about the world and characters they were to inhabit. And Helgeland was gratified when Clint assured him that he didn’t want anything about the novel softened for the screen. “He went all out,” he said. “Most directors would have found a way to slip some happiness into it. But no one’s told Clint that there’s a corporation out there you have to make happy.”

Actually, that wasn’t true. When Clint went to Warner Bros. with the finished script in early 2002 and told them that it was what he wanted to do next, they blanched. He told them he could do it for $25 million and get a powerhouse cast on board, and they gave him, he recalled, the most lukewarm of green lights: “They said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it, but you could take it elsewhere if you want to shop it around.’” He did just that. Malpaso went to several other studios with the project. “They all thought it was brilliantly written and a great story,” he said, “but it was too rough for them.” He decided to return to Warner Bros. and cut a deal to take less money for himself in order to get the picture made. As he put it, “I told my agent I was right back to where I was thirty-six years ago when I did Play Misty for Me. I’m more than seventy years old and I’m still out there selling.”

Then came casting. The story is built around three boyhood friends, one of whom is kidnapped by pedophiles and escapes after three days of horrors; decades later, the kidnapped boy has grown into a nervous wreck, living in the neighborhood with his own son, and his two friends have become an ex-con-turned-corner-store-owner and a Massachusetts state detective. When the ex-con’s daughter is murdered, and the nervous guy is a potential suspect, and the detective is charged with solving the crime, they find themselves wandering a minefield informed by their shared, haunted past.

For the ex-con, Clint had a spectacular choice: Sean Penn, known for his deep immersion in the settings and backstories of the often dark characters he chose to play. Clint sent the script over and, Penn said, “I immediately wanted to do it. It was a beast of a piece about the nature of emotional revenge.” For the equally challenging role of the damaged man, Clint’s longtime casting director Phyllis Huffman suggested Tim Robbins, and Clint was intrigued. Robbins stood 6 feet, 5 inches, and Clint imagined a fascinating dynamic in having someone so physically large play someone so emotionally damaged. “I thought, ‘Big guy, that might be interesting.’ He doesn’t shrivel away.” At first, Michael Keaton was cast as the detective, but he and Clint bumped heads over some of his acting ideas, and he was replaced with Kevin Bacon. Other roles were filled by a dream team: Laurence Fishburne as Bacon’s partner, Laura Linney as Penn’s rock-hard wife, and Marcia Gay Harden as Robbins’s suspicious wife.

As Clint later explained, a major portion of the budget went to the cast: “The only person working at a special rate was me, because I wanted to get it made. We paid the actors well.” A slew of local Boston film and stage actors were signed on for most of the rest of the cast, imparting an impossible-to-replicate authenticity to virtually every small role. There was one exception: an old chum of the director’s, Eli Wallach, whom he’d rarely seen since they made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and who, back then, had silently doubted that Clint could fulfill his grand career ambitions; he got a day’s work as a neighborhood liquor store owner. Wallach was delighted to get the gig, especially when he realized that his scene couldn’t be cut because he was providing a clue to the murder, and he was pleasantly impressed that Clint gave him no direction.*

Warner Bros., still thinking they could save some money, suggested he shoot in Toronto, but Clint wouldn’t hear of it. Prior to production, he invited Helgeland to join him in scouting locations around East Boston, Jamaica Plain, and South Boston, neighborhoods that production designer Henry Bumstead had identified as best suited to the story. The director and the screenwriter walked block-by-block together looking for just the right street, just the right front porch. Helgeland said he “heard snippets of conversation through three-decker screen windows as we strode along. ‘Hey! Clint Eastwood just walked by the house!’ ‘You’re crazy!’ ‘I’m serious!’”

It wasn’t long into the production that the lead actors, most of whom had never worked with Clint before, got the hang of his directorial style. “I asked the boss what I was supposed to be playing,” Bacon recalled, “and he didn’t give me an answer. He said, ‘I think it’s up to the audience.’” Robbins knew that many of his character’s scenes involved going into a place of emotional darkness, but, he said, “it became easier to get there than it would have been had I thought I was going to do twenty takes. You have to hold some emotions back when you’re going to do it that often. When you know you’re doing it once or twice, it’s all out there every time.” Clint later revealed that the wrenching moment in which Penn learns that his daughter is dead was filmed without rehearsal: “That way, Sean didn’t have to burn himself out. He’d have been a physical and emotional wreck otherwise. We did the scene two times.” Likewise, he said, a moment when Robbins nervously fumbled while in conversation with Penn was a case of a first take yielding a kismet that enhanced the reality of the scene. “Tim Robbins comes out on a porch and lights a cigarette,” he said. “The match exploded in his hand. A lot of people would have said, ‘Let’s do it again.’ But we kept it. It seemed like such a natural thing to happen—something you can’t buy, really.” (He had become zealous about filming first takes and even rehearsals: “There is nothing worse than to rehearse, to shoot, and then discover that the rehearsal was better than the take.”)

Clint was pleased to see that his cast “took great initiative on their own, constantly talking about the script and even organizing readings off the set.” He recalled giving only one pertinent note to the cast, when Bacon and Fishburne discussed the murder case while walking down a hallway. “I finally said to those two guys, ‘Look, you’re Rosalind Russell and you’re Cary Grant. Remember His Girl Friday, and how they talked in that picture? Just let it loose and keep flying.’”

He loved working on the streets of Boston, where a variety of locals would sneak onto the set to give him gifts of T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of police and firemen’s unions, neighborhood businesses, sports teams. “You don’t need to bring your own gym clothes when you work here,” he said. And he loved directing this particular cast, especially Penn, who admired Clint sufficiently to declare to a reporter, “He’s the least disappointing icon in American film.”

Clint’s creative work on the film continued after hours. In the past decade, he’d been playing piano more and more frequently, if never seriously. (Asked at a Hollywood jazz club if he wanted to sit in with the band for a number, he declined, saying, “These people in here have paid good money tonight, and I don’t want to annoy them.”) He’d gotten into the habit of having a piano installed in his lodging while on location, and he’d work out melodies of his own composition for the soundtracks. During the production of Mystic River, he wrote enough music for the entire score, and Lennie Niehaus arranged it for orchestra.

He was known for choosing projects based purely on gut instincts and shooting first drafts of scripts, but he made one particular movie on the basis of a single phone call, you can count on it. Martin Scorsese was producing a PBS documentary series called The Blues: A Musical Journey, with seven episodes exploring different aspects of the classic American roots music, made by seven different directors, including Scorsese himself, Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett, and Mike Figgis. Clint was asked if he’d like to put together a segment to be titled “Piano Blues.” Of course he said yes.

Filming began in the banquet room of Mission Ranch, a converted dairy barn, in early 2003, before he went to Boston to make Mystic River. Clint and Bruce Ricker had invited a galaxy of blues and jazz pianists to sit with him, talk about their playing and their influences, and bang out a few numbers. Visiting Carmel would be Dave Brubeck, Marcia Ball, Pinetop Perkins, and Clint’s Carnegie Hall duet partner, Jay McShann. Two other sessions were set up on the Warner Bros. lot in the Eastwood Scoring Stage, one featuring Malcolm “Dr. John” Rebennack, Henry Gray, and Pete Jolly (with whom Clint played in City Heat), and one with Ray Charles. These live recordings would be interspersed with film clips of other jazz and blues piano greats: Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Professor Longhair, Thelonious Monk, and many others. And Clint would read some (fairly simplistic) narration about the primacy of the piano as an instrument and the special place of blues in American culture.

The finished film, the last to air in the series, wasn’t really about the blues per se so much as about piano jazz and Clint’s unadorned love of it. Dressed casually in polo shirts, chinos, and running shoes, he stood beside the piano and asked the various players about how they came to music, what they knew of the blues, and who their influences were. Then he sat beside them as they played, his eyes locked on their hands, a perma-grin on his face, as they performed magic on the keyboard. You wouldn’t call it authoritative or definitive in any way, but it was transporting and charming; the ninety minutes zoomed by. And it would be the only feature-length documentary he ever directed.

(He had his love of music and the arts on his mind in another way, as well. Just the previous year, he donated to an initiative of Oakland mayor [and Democrat, as well as past and future governor of California] Jerry Brown to found charter schools in the city, including the Oakland School for the Arts, which would have been a great fit for a dreamy young Clint if it had existed in the ’40s.)

He brought Mystic River to Cannes, his fourth film in competition at the festival in eighteen years. To date, he’d had no luck with festival juries, and this time would prove no different. Although the film was warmly received by the press (both American and international) and the gala screening brought out Clint and his stars Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, and Laura Linney, the film came away empty-handed.* Clint was personally recognized by the Directors’ Fortnight, a sidebar within the larger festival, receiving the Carrosse d’Or, or Golden Coach, an honor for directors “of innovative works with uncompromising daring and spirit.” A consolation prize.

In October, Mystic River opened the New York Film Festival, a major platform for films being released in the autumn and winter awards season. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott raved, “What gives the movie its extraordinary intensity of feeling is the way Mr. Eastwood grounds the conventions of pulp opera in an unvarnished, thickly inhabited reality. There are scenes that swell with almost unbearable feeling, and the director’s ambitions are enormous, but the movie almost entirely avoids melodrama or grandiosity.” Other reviews followed suit. Mystic River received more acclaim than even Unforgiven. In The New Yorker, David Denby, occupying Pauline Kael’s onetime chair, declared it “as close as we are likely to come on the screen to the spirit of Greek tragedy.” And in Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwartzbaum wrote, “This is a true American beauty of a movie, a tale of men and their bonds told by and for adults who value the old-fashioned Hollywood-studio notion of narrative.” (A handful of minority voices emerged, such as Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, who called it “little more than the distended first half of a twisty, dark Law & Order script.”)

If you didn’t know that Clint had made Mystic River you’d never be able to guess it. You might note that, thematically, it lines up with some of his later-career films: Unforgiven, certainly, and A Perfect World. But those films feel like Clint was the likeliest guy to make them, while Mystic River is a melodrama built around a murder mystery, a noir bordering on the Gothic, a story of complex family and community connections—and nothing in Clint’s past indicated he could make a film like that, let alone a superb one. What’s more, the film is so convincingly faithful to its scrappy Boston setting—a location and a microculture purely alien to the TM-practicing cowboy golfer from California—that there was surely no way he could relate to it, let alone put it on-screen, just as he’d been unable to depict Savannah convincingly in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

But whose film could it be? Mystic River isn’t sufficiently stylized to be by, oh, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, or Michael Mann. It’s even plainer than the work of a classical stylist of urban drama like Sidney Lumet. In its bones, the film is austere and dangerous and given over to the performers and the plot, its visual textures are dark and shadowy, and the plangent melodies of the soundtrack occasionally swell into sobs. It’s hard, in short, to read a directorial signature in it, but there’s no doubt that whoever made it made it just as he wished to.

In fact, Mystic River is the film that in many ways marks Clint’s full transformation into a director who only occasionally acts. It displays his mature style, which he’d been coming toward since Pale Rider and Bird, in full bloom and command. There is a stateliness and an earthiness, there is an emotional openness, there is magnificent craft behind the camera and daring, raw acting in front of it. And it is unafraid to look its terrible themes dead in the eye, unblinking. Grief, loss, fury, anxiety, fear, vengeance, guilt: They’re all laid out starkly, with powerhouse actors inhabiting those blistering emotional states nakedly and in whole. It’s a hard film to watch, but it’s so well made and performed that you can’t look away.

The opening sequence, in which young Dave Boyle is kidnapped by pedophiles, whisked off in the backseat of a car, then escaping “from wolves,” as he later puts it, on a mad run through the woods, is harrowing. And things only get worse. When we shift to the present day, and a nineteen-year-old girl goes missing and is found brutally murdered, we bear witness to the flaming anguish of her father, Jimmy, as he hears the worst news in his already battered life. Penn is ferocious, pain and horror and adrenaline filling his body so completely that it takes a full detail of cops to hold him from rushing to the crime scene. The camera rises above him, and the music swells, in a moment that could be trite, overly familiar. But the emotion is so fully lived that the technique engulfs you. By using a potential cliché to represent the most wrenching of moments, by earning the right to use it, the film reminds us of how powerful the tool can be, of why it became a cliché. The camera tilts up to a sky that weighs down on the scene, a sky without mercy or salvation in it, bled of hope, of God, of redemption. You don’t watch this untouched, in any sense.

From then, the audience is as vulnerable as in the aftermath of the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. Nothing feels safe, pain is everywhere, the ground is always crumbling beneath our feet. Jimmy is a broken spirit, his normally decisive and solid mien splintered and scattered for all to see. The only one who can touch him in his grief is Dave, and Robbins is perfect in the role of a hollowed, shadowy giant who can walk among ghosts and ghouls and commune with the dead and with those grieving them. As they sit together on a porch, Jimmy says, through tears, that he hates himself for being unable to cry for his daughter, and Dave stammeringly, delicately, tells him, “Jimmy . . . you’re crying now.” It’s a moment of human empathy we’ve never seen in a film of Clint’s—that we rarely see on-screen at all—and it is as comforting as it is staggering.

And we continue to reel with each scene. We cut back and forth between the efforts of the police to solve the murder and the gossip, suspicion, and fear that control the tiny universe in which the characters live. The world, inner and outer, closes in on Dave, and he grows increasingly shadowy and desperate and confused. Jimmy, supported by a pair of feral cousins (played with terrifying realism by Boston actors Kevin Chapman and Adam Nelson), undertakes his own investigation while straining to keep from drowning in anguish. And Marcia Gay Harden, as Dave’s wife, drifts from loving protection of her fragile husband to skittish doubt about him to panicked fear of him. In a film that begins with the unimaginable, we never lose the sense that even worse is looming. And Dennis Lehane and Clint drag us, against our will, toward just that.

The craft and acting are brilliance. Penn and Robbins operate on a level and in a world of such realism that we forget who they really are. Harden stands in for all of us, a nervous wreck just wanting it all to stop or, better, never to have happened. And Fishburne, as the cop who isn’t infected by familiarity with the environment and the players, sneers and menaces and calculates, the only person in the whole film who can see plainly how this incestuous little world dooms everyone in it. Cinematographer Tom Stern and editor Joel Cox provide the shadows and flow with reliable quality, production designer Henry Bumstead gives us the bar-at-the-end-of-all-time of our nightmares, and every little role (including the amusingly pugnacious Eli Wallach) feels authentically lived in. The film is made so well that we feel it with all our senses. It’s beer-sour and chilly and cursed—a vivid embodiment of the broken people and place of Lehane’s novel.

The very ending, though, feels like pure Clint. The killing is over, for now, the scores have, for the most part, been tallied, and there is peace, or at least no drama, in the air. We’re watching a parade—an all-American display of Minutemen and Little Leaguers and marching bands, as red-white-and-blue as the hucksterism of Bronco Billy or the flag hanging in the rainy night at the end of Unforgiven. The audience may be granting itself the pardon of thinking that Mystic River deals with a small community and a specific way of life, and it does do that. But the man who made it, and who was alien to that place and those people, was able to do so only because he had seen the same behavior, the same cycle of violence and pain, played out elsewhere and over a span of many years. Don’t fool yourself, he tells us, into thinking that Mystic River is just about a smudged corner of Boston; it is, he insists that we recognize, about every inch of this blood- and guilt-soaked land.

Warner Bros. chose to handle its release just so, launching it on only thirteen screens, and it played to packed houses for a week. After that, it went nationwide and started to sell tickets well and steadily, spending ten weeks in the box office top twenty. When awards season rolled around, it picked up pace again. It won Best Picture from the Boston Society of Film Critics, Clint was named Best Director by the National Society of Film Critics, and Penn and Robbins won several awards each from other critics’ groups. More than two hundred critics nationwide put it in their top ten lists. It was nominated for five Golden Globes (Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor, and Supporting Actor), with Robbins and Penn winning their categories.

As Mystic River gained Oscar momentum, Clint was simultaneously eager to promote the film (he was considered a great campaigner and flesh-presser; he had been in politics, after all) and not to hope for too much. On the one hand, he was telling people, “It’s as good as I can do.” On the other, well, take this exchange in January, just before the Golden Globes ceremony:

Interviewer: Now that the Oscar nominations are upon us . . .

Clint: Kinehora! Kinehora!

Interviewer: Pardon?

Clint: That’s a Jewish expression meaning, “Don’t talk about it. It’s bad luck.”

Two days later, the Academy Award nominations were announced, and Mystic was in the running for six of them: the same five as at the Globes, plus Harden as Best Supporting Actress. (A nice haul, but The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was up for eleven; Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for ten; and Cold Mountain and Seabiscuit for seven each.)

On Oscar night, Clint was accompanied by a remarkable trio of women: Dina, Ruth, and his long-lost-but-rediscovered daughter Laurie Murray, whom only some photo editors noted—and about whom none seemed to know the full story. He was seated in the third row, on the aisle, with Robbins and Penn lined up in front of him, Harden directly behind him, and Ruth, Dina, and Laurie beside him. In his opening number, returning Oscars host Billy Crystal serenaded him with a version of “Ol’ Man River” with lyrics about Mystic River and Ol’ Man Eastwood, making fun of movies with orangutans and Sondra Locke (once again, he briefly sat in Clint’s lap).*

The first award of the night was for Best Supporting Actor, and Robbins was up against a field composed of Alec Baldwin (The Cooler), Benicio del Toro (21 Grams), Djimon Hounsou (In America), and Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai). In his first nomination, he won, hugging his partner, Susan Sarandon, his fellow actors, and Clint, before coming to the stage and thanking all of them and urging people who, like his character, had suffered abuse to seek counseling and “stop the cycle of violence.”

As the evening went on, Mystic River repeatedly came up short against Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings, which was sweeping its way to a record eleven wins in eleven nominations.* But in the next-to-last award of the night, for Best Actor, Sean Penn won his first career Oscar after three previous nominations.* As the audience stood to applaud, he kissed his mother, patted Robbins on the shoulder, and mounted the stage, where he held the Oscar high in his hand. He made a cheeky joke about the false premises of the Iraq War, declared that there was “no such thing as ‘best’ in acting,” and thanked Clint, “professionally and humanly, for coming into my life.”

All those trophies meant yet more tickets sold. Mystic River, which Warner Bros. had been willing to pass on, wound up making more than $90 million at the box office. Clint had proven he could make a huge commercial and critical hit without appearing on-screen. He was part of the conversation again, right?

You would think that on the heels of Mystic River and its global gross and its slew of awards, Warner Bros. would be wide open to whatever Clint brought them next. You would think. But when he found a project that appealed to him and revealed his plans, the studio once again flinched.

Albert Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather (and, ahem, Sondra Locke’s Impulse) and a longtime friend of Clint’s, came to him with an idea, a film based on the writing of F. X. Toole, the pseudonym of veteran boxing cut man Jerry Boyd, who’d published his first book, the short-story collection Rope Burns, in 2000 at age seventy. The film Ruddy had in mind was an adaptation of the story “Million Dollar Baby,” about a crusty old trainer who takes on a novice woman boxer despite his aversion to women in the sport and develops her into a fine fighter and even a surrogate daughter, only to see their lives shattered by a startling event in the ring. Ruddy had prize-winning TV writer Paul Haggis working on the script (he was incorporating bits from other stories in Toole’s book), and he thought that Clint was perfect for the role of the trainer. Clint read the material and decided he was willing to both direct it and star in it. (Haggis got a call from Clint, which he expected would be a chance to talk about his impressions of this first draft. Instead, it was an offer to write a different film. Haggis, a TV veteran, was taken aback: “We should get together and you should give me your notes.” Clint replied, “The script’s good.”)

But Warner Bros., as with Mystic River, wasn’t terribly interested. “They were saying, ‘Please, bring us something,’ and then I brought them something and they said, ‘Oh, no, not this.’” He wasn’t disappointed only by Warner Bros. but by executives all over town. “They approached it as a woman’s boxing picture,” he said, “and they didn’t want any part of that. And I said, ‘Well, it’s not a woman’s boxing picture, it’s a father/daughter love story.’ And they said, ‘Well, you know, we don’t think it’ll make any money,’ because there’d been another woman’s boxing picture that hadn’t worked out too well.”* But he persisted, looking for someone who would believe in the material and dismissing the doomsayers. “If they don’t want to do this,” he said, “and they don’t want to do dramas, why are they even in the movie business?”

Ruddy and Malpaso began shopping the film around and couldn’t get a bite even at a modest $30 million budget. They approached Lakeshore Entertainment, an indie outfit that had a string of unusual films, including some hits, in its decade of operation, but nothing on the scale on which Clint habitually worked. Lakeshore couldn’t fund the film alone, but it agreed to put up approximately half of what Clint and Ruddy were looking for, and the pair went beating the bushes again. And then Alan Horn, president of Warner Bros., had a change of heart. “I can’t let you go,” he told Clint. “You go ahead and make that.”

With Clint as the trainer and Morgan Freeman in the role of his sidekick, the crucial role of Maggie Fitzgerald, the aspiring boxer, loomed unfilled. Sandra Bullock was the front-runner for a time, but Clint didn’t approve. Phyllis Huffman, Malpaso’s longtime casting director, suggested Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank, who was born not far from the Ozarks where Maggie was from and had been a competitive swimmer and gymnast as a teen. She met with Clint, and they vibed. But he couldn’t help noting: She was Hollywood skinny. Could she bulk up to convince as a prizefighter? She said she was willing to put in the physical work, and, convinced, he offered her the role.

For the next four months, Swank showed up every morning at the famed Gleason’s Gym under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge. She ate several protein-rich meals a day, including a middle-of-the-night shake for which she had to set an alarm. She built and toned muscle mass, learned the basics of boxing, and sparred with women for whom the sport was a way of life. In the end, not only did she put on twenty pounds (“all muscle,” Clint boasted), but she learned to box as a lefty even though she was naturally right-handed. It was a legitimate transformation. “My back, my arms, my legs—everything changed,” she said. “My butt, my stomach. Everything.”

The film shot in the spring and summer around Los Angeles, and Warner Bros. frankly didn’t know what they had on their hands when they saw it. In a certain light, they could see the critical and decent commercial prospects, but there was a drastic change in tone and subject matter in the last act, and there were some voices at the studio who were more than a little frightened by the film’s willingness to wade into a hot-button cultural issue.* They thought about releasing it in early 2005, maybe even holding off until Cannes. But as awards season started to loom on the horizon, there didn’t seem to be any commanding favorites, and certainly no films that promised to succeed with both critics and audiences. The studio decided to release it slowly, maybe garner a few good reviews and a critics’ prize or two, and see if it couldn’t build up momentum en route to the Oscars. It wasn’t a vote of confidence in Clint, but they weren’t burying the picture, either.

Million Dollar Baby opened on eight screens—eight, fewer even than Mystic River’s tiptoe into the marketplace—on the week before Christmas, and the reviews were overwhelming. In Variety, Todd McCarthy said, “This endlessly resourceful filmmaker goes . . . dark and deep in this slow-burning drama of a determined female boxer and her hard-shelled trainer, a tale Eastwood invests with rewarding reserves of intimacy, tragedy, tenderness and bitter life knowledge.” David Ansen of Newsweek warned, “If you fear strong emotions, this is not for you. But if you want to see Hollywood filmmaking at its most potent, Eastwood has delivered the real deal.” And Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times typed, as if through tears, “It’s not a boxing movie; it’s the story of these people and what happens to them, and it goes deeper and deeper, never taking a wrong step, never hitting a false note. It touched me like no other film this year.”

From the moment the Warner Bros. logo appears in black-and-white at the start of the film, Million Dollar Baby feels like it’s from another era. The music (Clint gets his second solo credit as composer) is delicate, meditative, simple. The voice-over narration is plainspoken and clean, if occasionally possessed of a cobblestone poetry. The shots and frames are chosen without fuss yet always display a casual elegance. And the characters, as we meet them, are straightforward: a journeyman fighter; a crusty manager / cut man; a dogged corner man / janitor; a preening showoff; a hapless dimwit. If it wasn’t shot in color, if the fenders of the cars were a little rounder, if the TV sets were radios, it could star Jimmy Cagney or John Garfield without much of a rewrite.

But into this clear, predictable world, stepping out of a shadow from which she never entirely emerges, comes Maggie Fitzgerald, a scrappy thirty-one-year-old wannabe desperate for the venerable Frankie Dunn to teach her how to fight, despite his repeated growl, “I don’t . . . train . . . girls.” She scrapes together pennies from a waitressing job and pays for a six-month membership at his gym, which he is reluctant to forfeit. After weeks, he agrees, against every instinct in his body, to take her on. “This is a mistake already,” he says, just minutes after they shake hands. And we are on an unforgettable journey.

Hollywood movies of the twenty-first century don’t get more elemental than this, nor do many films as simple soar so impossibly high—in their craft, in their emotional content, in their storytelling, or in their understated clarity. There’s no effort to be modern in the music, lingo, photography, editing. It’s hard to say exactly when the film is set: There are no cell phones or DVD players, and there’s at least one rotary phone still in use, all of which could be marks of the economic condition of the characters but more likely mean that we’re in the early 1990s or so. But the film has been made in an era of endless culture war, when any deviance from neutral is an excuse for somebody to scream “J’accuse!” and launch accusations of political gamesmanship. In that context, the final turns of the plot are authentically daring. This film takes life and death and religion and decency very seriously—and it leads its characters to shattering choices in which all of those things factor and asks us to accept the outcome, regardless of its staggering cost.

In an era dominated by sequels and FX movies and animated features, there’s something monastic in Million Dollar Baby’s determination to stick to its throughline. Yes, it has tangents: Frankie’s relationship with a priest whose dander he loves to spark (“There are no demigods, you fuckin’ pagan!” the poor clergyman is reduced to shouting); his desire to connect to the daughter from whom he is estranged for reasons never explained; the subplot involving a simpleton who hangs around the gym and the conceited young fighter who bullies him; the greed and machinations of Maggie’s family back in the Ozarks. On first viewing, some of these seem extraneous, but there’s a common motif of humanity, struggle, and the search for belonging and redemption in all of them. Haggis was working on the screenplay for his overcooked Oscar winner Crash at the same time that he adapted the Toole stories, and Million Dollar Baby is by far the sleeker, sharper, and more sensible and human of the two. Everything fits.

At times, particularly as it’s narrated, we can feel like we’re in a fable with a moral waiting at the end. But the unstinting realism of the craft of the cast and the Malpaso crew never lets the film’s—or the audience’s—attention wander. Henry Bumstead’s production lets us smell the gym and locker rooms and grimy apartments these characters populate. Tom Stern, carrying forward the (dim) torch of Bruce Surtees and Jack Green, gives us more, and more expressive, shadows and dark spaces than Clint has ever dared, and there’s a lovely, muted use of colors—dull yellow and pale blue—that contribute to the mood as much as the musical score does.

And as for the acting: Swank’s transformation into a tenacious, ferocious fighter would count as an utter revelation had she not already demonstrated an ability to hide inside a character in her Oscar-winning performance in Boys Don’t Cry; as it stands, she’s as believable in the ring as Robert De Niro in the fighting-fit portions of Raging Bull and affecting both in her puppyish regard for her father/mentor figure Frankie and in her last scenes, in which she withers into pained silence slowly, asking the world—even the next world—of him. Morgan Freeman seems to be doing only Morgan Freeman things, but there’s no one more real than him, and his banter with Frankie is some classic old-married-couple material (they squabble about bleach, socks, cable TV, cheeseburgers, and even poetry);* he’s the moral weather vane of the film, telling us not what the subplots are but how they all fit in a longer, bigger story. And Clint succumbs to / reveals age, cantankerousness, and broken internal spaces more convincingly than ever before. Frankie is (inevitably) cranky, and his low-key Neanderthal views of the world can grate, but Clint and the script never let him off the hook for them. He is also a man of faith and conscience and heart and sensibility, a man teaching himself Gaelic to read Yeats,* a man who dubs his surrogate daughter Mo Cuishle (Irish Gaelic for “my heart” or “my pulse”). And when heartbreak pushes him beyond his moral convictions, Clint convincingly embodies the struggle. These are monumental performances, if played in a low key, and they are mounted in a frame that displays them to maximum effect without ever seeming to push them forward for attention. (Also fine are Margo Martindale as Maggie’s trailer-park mom, Lucia Rijker as her vicious rival,* and Brian O’Byrne as Frankie’s put-upon priest; and keep an eye out for a smiling Morgan Eastwood, sitting with a doggy in her lap and waving at Maggie at a gas station, an emblem of lost happiness and fond hope.)

Lastly, because it involves BIG, BIG SPOILERS, the final act. From the moment Maggie is assaulted between rounds by a brutally ruthless opponent, the film puts the viewer into freefall. You thought you were in a feel-good sports movie, a triumph-over-the-odds movie. Suddenly you’re in a life-and-death melodrama in which questions of faith and loyalty and decency and even the law are in play. The film gets darker in every regard; the blue hues, warm and inviting at the start, now feel like a loss of breath, a drowning, and the shadows and chiaroscuro lighting effects are starker and bolder than at any time in Clint’s directorial career, Unforgiven and Mystic River included. Frankie is asked to do the unthinkable, to not just watch as his chosen daughter diminishes but to literally be the vehicle of her demise, and everything in him wants to say no except for his conscience and his heart. The last we see of him for sure is in extreme shadow, a silhouette in a near-monochromatic hallway, walking out a door into a dizzying, despairing new world.*

There’s a chance that he finds a bit of peace, a bit of the Innisfree that he has dreamed about in his Yeats; in a blurry last image, we maybe see him in his Heaven, eating homemade lemon meringue pie in a diner in the woods. But it’s also possible that the words of the priest whom he consults about his dilemma are true: “If you do this thing, you’ll be lost, somewhere so deep you’ll never find yourself again.” And in leaving the audience with the uncertainty of that—not knowing whether Frankie is redeemed or not—Million Dollar Baby is more profound than any old-time boxing movie or, indeed, most any Hollywood movie of its time.

Sensing a better reception than they had dreamed of, Warner Bros. hurriedly got the nation’s critics to see the film as they assembled their year-end ten best lists, and, again, more than two hundred of them placed the film in those ranks. The New York Film Critics Circle named Clint Best Director, as did the Chicago Film Critics Association. The National Society of Film Critics named the movie Best Picture and Swank Best Actress. The Directors Guild awarded Clint its top prize for feature filmmaking. At the Golden Globes, where it was up for Best Drama, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, and Score—making three nominations for Clint—it won twice: Director and Actress. A few days later, Oscar nominations were announced, and it claimed seven: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, and Editing.*

That week, more than a month after its stealth opening, Million Dollar Baby expanded past 150 screens nationwide—to over two thousand, claiming third place at the box office and starting a run of more than two months in the top twenty en route to a total box office of more than $100 million—for a picture that neither Warner Bros. nor any other studio in town was interested in making. “His instincts were right, stunningly right,” said WB’s Alan Horn. “At the end of the day, and sometimes these are very long days, we did the picture. If I were sitting here talking about how I let Million Dollar Baby go to another studio, I would be more than chagrined.”

On Oscar night, Clint showed up at the Kodak Theatre with Flat Stanley, the paper doll that grade-schoolers like his daughter Morgan use to learn about how big the world is; he was photographed with it on the red carpet. Inside, host Chris Rock zeroed in on him in the front row beside Dina, with Hilary Swank and her then-husband, Chad Lowe, just alongside. “They like to say, ‘Oh, there’s a hundred stars out tonight,’” Rock said. “No there’s not. There’s only four real stars. The rest are just popular people, okay? Like, Clint Eastwood’s a star. That’s a star. Clint Eastwood is a star. Tobey Maguire is just a boy in tights.”

Before long, Morgan Freeman was awarded Best Supporting Actor, his first Oscar in four nominations.* “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” he said at the podium, and he thanked Clint for giving him “the opportunity to work with him again and to work with Hilary Swank.” It would be a long wait before the film would win another prize. Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes, The Aviator, had more nominations than Million Dollar Baby and won several awards, including Art Direction, Cinematography, and Editing. After a couple of hours, the Best Actress award was presented. Swank was in contention against Annette Bening (Being Julia), Catalina Sandino Moreno (Maria Full of Grace), Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), and Kate Winslet (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Sean Penn, his open collar and disheveled hair making it look like he’d been at the backstage bar since last year’s ceremony, unsealed the envelope and called out Swank’s name.

“I don’t know what I did in this life to deserve all this,” she said. “I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream.” She acknowledged her fellow nominees, her husband, the film’s producers, her boxing trainers, Tom Stern, Joel Cox, her parents, her agents, her managers, and her lawyers. The band started to play its get-off-the-stage tune, and she said, “Uh-uh, you can’t do that because I haven’t gotten to Clint yet; I’m saving him for the end.” She turned to him and said, “You’re my Mo Cuishle.”

The next big prize the film was up for was Best Actor, and Clint lost to Jamie Foxx, for his role in Ray.* And then Julia Roberts came out to present the award for Best Director, which everyone in the building assumed was a showdown between Clint and Scorsese, who had still not yet won that prize. To a roar, she called out Clint’s name. The audience took to its feet in an ovation, and Clint stood and started to mount the steps to the stage, but Dina stopped him and kissed him, and when he got to the podium Roberts wiped the lipstick off his face before he spoke. He thanked his wife, “my best pal,” and his mother, Ruth, who was seated just behind him down front and waved to him. “At ninety-six, I’m thanking her for her genes,” he said. He mentioned all of the cast he could recall and lots of the crew, including Henry Bumstead, approaching ninety, “the head of our crack geriatrics team.” He reckoned he was lucky to still be working and then recalled a moment earlier in the evening, when a lifetime achievement Oscar was awarded: “I watched Sidney Lumet out there, who’s eighty, and I figured, ‘Heck, I’m just a kid. I’ve got a lot to do yet.’”

He went backstage to speak to the press, and the final presenters of the evening, Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, were introduced. They read the nominees—The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Million Dollar Baby, Ray, and Sideways—and opened the envelope. Barbra pretended to need her reading glasses, Dustin whispered in her ear, and she leaned over and said, “I’m so happy to give you this again, Clint. Million Dollar Baby!”

Again, everyone stood. Clint kissed Barbra and thanked her; Albert Ruddy and the film’s other nominated producer, Tom Rosenberg, milled around; and Clint reminded the audience that he had given Ruddy the Oscar for The Godfather more than three decades earlier. Ruddy and Rosenberg stepped up to the mic, and Ruddy, in a gruff voice that sounded like everyone’s favorite old uncle, thanked the cast, Anjelica Huston for introducing him to F. X. Toole, and “the genius of Clint Eastwood.” Rosenberg thanked the studio, and Clint leaned in to acknowledge “everybody at Mission Ranch and in Monterey County who’s watching the show.”

He had won Best Picture and Best Director twice—only Miloš Forman among working directors could say the same. If he had ridden off into the sunset, nobody would have wondered why. Instead, as his seventy-fifth birthday approached, he was developing his most ambitious project yet.

Twenty-Eight

To the classic inane question “Where do you get your ideas?,” he could have, as of early 2004, given a simultaneously facetious and true response: Steven Spielberg.

On the night that Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars for Mystic River, Clint chatted with Spielberg at the traditional first stop on the ceremony party circuit, the Governors Ball. Spielberg had reinvigorated that old Hollywood staple, the World War II film, with 1997’s Saving Private Ryan and the 2001 HBO series Band of Brothers. He had another project of that sort in development at DreamWorks, the studio he co-owned, but he was starting to think he wouldn’t ever get around to making it. It was an adaptation of Flags of Our Fathers, a nonfiction bestseller by James Bradley about his father, John “Doc” Bradley, who served as a naval corpsman during the Battle of Iwo Jima and was one of the men depicted in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photo of the raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi during that bloody episode. The book had been adapted for Spielberg by William Broyles Jr., a screenwriter, journalist, and decorated marine who’d served in Vietnam.

Clint asked to see the script. And, as he so often did, he decided, while he was preparing Million Dollar Baby, that this film—involving midtwentieth-century battle sequences, the politics and economics of war, the lives of aging WWII veterans, and the horrors of post-traumatic stress—would be his next project. He was especially taken with the depiction of the psychological toll of battle as demonstrated by the descent into alcoholic self-destruction of Ira Hayes, the Native American marine who took part in the flag-raising. He phoned Paul Haggis, who was expecting to be asked for rewrites on Million Dollar Baby, and hired him to take a pass at Broyles’s work. And he started the process of planning a film that would be shot on three continents, with more than a hundred speaking parts, sometime after his seventy-fifth birthday, right after he made another picture. (Making it also meant going to work for DreamWorks, a move that had to give Warner Bros., which had been so unenthusiastic about Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, some pause: Their billion-dollar boy was actively dating.)

As rendered by Haggis, Flags had a complex structure leaping regularly among three time periods: the Battle of Iwo Jima; the war bond campaign on which the three survivors from the famous photo were sent out by the military on a nationwide fundraising tour; and the present day, in which Doc Bradley has died and his son interviews his onetime comrades-in-arms. That would mean two actors to play each of four or five central roles, plus whole platoons of servicemen, nurses, journalists, politicians, admiring crowds, families, and so on. It was a far broader canvas of characters than Clint had ever directed, and its epic combat sequences far exceeded the skirmishes he’d depicted in Heartbreak Ridge.

Filming on Iwo Jima itself would be impossible, he discovered, as the island was considered a sacred burial site: Of the twenty-one thousand Japanese soldiers who died defending it, more than twelve thousand were never recovered. In April 2005, just after Million Dollar Baby’s Oscar triumph, Clint and a small crew visited Japan to see the island for themselves and to meet with authorities and with families of the fallen soldiers. He expressed his respect for the unique nature of the place and his desire to honor it, and he was given permission to shoot some footage of the site—but not battle scenes.* That normally wouldn’t have been a problem: Many WWII movies used Hawaii to stand in for Pacific islands. But Iwo Jima is unique geographically, a volcanic island where white plumes of sulfuric gas regularly arise from black sand beaches and hills; nothing in Hawaii looks like it. Clint would have to shoot his battle sequences in . . . Iceland, which happens to be a near look-alike. And as the film involved the home stories of several of its characters and their travels around various locations around the United States, filming would also take place in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, Arlington, Virginia, and rural and small-town spots in Texas and Illinois. It was easily the biggest and costliest movie Clint had ever undertaken.

And it grew by the day. His research touched on the Japanese commander at Iwo Jima, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, a poet and diplomat who had served as a military attaché in Washington in the ’20s, had studied at Harvard, and had traveled around the United States by car. Throughout his time in the States—and during his service in the war—he wrote letters to his family sharing his feelings and impressions, including drawings of things he’d seen and haikus to express his emotions. These were collected and published posthumously, and when Clint learned about this fascinating man he realized that he had a second duty: If he was to tell the story of the cost of the war on the young American men who fought it, he felt bound to do the same for the Japanese. As a teenager during the war, he’d been fed dehumanizing images of the Japanese and watched movies depicting the cruelty and barbarity of their military. “When I grew up,” he reflected, “we thought that the Japanese tortured and killed people.” But he was learning differently. As he said in a written statement later, “Those who lose their lives in war, on both sides, are fully deserving of honor and respect.”

And so he did something extraordinary. He approached Warner Bros. and asked if it would finance a second, smaller film about Iwo Jima, one told from the perspective of the Japanese, to be written and performed in Japanese by a Japanese cast and to be made right alongside Flags of Our Fathers. He knew how to pitch it: Flags was costing DreamWorks some $55 million or more, but Clint reckoned he could do this film, piggybacking on the first, for about $15 million. The studio agreed—“There was no long dialogue,” said Warner Bros. boss Alan Horn, still smarting from the last two episodes of haggling with the studio’s franchise filmmaker. Clint asked Haggis for a script about Iwo Jima based on the stories of Kuribayashi and a second Iwo Jima officer, Takeichi Nishi, an actual baron who won a gold medal in equestrian show jumping at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and who was a playboy and a pal of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Haggis subcontracted the task to Iris Yamashita, a promising young Japanese American screenwriter whom he was mentoring. After her second meeting with Haggis, when he offered her the job, Yamashita, who had a master’s degree in engineering from UC Berkeley, called her immigrant parents and told them that she was writing a movie for Clint Eastwood. They responded, “Who’s Clint Eastwood?”

Flags was centered on three flag-raisers who survived the battle: Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). Their fellow combatants would be played by a teeming cast including Barry Pepper (a veteran of Saving Private Ryan), Jamie Bell, Paul Walker, and Robert Patrick.* John Benjamin Hickey and John Slattery would be the guys who ran the bond tour. Tom McCarthy would play James Bradley, and the parts of the aged veterans would be filled by George Grizzard, Harve Presnell, Len Cariou, and George Hearn. The usual Malpaso crew would be behind the lens, with a couple of poignant asterisks. Both Phyllis Huffman, Clint’s casting director of decades, and Henry Bumstead, his longtime production designer, died after completing their work on the films; as a result, the credits of Flags would read “for Phyllis and Bummy.” And, as on Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, Clint planned to compose the music himself, with Lennie Niehaus arranging for orchestra.

Production started in Alexandria, Virginia, in August 2005, with a scene depicting the 1954 dedication of the Marine Corps War Memorial, a huge bronze reproduction of the famous Iwo Jima photograph. The next day, it was off to Iceland, where the weather conditions at the height of summer more or less matched those in Iwo Jima in February and March, when most of the battle took place. Even though the scale of the battle—the scores of troop transports and airplanes and the literal tens of thousands of troops invading the beaches—would be depicted largely using digital sleight of hand, there were still many characters to follow amid all the action and frantic dialogue. Clint had the crew, himself included, dress in period-correct uniforms so they wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally being caught by the camera. And he used some trickery to capture the fever and horror of battle: Some of the actors carried small cameras in their ammo and medical pouches without knowing it, to help depict the frenzy in which they fought and ran, and sometimes explosions went off or stuntmen were gunned down near key actors without warning, bringing shock to their faces. (“We were caught off guard constantly,” recalled Phillippe. “When something explodes right next to you, your reaction is very real.”) It would seem a hell of a lot for a septuagenarian filmmaker who’d never worked on this scale before, and yet he surprised many of the crew when he asked them to shoot additional material, especially from inside the Japanese troops’ dug-in positions, with the explanation that “it’s for the other movie”—about which few of them had been made aware. “It was very confusing,” Clint said, “because when we were shooting up there, I would say to the script supervisor, ‘This scene we’re shooting right now is for the second picture. Just call it “second picture” and don’t make any notes on it, because we don’t have a deal on that yet.’” (His agent, Lenny Hirshan, was fond of saying, “Clint doesn’t make deals, Clint makes movies”—sometimes, it turned out, simultaneously.)

The fury slowed only for the filming of the flag-raising. In real life, two flags were raised on Mount Suribachi. The first was immediately requisitioned by a Marine Corps officer who wanted to keep it as a historical memento; a second flag was run up, and the raising of that flag was captured in Rosenthal’s immortal photo.* It was one of the few times in the entire shoot that Clint slowed down to allow multiple takes—four or five, according to Ben Walker, who played one of the flag-raisers: “The six of us rehearsed it the night before—we got the footage and slowed it down and practiced to try to get it as close as we could.”

After shooting in Iceland, they resumed work in the various American locations, and Clint continued to supervise the writing and casting of the companion film, which had been known variously as “Lamps Before the Wind” and “Red Sun, Black Sand” before being dubbed Letters from Iwo Jima. Yamashita’s script, which she had written in English, was sent off for translation. And Clint sat with Phyllis Huffman for the last time to choose the actors. Only one name was ever considered for the role of Kuribayashi: Ken Watanabe, the Japanese leading man who had become known to American audiences for his Oscar-nominated role in The Last Samurai and his appearances in Batman Begins and Memoirs of a Geisha. The remaining cast included Tsuyoshi Ihara as Baron Nishi and Kazunari Ninomiya as a fictional character, a baker-turned-soldier named Saigo, through whose eyes most of the events would be seen. Filming was planned for various locations in California for March and April of 2006, with a few days permitted to shoot on Iwo Jima itself, small scenes of Watanabe walking the beach while conceiving his defense. The plan was to release Flags of Our Fathers in September, in time for year-end awards consideration, and Letters from Iwo Jima, which Warner Bros. deemed a curiosity, a boutique item, and, really, a peace offering to Clint, in early 2007, as a means of keeping the conversation around Flags percolating.* Clint slowed down for a weekend during awards season to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild, but otherwise, he was a man on a mission.

Three times Margret Ruth Runner Eastwood Wood, to use all of her names, had been among her son’s entourage on Oscar night, and three times she had come away happy, watching his films win a total of ten Academy Awards, including two Best Picture and Best Director prizes, and gathering memories of red carpets and hugs from stars. A charming photo from the Governors Ball after the 2005 ceremony captured her at a table, with her son’s brace of newly won Oscars, having a chat with Julia Roberts. She always bought a new dress for the big show, and she always had her hair done in Carmel by a hairdresser named Roy Rogers, whose shop was filled with memorabilia of the cowboy actor with whom he shared his name. (She always promised, Rogers said, that if “anyone in Hollywood asked” about her hair, she’d be sure to mention him.)

She had been widowed for a second time in 2004, when John Wood passed away, but she had stayed active, golfing, visiting Hawaii, and spending a lot of time with her son and daughter and grandchildren, a sizable brood mostly located near her Carmel home. Clint spoke with her by phone every day that he didn’t see her. And he was amazed and inspired by her longevity. As he recalled, “When she got into her nineties, she said, ‘I want you to take my [golf] club membership.’ And I said, ‘I want you to keep playing.’ She was still in good shape.”

But in the months after John’s passing, she started to wane. In 2005, she made a trip to Hawaii, and in January 2006, she marked her ninety-seventh birthday in a frail state. “I knew that the time was gonna come fairly soon,” Clint said. She was living under full-time care and fading. Her son thought he could encourage her to persevere, saying, “ ‘Come on! Three more years and you make the big century!’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ So I asked the cardiologist, ‘Do we put her on IV and get her going?’ But he says, ‘You’re gonna have somebody who is really pissed.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I can’t defy her wishes.’ So I let her go.” She died on February 5, and like her husbands before her, she was cremated after a memorial service. It was the eve of the annual PGA tournament at Pebble Beach, which Clint normally hosted and played in, but he withdrew from the event, making no public appearances and reserving his time for his family and his grief.

Paramount had big hopes for Flags, its first film of Clint’s since Escape from Alcatraz, and opened it wide in late October. The reviews were respectful, even overly so. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men.” Online, in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek wrote that “the flaws in Flags of Our Fathers are at least partly attributable to Eastwood’s attempts to do too much. Still, even when he overreaches, he somehow hits the mark.” (Even the negative reviews were forgiving, as in the case of the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr, who wrote, “You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood’s reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn’t the sort of thing he does best.”) But despite largely positive reviews, and despite its resemblance to Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, the film never established a beachhead at the box office. It debuted in third place, behind The Prestige and The Departed, and it slid from there steadily, dropping out of the top twenty in its fifth week and petering out with $33 million in ticket sales.

Warner Bros., hurrying Letters into theaters in late December to qualify it for the Oscars, enjoyed more success. The reviews, for starters, were stronger. The film, said Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, “takes audiences to a place that would seem unimaginable for an American director.” And in the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern said, “The view taken by Clint Eastwood, directing from Iris Yamashita’s exemplary screenplay, is elegiac, but—and this is remarkable, given the nature of the production and the sweep of his ambition—not at all didactic. He lets the film speak for itself, and so it does—of humanity as well as primitive rage and horror on both sides of the battle.” Most critics considered the two films as one big one, as evidenced by Todd McCarthy in Variety (“a genuinely imposing achievement”) and Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times (“one of the most visionary of all efforts to depict the reality and meaning of battle”). The film was originally released on only five screens, like an art film, expanding—and never to so many as eight hundred screens—once Academy Award nominations were announced. It played through April and grossed $13 million, meaning that its international gross, which was more than triple the U.S. gross, particularly in Japan, where it was a big hit and important cultural occasion, was all profit.

It’s impossible—and, historically, incorrect—to view Flags and Letters as two films. They were made and released almost simultaneously, making them one big movie of two halves or chapters or sides—in the sense of a coin, not of a conflict. Together, they tell a story of the futility of war, of the unforgivable waste of young lives, of the perforated line between horror and honor, of the chasm between the stories that nations tell themselves and the things they demand be done in their names. Though neither film is a masterpiece, together, they form a monument, a singular achievement, and there are moments of human feeling in each that are as profound as anything in Unforgiven, Mystic River, or Million Dollar Baby, which is to say plenty.

The titles of the two films tell you a lot about what separates them: Flags is big and showy and has to do with displays and symbols and rhetoric; Letters is intimate, personal, handmade, even secretive. Flags plays more like a condensed version of a TV or streaming miniseries, and Letters is like a quiet art film, airless in its intimate, narrow focus.

The films are rooted in the same event, but their relationships to it are different. For the servicemen of Flags, the Battle of Iwo Jima is the beginning of the story: They’re ordinary young men, around twenty years of age, transformed into icons by an act that was the opposite of their ordinary duties, which is to say, creating something instead of blowing something apart or killing someone; afterward, they’re spun into the larger world unimaginably and, in the case of one of them, unbearably. For the soldiers of Letters, the battle is the end; the chance of survival, like the light reaching them in their underground fortresses, is dwindling; all that is left is their written memories, and even those, in the form of their unmailed letters, are buried for decades. In both films, there’s a tenderness toward the protagonists, who’ve been asked to carry and endure inhuman burdens, to subsume their identities into the facelessness of uniforms and ranks, and to not only witness but to perpetrate acts of immense cruelty. It’s a wonder that any of them retain humanity and that they don’t all snap like Ira Hayes.

Flags is larger in scale and scope, in depicting the battle and, especially, the world beyond the battlefield. This is the war both as it was fought overseas and as it was experienced at home. It’s enormous and ambitious, and if Clint doesn’t manage all of it with grace or finesse, it’s impressive as hell that he’s taking it on at this stage of his career and his life. The battle sequences are gripping and ghastly and speedy, though they don’t have a visceral punch. Nevertheless, they convey real danger, and there’s sickening fright at the sight of gun and mortar barrels emerging from hillsides, waiting for the advancing American troops (an image that is, importantly, a hinge between the two films). At the same time, though, there’s a coolness to the filmmaking that makes it feel less than immersive. In Saving Private Ryan, you are in the landing craft, in the water, on the beach; in Flags, you are watching it all, close-up, yes, but at a safe remove.

There is some intention behind that coolness: the raising of the flag (both times) is depicted without fanfare or special lighting or sense of momentous occasion. This was a nothing task asked of anonymous men not once but twice during a moment when little fighting was happening. The choice to underplay this immortal episode is, perhaps, a key to Clint’s vision of war, in which all deeds are on a par, no matter how ordinary or apocalyptic.

Where the film reveals its heart is in the stateside war bond campaign, with propagandists distorting the nonevent of the flag-raising for their own purposes* and one of the “heroes,” Hayes, unable to bear the weight of what he’s seen and lost and done and must now say and do. These feel like themes from a Clint Eastwood movie—the Hayes material, buoyed by a fine emotional performance by Adam Beach, particularly so. Hayes is constantly ridiculed for his heritage, which is assumed to be the source of his urge to drink himself into oblivion, but his anguish is obviously due to the trauma of his war experiences, his survivor’s guilt, and his unvarnished disgust at the jingoistic lies he’s being asked to peddle.* He in particular feels like a character of the sort that Clint had been depicting in films for more than a decade: a common man whose soul and peace of mind have been shattered by his participation in acts of violence. Beach’s portrayal alternates between showing us a man of solidity and dignity and humor and one so overcome with emotion that he can’t live inside his own skin. No one else in the movie comes close to his intensity.

In comparison to Flags, Letters is more internal, revelatory, suffocating, and doomed. The film is bracketed by scenes of a team of archaeologists exploring the caves of Iwo Jima, and the film feels like an act of retrieval and uncovering (Clint and his team were surprised to learn how little the Battle of Iwo Jima was taught and remembered in modern Japan). And it is entirely set in Iwo Jima except for a few small flashbacks to General Kuribayashi’s days in the United States and the backstories of two conscripted soldiers.

From the moment of his arrival on the desolate island, Kuribayashi knows that he’s overseeing a suicide mission, and everything he does is an effort to delay the inevitable, including his own death. He conveys good humor, stoicism, empathy, and worldliness in all his interactions with his men, which is seen by some of his subordinate (and, yes, insubordinate) officers as a form of weakness. But it is clearly a form of compassion: He is asking these men to die; to treat them ill in the process would be unspeakably cruel.

The battles in Letters aren’t assaults but ambushes. This time, we are the ones sliding gun barrels outside our fortifications, we are the ones pulling enemy combatants down into tunnels through trap doors, we are the ones being gunned down as we flee from overrun positions. It’s sickening, from the American perspective, to see so many soldiers die as they charge the beach in Flags; it’s equally terrible to see the Japanese force dwindle, run out of ammo, medicine, even water, face certain death and failure, and try to retain a thread of dignity and honor in the process.

In every way, Letters feels like a negative (in the photographic sense) sibling of Flags. The colors in Flags are dulled, as if seeing the world through the veil of memory, but the visual scheme of Letters is almost monochromatic—a high-contrast world of impenetrable blacks. Flags has immense breadth; Letters is largely played inside caves and trenches, imparting a physical sensation of the world collapsing. Flags tries to build heroes out of young men, while showing us how impossible the task asked of them is and then giving some of those young men the chance, as old men, to shed the mantle of heroism; Letters depicts the impossible, heroic dignity involved in giving oneself over to the ideals of national pride, even in the face of certain doom. Ken Watanabe, an actor with something of Clint’s statuesque screen presence, embodies the poet, the warrior, the diplomat, the kind master, the determined soldier—a panoply of ideals.* (Also noteworthy: Ihara playing the playboy/horseman Baron Nishi with suave steel and nobility, and Ninomiya as Saigo, one of those indestructible peasant types that fill Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, an emblem of human survival against all obstacles.)

The films inarguably do belong together, and as a pair they are, flaws and all, magnificent; but of the two, Letters is the finer, a film that feels Japanese in its DNA and its themes. The very genesis of the film—Clint’s late-life discovery of the gap between what he was told as a boy and what he could see with his own eyes as a grown man—is a fascinating story of someone trying to emerge from themselves—to, in the modern parlance, do the work of self-betterment. (And, of course, we’re talking about a man whose entire life and career were built on an act of cultural borrowing from Japanese cinema—that is to say, the Kurosawa-“inspired” Leone films—which fact he himself has never forgotten or tried to hide.) Letters isn’t easy to sit through, but it’s extraordinary filmmaking, and the fact that it succeeded better with critics isn’t a sign of their preference for esoterica but rather their recognition that, once again, a filmmaker whom everyone reckoned had shown all his tricks still had surprises to reveal. To have made two such films, so disparate in look and feel and narrative structure and tone and even language, in less than a year’s time, would be astounding for any director; to have done it at Clint’s age, and in doing it to come to a new understanding of the most pivotal global event of his early lifetime, with his personal and professional legacies and piles of baggage all widely known and assumed to be in conflict with what these films seem to argue, is incomprehensible. In short, if you think you know Clint Eastwood, you haven’t thought about these films.

When awards season rolled around, Flags was, again, the poor relation, though both films got some consideration among critics and industry groups.* For Flags, Clint was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Director, and the film garnered Academy Award nominations for Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing; it lost all of them. But Letters, which most observers agreed was hurried into theaters to get the prizes that Flags obviously wasn’t going to receive, was another story. By moving the film forward into late 2006, Warner Bros. had once again made Clint an important Oscar player. As David Carr of the New York Times put it, “Mr. Eastwood re-entered the Oscar battle by switching to the losing side.” (Or, in the words of an executive at a studio with films that were suddenly competing with Letters, “Of course all the critics loved it. The movie takes place in caves, and all of the critics live in them.”) Letters was named Best Picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and Best Foreign Language Picture by the Chicago Film Critics Association and at the Golden Globes, where Clint was granted a second Best Director nomination. At the Oscars, it was, impressively, nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, all of which it lost, but it won the Sound Editing award.* And in Japan, it won the equivalent of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and isn’t that amazing?

There was one last skirmish to do with Iwo Jima, a classic twenty-first-century-style beef. In the summer of 2008, when Spike Lee made his own World War II epic, The Miracle at St. Anna, concerning a platoon of Black American soldiers in Italy, he promoted it at the Cannes Film Festival. During a press conference there, asked about why he made the film, his thoughts turned to Clint’s movies: “Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total,” he said, “and there was not one Negro actor on the screen.* If you reporters had any balls you’d ask him why. . . . I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It’s not like he didn’t know.” Lee had previously complained that Clint had directed Bird, which Lee felt should have been made by a Black director (and to which he responded with his own jazz movie, 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues). At that time, Clint spoke calmly about his love and respect for Charlie Parker and his belief that the world of jazz could accommodate many movies. This time, when Clint was contacted by reporters for his reaction, the gloves were off. Clint pointed out that the racial composition of his cast was historically accurate, and then he said of Lee (one imagines from beneath a classic squint): “A guy like him should shut his face.” Spike retorted: “The man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either. . . . He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. . . . He sounds like an angry old man right there.” The ugly spat was settled when Steven Spielberg played go-between and convinced them to bury the hatchet.

If you had placed a bet that Clint would have followed the one-two of Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby with a two-film project, one of which was in Japanese and would be nominated for Oscar’s top prize, you would have made a lot of money. And no one would be willing to bet what he was planning to do next. It turned out to be a complete musical score for someone else’s film. John Cusack, who had adored his time working with Clint on Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, had starred in Grace Is Gone, a film about a man taking his daughters on a road trip after his soldier wife dies in the Iraq War. The story felt cut from the cloth of one of Clint’s own films, and he was pleased to provide the music at the request of Miramax, after the film debuted with a temporary score at Sundance.

But, then, music was the one thing that could always pull him in. His long-running relationship with documentarian Bruce Ricker continued to bear fruit in the form of documentaries about his musical heroes. Under the banner of Malpaso and with Clint named as producer, Ricker made films about the famed director of Westerns Budd Boetticher (Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, 2005), singer Tony Bennett (Tony Bennett: The Music Never Ends, 2007), songwriter Johnny Mercer (Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me, 2007), and pianist Dave Brubeck (Dave Brubeck: In His Own Sweet Way, 2010).

In 2007, Clint’s longtime public embrace of jazz resulted in an unexpected accolade. That September, at the Monterey Jazz Festival (on the board of which he had served since 1992), he received an honorary doctor of music degree from the Berklee College of Music. Berklee president Roger Brown said, “In Hollywood, a place rife with tawdry imitations and tepid convictions, we have the shining counter-example. An original, a stand-up guy who found his own drummers to march to, and they have been Elvin, Buddy, and Max.” Berobed and tassel-capped, Clint accepted the honor while—ever the Bay area boy—reminding the audience that it was not from the University of California at Berkeley. Two years later, he stood on the same stage to award the same degree to one of his heroes, Dave Brubeck, another East Bay kid made good.

Part VII

Unbowed

THE WORK NEVER SLEEPS

DARK HEART OF A MAN

A YEAR IN THE CROSSHAIRS, AS DAD AND AMERICAN

THE BILL OF BLOOD, NEVER PAID

HEROES BY HAPPENSTANCE

A FAMILY BONSAI

LAST MAN NOT JUST STANDING BUT PUNCHING

His application and productivity bottomless, he turned from one fascination to another. His family churned and changed; his politics became a talking point; and many familiar faces fell away. What he’d built was beyond stardom—legend: a life made wholly of art, in his own way, just as he’d dreamed.

PictureLux / Alamy Stock Photo

Twenty-Nine

He’d been interested in human longevity as a theory, but now he considered it a going concern. He was still working out, still eating well, still playing golf (although his prime as a 12-handicap was behind him), still avoiding vices except beer and wine and the occasional shot of tequila. But he had an idea, too, that he needed to stay young in spirit above all: “A friend of mine,” he said, “a ninety-five-year-old who looks much younger than his years, when people ask him ‘What’s your secret?,’ he says ‘I never let the old man in.’ So it’s a mental thing.”

Work was his chief stay against age—even, he reckoned, his chief means of keeping his family life thriving. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he reflected. “So what drives me? I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that. But she knows I’m a loyal citizen to the family. And that wasn’t necessarily a given thing. That was acquired.”

And the honors continued to accrue. In July 2006, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’s Los Angeles branch bestowed the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence on him. The following year in Washington, where he’d gone to lobby for stronger copyright protection for Hollywood movies, he was presented with the first Jack Valenti Humanitarian Award by the Motion Picture Association of America at a gala dinner filled with movie stars and politicians. Later that month, he was decorated by French president Jacques Chirac as a knight in the Legion of Honor in a ceremony at the Élysée Palace, during which he expressed a hope to “one day . . . do a French film, become a French director.”*

Also in 2006, he was among the inaugural class of the California Hall of Fame, a new institution created by Arnold Schwarzenegger after he became governor in an unlikely twist of history some three years prior.* He had been reappointed by Governor Arnold to the State Parks Commission, and Arnold added him as well to the State Film Commission in 2005. But he was soon wishing he hadn’t. Unlike Arnold, Clint had kept up his filmmaking regimen while serving as mayor of Carmel and while on the Parks Commission, leading to at least one frustrated conversation about him in the governor’s office, in which Arnold was captured on an audio recording complaining about Clint’s elusiveness. “I said, ‘Look, you can’t go and tell my people five times you’re coming, you’re not coming, you’re coming, you’re not coming.’ I said, ‘What’s that? Are you coming or not?’”

In 2008, Clint was told that he wouldn’t be reappointed to the commission when his current term expired. (Lest he feel personally affronted, he was told that Arnold wasn’t reappointing his own brother-in-law Bobby Shriver, either.) The issue wasn’t Clint’s failure to stick to a schedule. Rather, it was because he and Shriver opposed Arnold’s plan to build a toll freeway through San Onofre State Beach, a Southern California park where Clint used to surf back when he was breaking into Hollywood. As he said when reporters contacted him about his removal, “You’re not going to get people who are interested in state parks who want to build freeways through state parks.” A variety of voices in the conservation movement spoke up for Clint, including the director of the Sierra Club’s coastal programs, who had fought him on his proposed Pebble Beach project a few years prior. “He has a reverence for open space and public property,” said Mark Massara. “It’s deep, abiding, and sincere.” And there was some embarrassment when it was revealed that Clint was apprised of his removal not by Arnold but by an aide to the governor. Arnold called to apologize for the slight, and Clint let it slide. “I’m not a kid,” he said. “The parks is a voluntary job, and it’s just a job you do when they need you. It’s not like I need a day job.”

He wasn’t done with the land, though—conserving it or developing it. In 2008, Clint returned to the acreage he’d bought more than twenty years prior high in the Carmel Valley, the site of his Tehama golf course. This time he planned a development informed by conservation and protection of natural lands, a gated community, also named Tehama, consisting of ninety home sites that would be made available in tranches rolled out over time, with strict rules about design and construction and sensitivity to native flora and terrain. After a short period of availability, the development was paused by the Great Recession. It resumed about eight years later, with lots for sale through 2020, by which time about two thirds of the planned community had been purchased. The Tehama aesthetic was lauded in the pages of Architectural Digest and Forbes and even included a line of clothing and home decor products. Clint now ruled, if often in absentia, over a realm more private and dreamlike than even Mission Ranch or Pebble Beach—a luxurious mountain retreat above the sea.

With the one-two punch of Flags and Letters still alive in theaters and in awards chatter circles, a new script caught his eye. He loved films set during his formative years, and producer Brian Grazer had one on his hands. “The Strange Case of Christine Collins,” by journalist and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, was the story of a largely forgotten episode of 1920s Los Angeles history, when authorities “solved” a nine-year-old boy’s abduction by showing up at his mother’s house some months after his disappearance with a boy whom they told her was her son; when she insisted that this wasn’t her child, and provided physical evidence to prove her claims, she was involuntarily committed to an asylum and drugged into silence. Meanwhile, a detective working on a different missing-child case discovered that a serial killer was at work in the desert not far from Los Angeles, abducting, abusing, and murdering young boys, including Collins’s son.

Clint hadn’t heard of the case, known as the Wineville Chicken Coop murders* for the town in which it happened and the cages in which the victims were kept, but he was drawn to the script’s themes of child abduction and the misconduct of officials. Grazer’s partner, director Ron Howard, had developed the script, but other projects arose. So Clint took it over—and in so doing directed his first film for Universal in more than three decades. He learned that several stars were interested in playing Collins, including Hilary Swank and Reese Witherspoon, but among the potential candidates he favored Angelina Jolie, whom he’d once met in passing backstage at Larry King’s TV talk show and whose face looked to him like that of a silent-era movie star. He set about supervising the rest of the production, including paying a visit to the site of the murders, and he found the place still intact, coops and all.*

Under the title Changeling, the film commenced shooting in October 2007, in and around Los Angeles. Jolie, who didn’t meet face-to-face with Clint until her first day on the set, was another of those actors impressed by his speed and resolve. Like Tim Robbins, she realized that preparing for only a few takes of each scene meant she could go hard from the start. “You feel you can absolutely break yourself,” she said. “You can drain every bit of energy you’ve got. He’s not going to waste your time.” Eventually, she realized that, despite being a veteran actor and Oscar winner, she was relearning fundamentals of her craft on Clint’s set: “I was prepared emotionally, my lines were crisp. I was more ready than I’d ever been on a film. . . . This is how I should always work; I should always be this professional and prepared.” (John Malkovich, cast as a crusading clergyman who believes Collins’s story, offered this take on his long-ago co-star and current director: “There are some similarities between him and the Coen brothers. They don’t make drama, they’re not mentally ill, they don’t play cheap psychological games with the actors, they’re not control maniacs, they have very significant leadership abilities.”)

Around this time, another wrinkle in Clint’s directing technique became known. He didn’t say “Action” when he wanted filming to start. As he explained it, he noticed way back on Rawhide that shouted commands to keep quiet followed by a shout of “Action” had an adverse effect on actors (and horses), creating a needlessly tense atmosphere. In the late 1990s, he realized: “You can just start in and say, ‘Okay, just commence, go ahead.’ . . . That way nobody is getting an adrenaline rush or anything. You just go. I’ve worked on other sets where you hear whistles blowing and everybody yells ‘Quiet!’ and the actors are all . . . getting tics and things, and you think, ‘How the hell does anybody do it? How the hell can you get into it when everybody is screaming and yelling and certainly coming into it with the wrong focus?’” Like his preference for filming rehearsals or doing only one or two takes, he felt that easing into a scene was a help to the performers in it. “I don’t come in as a writer or as a cameraman or as a sound technician,” he said. “I come in and I know what actors are trying to accomplish and how hard it can be.” He even, he confessed, started scenes without cuing actors: “I can sometimes roll without even saying a word. I’ll just motion to the cameraman, and he turns it on, and there we go.” As Tom Hanks, who would come to experience these techniques on the set, put it with a wink: “He treats actors like horses.” (And, by the way, instead of shouting “Cut,” Clint would just say, in a low speaking voice, something like “Okay” or, if he wasn’t entirely pleased, “That’s enough of that.”)

Changeling wrapped principal production in December, and while Clint polished it for Cannes in May, he was handed another script, Gran Torino, by an unproduced Minnesota screenwriter named Nick Schenk. This one also pushed buttons for him. It centered on Walt Kowalski, a bitter, widowed, retired auto worker and Korean War veteran watching his neighborhood fall apart from the vantage of his porch, from the driver’s seat of his classic muscle car, and from a barstool at the VFW, where he drinks beer after beer and spews horrid racial slurs about the Blacks and Southeast Asians filling his once all-white community. Estranged from his children, coughing up blood, and haunted by memories of the killings he committed during the war, he becomes entangled, despite his prejudices, with the lives of the Hmong family next door.

At this stage in Clint’s life, despite a history of color-blind casting, of giving women substantial roles, and even of speaking frequently of his attitude of acceptance of the gay community, Clint wasn’t thought of as an icon of cultural sensitivity. For all his Libertarian values, he’d been quoted in interviews complaining about PC culture and his dislike of Barack Obama. It was telling, though not surprising, that he could see the truth in Schenk’s depiction of an angry old man of another time. “I thought, ‘I know that guy,’” he said (as he also had of Robert Kincaid). “I’ve felt some of his emotions and his confusions in life.” Even though he had repeatedly expressed a desire to walk away from the camera, he liked the script and he could see himself in it. “I’m doing that Frank Sinatra thing,” he had said just after Million Dollar Baby. “I’ll just un-retire when I feel like it.” He felt like it. He had Schenk move the setting from Minnesota to Detroit, where new tax incentives from the state would trim the budget considerably, and he filled the cast with non-actors from Hmong communities in the upper Midwest. Warner Bros. green-lit the film in February 2008, and production would take place in June and July—right in between Changeling’s debut at Cannes and its autumn release in American theaters.

Schenk couldn’t believe his good fortune. As ever, Clint didn’t want a word of the script changed, and Schenk had even stumbled on a car model that meant something to his star/director: “I had no idea,” he said, “that Clint’s character in Dirty Harry drove a Gran Torino.” The Hmong roles were largely filled with nonprofessional actors, including Bee Vang as Thao, the neighbor boy who comes into Walt’s life by attempting to steal his car, and Ahney Her as his sister, Sue, who is targeted by gangbangers and whom Walt steps in to protect. There were a couple of veteran actors in the cast,* but it was almost like a student film full of first timers, which meant that Clint’s speedy technique would be their introduction to screen acting. He expanded his practice of catching actors off guard by filming rehearsals more than he ever had before. “I would say, ‘Run through it for me, show me what it could look like,’” he said, “and then I would signal to roll the cameras. . . . Sometimes when you tell someone who is not a professional actor to start acting, they get real stiff. They change everything and think too much.” As he put it later, “Nonprofessionals don’t repeat things. They do things by accident that turn out great.” In some ways, this method of filming was close to his ideal. The movie wrapped before Labor Day, and he planned to have it ready for release in December, not two months after Changeling. If he was thinking about slowing down, he had a funny way of showing it.

Changeling premiered in competition at Cannes, where, once again, Clint failed to win the top prize or the prize for directing (he and Catherine Deneuve were awarded special prizes by the jury, but he’d left before they were announced). He was philosophical about the matter. “If you’re going to go, you’ve got to play the game,” he said. “The Dodgers don’t win every day either.” The following year, though, when he was in France to promote the European release of Gran Torino, the festival officially awarded him a Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement, an honor previously accorded the very elite likes of Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Jeanne Moreau, Jane Fonda, and Deneuve.

The film opened in the United States in late October and was met with mixed notices. In Newsweek, David Ansen said that “Eastwood tells his haunting, sorrowful saga with such a sure, steady hand, only a very hardened cynic could fail to be moved.” But Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek deemed it “a glum, listless affair that springs to life now and then, only to sag back into its saggy, depressive cushion.” It never really found an audience, earning only $35 million domestically; its $78 million international take put it, modestly, in the black.

Changeling is a dark, determined, and painful movie that confronts the horrors it depicts with a blunt, open-eyed frankness that makes for hard watching. It’s slow and airless, but it’s brilliantly acted and made, and it altogether clings to you. In a sense, the audience, like the protagonist, is subject to the evil the film depicts—not only that perpetrated by the killer, Gordon Northcott (played with ghastly verve by Jason Butler Harner), but also, and maybe more viciously, by LAPD captain J. J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan, also wickedly good), whose caustic treatment of a woman bereft of her child appalls again and again.

In the midst of this, that John Malkovich, of all people, portrays the film’s primary symbol of justice, solace, and righteousness tells you just how far from normal things are. As the Reverend Gustav Briegleb (the actual fellow’s actual name), he is certain that evil has befallen the boy and even more certain that the police are railroading the boy’s mother to polish their image in the public eye. And central to it all is Jolie, photographed with otherworldly glamour yet deeply rooted in the routines of her day, in her motherly care, in her frustration and anger at the false-faced authorities who want her to accept a child not her own as her own, and in her fright and steel in confronting the police and the murderous, insane Northcott. It’s a powerful performance, mounted in a vision of a softer world concealing jagged edges, and it was justly nominated for an Academy Award.*

Changeling is set in the years just before Clint was born, and it is built with loving care for the time period, which makes it feel more lived in than researched. You feel at once that you are in a dream/nightmare and in a very real place. It’s sometimes suffocating, as befits the facts, and it’s overlong at two hours and twenty minutes. But you get the sense that Clint felt honor-bound to tell the whole story, and, given the terrible truth confronting you at every minute of this slowly burning film, you can’t accuse him of taking an easy path.

He certainly didn’t go easy with Gran Torino. Warner Bros. opened it in mid-December on only six screens, then added a dozen, then a few dozen more. In January, encouraged by strong reviews, it expanded to twenty-eight hundred screens. In Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwartzbaum called it “a movie at once understated and radical, deceptively unremarkable in presentation and ballsy in its earnestness.” Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal said, “It’s a meditation, as affecting as it is entertaining, on the limits of violence and the power of unchained empathy.” And Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post added, “If you can survive the F-bombs and the near-constant ethnic invective, Gran Torino is not to be missed, if only as the gutsy, thoroughly unexpected valedictory of an icon fully willing to spend every bit of his considerable capital.” When the film went wide, it took off, claiming the number one spot with $29 million and holding a place in the box office top twenty until April, cruising to a $148 million domestic gross, which was fattened up by another $126 million from overseas. A tiny, virtually homemade movie was a significant surprise hit. But it was almost entirely overlooked by critics and the industry come awards time, a case, perhaps, of Clint cutting not only close to the bone with the subject matter but into it. And, as with The Bridges of Madison County and Space Cowboys, he had prompted discussion in film biz circles about the viability of movie fare about and for older audiences. The very fact of him, and his success, was still challenging the status quo.

How many times can an actor or director make a film that sums up an entire career? With Gran Torino, Clint did it for, what, the third? . . . the fifth? Walt Kowalski is something like the epitome of what much of the world took Clint, on- and off-screen, to be: white, old, angry, racist, violent, mean. And in the course of the film, while Walt doesn’t explicitly renounce any of that, he does come to realize what it has all cost him, and he makes amends, or at least tries to, with acts of selflessness, compassion, and self-sacrifice directed toward easing his mind of a ghost that has haunted most of his life: the shooting of a young North Korean soldier who was trying to surrender. His adoption, as it were, of the Hmong neighbor kids, Thao and Sue, and their family and even parts of their culture isn’t what the church would call an act of contrition, but it is an apology of sorts, if not to the people he has hurt throughout his life, then at least to the wounds inside him that made him lash out, curl into himself, and hide from the world behind a steel veil of duty, order, and hate.

It’s a daring role for any actor to play, and Clint is nothing if not game in tackling it. He overdoes some of it: Early on, especially, Walt’s habit of sneering, snarling, and grunting can be cartoonish. But as Walt cracks open, as he witnesses violence and depravity beyond his comprehension, as he acknowledges the core decency of the kids next door, and, especially, as he faces his own mortality, first in a cancer diagnosis and then as part of a plan of revenge, Clint is able to fill him with colors and nuances not unlike those with which he infused Will Munny or Frankie Dunn, two other men with pasts stained by misdeeds that they are given one cathartic chance to put to sleep, at least in their own tortured hearts. It’s a daring performance in that Clint is willing to embody and speak so much awfulness; it’s a fine performance in that, after a bumpy start, it goes as deeply into darkness and raw feeling as he has ever been able—or willing—to.

This brings up one of the most delicate aspects of the film: its explicitly racist content. Walt and a couple of his chums spew—by conservative estimate—scores of ugly epithets throughout the course of the film, and it’s legitimate to ask whether any purpose beyond shock is served by them. It’s not, however, legitimate to believe that the film or its makers are racist; showing a racist is not the same as being one. You may not agree with Clint’s real-world political or social views, which were, often, at once broader than and as narrow as you might expect, depending on the issue at hand. But he is not Walt, no matter how much glee you think you see in his eyes as he’s playing him, and it’s clear that the film recognizes Walt’s ugliness and how much it costs him.

A lot of Gran Torino succeeds without having to split hairs or establish definitions. The performances of Bee Vang and Ahney Her are entirely authentic, genuinely conveying youthful freshness, confusion, horror, fear, and, yes, amusement with the man whom Sue insists on referring to as “Wally.” There are chilling scenes of confrontation between Walt and the Hmong gangbangers, as well as a pack of corner boys he finds abusing Sue and her date (this scene finds him calling out the young man, played by the star/director’s son Scott, as a “pussy,” which can’t have been an easy day at work for anyone). The relationship between Walt and the young priest, played with earnestness and surprising grit by Christopher Carley, demonstrates perhaps the most profound evolution of the entire film. And the final scene between Walt, who has made his mind up about how things will end, and Thao, whom he has thwarted from joining him in the coming confrontation, is as hair-raising as the last scenes of Will Munny’s vengeance. “I’ve got blood on my hands,” Walt declares. “I’m soiled. . . . I finish things. That’s what I do. And I’m going it alone.” At that moment, nobody but Walt knows what’s coming, and he manages to bring events to a spectacular climax on his own resolute, irreversible terms. If these had been Clint’s last moments ever on film, they would have sewn up his career of over fifty years perfectly.*

Gran Torino is handsomely made, with the dark shadows and solid design and the near-tactile feeling of ordinary life expected in a Malpaso film. And there are bits in it that feel iconic in the way of some moments in the Dirty Harry series: Walt’s glare over a rifle stock or a cigarette or his terse and underplayed and not remotely jokey threat, “Get . . . off . . . my lawn!” There could be a sense in some of the late-career films Clint directed that he was noodling or checking items off a wishlist. But Gran Torino feels like an inevitable, even necessary, step in his work and, indeed, his life. In it, an ordinary man assesses his decades of words and deeds and realizes he must find a way to seek, if not forgiveness, then at least some form of expiation. Through a work of art that is also a work of work, on his own terms, Clint comes remarkably close to just that.

And then, with Gran Torino still in U.S. theaters, he continued his run. Nelson Mandela, who had been portrayed by the estimable likes of Danny Glover, Sidney Poitier, and Dennis Haysbert, had recently said at a press conference that he believed that the best actor to play him in a biopic would be Morgan Freeman, and Freeman decided to pursue that aim. In 2008, he discovered a book, Playing the Enemy, about an episode early in Mandela’s presidency, when he urged the entire nation to rally behind the South African national rugby team, long supported chiefly by whites, as it hosted the Rugby World Cup on home soil. Freeman optioned the book and asked Mandela if he could observe him for a few days up close. Mandela agreed, and when Freeman returned from South Africa, he brought the idea to Clint. The production would involve a couple of months shooting on location in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Robben Island, where Mandela had spent eighteen years as a prisoner, and it would entail filming a number of staged rugby matches in a stadium largely populated by digitally generated fans. Clint agreed. He cast Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, the captain of the Springboks, as the South African national rugby team was known, and he set off on as unlikely a mission as he’d ever undertaken. The film would shoot in March and April of 2009—the South African autumn—and be in theaters before the end of the year, meaning he would have debuted three feature films set in three eras on two continents in fourteen months. At age seventy-nine.

Also in 2008, while Clint was in the middle of this binge, Peter Morgan, the playwright and screenwriter responsible for The Queen and Frost/Nixon, sold a script to Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks based on some thoughts he was having about mortality. It traces the stories of three unconnected people: a French journalist who almost drowns in a 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean; a London teenager whose twin brother is killed in an accident and who himself nearly dies in the 2005 London terror bombings; and an American factory worker possessed of clairvoyant gifts that allow him to communicate with the dead. DreamWorks producer Kathleen Kennedy thought of M. Night Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense fame as a possible director for the material, but she showed the script to Spielberg as well. He liked it sufficiently to provide Morgan with notes for a revision, which the writer worked to incorporate. But when Spielberg saw the new draft, he felt as if he had squelched what was best in the original script. And so, as Morgan recalled, he asked, “ ‘Can I show [the first script] to my friend Clint?’ . . . So now we’re really in the realm of the absurd!” He agreed, but he didn’t put overly much hope in the thing. The next he heard, Clint was already filming the very same first draft that Spielberg had initially read. “I believe very strongly in first impressions,” Clint said. “When something hits you and excites your interest, there’s really no reason to kill it with improvements.”

Hereafter, as the film was known, was filmed in late 2009 and early 2010 in London, Paris, the San Francisco Bay area, and Maui, which doubled for South Asia. Matt Damon was cast as the clairvoyant, French actress Cécile de France was selected to play the journalist, and the twin brothers Frankie and George McLaren made their professional debuts as the English teens. The tsunami and images of the afterlife were computer-generated, but otherwise it was another lock-and-load Malpaso film, shot and finished in a matter of months, in time for a December 2010 release. Morgan, who’d been around a bit and seen things drag on for years, couldn’t believe what was happening in front of his eyes.

When it appeared at the end of the year, Invictus drew surprisingly reverential reviews, as if critics felt they were weighing in on Mandela, Clint, and Freeman all at once. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote, “Eastwood, a master director, orchestrates all of these notes and has us loving Mandela, proud of Francois and cheering for the plucky Springboks,” calling the film “a great entertainment.” Lou Lumenick of the New York Post called it “inspiring and insightful without ever becoming schmaltzy or preachy.” American audiences didn’t turn out, buying only $37.5 million in tickets, but overseas, where rugby was more appreciated, the film grossed an additional $87 million.

To respect and admire Invictus isn’t necessarily to be completely won over by it. The film impresses as a showcase for a titanic actor playing a role with near-theatrical immersion. Freeman is more convincing as Mandela than you could possibly imagine (and considering how apt he is for the part, that’s a lot to imagine). He stiffens his upper lip, clips the cadences of his speech, pitches his molasses voice to a tinny register, moves with stiff shoulders and simple grace, and all but transforms into Mandela before your eyes. The script allows him ample opportunity to inhabit the humor, wisdom, savvy, and sorrow of the man, and it’s a wonder to watch him. Matt Damon is stalwart and respectful as Pienaar. But the film suffers from a major tactical blunder of storytelling that shuts us down just when we should be most absorbed, transforming into a big-game sports movie, including a ten-ish-minute rugby match, stopping things cold just when they should be rising to a climax.

The film’s flaws reveal a problem that was creeping into Clint’s work: the thirst to get to the next story and tell it and then hustle on to yet another brings an awful lot of inconsistency into the films. In some ways, Invictus marks the first film of Clint’s late-career aesthetic. He was never Terrence Malick or Stanley Kubrick, to name a notorious pair of perfectionists, but he was starting to jog a little, and it shows. But, then, he was engaged in his passion, he had the energy and stamina for a hard job, and he often turned a profit, sometimes a quite large one. A marvelous anecdote from the time told of him walking past a table where crew members were eating; one offered him a slice of pizza. He looked at it and hissed, “No thanks: I’ve got more films I want to make.” You wouldn’t want to be the one to tell him to stop.

A year later, some critics tried to make a case for Hereafter. In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan praised its “quiet but potent filmmaking that believes nothing is more important than the story it has to tell,” while A. O. Scott of the New York Times declared that “it has the power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous and to fascinate everyone in between.” But most reviews sounded like that of David Edelstein of New York magazine, who wrote that “Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.” Americans once again stayed away, generating only $32.7 million in ticket sales, though, as with Invictus, the overseas take of $75 million rescued Warner Bros.’ investment.

No matter whether your beliefs about life after death conform to traditional religion or something more paranormal, you will likely find Hereafter a slog that makes life on this plane of existence less vital, at least for two hours. After an impressive depiction of a tsunami, we’re in a film—no, three films—for which Clint has no particular feel or sensibility. Solid actors anchor two of them—Damon and de France—but the third, the tale of the twins, is built around one of the very few bland performances by a child actor under Clint’s direction. Now and again, something like vitality springs into the frame, such as Damon’s flirtation with Bryce Dallas Howard. But most of the picture is static, somber, and unconvincing. And the questions you have in your head afterward have less to do with the nature of life after death than with what Clint was thinking when he chose to make the film in the first place. It’s as if it took him until his eightieth year to recognize that he wasn’t going to be here forever and then decided to make three sad little movies about the fact. The result is a passing footnote in his filmography.

Having succeeded in interesting Clint in one film about crime and law enforcement set in the 1920s, producer Brian Grazer thought that a script about J. Edgar Hoover, founding director and longtime face of the FBI, would also be up Clint’s street. Grazer had been developing a Hoover biopic with Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, which had demonstrated his facility with political subject matter and historical storytelling and which involved, like certain aspects of Hoover’s story, the nexus of homosexuality and public life. (Hoover, famously, never married, had a lifelong companion in FBI assistant director Clyde Tolson, and was said by at least one biographer to have practiced transvestism.) Like Milk, Black’s script jumped back and forth in time, from Hoover starting his career at the Department of Justice and helping to organize and establish the FBI to a latter-day Hoover defending his realm against enemies real and imagined while dictating his memoir. Clint, as ever when he liked something, agreed to direct it as it stood; Black, a habitual rewriter, had heard the stories about Clint shooting first drafts, so he managed to get himself invited to the set as a historical consultant so that he could suggest edits and changes on the fly.

In a bit of a surprise, Leonardo DiCaprio would play Hoover, requiring that he undergo extensive makeup and costume preparation for approximately half the film to simulate Hoover’s age and portly physique. Armie Hammer, just off his breakout role in The Social Network, was selected as Tolson. Judi Dench filled the role of Hoover’s mother, and Naomi Watts would play Hoover’s longtime secretary. Like Flags of Our Fathers, the film contained dozens of characters: politicians, FBI agents, criminals, and Hollywood celebrities. It would shoot mainly on Warner Bros. soundstages, but also in Washington, D.C., and at the Del Mar raceway near San Diego (Hoover was keen on the ponies) and various vintage spots around L.A.

While he prepared for the film, Clint was lured by DiCaprio to be honored at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s inaugural Art + Film Gala (another California native, conceptual artist John Baldessari, was the co-honoree); DiCaprio and fashion designer Eva Chow chaired the event, a star-studded evening that raised more than $3 million. The big night out didn’t slow Clint’s roll on J. Edgar. It was, as his actors later recalled, a typically quick-paced shoot. Hammer, who didn’t meet his director until his first day shooting, remembered playing a tricky scene with DiCaprio and being told by their director, “Figure it out on your own. Figure it out as you go. But figure it out quick.” DiCaprio, who said he wanted to tear the heavy “old Hoover” makeup off his head every day, was grateful for the pace; Dench, however, was not amused by Clint’s speed, remembering her frustrating discussions with the director about his one-take aesthetic thus: “ ‘Mr. Eastwood, could we possibly do that again?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, because we’ve just done it once. Could we have another go?’ ‘No.’”

Even though the script touched on hot-button issues of law and order and politics, even though it depicted Hoover’s ugly history of anti-Communist hysteria and his deplorable hounding of Martin Luther King Jr. and other icons of the political left, the most sensitive material in it involved the relationship of Hoover and Tolson, which was expressed in a series of impassioned, strained, couched conversations, and tiffs, including an angry wrestling bout that ended in a kiss. Clint was cagey about the subject of Hoover’s sex life. “My intention was to show two men who really love each other, and beyond that it’s none of my business,” he said. Nor was he explicit with DiCaprio and Hammer about what he believed the nature of their relationship to be. Ironically, according to Hammer, that don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude rather suited the closeted times the film depicted: “It was also interesting that we didn’t explicitly have these conversations, because these guys might not have explicitly had these conversations.” The film shot in thirty-nine days between February and April of 2011, and Clint got it ready for Warner Bros. to release that October.*

J. Edgar was received as an enigma. In the Boston Globe, Ty Burr wrote, “That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces—that at times it’s quite entertainingly bad—can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project’s very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.” At the Hollywood Reporter, longtime Clint aficionado Todd McCarthy tried to make a case for it, saying it “tackles its trickiest challenges with plausibility and good sense, while serving up a simmeringly caustic view of its controversial subject’s behavior, public and private.” But that didn’t entice audiences. It opened in mid-November with $11.3 million, then faded, vanishing at awards time save for a Golden Globe nomination for DiCaprio.

As an act of re-creating the past, as a historical epic, J. Edgar is admirable: a grand-scale narrative covering more than fifty years of America’s criminal history as thwarted (and, in some cases, perpetrated) by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI. And it’s acted with real depth and vigor by DiCaprio, who conveys the title character’s ambition, intellect, volatility, anger, cunning, vindictiveness, and sexual frustration with power, even from beneath globs of makeup. But J. Edgar is a strange and choppy film, coming close only intermittently to taking a point of view on Hoover’s reign of secrecy and intimidation, mixing nostalgia with (mild) critique uneasily, holding Hoover at arm’s length, never seeming able to decide if he’s a hero or a villain. Aside from DiCaprio, there are substantial performances from Hammer and, in a smashing turn late in the film, Christopher Shyer as a potty-mouthed Richard Nixon. As in Changeling and the Iwo Jima films, Clint coats the past in subdued colors, sometimes near monochrome. But that technique can make things look faded, even dead, and this film never really comes to life. It’s a long, dour tale of misguided use of power, thwarted love, and unfortunate (at the very least) turns of history. In Bird and Changeling, Clint had embraced his passion for the past, and he brought it to pulsing life; J. Edgar’s vital signs are intermittent and decidedly weak.

Thirty

For someone who had once yearned so mightily to break away from TV, he suddenly found himself up to his neck in it. In February 2012, the year’s traditionally largest TV audience tuned in to the Super Bowl, as much for the ads as for the game. And during the halftime break the nation watched a commercial in which a tall, lanky figure in a sports coat walked slowly through a stadium tunnel in silhouette and spoke in an unmistakable rasp.

“It’s halftime,” the voice said—and everyone knew instantly it was Clint. “Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half. It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work, and they’re hurting. They’re all wondering what they’re gonna do to make a comeback. And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.”

As he spoke, the screen filled with images of cityscapes and pastures, worried faces, an American flag fluttering in a gray sky. And then it started showing images of factory work.

“The people of Detroit know a little something about this,” he said. “They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together. And now Motor City is fighting again.”

After Clint’s face appeared, the spot ended with the words IMPORTED FROM DETROIT above the logos for Ram, Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler—the marks of the Chrysler Corporation, one of the traditional Big Three American auto manufacturers, and one of two, along with General Motors, to have been bailed out by the federal government under the leadership of Barack Obama in 2009.

The two-minute commercial, which cost an estimated $14 million to air, was created by the Wieden+Kennedy ad agency and directed by David Gordon Green. And it did more than stop people from rushing into the kitchen for snacks or get them thinking about buying a new Chrysler: It lit the hair of conservative pundits on fire.

It was, of course, a presidential election year, and Obama was running for a second term, at least in part on his record of having successfully rescued American car manufacturing. For some on the right, to trumpet this achievement was a political statement, and social media, newspapers, and cable TV were littered with commentary by the likes of Karl Rove, Rich Lowry, and Michelle Malkin suggesting that the bailout of the auto industry was a bad thing or even a failure and that Clint had been hoodwinked or taken advantage of in choosing to laud it. “The president of the United States and his minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising,” Rove said on Fox News.

The White House laughed off the suggestion that it had loaned Chrysler $4 billion to get an ad out of the deal. Clint showed up on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show to declare that he hadn’t voted for Obama and wasn’t planning to (he confessed that he couldn’t remember ever voting for a Democrat for president).* As he told the New York Times, “The ad doesn’t have a political message. It is about American spirit, pride, and job growth.” He also announced that he’d donated the fee he’d been paid for appearing in the spot to charity. And then he retreated from the political spotlight—for a time.

But the TV cameras weren’t done with him. During the making of Invictus, Dina had visited Johannesburg with Morgan and Francesca, and she saw a performance by Overtone, an a cappella singing group made up of half a dozen young men, and she got the idea that they had star quality and that she could guide them to a big career. She introduced Clint to the group, and he liked them well enough to include them on the film’s soundtrack, and she convinced Malpaso and Warner Bros. to bring the group to the United States to help promote the film and to launch them as a music act. Soon she had outright declared herself the band’s manager and moved them into a rented house near Carmel.

“I had a midlife crisis and I adopted a boy band,” she told the press. “I was edgy, I didn’t know what I was doing. Clint was accelerating how many movies a year he was doing. Our youngest daughter was getting to the point she doesn’t want to be around me as much.” The family was aging and growing apart. But Dina hit on a way to make her new gig something that could knit them back together: a reality TV series. She hadn’t been on TV since 1998, when she briefly hosted a show about educational excellence sponsored by the California Teachers Association. But now she hired a friend to film a sizzle reel featuring herself, Overtone, Morgan and Francesca, the Eastwoods’ cantankerous Korean housekeeper Lisa, Dina’s brother Dominic (who helped manage the band and whose wife, Jade, was the granddaughter of Groucho Marx), the family’s menagerie of pets, and, very occasionally, Clint himself as they filled Hacienda Este Madera with the sort of nondramatic domestic and professional dramas that are the stuff of unscripted TV. Using that footage, she got the attention of Bunim/Murray Productions, the company behind The Real World and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. A pilot was shot, the E! network picked it up, and a season of ten one-hour episodes was commissioned.

The very idea is surreal. A notoriously private movie legend, in his eighties, abiding the presence of a reality TV crew in his home, filming his wife and daughters, airing personal matters, and generally turning his name and family into the seed of a brand. Clint decidedly did not dig it. But Dina pitched it to him as a means to launch Overtone. “I told him, ‘I know you don’t want to do this, probably, but you kind of have to,’” she said. “He knows it’s important to me, and he knows I’m not going to jack up his reputation. He’s in a couple of episodes out of ten by his choice. If I said today, ‘I need you in a scene,’ he would not do it. He did what he wanted to do. He’s got a duck’s back: Nothing affects him. But this has actually pushed a couple of buttons with him. I think he feels that I’m putting us in, I don’t know . . .’”

Clint managed to keep himself out of the thing with the legitimate excuse that he was acting in a film in Atlanta, Trouble with the Curve, directed by Rob Lorenz, who’d taken over for David Valdes as Clint’s chief in-house producer. The story of an aging baseball scout with failing eyesight and a fractious relationship with his daughter (Amy Adams), it seemed practically written for Clint, even if it was a rather generic script. He did show up, briefly, in two episodes of Dina’s reality project—once at a restaurant, once at a wedding of Dina’s friends—without ever speaking to the camera.* He abided the thing, in short, barely.

In May 2012, the series, titled Mrs. Eastwood & Company, aired, in a coveted Sunday night slot right after the Kardashians. It proved to be noisy, scattershot, and shallow. There was some effort to depict the struggle to launch Overtone, and some drama about the desire of one of the members of the band to come out as gay. But that was a subplot compared to the time spent on Dina and the girls and, of all things, a belly-button piercing. Morgan wanted one badly, so Dina, on the theory that Morgan would never do it if she did it, went and got one (on camera) to demonstrate how bloody and painful and unsightly and dumb they were. (In a subplot, Francesca bonds with Dominic and Jade’s baby and flirts with Overtone’s lead singer, to whom Dina also seems, perhaps unconsciously, attracted.) Clint appears briefly for a family meal at Mission Ranch and sits with his back to the camera. As these things go, it’s fairly chaste, but there’s a lot of wealth and privilege on display in the form of the gorgeous setting, the handsome kitchen, and the pets (if you’ve not seen a pig take a good, long piss on camera, this show’s got you covered).

The ratings were modest: twenty-eighth among cable shows for the week, with about 750,000 viewers. And the reviews were scalding: “hugely boring . . . cringey” (New York Post), “loose, somewhat rambling . . . dull” (New York Times), “tame to the point of sedation” (Los Angeles Times). The ten episodes were dutifully rolled out, and the ratings and public response stayed about level. The ostensible excuse for the thing—launching Overtone—wasn’t achieved. And that was that for Mrs. Eastwood & Company. Morgan posted on social media that the network “wanted/want us to do another season but we said no . . . It’s just kind of too much for us.”

But there was another story underneath.

As it later came out, Clint was absent from the household not just because he was making a movie out of town and because he didn’t want to expose himself on reality TV, but because he and Dina weren’t getting along; he’d even stopped wearing his wedding ring. Mrs. Eastwood & Company was, in this light, a last straw. By June 2012, Clint had all but moved out of their shared Carmel house. In the coming months, Dina began spending time with Scott Fisher, a high school acquaintance who was working as an assistant men’s basketball coach at the University of Hawaii. Fisher was nearing completion of a divorce from his wife, Erica, and Erica reached out to Clint to find out what he knew about Dina and Scott. Clint and Erica met, and in a twist that would have made reality TV gold, they started seeing each other. In September, Dina filed for a legal separation, and tabloid news outlets ran paparazzi shots of Clint and Erica together in Los Angeles. Dina was said to be startled by this turn of events, and within two days she withdrew her separation request. She and Clint spent a few weeks going back and forth about their situation, but there was no way out. In October, she filed for divorce.

This wasn’t going to be a drawn-out struggle like his divorce from Maggie or a public spectacle like his split from Sondra Locke. (For one thing, he had an ironclad prenuptial agreement in place when he and Dina wed.) In statements on social media and with a very select number of friendly interviewers, Dina said that she and Clint were getting along, that he hadn’t opposed her request for custody of Morgan, and that he was a “wonderful, good-natured, brilliant person” with whom she simply had differences that couldn’t be reconciled. But as the months of negotiations unfolded, and as Clint and Erica became more involved, the situation wore on Dina. Clint’s attorneys, leaning on that prenup, refused to grant her request for spousal support, and they insisted on joint physical custody of Morgan. Unpleasant—and exaggerated—headlines about a bitter fight started to surface. In April 2013, Dina was admitted to a rehab facility in Arizona for treatment of anxiety and depression (and not—not even according to the sauciest gossip outlets—due to a substance abuse problem). She soon returned to Carmel, where the grind of the divorce became final on December 22, 2014. At the time, Clint’s net worth was believed to be in the range of $400 million, maybe more; no details of what portion of that constituted the divorce settlement were made public.*

Meanwhile, other threads of his life continued to unspool despite the drama around him. He was working on a film that wound up not coming together, a remake of A Star Is Born with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter in the role previously played by Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, with various possible leading men being considered opposite her, including Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christian Bale; negotiations and planning were taking ages, and then Beyoncé became pregnant, and the film was scrapped.

In May 2012, the Pebble Beach Company got approval to develop some of the acreage around its golf course properties in the Del Monte Forest. The new plan was significantly smaller than the proposal of a decade earlier, and it contained far more provisions for conservation. It called for the construction of a luxury hotel, expansion of the existing hotels, and the siting of ninety new homes. The company agreed to permanently preserve more than 635 acres of pristine woods and wetlands and to build more coastal access ways, scenic overlooks, and hiking trails. And the commission that green-lit this pared-down proposal essentially declared that it would be the last development it would ever approve in the area.

When it appeared in the fall of 2012, Trouble with the Curve passed without rustling the air, with most critics comparing it unfavorably to the previous year’s baseball movie Moneyball and noting that Clint was playing Clint for Rob Lorenz even more than he played himself for . . . himself. “Eastwood plays a reminder of an older way of doing things, a professional whose likes the world won’t see again once he’s gone. The role isn’t much of a stretch,” wrote Keith Phipps online for the A.V. Club. The $12 million opening couldn’t be sustained, and it maxed out at $35.7 million.

In a funny way, it’s a film to force Clint-haters to sit through so they can understand the subtle control and impact he brings as a director. It’s not a bad film, but it has no salient qualities to recommend it. Clint’s Gus Lobel is cut from the same cloth as Walt Kowalski, but he’s more comical (and not remotely as racist), and his situation never feels particularly imperiled or even dark. The film is more grumpy than grizzled, more breezy than vulnerable. Yes, it’s easy fun watching Clint spar with his fellow codger scouts and, especially, with Amy Adams, playing his daughter. But it’s like a temporary tattoo—faded by morning—that mainly serves to remind the viewer that Clint and his Malpaso crew are capable of deeper and sharper work when they’re at their best.

In early August, Clint was in Sun Valley and attended a fundraiser for Mitt Romney, who had secured the Republican presidential nomination and was planning his convention and fall campaign. Clint had met Romney a decade prior, when he was making Mystic River in Boston and Romney was engaged in a successful campaign to become governor of Massachusetts. “I saw a lot of him,” Clint remembered, “and you have to admit: He looks like a president. I mean, if you were casting a movie where you needed someone to play president, you’d definitely pick him.”* Now this central casting version of a president was a candidate for the Oval Office, and Clint offered his endorsement. A couple of weeks later, when Romney asked him for a favor, Clint agreed: He would go to Tampa at the end of the month to address the Republican National Convention in support of Romney.

Giddy with their get, the campaign and convention organizers didn’t tell anyone that he’d be speaking. They planned for Clint to take the stage for five minutes on prime-time TV on the convention’s closing night, immediately before Romney’s formal acceptance speech. One of the most iconic figures in American culture throwing his support behind their guy on the cusp of his big moment: What could go wrong?

Well. As Clint put it, “I was a mayor, and they’re probably thinking I know how to give a speech. But even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.” Not that the Romney folks knew that; according to Clint, nobody ever asked him or briefed him about his plans.

On Thursday, August 30, the day of his speech, he boarded a private jet in San Jose and flew to Florida—and he still didn’t have a text or even a road map for his comments. And the Romney camp still hadn’t debriefed him. “They vet most of the people,” he said, “but I told them, ‘You can’t do that with me, because I don’t know what I’m going to say.’”

In Tampa, he went to his hotel and meditated, then dressed in a business suit and headed to the convention, arriving about twenty minutes before his time slot. He still didn’t have a speech or even notes, and he hadn’t been through any briefing or rehearsal, but he had decided to highlight three points in his impromptu remarks: (1) not everyone in Hollywood is a liberal; (2) Barack Obama hadn’t kept his campaign promises; and (3) it’s the right of citizens to fire politicians who aren’t getting the job done. He thought an off-the-cuff approach suited the role he’d be serving. “It was supposed to be a contrast with all the scripted speeches,” he said, “because I’m Joe Citizen. I’m a moviemaker, but I have the same feelings as the average guy out there.”

En route to the stage, he noticed a chair backstage and asked a stagehand to put it onstage next to the podium. He had an idea . . .

On the big screen in the arena, a documentary about the life, values, achievements, candidacy, and worthiness of Mitt Romney played. Then the screen went dark, the familiar theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly filled the air, a massive image of Josey Wales appeared behind the stage, and the announcer spoke Clint’s name. The place erupted in a standing ovation. He approached the mic and responded with thanks and exhorted the crowd, “Save a little for Mitt.”

“I know what you’re all thinking,” he said. “ ‘What’s a movie tradesman doing here? You know they’re all left-wingers out there; left of Lenin.’” He said that there were plenty of conservatives and moderates—Democratic and Republican—in Hollywood, but “they don’t go around hotdoggin’ it.” (He mentioned Jon Voight, the noted conservative actor who was also at the convention.)

And then he pointed to the empty chair: “So, I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here, and I was just gonna ask him a couple of questions.” He said that he recalled watching Obama’s 2008 victory celebration and thinking, “This is great. Everybody was crying. Oprah was crying. I was even crying. And finally . . . um . . . I haven’t cried that much since . . . I found out that there’s 23 million unemployed people in this country.”

That was the tenor going forward: a rhythm of starts and stops, pauses, “ums” and “uhs,” half-sentences. It didn’t not make sense: His intent was always clear. But it was shaggy and choppy and meandering, hardly the sort of thing you expect to see at a micromanaged event like a modern political convention, and certainly not on its biggest night. It was just . . . weird.

As if hearkening back to one of his acting classes at Universal, he began to speak to the chair, pretending that Barack Obama was sitting in it. He turned and asked it a long, vaguely sarcastic question about broken campaign promises; then he paused, as if listening.

“Whattaya mean, ‘Shut up’?” he asked the chair, to laughs.

He went on to praise the chair for opposing the war in Iraq. Then, again as if the chair spoke, he said, “I’m not gonna shut up: It’s my turn.”

He stammered a bit more and then, again, to the chair: “What? What do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that. He can’t do that to himself. You’re absolutely crazy. You’re getting as bad as Biden.”

By now he was a couple of minutes past the time limit he’d been allotted, and he hadn’t yet made the point of endorsing Romney. It was morphing from a surprise to an absurdity. Unseen by the TV cameras but visible to the podium, a red light flashed, intending to tell him that time was up, but Clint either ignored it or didn’t see it or, most likely, hadn’t been told what it meant.

He continued, creating an astounding spectacle: the Republican National Convention held captive by an eighty-two-year-old movie star going off on strange tangents, losing himself in half-thoughts, and, surreally, talking to a piece of furniture. It was remarkable television, but it was catastrophic political theater.

At last, he got to the task: “Ladies and gentlemen . . . you, we . . . we own this country. . . . Politicians are employees of ours. . . . And when somebody does not do the job, we’ve gotta let ’em go.”

This time, a real standing ovation, with a chant of “Let him go!” starting up spontaneously.

When he settled the crowd, a woman shouted very clearly, “Clint: Make my day!” and he shot a stern look toward the direction of her voice and replied, “I don’t say that word anymore.” Then he rolled with it: “Well, maybe one last time.” He winked, sensing an ending.

“Okay. You want a ‘Make my day.’ I’ll start it, you finish it. ‘Go ahead . . .’” Then he raised his hands like a conductor as the crowd chanted, “Make! My! Day!”

Finally, having used eleven and a half of a scheduled five minutes and saying next to nothing about the candidate he was there to support, he thanked the audience, bowed, and left to a big ovation. Cameras showed vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan and his wife, Janna, applauding and smiling broadly, and Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, with a frozen grimace. (As one TV critic put it, “If you thought everyone in the convention center was laughing while Eastwood spoke, then you didn’t see the look on Ann Romney’s face.”)

And, dear God, the aftermath. Across the political spectrum, instant and overnight reactions to Clint’s appearance overshadowed anything Mitt Romney went on to say or do that night. Cable news pundits sat puzzled, conservatives making the (weak) case that the speech was fresh and novel and, if nothing else, memorable, liberals mocking it as incoherent and a sign of the Romney campaign’s ineptitude. There were even voices on the right—fueled, in part, by memories of the Chrysler ad—suggesting that Clint was a liberal sailing under a false flag and that he had deliberately sabotaged Romney’s big night with an incoherent stunt.

On social media, people shared pictures of themselves talking to empty chairs with the hashtag #Eastwooding. Barack Obama’s official Twitter account posted an image of him sitting in a big leather chair in the White House with the caption “This seat’s taken.” And barely forty-eight hours after the speech, Saturday Night Live ran a parody ad for “Eastwood and Chair,” a traveling show (“No script! No predetermined theaters!”) in which Clint (played by Bill Hader, who’d also spoofed the Chrysler ad) parleyed with chairs representing various Democratic leaders.

Clint’s unscripted appearance was widely seen as a gamble that didn’t pay off. Various Romney aides told the media that they weren’t responsible for the thing. “You don’t edit Clint Eastwood,” one said about not vetting the speech in advance. Asked about the chair business, another said, “The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it.” And yet another aide, speaking a truth that perhaps should have informed the initial decision to let him speak in such a visible and potentially sensitive slot: “Judging an American icon like Clint Eastwood through a typical political lens doesn’t work.”

Clint claimed to have no idea what a ruckus he’d caused. He said he left the stage, was congratulated by everyone, Romney included, and went back to his hotel to watch the candidate’s acceptance speech. In the morning, he grabbed the newspapers before flying back to California and he got the first glimpse of the commotion around his appearance. It became clear that he would have to conduct an interview to explain himself, so he approached a trusted source in which to make his feelings known: the Carmel Pine Cone.

Sitting with its editor, he declared flatly, “President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. Romney and Ryan would do a much better job of running the country.” He explained the process by which he was asked to participate in the convention and what his thoughts were as he spoke. His remarks circulated for a news cycle or two, and then it all vanished into legend.

Or, rather, it almost vanished. In October, Clint narrated a thirty-second commercial supporting Romney and airing in seven key swing states. This time, as in the Chrysler ad, he worked strictly from a script. That same month, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner—an annual white-tie fundraiser and a night of political comedy, often featuring the two nominees for president—Barack Obama was called to the podium and settled the standing ovation he received by declaring, “Everyone please take your seats; otherwise Clint Eastwood will yell at them.” (Big laugh.)

And in his own last words on the matter, Clint told the E! network’s Extra show, “If somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re going to have to take what they get.”

Thirty-One

If you visited the Malpaso offices at Warner Bros. at around this time, you might be fooled into thinking he’d become a doddering old man. Amid the posters for his movies and framed awards and piles of scripts, he’d often be taking care of the squirrels that lived on the lot and came to his bungalow to help themselves to peanuts he kept in a sack on a bookcase. “That one there is probably the great-great-great-great-grandson of the first one I found here,” he told a visitor. “Still a little shy. He’ll be inside and on the desk in another month. Then they’ll overfeed him, and his cholesterol will go through the roof.”

But he was still working at a pace that would be enviable in a man half his age. “I just keep grinding them out, like a machinist,” he joked. But, more seriously, he explained, “It’s like being a musician. If you play every day, your embouchure is strong. If you play once every two years, you have to build up all over again.” And asked who he was making all these movies for, he stared into his interlocutor’s eyes and said, “You’re looking at ’im.”

And so it was back to work. Of all the scripts that Clint had ever chosen to do, likely for him or not, it’s possible that the one that he was most insistent on having rewritten was a musical about the early career of New Jersey pop stars Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Jersey Boys had been a hit on Broadway (and, later, the West End of London) from the day it opened in 2005. Producer Graham King’s GK Films, which had a home at Warner Bros. (where, among other things, it had produced Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed), had acquired the screen rights and was developing it with director Jon Favreau. In early 2013, the project fell apart, and King offered the script to Steven Spielberg and then (this was getting to be a thing) to Clint.

Clint knew the Four Seasons, but he didn’t know their story, so he went to Las Vegas to see a road production of the show and agreed to pursue the project. But he didn’t like the script that King and Favreau had worked up. They had, he felt, gone to such lengths to differentiate their film from the stage show that they had drowned its spark. As he put it later, “Only in Hollywood do they take a play that’s run for nine years on Broadway, six years in London, and five years in San Francisco, then go out and hire another writer.” He asked the writers of the stage show, Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, to work up a screenplay, slightly intensifying the drama of the singers’ connection to the New Jersey crime underworld but otherwise retaining the spine and feel of their original work.

There were voices at the studio suggesting that Clint cast a net for known screen actors to play the singers, but there were two experienced stage casts already in place—Broadway and London actors who’d performed the material hundreds of times. John Lloyd Young, who originated the role of Valli in the Broadway production, signed on for the film, and he noted that Clint’s changes to the stage script might reveal why he was drawn to the material. “Clint definitely understands melancholy,” he said. “That sort of darkness, which is authentic to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ beginnings, is much more on display in this film than it is in that fast-paced treadmill of a slick Broadway show.” Christopher Walken would play a gangster whose involvement with the group brought on much of that darkness, and the showy but small role of Joe Pesci—that is, actor Joe Pesci, who knew Valli and company when they were all kids running around the same New Jersey neighborhood—went to Joey Russo. The film shot mostly on soundstages at Warner Bros. from August through October 2013, with the goal of a summer release the following year.

(Quick aside: He had a brush with death—not his own—while finishing work on the film. At a social event during the 2014 Pebble Beach Pro-Am golf event, he noticed a tournament official choking on something he’d eaten. The eighty-three-year-old Clint rushed over, gripped the two-hundred-pound-plus man from behind, and performed the Heimlich maneuver on him, lifting and squeezing him three times before dislodging the hunk of cheese that had gone down the fellow’s throat the wrong way. “Clint saved my life,” the amazed and grateful man told reporters.)

If Jersey Boys was a film you couldn’t imagine Clint making, his next project was one for which it would be hard to think of a director more apt. January 2012 had seen the publication of the memoir of Chris Kyle, a thirty-seven-year-old Texas deacon’s son who grew up among cattle and horses and became a navy SEAL marksman and the most proficient sniper in American military history, with more than 150 officially confirmed battlefield kills during four tours of duty in Iraq between 2003 and 2008. It was an instant and immense bestseller, and by May film rights to it had been acquired by Warner Bros. for Bradley Cooper, who wanted to produce and star in it, with David O. Russell, who’d directed Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, in talks to direct (Russell had also made 1999’s Three Kings about the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s).

Actor/screenwriter Jason Hall was hired to adapt a screenplay from the book, and he completed his work on February 1, 2013. On that same day, Kyle was murdered at a Texas shooting range by a Marine Corps veteran whom he’d been mentoring through bouts of post-traumatic shock. Kyle’s death put a new light on the project. Warner Bros. brought the film to Steven Spielberg, who worked on the script, making it bigger and more intricate, adding weight to the story of an elite enemy sniper against whom Kyle played a game of life and death. Spielberg’s concept ran up against Warner Bros.’ projected budget, however, and, once again, somebody thought of Clint for a film on which Spielberg was taking a pass. In the summer of 2013, two weeks after Spielberg dropped out, the studio announced that Clint would direct the film.

Actually, he had one important qualification before he agreed to start. He would make the film only if he had the blessing of Kyle’s widow, Taya, and his parents. He and Cooper visited the family home near Dallas and spoke about their intentions. Kyle himself had approved of Cooper, although, Cooper said, Kyle said he thought Cooper was too attractive to play him, a situation that he offered to fix with a punch-up. Clint, though, was a newcomer, and he approached politely, learning about the family’s religious convictions and Kyle’s boyhood and modestly asking for permission to put his feet up on the coffee table as they spoke. As Clint understood it, the film should be as much about life in that house as it would be about the action in Iraq. “A guy going off for four tours and leaving his family has to be tremendously difficult,” he said. “I wanted to show that and not just the shoot-’em-up.” The Kyles agreed that Clint and Cooper were the people to tell the story, and the two went off to make their movie. (Cooper went off first, to bulk up for the role, adding something like forty pounds of muscle and meat to his Hollywood pretty-boy frame with protein shakes and weightlifting.)

American Sniper was filmed from late March through mid-June, mostly in Southern California, with some footage shot in Morocco (a good amount of the film’s Iraq War footage was captured on a set at a movie ranch near Santa Clarita, about twenty-five miles north of the Warner Bros. lot). British actress Sienna Miller was selected to play Taya, but much of the rest of the cast consisted of younger, relatively unknown actors.* Miller was yet another actor struck by Clint’s pace. “On our first day,” she recalled, “after we’d shot an emotional scene, I went up to him. ‘I was just thinking, maybe . . .’ and he was like, ‘Have a great weekend.’ And as he was walking away, he said, ‘You cast the right people. . . .’” She only found a groove—and some freedom—after a moment of crisis: “I got into a bit of a panic. . . . And he came up and was, like, ‘You just say it,’ which is the truth about acting.”

Clint committed to getting American Sniper into theaters before the end of the year. One of the exigencies he employed was using plastic dolls rather than living babies to play the Kyles’ children in several scenes, a choice that may have made sense from a scheduling standpoint but would look absurd on the big screen and eventually occasion merciless mockery. A finer touch was a piece of music used for the scene of Kyle’s funeral, a mournful tune that Clint had first heard some five decades prior when he was making The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for which it had originally been composed. It was, as he described it, “an old Ennio Morricone piece that Sergio Leone played for me on the plains of Spain 50 years ago. . . . It starts out with ‘Taps’ and then goes into a beautiful chorus. And I thought that would be a perfect memory for Chris Kyle.”

Despite the popularity of the stage musical, Jersey Boys bombed with critics and with audiences. In USA Today, Claudia Puig wrote, “What was blandly charming onstage—characters addressing the audience, ultra-broad jokes and showbiz patter—feels contrived, cheesy and clichéd on-screen.” And in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane said, “the sad fact is that Jersey Boys is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished.” Even though Clint helped promote it by appearing at the 2014 Tony Awards to present the Best Director prizes (his only appearance at that venerable event), the picture opened wide but soft, finishing its theatrical run with $47 million and adding only $18 million more overseas.

It’s possible to admire the fact of Jersey Boys in spite of Jersey Boys. There’s a Rocky-meets–Walk the Line quality to it that you can’t help but root for, and at least at the outset it whisks you along with spirit and craft and, especially, music. But by the time it ends, more than two hours later, it’s been a struggle, far more manipulative than moving. The genre of the jukebox biography doesn’t feel as vital on film as onstage, and even with a script that adds some weight to the story’s heartache and drama, the movie never gets close to its characters, let alone inside them. Even compared to J. Edgar and Invictus, it feels artificial and strained. It could be simply that Clint is the wrong shepherd for this material, or it could be that he simply failed to translate the energy and emotions of live performance into the more cerebral and technological medium of the movies.

For all the serious attention his work had been attracting since as far back as Bronco Billy, nothing he ever did drew as much notice as American Sniper upon its late 2014 release. Most reviews were positive. Richard Corliss of Time described the combat scenes as “terse, tense panoramas with little cinematic editorializing, as if [Clint] were an old Greek or Hebrew God who is never surprised at man’s ability to kill his fellow men, or to find reasons to do so.” In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “American Sniper is at its best when it deals with the assembly-line-of-death relentlessness of combat for Kyle, how it simultaneously consumes him and wears him down, and how, to his wife’s distress, it turns the civilian life he returns to between tours of duty into the aberration, not the norm.” And in The New Yorker—once home, of course, to Pauline Kael—David Denby wrote, “Eastwood has become tauntingly tough-minded: ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ he seems to be saying.” Even the less-than-admiring reviews could be complimentary. In the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips said, “The film is rarely dull. . . . But Eastwood honors his subject without really getting under his skin.” And Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty wrote, “A month after seeing it, you might still be wrestling with whether it’s powerful, profound, or propaganda.”

It occasioned a great number of think pieces and feature stories about Kyle, many of which took the opportunity to question the veracity of parts of his memoir that were not depicted in the film. Editorials and feature stories in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Salon, and other outlets criticized the depiction of Iraqis and the relative weight given to American lives versus Iraqi lives. Clint and Cooper explained in interviews that they were most interested in demonstrating the impact of warfare on veterans (several wounded vets appeared as themselves) and the cost of taking a life on the man who does it. And while it didn’t feel like a particularly nuanced film, the wrinkles in it were sufficiently deep to attract the most unlikely of fellow admirers: Both Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin had kind words to say about it.

The picture was an immense hit. Warner Bros. released it gingerly at first, opening it on four screens, then waiting until mid-January to expand, overnight, to over thirty-five hundred screens, when it absolutely took off. It claimed the number one slot with $89 million, held that spot for two more weeks, stayed in the box office top ten until the end of February, and held on in the top twenty until May, eventually earning $350 million on domestic screens, more than double Clint’s previous all-time hit, Gran Torino, and more than five times the biggest gross of any Dirty Harry movie. (It made an additional $197 million internationally—massive, massive business.)

American Sniper is a shape-shifter of a movie, sometimes lyrical and domestic, sometimes violent and overheated, sometimes jingoistic, sometimes dubious about the means and even the ends of American military policy, sometimes excruciatingly focused on detail, sometimes so casual with reality as to seem a parody of itself. Kyle starts off fresh-faced and big-eyed and -hearted, and he ends up twitchy and edgy and locked down, and the change is rendered by Cooper with delicacy, even beneath the extra flesh and muscle he’s wearing for the role. It’s a performance more nuanced than one might expect, and it justly resulted in his third Oscar nomination in as many years.* Other actors might have played Kyle with greater emotional clout, but Cooper achieves the difficult task of disappearing into someone who would be ordinary except for the circumstances he faces, which bring out his most exceptional qualities. (This is where American Sniper overlaps with one of the most formative films of Clint’s life, namely his father’s favorite movie, Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York, about a young man who wants to avoid serving in World War I on religious grounds but whose sharpshooting skills win him a Medal of Honor.)

The battle sequences are tense and frightening, the focus not so much on the action and objectives as on the psychological toll of the danger Kyle and his comrades face and of the death and damage they inflict. The film opens with a horrific incident in which Kyle must decide whether or not to shoot a woman and a boy who seem intent on assaulting an American military convoy with a grenade; we leave him on the verge of a fateful decision. Later, we come back to the incident—and Kyle does shoot them both. He does his job—the sine qua non of the Clint Eastwood movie hero—and is congratulated for it, but it has cost him a piece of his soul, and he will continue to pay a similar price as the body count associated with his sharpshooting rises. We see it in his eyes, his twitches, and in his near catatonia when he returns home after each tour of combat duty. And Clint and Cooper demonstrate respect for his sacrifice by underplaying but never flinching from it. In comparison to the more heated vision of a similar psychology in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it’s almost subliminal.

But the film has some serious failings as well. While it depicts Kyle’s hurt with cool understatement, it repeatedly makes beasts of the Iraqis—fighters and civilians—and doesn’t blink about calling them “savages” and depicting their deaths as just deserts again and again. It creates fictitious bogeymen in characters known as “The Butcher” and “Mustafa” who are loosely based, perhaps, on real enemy combatants but given flesh-and-blood credence here. It’s hard to reconcile the director of such an angry and one-sided vision of the Iraq War with the one who, just a few years prior, recognized and honored the humanity of the Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima or the one who seemed to acknowledge and try to make amends for the hateful attitudes of men of his generation in Gran Torino.

And the film never convincingly balances Kyle’s home life with his life as a warrior. Part of that is down to Clint’s impatience; the use of plastic babies, as well as Miller’s deeply unconvincing pregnant belly, is forgivable to some degree. But it also indicates a lesser interest in the domestic than the martial, in which few if any corners seem to have been cut. Yes, the film stands with others—Unforgiven, A Perfect World, Mystic River, Gran Torino—in detailing the extreme cost of violence on those who commit it. But its willingness to be hasty about Kyle’s time at home at the expense of being painstaking about his time at war makes it seem bloodthirsty. The domestic material feels, relatively, like an afterthought. Clearly somebody cared deeply about getting the battles right; would that they’d cared equally about the struggle at home.

Flaws and all, American Sniper proved a contender when awards season dawned. It scored six Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing (it won the Sound Editing prize). Clint was named Best Director by the National Board of Review and was nominated by the Directors Guild for that same award. He was in his mideighties, and he had made an impact that a filmmaker a third of his age would envy.

In the spring of 2015, in the glow of American Sniper’s half-billion-plus international box office, Clint could have told Warner Bros. he was interested in anything and the studio would have listened. What he was interested in was a script called Patriots Day about the Boston marathon bombing and the subsequent manhunt, but that project eluded him,* as did another script, “The Ballad of Richard Jewell,” the story of the security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics who noticed a suspicious backpack at a crowded event and cleared the area just before a bomb exploded, only to become the FBI’s chief suspect in the crime.

In the meantime, producer Frank Marshall, who’d had a hand in Hereafter, was shopping a book he’d owned the rights to since it was in galleys, Highest Duty, the memoir of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who famously landed a crippled commercial airliner on the Hudson River in January 2009, saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew members. Marshall and Warner Bros. had a script by Todd Komarnicki and were in talks with Tom Hanks for the role of Sully. Would Clint be interested in directing?

There was a joke among movie fans, thinking of Apollo 13, Cast Away, The Terminal, and Captain Phillips, that one should never travel with Tom Hanks, as so many of his roles involved getting into trouble while flying or sailing. There may have been some truth to that, but Clint was likely the only working director in Hollywood who had survived the forced water landing of an airplane, albeit more than sixty years earlier. Even more to the point, he was fascinated by real-life stories of people drawn into extraordinary circumstances and doing the jobs they’d trained for so well that they were deemed heroes by the world.

Clint admitted that he didn’t initially think that there was much more to the story than an admirably heroic feat: no drama, in other words. But Komarnicki juggled the events of the fateful day with the aftermath, in which aviation authorities investigated the incident and suspected at first blush that Sully might have been able to reach a nearby airport. That made it a perfect Venn diagram of two of Clint’s favorite themes: the heroism of competency and the mistrust of authority. In June, he decided to do it. He and Hanks, a couple of Oakland’s most famous movie-world sons, would be working together.

The film would shoot in New York, in studios and locations in and around Atlanta, and at Warner Bros. and Universal studios where the scenes involving the airplane in the water were staged (later to be blended digitally with the real-life backgrounds of New York and the river). Aaron Eckhart, a licensed pilot in real life, was cast as Sully’s copilot, First Officer Jeffrey Skiles; Laura Linney, marking her third movie with Clint, was to play Sully’s wife; and several of the ferry captains, NYPD scuba men, and other first responders who helped rescue the passengers of the ditched jet played themselves. The film would be made with brand-new IMAX cameras, making it the largest-format movie on which Clint had ever worked, and it was also the shortest feature he’d ever directed, at approximately ninety minutes. Filming took place between September and November of 2015, with an aim toward an autumn release the following year.

On arrival, Sully impressed critics who, like Clint, believed they would find neither drama nor engagement. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, “That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends. But Mr. Eastwood is also very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension.” The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday said that “Sully is a classy, enormously satisfying ode to simple competence. To paraphrase the title character, it’s just a movie doing its job. And amen to that.” Warner Bros.’ prayers were answered at the box office: It opened on more than thirty-five hundred screens at number one, with $35 million, stayed in the top ten for more than a month, and grossed $125 million altogether, with another $113 million coming from overseas.

Sully is sneaky, a film that shouldn’t have any impact and that manages to be absorbing and deeply moving because it is spry, sleek, and low-key. The story is famous and familiar, the ginned-up plot can’t make us feel that there are any stakes in play, and the happy ending comes at the beginning. And yet the film is compelling as if through sleight of hand, part of which is to do with its pace, part with its reluctance to lionize its protagonist, part with Hanks’s near-disappearance into his role, and partly with the reality that the feat it celebrates is just so damn amazing and unlikely.

The script dances in time between the water landing (not “crash”) of US Airways Flight 1549 and the aftermath, in which Sully and Skiles are subject to a routine but serious inquiry by the National Transportation Safety Board. Some members of the board, along with the manufacturers of the plane, believe that Sully could have returned to LaGuardia Airport or reached another airport safely. Sully and Skiles insist that they didn’t have enough momentum to complete a turn and landing. As the inquest grinds on, a media circus roars around Sully and his family.

Nothing is gimmicky or forced about the film. Taking its cue from the deeply humble protagonist, it’s a feet-on-the-ground, just-the-facts narrative, even with its back-and-forth time structure and Sully’s post-flight nightmares. You can feel that Hanks/Sully is piloting the film, it’s so cool and calm and straightforward. Even the water landing itself, built out of seamlessly convincing special effects, is underplayed, with no music or heroic stagings or moments when we feel we’re being swayed emotionally. (In this, it compares notably to Paul Greengrass’s horrifying United 93, a fine film about the plane that failed to hit its intended target on 9/11, in which we’re jolted repeatedly into anxiety and terror—but, then, none of those people survived.)

But here’s the thing: By backing away, Clint and Hanks make room for their film to be exceedingly emotional. The horror of watching the plane fail and hit water; the panic among the passengers; the rapid response of the rescuers; and the slow realization that every single one of the 155 souls aboard the plane survived: These feelings and moments build in a series of quiet crescendos. It’s something of a theme park ride or haunted house—we know it will all turn out well—but nevertheless we’re swept up in it. Of all of the nonfictional tales Clint gravitated toward in this phase of his career, it’s the most persuasive.

In July 2016, Dina Ruiz and Scott Fisher were married in Santa Barbara, which made for a happy ending. But there was no such joy for Clint and Scott’s ex, Erica. Their relationship had fueled tabloid headlines and filled the pockets of paparazzi for a while, with reports emerging that Clint gave her a new Mercedes, allowed her to help herself to Dina’s clothes from the Bel-Air house, and even bought her a house of her own, a two-bedroom ranch in Sherman Oaks for which somebody paid $715,000 in March 2014. But by the time that his divorce from Dina was final, Clint had moved on. He was seen around Carmel and Los Angeles with fifty-something Christina Sandera, whom he met when she was working as a hostess at the Mission Ranch restaurant. Sandera had been in a brief and stormy marriage with the owner of a popular Monterey-area bakery who twice called police on her when, he claimed, she assaulted him. Her life had leveled out by the time she and Clint met and began dating. Before long, she had met several of Clint’s children and moved into his Carmel home. In March 2015, she joined him on the red carpet at the Academy Awards, and she would attend similar events with him throughout the coming decade, appearing in photos at premieres of his films alongside many of his kids and grandkids and their significant others and even Maggie.

The roll he was on as a filmmaker was kind of remarkable: Any Hollywood director would be radiant with back-to-back worldwide hits; to do it in one’s mideighties was crazy. He could have chosen anything to do next, and he was considering the story of Jessica Buchanan, an American teacher kidnapped by land pirates in Somalia in 2011 and rescued after three months by navy SEALs in a daring raid. Instead, he landed on yet another story of ordinary people performing real-life heroics. As he had known about Sully’s water landing from press accounts, he was also familiar with the story of three young American men who subdued a would-be terrorist on a train going from Amsterdam to Paris in August 2015. The trio—Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Spencer Stone—had grown up together in Sacramento and remained friends even after moving on with their lives, the latter two to active duty in the Oregon National Guard and the U.S. Air Force, respectively. After their deed, which saved scores of lives, they and a British passenger who’d helped them disarm and confine the terrorist were awarded the Legion of Honor by French president François Hollande, and the three young men collaborated with a journalist on a book about their lives and the episode that put them in the headlines: The 15:17 to Paris, named for the high-speed train on which the events occurred.

Here’s where fate starts to step in: On the set of Sully, Dorothy Blyskal, a thirty-two-year-old production assistant, who later said that she had fetched a lot of organic tomato soup for the film’s director, approached a couple of the producers with a spec script she’d written about her cousin, a New York firefighter who died on 9/11. The producers liked the writing but not the subject. They asked her to take a crack at adapting a book to which they’d acquired the rights: The 15:17 to Paris. She did, they approved, and they submitted it to Malpaso. Clint happened to have met the three heroes, backstage at Spike TV’s “Guys Choice Awards” in June of 2015 (he had become fond of the event, appearing several times, and that particular year was on hand to present an award to Dwayne Johnson, during which time he ad-libbed a tasteless joke about Caitlyn Jenner that was cut from the broadcast); he demonstrated amusement when the trio pitched him on the idea of making a movie about them. “You never know,” he’d joked. He liked the idea of heroic acts performed by regular guys doing something extraordinary. Sully wasn’t a superhero, but he was trained and expected to get the plane safely back to earth; these guys just happened to be on the spot when something happened, and they performed heroically. Clint wondered, “What would most people do—especially me? You’d hide under the seat. What makes a person just jump up and run at somebody who has a very reliable weapon pointed at them?” He liked the idea of exploring that question, and he signed on.

Filming was set for July through September 2017, in Italy, France, and Holland, plus some studio and location work in and around Atlanta. (Before he began, he attended the Cannes Film Festival for a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening of Unforgiven and an onstage chat with his longtime admirer Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times.) The train sequence would be shot over five days, with the crew and actors riding back and forth between Paris and Amsterdam. In June, three young actors were announced in the trade papers for the leads. But Clint had been spending time with the real-life Sadler, Skarlatos, and Stone, and a light went off in his head. “I got the crazy idea maybe these guys should play themselves,” he said. “They’re genuinely charismatic. I figured I’d roll the dice, what the hell? What can they do to me at this stage?” Just three weeks before shooting began, he called them in to Warner Bros. to reenact events for him, just so he could get a sense of how to shoot things, he said, and he filmed them in action. Then, out of the blue, he offered them the chance to play themselves in the movie.

Ironically, given what they’d done in real life, the idea of being in a movie scared them, but they couldn’t say no to Clint Eastwood. As a group, they told him that they wanted to take acting lessons, but he told them absolutely not to: “ ‘You don’t want to do that, because then you’ll look like you’re acting.’ . . . I told them after they were done shooting this movie, they could take acting lessons. It’ll probably screw them up for a while, but they’ll be all right.” (He joked that he’d worked with so many nonpros at this point that “I’ve become an anti-anxiety specialist.”) They would be asked not just to relive their experience in foiling a terrorist but to act—to play themselves as young men with jobs, families, and military training. But they wouldn’t be given time to sit and stew about the idea: As ever, production was speedy, starting in mid-July and wrapping in early September.

Very few critics seemed willing to go along with Clint’s experimental approach to The 15:17 to Paris. A. O. Scott of the New York Times was one, writing: “Mr. Eastwood . . . practices an economy here that makes some of his earlier movies look positively baroque. He almost seems to be testing the limits of minimalism, seeing how much artifice he can strip away and still achieve some kind of dramatic impact.” And Stephanie Zacharek at Time said that “the very averageness of these conscientious, gutsy guys is precisely the point.” But most critics didn’t buy it. In the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips said, “It’s the last thing he wanted, I’m sure, but Eastwood’s latest ends up feeling like a stunt.” It wasn’t a trick that audiences were interested in watching. Absent stars of any wattage, the film grossed only $36 million, adding $19 million overseas.

If The 15:17 to Paris had shown up at, say, Sundance, and wasn’t made by Clint and Warner Bros., it might have been admired as an experiment in real-life casting and spare storytelling. The events of the fateful day are depicted with otherworldly bluntness, in real time, without a musical score, in the cramped quarters of a moving train. It’s like an avant-garde take on a news event. Unfortunately, there’s an ordinary and even dull film preceding that sensational incident, a melodrama about the hopes, successes, and failures of three characters who aren’t especially interesting or, alas, good actors. There is a certain charm, in theory, in seeing these young men reliving various days of their lives as if playing make-believe (it had worked in, for instance, biopics about Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Audie Murphy, and Howard Stern). But it’s better imagined than experienced. Still, the action of the climax is plausible and gripping, and there’s something commendable, if not recommendable, about the whole thing.

Thirty-Two

In December 2018, newspapers carried reports of the death, at age seventy-four, of Sondra Locke, who had passed from cardiac arrest and a recurrence of her cancer the previous month. In the years after her acrimonious lawsuits against Clint and Warner Bros., she had directed two small films and acted in three others. She had bought a home of her own in the hills above Hollywood and had a relationship with a man some two decades her junior. In 1997, freed from the terms of her initial settlement with Clint, she had published a memoir, most of which involved her life with and struggles against Clint, as indicated by the title that she and her publishers, William Morrow, gave it: The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly. She always believed that Clint did everything he could to discourage media outlets from giving time and space to her and the book, but it made it into the world.

When news of her passing reached the media, a hurtful—and factually incorrect—headline appeared in the online edition of the Hollywood Reporter referring to her as Clint’s “embittered” “ex-wife.” A brief social media storm ensued, forcing the site to change the story and headline. Among those protesting on Twitter was Frances Fisher, who wrote “#RestInParadise dear longtime friend #SondraLocke. #AcademyAward nominated actress, skilled director (I did a scene for her in #TradingFavors), and I #BelieveHer. And Sondra was not embittered. She won!” Just a few weeks later, though, during the Oscar ceremony’s traditional tribute to members of the filmmaking community who had died the previous year, she was omitted. It could sometimes seem that she was precisely right in believing that all Hollywood trembled in fear of riling Clint.

Clint hadn’t appeared in a movie since Trouble with the Curve, and he hadn’t directed himself since Gran Torino, and what were the odds, anyway, that there would be a script out in the world that would beckon him back onto the screen? Hollywood had next to no use for an actor in his eighties, no matter how legendary, fit, or active. A guy like that might as well be invisible.

Which was rather the whole point of the next subject that drew his attention. In 2011, federal drug authorities had closed in on a prolific drug courier, a mule, who had been working with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel for a decade, transporting perhaps tens of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the United States and returning to Mexico with perhaps tens of millions in cash. The shadowy figure regularly eluded detection and roadblocks, but the authorities zeroed in on the vehicle they believed their suspect was using, planning to capture it in what would look like a routine traffic stop but was actually a multi-agency sting. When a state trooper pulled the battered pickup truck over and the suspect stepped out, everyone involved was amazed to find that a grizzled World War II veteran had been at the wheel—and 104 kilos of cocaine were in duffel bags in his truckbed.

Leo Sharp, the eighty-seven-year-old man who was arrested that day, was a longtime and admired horticulturalist from Indiana whose business had collapsed, taking his life savings with it. He’d been enticed into drug running by Mexican laborers working on his farm, and he made peace with the profession, driving deliberately and slowly back and forth between the Great Lakes and Mexico for years without detection. He had made millions during his tenure as the cartel’s most successful mule, and he had hidden it by living as he drove: slowly, carefully, never in such a way as to draw attention. In 2014, he was sentenced, at age ninety, to three years in federal prison.

That year, a New York Times Magazine article by Sam Dolnick detailed Sharp’s story and that of the investigation that brought him down. Screen rights were purchased by an independent production company, Imperative Entertainment, with Ruben Fleischer, best known as the director of Zombieland, attached to direct. He in turn brought on Nick Schenk to adapt the article into a script. Schenk was on a roll, having just seen the premiere of The Judge, his first feature to reach the screen since Gran Torino. His script had geezer humor, tension around the cartel and the investigation, and a subplot about Sharp’s estrangement from his family. The project languished until late 2017, when it came across Clint’s desk and he immediately recognized it as something he could both direct and star in. As soon as he said he was interested, Warner Bros. said yes, and he was off.

Dianne Wiest was cast as his ex-wife, old Clint hands Bradley Cooper and Laurence Fishburne as federal investigators, and Andy Garcia and Clifton Collins Jr. as Sinaloa cartel bosses. For the role of his daughter, who was especially embittered with him, Clint had a daring idea. Tim Moore, who’d been working on Malpaso films as far back as Mystic River and stepped up to full producer credit with Sully and The 15:17 to Paris, made a phone call to another actor who’d appeared in Clint’s movies previously but had since retired from performing: Alison Eastwood. “He [said], ‘You know, your dad wants you to do this film,’” she remembered. “I almost threw up. [My husband] was like, ‘Is everything OK? Did somebody die?’” When she told him what had happened, he insisted, “If you don’t do this, you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.” She agreed to play the role, and then marveled watching her dad at work: “He’s a machine,” she said. “I think he has a robot chip in the back of his head. He’s not human.” Alison had directed two films of her own by this point, 2007’s Rails & Ties and 2017’s Battlecreek, and, she said, “the last one almost killed me. He just seems to make it look so easy, which is very inspiring, but it’s also like, ‘Why can’t it be as easy for me?’”

The film shot between June and August of 2018 in Georgia and New Mexico. Clint broke in a new cinematographer, Yves Bélanger, to replace Tom Stern, who was cutting back his workload at the relatively (to Clint, anyhow) young age of seventy-two. And he got the great Cuban jazz trumpeter and pianist Arturo Sandoval to provide the film’s score. (A country song he chose for the soundtrack, Toby Keith’s “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” was inspired by a bit of old-guy philosophy he’d learned and shared with Keith at a golf event a few years prior.) He grinded away at finishing the picture with an eye toward an end-of-year release.

In December, Warner Bros. premiered The Mule at a theater in Westwood, and it was an altogether astonishing event, not only because of the film itself but because of his guest list for the evening. Joining him for photos on the red carpet were Christina Sandera, Maggie, and all of his (known) children: Laurie Murray; Kimber; Kyle and Alison (along with their spouses and Kyle’s daughter Graylen); Kathryn and Scott; Francesca; and Morgan. One enterprising paparazzo got a few shots of the eight Eastwood spawn together—perhaps the only such photos in existence.*

On top of everything else, he stood among this gnarled family tree, a bona fide paterfamilias. His path to that station in life had sometimes been skewed and jagged like a bonsai. Kimber often felt estranged from him, once telling the press that she had “tried to make an appointment to see him, but he always has other commitments.” Kyle had chosen not to release records through his father’s label and even lived for a while in Paris to pursue his career independent of his influence. Alison had her bumpy journey to maturity, eventually acting in more than thirty movies. Scott and Kathryn had been raised under the name Reeves, and Scott would have to audition for every small role he played in his father’s films (Kathryn, too, had the acting bug, but she only appeared in a single one of Clint’s movies, Jersey Boys, in a tiny role). And Morgan was also starting to work in the biz, appearing in and having a hand in producing a few short films.

Of the brood, Francesca had arguably the wildest ride. In November 2013, she married Jordan Feldstein, manager of the musical acts Maroon 5 and Robin Thicke and brother of actors Jonah Hill and Beanie Feldstein, in a boozy ceremony in Las Vegas, officiated by an Elvis impersonator; she was twenty, he was thirty-five. Eight days later, she had the marriage annulled. In 2017, she began dating actor, Alexander Wraith, who was married with a child. Wraith filed for divorce in early 2018, around the time that Francesca became pregnant, and their son, Titan Wraith Eastwood, was born later that year.

It would be hard to say which was more remarkable—that Clint had spawned this brood or that he’d kept it, however infrequently, together.

And it would be equally hard to say who was more surprised by The Mule—the critics, the audience, or Warner Bros. The studio opened the film in December in hopes that the very fact of Clint making and starring in it would draw awards season attention. The reviews from critics who’d followed Clint for decades were surprised and positive: “persuasively expressive in conveying an old man’s regrets along with his desire to improve himself even in late age . . . Eastwood’s still got it” (Todd McCarthy, the Hollywood Reporter); “The Mule has an unexpected emotional kick . . . as personal as anything the filmmaker has done” (Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times). Other critics weren’t as enamored. “It brings me no joy to relay this: . . . Eastwood and his Gran Torino screenwriter Nick Schenk have made a movie that feels dodgy and false at every turn,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. But audiences turned out. It opened amid the holiday field at number two, with $17.5 million, and stayed in the top ten until late January, eventually earning $103.7 million domestically and $69.6 million internationally—a certifiable hit. It got no awards of note, but it convinced the industry that there was still no counting the man who made—and starred in—it out of the game. And, again, it made people in Hollywood realize, if only for a few minutes, that older folks were willing to leave their houses and spend money to see people like themselves in movies.

You can think of The Mule as a Hollywood take on an offbeat real-life story, or you can think of it as a weird cocktail of various roles and tropes in Clint’s career on-screen, and it succeeds either way. Like so many of Clint’s characters, Earl Stone, as the main character was renamed, has sacrificed family for work or simple orneriness, and only now, with time ticking away, does he seem to realize it. (It can’t be a coincidence that Alison plays Earl’s estranged daughter in her first role for her dad in more than twenty years, during which time she worked steadily elsewhere.) Like other Clint characters (think Philo Beddoe or Robert Kincaid), he’s happy wandering the country slowly in his truck. And like yet others, he thinks little of mixing with villains or toying with cops or living as a sovereign citizen outside the norms of law and morality.

In his first appearance in a film of his own making in a decade, Clint looks threadbare and gaunt and utterly without vanity (though he does grant himself/Earl the ego-fluff of a threesome with a pair of comely young señoritas at the cartel’s Mexico compound). Earl inhabits the roguish/rascally side of Clint’s screen persona, a guy he hasn’t let himself play in ages, and he doesn’t have a violent past or a well of hatred inside him to expiate. He’s just a man impelled by circumstance, opportunity, and the good luck to fit a particular bill of needs, the filling of which will reward him considerably.

That impish rascality feels like it runs through the veins of the film. The Mule is breezy for a film directed by or starring Clint, as if he’s finally loosened his grip after eighty-eight years on the planet, sixty-four as an actor and forty-seven as a director. In that sense, he seems very akin to Earl: someone who only starts to enjoy working when he allows himself to conflate business with pleasure. Clint is surrounded by the usual Malpaso gang and seems to delight, especially, in a particular scene in which Earl brazenly chats up the DEA agent played by Cooper in a diner. As he spews his decidedly un-PC views on the world, the agent smiles at him, thinking him a harmless old codger and even something of a museum piece: “You live so long, I think you’ve probably lost your filter,” the agent says, to which Earl replies, “Really? I never realized I had one.” You can’t keep up with a guy like that, on or off camera: The old goat who made this picture is peppy and slippery and has some gas—and surprises—left in the tank.

Once again, an unexpected hit opened up options for him, and he circled back to a story in which he’d been interested just a few years prior that still hadn’t made its way to the screen. “The Ballad of Richard Jewell” had been developed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, with Hill to play the title character and Paul Greengrass (United 93, Captain Phillips) as director. That version of the film fell through, and when Clint remembered the story in May 2019, Warner Bros. purchased the rights.

The script posited Jewell as a hapless mama’s boy who aspires to be a supercop but habitually oversteps his bounds and abilities; when he does something authentically heroic, he’s so hamfisted about it that he draws the scrutiny of law enforcement; at the same time, an aggressive crime reporter willing to trade sex for scoops starts to bandy his name about, turning him from media darling to public enemy overnight. Screenwriter Billy Ray, who had written about shady journalists and FBI agents in the films Shattered Glass, State of Play, and Breach, had followed the story as laid out in a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner and a book by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen, but he might have been writing with Clint in mind as his ideal audience. The combination of a nowhere-man hero, sleazy media, and abuse of power by law enforcement was like a cocktail of Clint’s hobbyhorses.

Casting fell in place quickly once he’d decided to do the film. Within a matter of weeks, he’d lined up Paul Walter Hauser, a remarkable look-alike for the real Jewell, in the title role. (He was best known for playing another torn-from-the-headlines figure in the Tonya Harding biopic I, Tonya.) Kathy Bates was cast as Jewell’s mother, Sam Rockwell as his eccentric lawyer, Jon Hamm as the FBI agent suspicious of him, and Olivia Wilde as the journalist who smears him. Every important event in the script took place in Georgia, and whenever possible Clint shot on the real locations. Filming ran from June to August 2019, and then Clint saw to postproduction back at Warner Bros. In November, just weeks before the film was set to premiere, he arrived at the studio to work on the sound design, unaware that a brush fire was raging in the nearby hills. As he related later, he was headed to work when “I saw all this smoke going. And I’m getting closer and closer . . . and I thought the whole studio’s burning down, maybe I’ll go in and see if I can retrieve something. So we went on the soundstage and started working and we forgot about it and . . . everybody said, ‘The studio’s been evacuated!’ And I said, ‘We’re not evacuated, we’re here working!’” Say this for him: He didn’t scare easy.

Upon its release that December, Richard Jewell was immediately taken up as a hot-button movie, albeit not on the level of American Sniper, and it polarized critics. Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly called it “a taut, streamlined drama leavened by crucial doses of empathy.” And in the Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern wrote, “In a jauntier time it might have been raw material for social satire; in our day it’s a cautionary tale about abuse of power by the press and government alike.” But Stephanie Zacharek in Time was one of those who (understandably) couldn’t silently ignore the film’s angry, even defamatory depiction of the media: “Jewell is one of those expertly crafted pictures that reminded me how little I care for craftsmanship when a filmmaker’s ugliest impulses are thrumming in the background.” (Some critics claimed the film’s anti-media, anti-FBI vibe marked it as propaganda for Donald Trump’s crusades against both of those institutions, but Clint had been throwing suspicion on the media and the bureaucracy back when Trump was an unknown cog in his father’s organization.) As with 15:17, audiences weren’t terribly interested in a film about an act of terror without a major star at its heart. It grossed $22 million at home and slightly less than that overseas.

In many ways, Richard Jewell is as ordinary a film as Clint has ever made; it plays just like a TV movie of the week. There’s very little special or inspired enough about it to warrant its length or the scale on which it’s mounted. In the title role, Hauser is credible, but the character as written is so passive that you want to slap him and snap him out of his habituated hangdoggery. Rockwell is, for him, unusually low energy, even though he’s meant to be an oddball. The sneering FBI agent played by Hamm is cartoonish. And Bates—inexplicably Oscar-nominated for her work here—veers into TV comedy as Richard’s weary mom. The one aspect of the film that stands out is the role played by Wilde, a journalist based on an aggressive, manipulative, sexually forward Atlanta newspaperwoman named Kathy Scruggs, who died in 2001 of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. The character, also named Scruggs, is like the real thing in that she dresses provocatively, drinks heavily, flirts boldly, and carries on more like a teenage rebel than a big-city reporter. Most controversially, she seems to trade sex for information, something that was muttered about the real Scruggs by her rivals but which her colleagues claimed was untrue. The character is so out of tenor with the rest of the slack and dreary film that she feels imported from reality TV or a soap opera.

As it stands, the film indicts law enforcement and the media for their treatment of Jewell and loses sight entirely of the bombing itself; the perpetrator of the crime is only revealed in an abrupt coda. A tighter script, a livelier pace, and a more heated sense of stakes might’ve made for a more convincing film, but Richard Jewell feels like an overlong fable to teach the audience that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

It can be hard to get a handle on this sort of fact, but by some consensus, the oldest director ever to make a Hollywood studio film had been Sidney Lumet, whose 2007 Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead came out when he was eighty-three.* Clint was now a full seven years older than that, and credit diet, exercise, longevity treatments, genes, sheer determination, or what have you, he was still focused on work. But there was at least one guy in Hollywood even older who was still banging away trying to get pictures made. If there was anyone in Hollywood with stamina, longevity, and persistence to equal Clint’s, it was Albert Ruddy, who was two months Clint’s senior. In 1975, he acquired the rights to a novel, Cry Macho, by N. Richard Nash, who was best known for his 1954 play The Rainmaker. The story, which had begun life as a spec screenplay, concerns a battered old Texas rodeo star sent by his boss to kidnap the boss’s eleven-year-old son, who’d been spirited away to Mexico by the boss’s ex-wife after an ugly divorce; the kid turns out not to be living with his mother, who has remarried and lives in wealth, but rather out on the streets, where he is engaged in the world of competitive cockfighting. The cowboy tries to persuade the boy to come back to America with him, while the boy’s mother sends henchmen out to stop them before they reach the border.

In 1988, Ruddy brought the script to Clint, hoping to interest him in directing and starring in it. Clint said he could imagine himself behind the camera but suggested an actual old man—Robert Mitchum, then seventy-one, say—for the lead role. And that never happened. (Over the years, Burt Lancaster and Pierce Brosnan were connected to the project.) In 2011, Ruddy got the script into play again, this time as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first starring role after leaving the governor’s office. And then that fell through. Ruddy carried on, though, and in 2019 he brought the script back to Clint, who could finally picture himself both in front of and behind the camera. He had Nick Schenk take a run at the script and prepared to start shooting it in early 2020; in theory he could have it in the can in time for his ninetieth birthday in May.

The world, you may recall, had other plans. Like everything else, Hollywood productions were halted by the outbreak of COVID-19, and Cry Macho didn’t go before the cameras until health and safety protocols for film production had been established. Clint waited out most of the pandemic in Tehama, the aerie he’d built in the hills above Carmel, saying of it, “This place is how I thought it’d be: privacy, safety, an escape.” When he was able to get back to work, he shot the new film through November and December in New Mexico, with only brief delays caused by some members of the crew possibly being exposed to COVID. (Perhaps related to the delays and precautions, Ben Davis replaced Yves Bélanger as cinematographer, making him only Clint’s fifth director of photography in more than forty years.) Another long-standing streak was broken during production: Clint rode a horse on camera for the first time since Unforgiven, some thirty years prior. He recalled the look of concern on the face of the shoot’s animal wrangler when she watched her ninety-year-old star and boss get into the saddle: “She was saying, ‘Be careful, be careful now.’ She was scared I’d end up on my rear end. But if you treat a horse like a buddy, he’ll take care of you.”

The Mule surprised people; and Cry Macho repeated the trick. Coming, as it did, in the still unfolding pandemic, with a nonagenarian producing, directing, and starring in it, it defied, in and of itself, any critical lens that could be applied to it. Its box office performance, in a broken theatrical economy, was impossible to evaluate (for the record, it grossed $10 million in the United States and $4.3 million overseas, and surely most of its likeliest audience stayed home for reasons not having to do with the reviews it got or their desire to see it). And it was met with wonder by many of those reviews. At RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny wrote, “This is Eastwood’s version of pastoral. . . . The simple sincerity about what’s worthwhile in life is the movie’s reason for being. Nothing more and nothing less.” A. O. Scott of the New York Times called it “a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say.” And Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times said, “With its attractive but not indulgent landscapes . . . backed by a spare, twangy Mark Mancina score, [it] takes pains to reject anything that might smack of falsity or pretense.”

One place the film landed with a particularly nasty thud was the balance sheet of Warner Bros., where a new corporate owner, the cable/streaming network Discovery Inc., had emerged in early 2022. The new CEO, David Zaslav, an attorney who’d worked at NBC prior to rising at Discovery, learned that Cry Macho had been green-lit even though nobody anticipated it would earn back its budget, mainly on the basis of production executives seeing Clint’s long tenure with the studio as a kind of bond of obligation. Zaslav responded with a quote from (the villain in) Jerry Maguire—“It’s not show friends, it’s show business”—and told his employees that he felt no debt at all to any artist, immediately labeling himself as the brand of villainous, tone-deaf corporate overlord that Clint and his characters had been rebelling against for half a century or more.

There’s a push-pull thing going on with Cry Macho. At one and the same time, there’s something dear in the notion that a man in his nineties is able to pull the thing off at all, let alone well, and you roll your eyes at some of what you’re being asked to abide. Yes, you can believe that Clint is a busted-down rodeo cowboy living in a trailer and altogether without prospects, and you can believe that he takes the job and makes the trip and convinces the boy to come home with him and that he finds community and even love in a small Mexican town. (It’s also amazing that he’s still finding vigor in a story about a road trip with a young person—a story he’s been telling for decades.) But when he performs physical feats, including decking a guy with a single punch, and woos a woman decades his junior, we are well beyond the plausible. There’s charm enough in the picture if you let go of some scruples—if you grant it a senior discount, as it were—and the odds against it being made in the first place are impressive to consider. The best thing Cry Macho gives us is something of a scrapbook of a movie icon: Clint in a cowboy hat and on horseback, wandering toward danger, riding the open range (even if in a battered pickup truck), breaking horses, making hard moral choices. You may be immune to that, but if you’ve made it this far in his career—from Rawhide through the Leone and Siegel films, from Harry Callahan to Philo Beddoe, from Play Misty for Me through Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino—then there’s something poignant and singular and heartening going on here.

The amazing thing, of course, is that it exists at all: Hollywood has, historically, done next to nothing to accommodate old folks on-screen and almost never behind the scenes. And yet here was a man in his nineties wrestling with themes and demons that had haunted his entire career. If that doesn’t define someone as a lifelong artist, then nothing does.

Coda

Sunset . . . in Due Time

In 1972, when he was making High Plains Drifter on the otherworldly shores of Mono Lake, he liked to visit Frank Capra—the celebrated director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It’s a Wonderful Life—and talk about making movies. Capra, then seventy-five years old, hadn’t made a film since 1961, and he would live another nineteen years without getting a sniff of work. Clint didn’t understand it: “I always used to say, ‘Why the hell isn’t this guy making movies? Did he dump them or did they dump him?’ I’ve watched wonderful directors—Capra, Billy Wilder, to name two—stop working in their sixties, and you think, ‘How can you stop working in your sixties? You should be in your prime.’”

Clint had worked—hard, prolifically, and often at a remarkably high level of achievement, commercial and critical—through his sixties and seventies and eighties, and he seemed incapable of slowing down even as he blew into his nineties. David Zaslav and the bean counters be damned, Warner Bros. and Malpaso set out on a new film in 2023, announcing that Clint would produce, direct, and appear in Juror #2, a courtroom thriller from an original script by Jonathan Abrams about a juror in a murder trial who realizes that he might be the one responsible for the victim’s death and struggles to acquit the defendant without becoming implicated himself. Nicholas Hoult was cast in the central role, with other key roles going to Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland, Zoey Deutch, and Chris Messina; Francesca Eastwood would fill a small, vivid role as the woman whose death is at the root of the trial. The production was budgeted in the neighborhood of $30 million, with filming taking place around Savannah and in Los Angeles starting in June 2023, but it was interrupted by the strikes of the screenwriters’ and screen actors’ guilds, resuming only in November—a hell of a ticking clock when working with a ninety-three-year-old principal creator. (There were other quirks of working with and for him: Hoult revealed that Clint often referred to him as “Captain Lingus” during the shoot, in honor of the sexual habits of the actor’s character in the streaming series The Great, and Clint’s fondness for crunchy cheese snacks, which he chewed loudly enough for the sound crew to catch on their recordings, caused takes to be scrapped on more than one occasion.) In the spring of 2024, word spread that Clint was readying it for release before the end of the year.

That news was greeted with some relish, because even in his nineties, his name was a unit of meaning—and he and his people were absolutely vigilant about protecting it. In 2021, he sued a manufacturer of CBD products that used his name and image in advertisements for something he never consumed or agreed to endorse; he was awarded $6.1 million in federal district court. Two years later, though, a remarkable film clip appeared on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Clint had licensed his name to Sideshow Collectibles, a manufacturer of high-end replicas of pop culture figurines. The company turned five of his characters—the Man with No Name, Harry Callahan, Josey Wales, the Preacher from Pale Rider, and Will Munny—into foot-tall, um, dolls, rendered with precise detail from life and photographs, dressed in handmade fabric and leather costumes, carrying detailed props, and mounted on stands representing the sets of the films in which they appeared. A video released by the company showed Clint visiting its Southern California headquarters in 2023 to see what they’d done, admiring the work process—which he said was “exciting because it’s new to me”—and joking that the miniature Man with No Name had “a lot more detail than we had in the movie.” He was beholding his life as if in a museum. As with so many things he’d done, nobody else in American movies had ever had this experience. And likely nobody ever would.

Ninety-four.

People had snickered behind his back decades earlier when he was proselytizing about health food and exercise and vitamin regimens and longevity, but he had been enjoying the last laugh for some time. He was a living, breathing monument: to Hollywood’s past, to America’s past, to his own legacy. Spending his days around Carmel—the house in town, the house in Tehama—he would occasionally be spotted, complete with old-man beard and wispy white hair, dining in a restaurant or taking in a concert or gassing up his car or playing a few holes of golf or pushing a cart around Whole Foods. He made rare public appearances . . . in the flesh, that is: In the spring of 2024, in response to a number of social media accounts claiming to be his, an account appeared on Twitter/X—@EastwoodMalpaso—that featured fuzzy selfies of Clint at dinner or attending events in the Carmel area, along with old publicity stills and random video clips, all of them dappled with multiple watermarks to prevent their use in any other fashion; if there wasn’t a nonagenarian at the helm of the thing, some social media intern was doing a very good job of posing as one.

In March 2024, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall was in Carmel (not long after her own ninetieth birthday) to address a fundraising gathering of the Wildlife Conservation Network, and Clint appeared in the green room and the audience; snapshots and video clips of him, gaunt and frail but clear-eyed and alert beneath his beard and wiry mane, circulated on social media and news outlets.

In June, cleaned up and dressed in a dark blue suit and green tie, he walked his youngest daughter, Morgan, twenty-seven and round with child, down the aisle at Mission Ranch for her wedding to Tanner Koopman, a deliberately low-key, homey celebration attended by Morgan’s mother, Dina, and several of her siblings. Her baby, named Cleo, arrived in late summer.

About one month after the wedding, the unthinkable happened. Some ten years into her relationship with Clint, Christina Sandera died of a sudden heart attack at the age of sixty-one; she had been living with undiagnosed coronary artery disease and was overcome by an episode of arrhythmia. Clint released a statement through Malpaso declaring, in its entirety, “Christina was a lovely, caring woman, and I will miss her very much.” On Instagram, Morgan posted a story with a photo of herself, her new husband, her father, and Sandera, acknowledging “a devastating loss for our whole family” and adding, “Thank you Christina for being a good partner to my Dad.”

He lay low, keeping his grief private, taking walks and feeding the geese on his Tehama property, spending time with Francesca and her son Titan, with Morgan and baby Cleo, and with any of the kids or grandkids who passed through town; in many ways, the big, sprawling family seemed closer to him than ever.

In September, he did the most Clint Eastwood thing imaginable: He appeared once again at the Monterey Jazz Festival to accept the inaugural Clint Eastwood Cultural Leadership Award. It was a reunion of sorts: The award was presented to him by Morgan Freeman, a pup of eighty-seven years. “His films have kept jazz alive in the popular culture,” Freeman said in a jocular speech. He pointed out Clint, who stayed seated in the audience accepting his ovation, and ended with “I’m done, friend. I’ll see you ’round the block.” That was followed by Kyle Eastwood leading his quartet and a small orchestra in “Eastwood Symphonic,” a performance built around the most famous musical themes from Clint’s films.

In late October, Juror #2 debuted, as had American Sniper, J. Edgar, and Richard Jewell, at the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest in Hollywood. Clint didn’t make an appearance on the red carpet, but most of the film’s stars were on hand, including Francesca, who just two weeks prior had been arrested in Beverly Hills on a charge of felony domestic violence against her boyfriend, an incident that resulted in her spending a night in custody before being released on a $50,000 bond. (All charges would eventually be dropped.)

The reviews were largely strong. In Deadline, Pete Hammond called it “his best since American Sniper . . . one of the most compelling dramas of his career . . . an exceptionally fine entertainment for adult audiences craving something compelling and engrossing.” In IndieWire, Christian Zilko called it, flat out, “one of the best studio films released in 2024.”

All the more puzzling, then, was Warner Bros.’ decision to open Juror #2 on merely thirty or so screens nationwide, with no plans to expand its run appreciably before premiering it on the HBO Max streaming service in December. Some observers suggested that the release pattern was down to David Zaslav’s lingering reaction to the studio’s handling of Cry Macho, others that WB had decided to bet all of its holiday/awards season chips on its big releases Joker: Folie à Deux and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (both of which failed to generate Oscar talk). And a source at the studio told at least one reporter, anonymously but apparently with a straight face, that the limited release was a means of protecting Clint from embarrassment: If the film opened wide and poorly, the reasoning went, it would be a cruel blow to the elderly auteur in what might be his final work. As if to underscore that “poor old guy” line of thought, the studio announced that it would not report North American box office grosses for the film, an unheard-of bit of secrecy suggesting it was the distributor, not the filmmaker, who had something to hide.

The film squeaked into U.S. theaters in early November and enjoyed a wider release in Europe and Asia, where it did good business, especially in France, taking in approximately $5 million in international markets its first weekend; estimates of the U.S. take suggested something like $300,000 from the thirty-ish venues. And the reviews in the mainstream American press were as strong as those from the critics who saw it at the AFI Fest. In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis declared, “Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in Changeling and Richard Jewell. This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.” In The New Yorker, Richard Brody called it “a brisk and engaging courtroom-centered (but not courtroom-bound) thriller to which Eastwood, at the age of ninety-four, applies, with the lightest of touches, his full panoply of dramatic vigor.”

Some critics found the film tired and predictable, and more than a few, even among the positive notices, pointed out a puzzling leap in the plot late in the going. But in the main the thumbs-up crowd got it right. Juror #2 turned out to be gripping, complex, and human-scale, with terrific performances, handsome cinematography (Yves Bélanger once again), and a sparingly used, low-key score by Mark Mancina, who had also worked on Cry Macho. There’s great sobriety and deftness in the handling of the potboiler story and, especially, some of the film’s moments of raw passion and emotion—the bar fight that precedes the victim’s death and the nauseated realization by the main character that he could be the guilty party. Clint’s camera focuses on faces, eyes, little flutters of hands, often without any musical cues to tell the audience what the characters are thinking or how to feel about it. It’s a remarkable demonstration of the power of restraint.

In the lead, Nicholas Hoult gives a full-blooded, far-ranging performance, often deeply internal but wholly plausible; his character is a reformed alcoholic, an expectant father, and, as the film progresses, something of a justice warrior (or, at least, apparently one), and he layers his work deeply and authentically, centering on a speech about his drinking and recovery but always with multiple levels of guilt, self-doubt, and a white man’s winning charm near the surface. Among the other key performers, Collette (who played Hoult’s mother more than twenty years prior in About a Boy) has a similar depth of contradictory impulses as a prosecutor who sees the case as a ticket to election as district attorney but who comes to doubt her own certainty. And J. K. Simmons has a lark as a retired Chicago homicide detective who winds up on the jury and decides that the cops did a lousy job of investigating the crime.

The Savannah setting is blissfully free of the gauche touristic touches that smothered Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and the pace, even at just shy of two hours, is brisk and engaging. (Screenwriter Jonathan Abrams, getting his first feature film credit, reported that Clint was constantly paring away the dialogue; the inexplicable leap that occurs not long before the film ends, when the jury suddenly has a verdict without letting the audience see how they arrived at it, feels like a cut into the bone.) If it doesn’t seem very different from something you might find on TV, that isn’t a put-down. Juror #2 arrived in a world in which it was routine for audiences to prefer TV fare to movies, and Clint’s spare, primal aesthetic choices often worked as well on the small screen as on the big, anyway. What it was, without a doubt, was a grown-up, if small-scale, entertainment in an era when such enterprises seemed not to register as commercial to movie studios.

Given the good reviews, Warner Bros. distributed the film more widely in each of the following weeks—although, again, without reporting the exact number of locations or the gross. And then, in a sign that they were beginning to see the error of their strategy, they started to promote the film in their “For Your Consideration” advertising for year-end critics’ awards, guild prizes, and, of course, the Oscars, touting it for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, and various acting categories. It got no nominations from the Golden Globes, the guilds, or the Academy, but on the HBO Max streaming service it proved a sizeable streaming hit; any embarrassment about the film would be the studio’s not the filmmaker’s.

Not surprisingly, Clint and Malpaso had nothing to say about Warner Bros.’ feckless handling of Juror #2. But word did leak out indicating that Clint wasn’t going to let Zaslav or the studio have the last word—and that Juror #2 might not even be his last film, of one sort or another.

On his Twitter/X account, he revealed the existence of a project called “Clint,” a biopic about his years as a lifeguard and G.I. and enrollee at the Universal Talent School; the film was scripted by and would star an actor named, of all things, Clint Ward, who had appeared in tiny roles in Changeling, Gran Torino, and Jersey Boys. It would mark Ward’s first produced screenplay, and it would also mark the first directorial feature of stuntman Benjamin J. Perry to reach theaters. The project, officially listed as “in development,” was credited to Dossier Films, the website of which featured a trailer for the picture that sure sounded like it was narrated by Morgan Freeman and another trailer for a documentary about Tehama, Clint’s golf course and gated community. The whole thing was as mysterious as it was unlikely.

But there was another murmur in the press, one that seemed altogether far more likely. In October, just before Juror #2 premiered, a few film columnists and bloggers with legitimate connections to sources inside the business began to report rumblings that Clint was looking at scripts and hoping to get back behind the camera for another run. Given that nothing was signed or announced as winter approached, that would mean that, at the very soonest, any new film he’d be working on would be in development or preproduction in May 2025; if it happened, he would be making his forty-first feature film at around the time he reached his ninety-fifth birthday.

A monumental achievement by any way of reckoning, it might even seem impossible.

But just look back on where he started, where he’d been, what he’d accomplished, and how doggedly and devotedly he kept at the work.

You’d be crazy to bet against him.

Acknowledgments

I first conceived of writing a biography of Clint Eastwood in 2009, immediately after publishing a book about Paul Newman; I thought the two would complement and contrast with one another nicely. However, another biography of Clint was already in the pipeline, making the timing all wrong. A dozen years later, though, Clint hadn’t slowed his roll—at all—and he seemed even more to be a worthy subject. I proposed to my agent, Richard Pine, that Clint should be my next book, and he agreed, and then he found a perfect home for it. Peter Hubbard was keen on the notion from the outset, and he welcomed with real delight the chance to work together on this biography. I wouldn’t have written a page of this book without the encouragement and confidence of these two stalwart fellows.

In 2021, I reached out to Malpaso to ask for an interview with Clint (already in his nineties) and was met with silence. But I was able to talk with a few on-set collaborators of Clint’s, and I had, during my decades of writing for newspapers and magazines, conducted several interviews with his colleagues. As a result, these pages include moments from conversations I’d had with Morgan Freeman, Tom Hanks, Denis Leary, John Malkovich, Tim Robbins, and James Woods, and I appreciate their availability, even many years after the fact. (I spoke as well with a few folks who preferred to remain unnamed.)

Other streams of research involved archives and special collections held at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library; the Multnomah County Library; the Los Angeles Public Library; and the online archives of such publications as Variety, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Carmel Pine Cone. In addition, I relied on the resources of Movie Madness and Powell’s City of Books in my hometown of Portland, and on the ever-friendly and dependable auspices of the Photofest image archive.

At Inkwell Management, I am eternally grateful for the savvy and friendship of Richard Pine and the tireless and reliable efforts of Eliza Rothstein. At Mariner Books, I thank Peter Hubbard for his enthusiasm and trust and Jeanie Lee and Bob Castillo for their sharp-eyed and wise work on the manuscript. And Elina Cohen’s design: Wow!

Closer to home, I thank my lucky stars, as ever, for the unceasing support of my family—Vincent and Amy; Anthony and Alina and Paloma; Paula; Jenny and Jason and Fanny and Harry; and a constellation of cousins—and for the camaraderie of Portland’s writing and soccer communities.

And, just like the rest of my life, this work would be inconceivable with the love, support, intelligence, spirit, and, above all, fortitude of Shannon Brazil, without whom . . .

Sources

In the following pages, I indicate the principal sources from which I gathered information or verified discoveries made in my own research. Where my inquiries overlapped with previously published sources on a given subject, I have named the place of its prior publication.

BOOKS

There are many books about Clint Eastwood, but these are the ones that constitute significant sources of original interviews and research:

Frayling, Christopher. Clint Eastwood. London: Virgin, 1992.

Goldman, Michael. Clint Eastwood: Master Filmmaker at Work. New York: Abrams, 2012.

Kaminsky, Stuart M. Clint Eastwood. New York: Signet, 1974.

McGilligan, Patrick. Clint: The Life and Legend. London: HarperCollins, 1999.

Nelson, Paul. Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979–1983. New York: Continuum, 2011.

Plaza, Fuensanta. Clint Eastwood/Malpaso. Carmel Valley, CA: Ex Libris, 1991.

Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Wilson, Michael Henry. Eastwood on Eastwood. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2012.

In addition, these works constitute primary source material concerning some of the most important people in Clint’s life:

Frayling, Christopher. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.

Locke, Sondra. The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997.

Siegel, Don. A Siegel Film. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.

I: OAKLAND TO THE OPEN RANGE

One

For genealogical information about the Eastwood and Runner families, I augmented my own online and documentary searches with information found in McGilligan and Schickel. For Clint’s childhood and school years, see interviews in the Sidney Skolsky papers at the Margaret Herrick Library, in Nelson, Schickel, and Wilson, and:

Playboy, February 1974.

Village Voice, May 24, 1976.

Time, January 9, 1978.

Cosmopolitan, July 1980.

Film Comment, September/October 1984.

Rolling Stone, July 4, 1985.

Esquire, October 1988.

Interview, January 1997.

Playboy, March 1997.

Icon, December 1997.

The New Yorker, March 24, 2003.

The Guardian, October 6, 2003.

GQ, November 2009.

Two

For Clint’s post–high school and military life, including the water landing off Point Reyes, see McGilligan, Schickel, Wilson, the Sidney Skolsky papers, and:

New York Post, October 25, 1969.

Los Angeles Free Press, April 20, 1973.

Playboy, February 1974.

Esquire, March 13, 1979.

Rolling Stone, July 4, 1985.

Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1987.

American Film Institute Life Achievement Award Souvenir Book, 1996.

Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1997.

Icon, December 1997.

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

Monterey Herald, February 26, 2022.

Three

For Clint’s time at the Universal Talent School, see Schickel and:

Life, July 23, 1971.

Los Angeles Free Press, April 20, 1973.

Playboy, February 1974.

The Guardian, October 6, 2003.

Directors Guild Quarterly, Spring 2006.

Heritage Auction website, October 4, 2008.

Backstage, January 1, 2009.

GQ, November 2009.

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

Four

For the Eastwoods’ marriage and his sexual behavior outside of it, see McGilligan, Schickel, and:

Photoplay (UK), February 1963.

New York Post, October 25, 1969.

Screen Stars, July 1971.

Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, 1972.

Fanfare, June 13, 1973.

Esquire, March 1979.

People, May 26, 1986.

For Clint’s 1950s film and television career, see:

Life, July 23, 1971.

Playboy, February 1974.

Parade, October 23, 1983.

New York Daily News, August 12, 1984.

Icon, December 1997.

II: THE RISE OF THE SIDEKICK

Five

For the genesis and early run of Rawhide, see Wilson and:

Hollywood Reporter, July 13, 1961.

New York Daily News, December 3, 1961.

Playboy, February 1974.

Variety, October 28, 1975.

Film Comment, January–February 1978.

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, December 13, 1980.

Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1992.

Hollywood Reporter, March 11, 1993.

New York Times, October 27, 1993.

Icon, December 1997.

Playboy, December 1997.

TV Guide, August 5, 2000.

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

Six

For Maggie’s illness and Clint’s sexual entanglements, see McGilligan and:

Playboy, February 1974.

Rolling Stone, September 17, 1992.

For Clint’s leap to film, the life of Sergio Leone, and the making of A Fistful of Dollars, see Frayling (2000) and:

New York Post, January 1, 1967.

Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1967.

Newark Evening News, November 5, 1969.

Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1971.

Los Angeles Free Press, April 20, 1973.

American Film, June 1984.

Cable Guide, July 1989.

Premiere, April 1993.

Icon, December 1997.

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

Seven

For the making of For a Few Dollars More and The Witches, see Frayling (2000) and Schickel and:

Newark Evening News, July 31, 1965.

Playboy, February 1974.

Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1992.

Eight

For Clint and Raymond Floyd, see:

Golf Digest, January 31, 2022.

For the Eastwoods in Carmel, see:

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June 1, 1975.

Saga, February 1977.

For the making of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, see Frayling (2000) and:

Wallach, Eli. The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage. New York: Harcourt, 2005.

For Clint’s outsider feelings, see:

Hollywood Studio Magazine, February 1973.

Playboy, February 1974.

Us, July 8, 1980.

Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1992.

For the publicity tour around the Dollars trilogy, see:

Newark Evening News, April 23, 1966.

New York World Journal Tribune, January 15, 1967.

Newsday, February 2, 1967.

For Clint’s post-Dollars plans, see:

Newark Evening News, April 23, 1966.

Hollywood Reporter, March 8, 1968.

TV Guide, August 5, 2000.

Nine

For Robert Eaton on Clint, see:

Palm Beach Post, November 21, 2014.

For meeting Don Siegel, see Siegel and Kaminsky and:

Premiere, April 1993.

For the casting and making of Where Eagles Dare, see:

Cinema Retro Movie Classics: “Where Eagles Dare,” 2012.

Los Angeles Free Press, April 20, 1973.

Ten

For Clint’s sexual compulsions, see:

New York Daily News, March 31, 1999.

For Clint’s glee in one-upping Universal, see:

Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1969.

For Clint’s affair with Jean Seberg, see:

Richards, David. Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story. New York: Berkeley Books, 1983.

Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1968.

Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1969.

For Clint’s affair with Gael Greene, see:

Greene, Gael. Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess. New York: Warner Books, 2006.

New York, February 23, 2006.

For casting of Kelly’s Heroes, see:

Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1985.

For Clint’s views on excess spending on Paint Your Wagon, see:

New York Daily News, April 4, 1971.

Playboy, March 1997.

For Malpaso’s thrift, see:

Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1973.

New York Times Magazine, February 24, 1985.

III: DEFINING A KINGDOM

Eleven

For the making of Two Mules for Sister Sara, see Siegel.

For the making of The Beguiled, see:

New York Daily News, April 4, 1971.

For Clint’s fear of his career ending, see:

New York Daily News, July 25, 1976.

For the death of Clinton Eastwood, see:

Parade, August 2, 1992.

GQ, November 2009.

For Clint’s experience of being stalked, see:

Playboy, February 1974.

Us, January 26, 1987.

For Clint seeking Universal’s permission to direct, see:

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1985.

For Donna Mills on Play Misty for Me, see:

National Enquirer, June 6, 1978.

Hollywood Reporter, March 11, 1993.

For Jessica Walter on Play Misty for Me, see:

Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1971.

TV Guide, August 5, 2000.

For Clint preparing to direct Play Misty for Me, see:

New York Daily News, April 4, 1971.

Premiere, April 1993.

Twelve

For Clint directing a scene in Dirty Harry, see:

Life, July 13, 1971.

For Play Misty for Me at the San Francisco Film Festival, see:

Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1971.

For Clint breaking in as a director, see:

Monterey Peninsula Herald, August 15, 1972.

Look, July 1979.

New York Times Magazine, February 24, 1985.

TV Guide, August 5, 2000.

For Andy Robinson’s post–Dirty Harry career, see:

Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1978.

For Clint and Don Siegel defending Dirty Harry, see:

Playboy, February 1974.

For Richard Nixon on Dirty Harry, see:

American Film, September 1976.

For Clint at the White House, see:

Washington Post, April 24, 1973.

Thirteen

For Merv Griffin at the Hog’s Breath, see:

Carmel Magazine, 2007.

For Clint’s sexual conquests and Maggie’s reaction, see:

Fanfare, June 12, 1973.

Los Angeles Magazine, March 1987.

For Ernest Tidyman writing for Clint, see:

Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1972.

For Clint’s resentment of Hollywood machinery, see:

Life, July 1979.

For Clint working like a crewman on High Plains Drifter, see:

Hollywood Reporter, March 11, 1993.

For the casting and production of Breezy, see:

Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1973.

Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1974.

Hollywood Reporter, March 11, 1993.

For John Milius on working for Malpaso, see:

Newsweek, July 22, 1985.

For John Wayne on High Plains Drifter and Clint’s on-screen image, see:

Esquire, October 1988.

Chicago Tribune, August 2, 1992.

For Clint at the Oscars, see:

Playboy, February 1974.

Premiere, April 1993.

Fourteen

For the production of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, see:

Elton, Charles. Cimino: “The Deer Hunter,” “Heaven’s Gate,” and the Price of a Vision. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2022.

New York Times, January 11, 1981.

Hollywood Reporter, March 11, 1993.

American Film Institute Life Achievement Award Souvenir Book, 1996.

For Clint on Heaven’s Gate, see:

Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1984.

For Clint’s feud with Pauline Kael, see Nelson and:

Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1976.

Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1976.

Village Voice, May 21, 1976.

Film Comment, January–February 1978.

Oui, June 1978.

For Clint on Transcendental Meditation, see:

Esquire, March 1979.

GQ, November 2009.

For the fatal accident on The Eiger Sanction, see:

Family Weekly, November 29, 1974.

For Clint’s climbing efforts on The Eiger Sanction, see:

National Star, November 16, 1974.

Cable Guide, July 1989.

Fifteen

For Clint on independence, see:

Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1973.

For Malpaso leaving Universal, see:

Film International, June 1975.

Sight & Sound, Spring 1985.

For Sondra Locke’s backstory and first meetings and trysts with Clint, see Locke.

For Kaufman on The Outlaw Josey Wales, see Frayling (1992).

For Clint on Locke’s physical appeal, see Nelson.

For Clint on Sam Peckinpah and Alfred Hitchcock, see:

Premiere, April 1993.

GQ, November 2009.

For Clint agreeing to a third Dirty Harry movie, see:

New York Daily News, July 25, 1976.

For Clint’s letter to Andrew Sarris, see:

IndieWire, February 13, 2014.

For Clint losing his temper on the set of The Gauntlet, see:

Cosmopolitan, July 1980.

Sixteen

For Clint passing on Apocalypse Now, see:

New York Times, June 17, 1979.

For Clint’s demands concerning Locke’s medical decisions, see Locke.

For Locke’s poor singing, see:

People, February 26, 1979.

For the filming conditions at Alcatraz, see:

Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1979.

For Clint starting to spend his money more freely, see:

Newsweek, July 22, 1985.

For Clint seeking a legal separation from Maggie, see:

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, September 7, 1979.

IV: PULLING ALL THE STRINGS

Seventeen

For Clint stomping Locke’s foot, see Nelson.

For Clint’s avoidance of drugs, see:

New York Daily News, August 12, 1984.

GQ, November 2009.

For Clint’s adherence to Life Extension techniques, see McGilligan, Schickel, and:

Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach. New York: Warner Books, 1982.

For Clint’s hair transplants and avoidance of plastic surgery, see Locke and:

Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1982.

For Clint forgetting studio ID on Warner Bros. lot, see:

Newsweek, July 22, 1985.

For Clint’s lawsuit against National Enquirer, see:

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 7, 1982.

Eighteen

For Maggie on divorce and life after marriage, see:

Star, October 21, 1980.

New York Daily News, November 28, 1980.

Star, February 2, 1982.

For Henry Wynberg’s legal history, see:

Wynberg v. National Enquirer, Inc., 564 F. Supp. 924 (C.D. Cal. 1982).

For Bo Gritz raid, see Nelson, Schickel, and:

Los Angeles Times, January 31, 1983.

New York Times, February 1, 1983.

Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1983.

Premiere, April 1993.

For Norman Mailer on Clint, see:

Parade, October 23, 1983.

For Robert Mazzocco on Clint, see:

New York Review of Books, April 1, 1982.

For Tom Stempel on Clint, see:

Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1984.

For the making of Tightrope, see:

Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1992.

For the making of City Heat, see Locke and:

Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2016.

Nineteen

For Clint’s tour of Europe, see:

New York Times Magazine, February 24, 1985.

For Clint at Cannes in 1985, see:

Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1985.

For Locke’s resentment of Clint’s hold on her career, see Locke and:

New York Times, December 23, 1983.

Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1986.

For Clint casting a sexual partner opposite Locke, see Locke.

For Locke’s impression of Clint as a grudge holder, see:

Cosmopolitan, July 1980.

For Clint’s anger at Carmel city planners, see Locke.

For Clint’s explanation of his animus toward Carmel city planners, see:

Associated Press, March 9, 1986.

New York Daily News, November 30, 1986.

For Clint’s frustrations with Carmel politicians prior to running for mayor, see:

Carmel Pine Cone, June 20, 2008.

For Clint on SAG policies, see:

Variety, December 31, 1986.

For Paul Laub as “a pain in the ass,” see:

Monterey County Weekly, May 23, 2013.

For Charlotte Townsend on Clint, Carmel, and the election, see:

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, February 3, 1986.

New York Times, March 25, 1986.

People, May 17, 1986.

For Clint standing up to Townsend’s campaign manager, see:

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, April 3, 1986.

For Clint mistrusting out-of-town reporters, see:

Us, April 7, 1986.

Los Angeles Daily News, April 9, 1986.

For ousted planning commissioners on Clint and new Carmel tourists, see:

Long Beach Press-Telegram, April 5, 1987.

Time, April 6, 1987.

For Carmel residents’ dislike of Locke, see:

People, May 15, 1989.

For birth certificates of Scott and Kathryn Reeves, see McGilligan.

Twenty

For ousted Carmel city planners praising Clint’s conservation work, see:

Time, April 6, 1987.

For the firing of Fritz Manes, see McGilligan and:

The Independent, May 4, 1997.

For the casting of Diane Venora, see:

Backstage, January 1, 2009.

For speed of shooting on Bird, see:

New York Times, January 17, 1988.

Twenty-One

For Locke and Brolin quarreling in Sun Valley, see Locke.

For Clint damaging Stacy McLaughlin’s car, see McGilligan and:

Los Angeles Times, May 10, 1989.

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June 23, 1989.

Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1991.

For Clint asking Locke to leave the Stradella Road house and subsequently evicting her, see Locke, McGilligan, and Schickel.

For Locke’s lawsuit against Clint, see Locke, McGilligan, Schickel, and:

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, April 27, 1989.

Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1989.

People, May 15, 1989.

For Locke’s fear of Clint’s temper, see:

Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1989.

For Clint’s disappointment in himself over his relationship with Locke, see:

TV Guide, January 27, 1990.

Playboy, March 1997.

For Clint and Locke meeting in Malpaso’s offices, see Locke.

V: A HIGHER LEVEL YET

Twenty-Two

For Sonia Chernus on Unforgiven, see:

Warner Bros. interoffice memo, January 5, 1984.

For casting of Unforgiven, see:

Rolling Stone, September 17, 1992.

Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2011.

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

For Unforgiven shoot, see:

Premiere, April 1993.

Directors Guild Quarterly, Spring 2006.

For Warner Bros.’ reaction to Unforgiven, see:

Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2004.

For Megan Rose’s claims about Clint and Unforgiven, see McGilligan and:

New York Post, March 8, 1993.

The Independent, May 4, 1997.

Twenty-Three

For Clint’s interactions with Kevin Costner during A Perfect World, see Schickel and:

Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1993.

For Clint meeting Laurie Murray, see McGilligan.

For Meryl Streep’s aversion to The Bridges of Madison County novel, see:

Time, June 5, 1995.

For Streep’s preparation for The Bridges of Madison County, see:

Entertainment Weekly, June 1, 1995.

Twenty-Four

For Clint on disloyalty, see:

New York Times Magazine, February 24, 1985.

For Locke’s suits against Warner Bros., see:

Variety, March 11, 1994.

New York Times, March 26, 1995.

Premiere, December 1996.

For Clint’s lawsuit against The Globe and the misdeeds of Tony Castro, see:

Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1993.

For Clint’s meeting and courting Dina Ruiz, see:

Hello!, March 29, 1997.

Modern Maturity, March/April 2001.

The New Yorker, March 24, 2003.

Carmel Magazine, May 2007.

GQ, November 2009.

For Frances Fisher and Clint on the end of their relationship, see:

Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1995.

Playboy, March 1997.

For Clint paying off Dina’s credit cards, see:

Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2011.

For Locke’s second lawsuit against Clint and the subsequent trial, see:

E! Online, September 11, 1996.

Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1996.

Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1996.

Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1996.

For Clint’s final words on Locke, see:

Playboy, March 1997.

Twenty-Five

For Clint onstage at Carnegie Hall, see:

Vanity Fair, December 12, 2008.

For Clint and Steve Kroft, see:

New York Daily News, November 14, 1997.

For Alison Eastwood’s youthful escapades, see:

W, September 1997.

Interview, December 1997.

Movieline, December/January 1997–1998.

For Dina keeping the entire extended family together, see:

The New Yorker, March 24, 2003.

For Clint on monogamy, see:

GQ, November 2009.

VI: A PANTHEON OF ONE

Twenty-Six

For McGilligan on Clint as an actor and director, see:

Chicago Tribune, August 8, 2002.

For Clint’s suit against McGilligan, see:

Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2002.

For Clint tricking the cast of Space Cowboys into a nude scene, see:

Modern Maturity, March/April 2001.

Twenty-Seven

For finding Mystic River at Costco, see:

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

For Warner Bros.’ reluctance to make Mystic River, see:

New York Daily News, October 5, 2003.

The Guardian, October 6, 2003.

New York Times, February 13, 2005.

For limited number of takes on Mystic River, see:

New York Daily News, January 23, 2004.

For Warner Bros.’ reluctance to make Million Dollar Baby, see:

New York Daily News, December 13, 2004.

New York Times, February 13, 2005.

Hollywood Masters broadcast transcript, March 2015.

Twenty-Eight

For Clint’s evolved attitude toward Japanese in World War II, see:

Variety, September 4, 2006.

Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2006.

For Clint surprising actors with explosions during filming, see Paramount Pictures production notes for Flags of Our Fathers.

For the death of Ruth Eastwood, see:

Reuters, October 14, 2010.

Golf Digest, January 31, 2022.

For Clint’s feud with Spike Lee, see:

Huffington Post, June 13, 2008.

VII: UNBOWED

Twenty-Nine

For Clint on longevity, see:

Sydney Morning Herald, June 28, 2014.

For Clint on loyalty to family, see:

GQ, November 2009.

For Arnold Schwarzenegger’s impatience with Clint, see:

Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2007.

For Clint on being dismissed from the State Parks Commission, see:

Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2008.

For John Malkovich on Clint as a director, see:

Los Angeles Times, September 7, 2008.

For Clint’s familiarity with the character Walt Kowalski, see:

Sydney Morning Herald, June 28, 2014.

For the film J. Edgar and J. Edgar Hoover’s sexuality, see:

Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2011.

New York Times, November 6, 2011.

Thirty

For Dina wanting to create a reality TV series, see:

Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 2012.

Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2012.

For the end of Clint’s marriage to Dina and her time in rehab, see:

People, September 9, 2013.

For Clint’s admiration of Mitt Romney, see:

Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2011.

For Clint’s account of his Republican National Convention speech, see:

Carmel Pine Cone, September 7, 2012.

For Republican damage control after Clint’s speech, see:

Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2012.

New York Times, September 1, 2012.

For Clint calling anyone who asks him to make a political speech “dumb,” see:

New York Daily News, September 18, 2012.

Thirty-One

For Clint scorning Hollywood for rewriting Jersey Boys, see:

Variety, June 10, 2014.

For casting the actual heroes of The 15:17 to Paris as themselves, see:

New York Times, February 7, 2018.

Thirty-Two

For Alison Eastwood agreeing to appear in The Mule, see:

Variety, December 13, 2008.

For Clint not evacuating Warner Bros. lot during nearby wildfire, see:

Ellen DeGeneres Show, December 9, 2019.

For the horse wrangler’s concerns for Clint during shoot of Cry Macho, see:

Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2021.

For David Zaslav’s admonishing his executives for green-lighting Cry Macho, see:

IndieWire, May 20, 2022.

CODA

For Clint on Capra, see:

Sydney Morning Herald, June 28, 2014.

Index

A specific form of pagination for this digital edition has been developed to match the print edition from which the index was created. If the application you are reading this on supports this feature, the page references noted in this index should align. At this time, however, not all digital devices support this functionality. Therefore, we encourage you to please use your device’s search capabilities to locate a specific entry.

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem, 203

abortion, 171, 231–32, 237, 350

About a Boy, 493

Abrams, Jonathan, 488, 493

Absolute Power, 377–79, 389

Academy Awards (Oscars), xiv, xix, 96, 170, 323, 346, 474

American Sniper, 470

The Beguiled, 147

Bird, 313

The Bridges of Madison County, 365

Clint’s presentation at 45th, 186–88

Flags of Our Fathers, 424, 431

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 208–9

Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, 361–62

Juror #2, 493–94

Million Dollar Baby, 416–18, 420

Mystic River, 407–9

The Outlaw Josey Wales, 215

Unforgiven, 341, 342–44

acting classes, 28, 34–36

Adams, Amy, 454–55, 458

Adam’s apple, 35, 56

Addams, Charles, 159

Addams Family Values, 351

Addicted to Love, 358n

Adler, Renata, 115

Adventures of Ellery Queen, The, 60

African Queen, The, 317, 318, 322

airplane crash of 1951, 22–24

Alaska Gold Rush, 5

Albarn, Damon, 397

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, 225–27

Alda, Alan, 417n

Aldrich, Robert, 77

Alexander, Jane, 371

Alexander, Kent, 482

Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, 462

Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 56n

Allen, Bud, 280–81, 282, 290

Allen in Movieland, 38n

Allen, Paul, 363

Allen, Steve, 38n

Allen, Woody, 272, 377, 441

All My Sons, 38

All-Star Party for Clint Eastwood, 295

Altman, Robert, 196, 342, 343, 390

Amazing Stories, 277–78

Amblin Entertainment, 353, 355

Ambush at Cimarron Pass, 48–50, 48n, 54, 55, 56, 57n, 60, 73, 112

American Film Institute, 193n, 371, 491

American Graffiti, 180

American Hustle, 465, 469n

American Sniper, 465–70, 491

Anderson, Frank, 23–24, 24n

Anderson, Gordon, 207–8, 212, 218, 246–47, 279, 310, 314–16, 320, 324

Anderson, John, 253

Anderson, Paul Thomas, 180n

Andrews, Julie, 135, 263–64

Anka, Paul, 284n

Ansen, David, 241, 257–58, 351, 412, 441

Any Which Way You Can, 240, 244–45, 248, 253

Apocalypse Now, 221

Architectural Digest, 296, 437

Arkin, Alan, 164n, 208–9

Armageddon, 393

Army, U.S., 19–22, 25–26

Arnold, Gary, 244, 258

Arnold, Jack, 33, 34

Aryan Nations, 360

Asner, Ed, 283–84

Atlantic Records, 155

August, Bille, 303

Aviator, The, 417, 418

Away All Boats!, 37

Babenco, Héctor, 272

Bachelorette, The, 455n

Back to the Future, 276, 396

Bacon, James, 105

Bacon, Kevin, 400, 401, 402, 404, 471n

Baiano, Solly, 32

Baird, Sharon, 279

Baker, Chet, 13, 35n

Baker City, 130–32

Baldacci, David, 377–78

Baldessari, John, 449

Baldwin, Alec, 409n

Baldwin, James, 171

Bale, Christian, 457

“Ballad of Ira Hayes, The” (song), 428n

Ball, Lucille, 295, 331

Ball, Marcia, 403

Balsam, Martin, 61

Band of Brothers, 419, 425

Banner, Jill, 128

Barla, Marco, 343

Barris, George, 94n

Barron, Kenny, 377

“Bar Room Buddies” (song), 239, 240

Barrymore, Lionel, 121

Bartold, Norman, 22

Barton, Dee, 154, 179, 184

Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 393

Bates, Kathy, 483–84

Battlecreek, 479

Battle of Iwo Jima, 294, 419–32, 451, 470

Battle of San Pietro, The, 22n, 318

Bay, Michael, 393

Beach, Adam, 422–23, 428

Beastie Boys, the, 396

Beatty, Warren, 342, 371

Beaver Lake, 26

Becker, Walter, 174

Beck, Marilyn, 369

Bedtime for Bonzo, 222

“Beers to You” (song), 240

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, 484–85

Begley, Ed, 119

Beguiled, The (Cullinan), 146

Beguiled, The (movie), 146–47, 153, 158–60, 164, 195, 253, 268, 269, 272n

Beiderbecke, Bix, 297

Bélanger, Yves, 479, 485–86, 492

Bell, Jamie, 422–23

Bello, Maria, 362

Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 131–32

Bening, Annette, 417

Benjamin, Paul, 227, 230

Benjamin, Richard, 265

Bennett, Tony, 432

Benson, Sheila, 252

Berendt, John, 381, 382

Beresford, Bruce, 355

Bergen, Candice, 353

Berg, Peter, 471n

Bernhardt, Jeanne, 7, 10, 17, 101, 289

Bernhardt, William, 101

Berry, Chuck, 393

Berti, Jade, 454

Bertolucci, Bernardo, 196

Bethlehem Steel, 9

Beverly Glen Boulevard, 62

Beverly Hills, 62, 64

Beverly Hills Cop, 270

Beverly Hills Hotel, 139

Bicycle Thief, The, 76, 96

Big Brass Ring, The, 215n

Bigelow, Kathryn, 470

Bigg Surr, Ltd., 113–14

Big Lebowski, The, 70n

Big Valley, The, 22

Billboard, 64, 70, 239, 240

Bird, 181n, 297, 299–304, 306–9, 312–13, 321, 323, 405, 451

birth of Clint, 6

Bitter Rice, 94

Black, Dustin Lance, 448–51

Black Panther Party, 132

Blackwell, Dewayne, 253

Black Whip, The, 48

Black Windmill, The, 183

Blade Runner, 329

Blake, Robert, 66, 95

Blood Work, 397–98, 399

Blossom, Roberts, 230

Blue Note 78s, 12

Blues Brothers, 59

Blues, The, 402–3

Blyskal, Dorothy, 474–75

Body Brokers, The (Eaton), 113

Boeing Company, 19

Boetticher, Budd, 432

Bogart, Humphrey, 81, 121, 319

Bogdanovich, Peter, 272

Bohemian Grove, 376

Bolognini, Mauro, 94n

Bonanza, 73, 95n

Bonjour Tristesse, 131

Bonnie and Clyde, 85, 110n, 350

Boom!, 125

Boone, Pat, 69

Borgnine, Ernest, 139

Boston Globe, 425, 450

Boyd, Jerry, 410

Boys Don’t Cry, 414

Bradford, Jesse, 422–23

Bradley, James, 419

Bradley, John “Doc,” 419, 420, 422–23, 428n

Brady Bill, 171, 171n

Braga, Sonia, 325, 371

Brammer, Robert, 396

Brando, Marlon, 31, 36–37, 117, 188, 217, 221

Brautigan, Richard, 221

Breathless, 131–32

Breezy, 179–81, 192–93, 209, 264n

Brenner, Marie, 482

Brest, Martin, 343

Brezhnev, Leonid, 172

Brickman, Marshall, 464

Bridges, Beau, 190

Bridges, Jeff, 190–92, 199–200

Bridges, Lloyd, 190

Bridges of Madison County, The, 353–57, 363–67, 369, 376

Brinegar, Paul, 57–58, 57n, 69, 185

British Academy of Film and Television Arts, 435

British Film Institute, 120, 343

Brody, Richard, 492

Broka (yacht), 273

Brolin, James, 212, 220, 290

Brolin, Jane, 212, 232, 290, 310–12, 316

Bronco Billy (movie), 231, 238–42, 244, 254, 257, 308, 407

Bronco Billy (musical), 242n

Bronson, Charles, 66, 79, 92, 95, 140

Brooks, Walter R., 8, 68n

Brosnan, Pierce, 485

Brown, Jerry, 403

Brown, Roger, 432

Brown, Willie, 302n

Brubeck, Dave, 13, 403, 432

Bruce, John Campbell, 226

Buchanan, Jessica, 474

Bujold, Genevieve, 263, 269

Bullets Don’t Argue, 79

Bullitt, 156, 305

Bullock, Sandra, 411

Bumstead, Henry, 178–79, 331–32, 333, 339, 401, 407, 414, 418, 422

Bunim/Murray Productions, 454

Burnett, Charles, 403

“Burning Bridges” (song), 148n

Burr, Ty, 425, 450

Burton, Richard, 122–25, 123n, 145, 171n, 251, 303

Where Eagles Dare, 122–25, 136–37, 139, 151

Burton, Tim, 221

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 221

Bush, George H. W., 302, 376

Bush, Kate, 450n

Bus Stop, 126

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 199

Butler, Michael, 266

Byrnes, Edd, 362

Cabaret, 188

Cahiers du cinéma, 120

Cain, Dean, 184n

Caine, Michael, 139, 183

Calhoun, Rory, 73, 77

California Film Commission, 298, 436

California Gold Rush, 3, 4, 45, 126

California Hall of Fame, 436

California State Parks and Recreation Commission, 395, 436

California Teachers Association, 454

Camelot, 126

Cameron, James, 369

Cameron, Rod, 79

Campbell, Glen, 240

Camp Pendleton, 47–48, 293

Cañada Woods North, 389, 395

Canby, Vincent, 134, 136–37, 137n, 140, 147–48, 159–60, 219, 229, 252, 258, 272, 274, 294, 335, 347

Cannes Film Festival, 158, 320, 353, 431, 439

Bird, 303–4

Changeling, 439, 440, 441

Mystic River, 404

Pale Rider, 271–73

Unforgiven, 475

Capote, Truman, 115

Capra, Frank, 178n, 238, 241, 488

Captain Phillips, 482

Carabatsos, James, 292

Cardinale, Claudia, 124, 137, 147

Carelli, Joann, 191

Carfagno, Edward, 264, 278

Cariou, Len, 422–23

Carley, Christopher, 444

Carlile, Clancy, 248–49

Carmel-by-the-Sea, xx, 99–101, 149, 173–74, 225, 280–83, 383–84, 389

Clint’s first visit, 25

Clint’s mayoral campaign of 1986, 284–90

Clint’s mayoralty, 289–90, 295–96, 298–99, 301–2

Carmel Mission, 299

Carmel Pine Cone, 175, 285, 288, 296, 302, 462

Carmel Youth Center, 295

Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, 376–77, 403

Caron, Leslie, 124

Carradine, David, 220

Carradine, Robert, 220

Carr, David, 430

Carrey, Jim, 305, 371

Carricart, Robert, 57n

Carter, Asa, 206–7, 210

Carter, James, 377

Casablanca, 121, 386

Cash, Johnny, 349, 428n

Casper, 363, 364

Cassavetes, John, 66, 272

Cassidy, Jack, 203

Castle Rock, 340–41, 378

Castro, Tony, 360–61

Cattle Empire, 57, 57n

Caviezel, Jim, 362

CBS, 67–68, 204, 220, 277n, 295

Rawhide, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58, 61, 67, 68, 89, 90, 95

Cecil B. DeMille Award, 301n

Celluloid Closet, The (Russo), 199n

Cerruti, Nino, 342, 370

Chamberlain, Wilt, 64, 139

Chandler, Jeff, 29

Changeling, 437–42, 438n, 442n, 451, 492

Chang, Justin, 486

Channing, Carol, 43

Chaplin, Charlie, 421

Chapman, Kevin, 406

charisma, 16, 60

Charles III, 284

Charles, Ray, 240

Charley Varrick, 182–83

Chavez, Cesar, 436n

Chayefsky, Paddy, 130

Cheadle, Don, 417n

Checker, Chubby, 69

Che Guevara, 237

Cher, 171n, 224–25, 355

Chernus, Sonia, 54–55, 68, 152–53, 206, 329–30

Chicago Film Critics Association, 416, 431

Chicago Sun-Times, 134, 147, 163, 214, 229, 244, 253, 267, 274, 347, 385, 392, 398, 412, 426, 446

Chicago Tribune, 141, 163, 169, 192, 208, 227, 229, 242, 279–80, 294, 306, 334, 335, 390, 468, 476, 481

childhood of Clint, 6–17

Chinatown, 318

Chirac, Jacques, 435

Chow, Eva, 449

Christian Science Monitor, 115, 287

Chrysler Corporation, 452–53, 461

Church, Thomas Haden, 417n

Churchill, Winston, 303

Cimino, Michael, 182, 200n, 333, 347n

Heaven’s Gate, 192n, 200n, 347n

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 190–92, 192n, 199–200

City Heat, 263–65, 266, 270, 271, 276

Claremont Country Club, 25

Clarke, Warren, 252

Clark, Matt, 215

Clarkson, Patricia, 305

“Claudia’s Theme” (song), 339

Cleopatra, 81, 123

Clift, Montgomery, 36, 57

“Clint Eastwood” (song), 397

Clint Eastwood: A Biography (Schickel), xx–xxi, 41, 256n, 272, 314n, 332, 363, 371–72, 373n, 390

Clint Eastwood Cultural Leadership Award, 491

Clint Eastwood: Sexual Cowboy (Thompson), xx, 371n

Clint Eastwood Youth Program, 299

Clint Fucking Eastwood (Bouquet), xx, 371n

Clinton, Bill, 341, 378, 393

Clint: The Life and Legend (McGilligan), xx–xxi, 26, 298, 334, 390–91

Clockwork Orange, A, 252

Coachella Festival, 450n

Coburn, James, 79

Cocoon, 276, 392

Cold Mountain, 408, 409n

Cold War, 247–48, 255, 260

Cole, Gary, 341

Collette, Toni, 488, 493

Collins, Clifton, Jr., 479

Colossus of Rhodes, The, 77

Coming to America, 304

Como, Perry, 84, 349

Connelly, Michael, 397–98

Connery, Sean, 109

Connors, Mike, 64

Container Corporation of America, 17

Coogan’s Bluff, 119–20, 122–23, 134–36, 156

Cooke, Sam, 69

Cooper, Bradley, 465–67, 469–70, 469n, 479, 482

Cooper, Gary, 31, 63n, 84, 97, 133, 241

Copelan, Jodie, 48, 49

Coppola, Francis Ford, 221, 329, 334n

Coppola, Sofia, 159n

Corley, Annie, 366

Corliss, Richard, 335, 467–68

Cosmopolitan, 138, 279

Costa-Gavras, 147

Costner, Kevin, 297

Dances with Wolves, 342, 346, 347n

In the Line of Fire, 345–49, 351–52

Cotet, Danielle, 128

COVID-19 pandemic, 485–86

“Cowboy Wedding Song” (song), 69

Cox, Joel, 278, 343, 357, 407, 417

Crash, 413

Creature from the Black Lagoon, 33

Crescent Heights Boulevard, 247, 315, 324

Crist, Judith, 106

Cromwell, James, 391–92

Cronenberg, David, 269

Cronkite, Walter, 376

Crosby, Bing, 25, 99, 225

Crowther, Bosley, 101–2, 106–7, 109, 115

Cruise, Tom, 293–94, 457

Crying Game, The, 341, 342, 343

Cry Macho, 485–87, 492

Crystal, Billy, 343, 408

Cullinan, Thomas, 146

Curb, Mike, 148n

Curtis, Tony, 29, 428n

Cusack, John, 381–82, 432

Daktari, 95

Daley, Robert, 113–14, 129, 175, 176, 180, 190–91, 192, 206, 211, 248, 279, 298

Dallamano, Massimo, 107, 110

Damon, Matt, 445–48

Dances with Wolves, 342, 346, 347n

D’Angelo, Beverly, 224

Dangerfield, Rodney, 363

Daniels, Jeff, 397–98

Dante, Joe, 277n

Dargis, Manohla, 382, 425, 472, 492

Das Boot, 341

David, Keith, 300

Davis, Ben, 485–86

Davis, Bette, 121

Davis, Gray, 395

Davis, Judy, 378

Davis, Miles, 72

Davis, Sammy, Jr., 63, 63n, 139, 295

Day After Trinity, The, 329

Day, Doris, 95n, 284n

Dead Kennedys, 59

Dead Man Walking, 365n

Dead Pool, The, 303–5

Dean, James, 36

Death Valley Days, 45

Deauville American Film Festival, 279

Deer Hunter, The, 192n, 200n

de France, Cécile, 446, 448

DeGeneres, Ellen, 408n

De Laurentiis, Dino, 94

Del Monte Forest, 395, 457

del Toro, Benicio, 409

Denby, David, 404, 468

Dench, Judi, 449

Deneuve, Catherine, 128, 353, 441

De Niro, Robert, 304, 414

Denis, Claire, 303

De Palma, Brian, 196, 258

Departed, The, 425, 463

Depp, Johnny, 409n, 417n

Dern, Bruce, 66, 95, 119, 133n

Dern, Laura, 346

De Sica, Vittorio, 76, 94, 96–97, 105, 123, 137n, 179

Desperados Are in Town, The, 48

d’Estaing, Valéry Giscard, 213

Deutch, Zoey, 488

Devane, William, 391–92

Devil’s Hand, The, 150

DeVito, Danny, 277n

Diana, Princess of Wales, 284, 284n

DiCaprio, Leonardo, 417n, 449–50, 457, 482

diet, 42, 149, 243, 488–89

Dirty Harry, xviii–xix, 59n, 164–71, 173, 205, 216, 257, 258, 267, 396. See also specific sequels

background, 155–57

ideal for sequel, 181–82

production, 160–61

release, 164–68

revenues, 168, 258

reviews, 167–68

Discovery Inc., 486–87

Disneyland Los Angeles, 64

Disneyland Paris, 330n

Disney, Roy, 353

Disney, Walt, 436n

Dixieland, 12, 13

Dobrofsky, Neal, 231

“Doe Eyes” (song), 357

Dolnick, Sam, 478

Domingo, Placido, 393

Domino, Fats, 240

Donahue, Troy, 61

Donner, Richard, 221

Donovan, Jeffrey, 441

Doonesbury (comic), 287

Dossier Films, 494

Double Trouble, 150

Douglas A-1 Skyraider crash of 1951, 22–24

Douglas, Kirk, 117, 296–97

“Dove She Is a Pretty Bird” (song), 159n

“Do [ya] feel lucky?,” 194, 194n, 216n, 258n, 362

DreamWorks, 419, 421, 424n, 445–46

Duel, 164n

Duel of the Titans, 77

Duffield, George C., 57

Dunst, Kirsten, 159n

Duryea, Dan, 61

Duvall, Robert, 176–77, 362

Dyer, Geoff, 137

Dysart, Richard, 266

Eagle Cap Wilderness, 130–32

Earhart, Amelia, 436n

Eastwood, Alison, 333, 371, 377, 380–81, 380n, 480

acting career of, 262, 263, 267, 378, 380–81, 479, 480, 481

birth and early life of, 173, 173n, 222, 251, 311, 335

Eastwood, Asa B., 4

Eastwood, Burr, 4

Eastwood, Clinton, Sr., 4, 5–11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 26, 30, 62, 101

death of, 149–50

Eastwood, Dina. See Ruiz, Dina

Eastwood, Francesca, 450n, 453n, 479–80, 480n, 491

acting career of, 362–63, 385, 488

birth and early life of, 349, 361, 362–63, 367, 368–69, 380, 384, 396

Mrs. Eastwood & Company, 454, 455

Eastwood, Graylen Spencer, 380, 479

Eastwood, Jeanne. See Bernhardt, Jeanne

Eastwood, Jessie Anderson, 4, 5, 9

Eastwood, Kathryn Ann, 291, 316, 370, 380, 479–80

Eastwood, Kimber Lynn, 89, 126, 378, 380, 479–80

Eastwood, Kyle Clinton, 249, 253, 310–11, 316, 316n, 320, 333, 380, 479

acting career of, 249, 254

birth and early life of, 126, 127, 128, 139, 149, 160, 161, 222, 251

music career of, 249, 310, 371, 377, 380, 480, 491

Eastwood, Laurie. See Murray, Laurie Alison

Eastwood, Margaret Neville Johnson “Maggie”

children and family life, 126, 128, 139, 149, 164, 173–74, 212, 245–46. See also specific children

Clint’s mayoralty, 290

Clint’s movie career, 48, 49–50, 58–59, 62, 74–75, 92, 160, 186

divorce from Clint, 231, 245–46, 251, 265–66

marriage and relationship with Clint, 27, 40–42, 71–72, 89, 100, 126, 128, 175–76, 223–24, 225, 391

Eastwood, Margret Ruth, 384n

Clint’s airplane crash, 24

Clint’s movie career, 289, 342–43, 344, 371, 379

death of, 424–25

marriage and family life, 5–11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 26

marriage to John Wood, 189, 424–25

move to Carmel, 101

Eastwood, Morgan Colette, 453, 479–80, 490, 491

birth and early life of, 370, 380, 383–84, 415, 416

Mrs. Eastwood & Company, 454, 455, 456

Eastwood Scoring Stage, 386, 403

Eastwood, Scott, 456, 466n, 479–80

acting career of, 422n, 440n, 444

birth and early life of, 291, 316, 370, 380

“Eastwood Symphonic” (song), 491

Eastwood, Titan Wraith, 480, 480n, 491

Eaton, Robert P., 113

Ebert, Roger, 134, 140, 147, 163, 168, 202, 214, 217, 229, 244, 253, 267, 270, 272, 274, 304, 317, 323, 335, 347, 350, 385, 392, 398, 412, 426, 446

Eckhart, Aaron, 472–73

Edelstein, David, 447–48

Eder, Richard, 213

Edge of Night, The, 309–10

education of Clint, 7, 9, 11–13, 14–15, 17, 27

Education of Little Tree, The (Carter), 206–7, 210

Edwards, Blake, 263–64

Eiger Sanction, The, 198–99, 200–203, 221, 352

El Cid, 81

Elephant, 404n

Elephant Man, The, 252, 278

Elice, Rick, 464

Enforcer, The, 216–17, 226, 257, 357

Entertainment Weekly, 335, 404, 442, 468, 483

Escapade in Japan, 45–46

Escape from Alcatraz, 225–27, 229–31, 269, 351, 425, 444n

E.T., 252, 278

Evans, Nicholas, 383n

Everly, Phil, 224, 225

Every Which Way But Loose, 222–23, 224–25, 227–29, 237, 242, 253

Fahey, Jeff, 311, 317

Fairbanks, Douglas, 421

Family Plot, 212

Fanning, Elle, 159n

Fargo, George, 47, 162

Fargo, James, 216, 222–23, 240, 257

Farrell, Colin, 159n

Fat City, 190

Favor, Gil, 59, 60, 61, 65, 79, 80, 89–90, 92, 95

Favreau, Jon, 463–64

Feldstein, Beanie, 480

Feldstein, Jordan, 480

Ferdin, Pamelyn, 158–59, 159n

Ferrari, 94, 94n, 139, 220

Ferrer, José, 277n

Ferris, Richard, 394–95

Fielding, Jerry, 215

15:17 to Paris, The, 474–76, 479, 483

Figgis, Mike, 403

Film Society of Lincoln Center, 371

Fincher, David, 405

Fink, Harry Julian, 156, 156n

Fink, Rita, 156, 156n

firearms regulations, xvi, 171, 171n, 237

Firefox, 247–48, 248n, 249, 251–52, 255, 277, 393

Firm, The, 349

“First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, The” (song), 154–55

First Traveling Saleslady, The, 43–44, 43n

Fischer, Bruce M., 230

Fishburne, Laurence, 400, 402, 406–7, 479

Fisher, Erica, 456

Fisher, Frances

death of Sondra, 477

fire of 2001, 396

movie career of, 309–10, 350, 396; The Stars Fell on Henrietta, 362–63; True Crime, 385, 386; Unforgiven, 331–34, 339, 342–43

relationship and children with Clint, 349–50, 361, 362, 367–70, 380

Fisher, Scott, 456, 473

Fistful of Dollars, A, xv, 79–88, 90–93, 115, 118, 136

casting, 73–75, 79–81

Clint’s costume, 80–81

European release, 87–88

financing, 78–79

plot and themes, 78–79, 83–84, 107–9

production, xiii, 81–86

reviews, 101–2, 106, 109

screenings, 90–91

U.S. release, 104–7

Yojimbo and legal dispute, 74, 77, 78, 86–87, 87n, 92, 97, 106, 107

Flack, Roberta, 154–55

Flags of Our Fathers, 419–31, 449

Flaming Star, 120

Fleischer, Ruben, 478

Fleming, Eric, 55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 69, 79, 80, 90, 95, 95n

Floyd, Raymond, 99, 99n

Flynn, Errol, 121

Folsom State Prison, 226

Fonda, Henry, 79, 92, 171n, 371

Fonda, Jane, 163, 262–63, 441

Fonda, Peter, 164n

For a Few Dollars More, 91–94, 96–97, 104, 109–11, 115

“For All We Know” (song), 69

Ford, Gerald, 213

Ford, Harrison, 135, 268

Ford, John, 14, 61, 120, 318, 371

Forman, Miloš, 272, 418

Fort Bragg, 292–93

Fort Ord, 19–22, 24, 25–26, 29, 41, 292, 318

“For You, For Me, For Evermore” (song), 69

Fox, Michael J., 396

Foxx, Jamie, 417, 417n

Francis in the Navy, 34–35, 222

Francis Joins the WACs, 29, 29n

Fraser, Dennis, 125

Freddy the Pig, 8, 68n

Freeman, Leonard, 118

Freeman, Morgan, 394, 491, 494

Invictus, 445, 446–47

Million Dollar Baby, 411, 414, 417

Unforgiven, 331, 339, 340

French Connection, The, 168, 177

Frizzell, David, 253

Fugitive, The, 22, 284n, 349

Gable, Clark, 13, 113

Gaddie, Clinton Eastwood, 380

Gagnon, Rene, 422–23, 423n, 428n

Gambler, the Girl and the Gunslinger, The, 183–84, 184n

Garcia, Andy, 479

Garland, Judy, 457

Garner, Erroll, 154–55

Garner, James, 56, 63, 64, 111, 139, 220, 296, 391–93

Garrett, Snuff, 224–25, 239–40, 240n

Gary, Romain, 132

Gauntlet, The, 217–19, 266, 325

Gehry, Frank, 436n

George, Chief Dan, 213, 214–15

“Get Yourself Another Fool” (song), 69

Ghost Diver, 48

G.I. Bill, 22, 26

Gibson, Mel, 363

Glass Bottom Boat, The, 95n

Glass Key, The (Hammett), 74

Gleiberman, Owen, 335

Glenn, Scott, 378

Globe, The, 360–61

Glover, Danny, 227, 445

Godard, Jean-Luc, 120, 131–32, 272

Godfather, The, 188, 409–10, 418

Gold, Bill, 168n

Golden Globes, 153, 163, 193, 209, 231, 313, 342, 407, 408, 416, 430, 431, 450, 494

Cecil B. DeMille Award, 301n

Goldfinger, 96

Goldman, William, 378

Goodall, Jane, 490

Goodbye Girl, The, 219

Goodman, Benny, 38n, 377

Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The, 97–103, 114–18, 127, 401, 467

Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly, The (Locke), 477

Gordon, Ruth, 209n, 224

Gorey, Edward, 158

Gorillaz, 397

Governors Ball, 419, 424

Grace Is Gone, 432

Grady, Timothy, 286

Grand Prix, 153

Grant, Cary, 295, 350n, 402

Grant, Hank, 67

Gran Torino, 439–40, 442–45, 466n, 468–69, 477–78

Grapes of Wrath, The, 7, 14

Grazer, Brian, 437–38, 448

Great Depression, 6, 11, 148

Great Escape, The, 136, 176

Great Gatsby, The, 221

Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, The, 209

Great Recession, 437

Great, The, 489

Greenblatt, Leah, 483

Green, David Gordon, 452–53

Greene, Gael, 128, 138

Green Flag of Allah, The, 77

Greengrass, Paul, 482

Green, Jack, 300, 301, 332, 339, 343, 366, 414

Greenspun, Roger, 147, 148, 163, 168, 176–77

Greenstreet, Sydney, 121

Grier, Pam, 203n

Griffin, Merv, 175, 198, 215, 243, 277, 284n, 295, 319

Gritz, James Gordon “Bo,” 255–57, 256n

Grizzard, George, 422–23

Gunfight at Red Sands, 78–79

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 176

gun regulations, xvi, 171, 171n, 237

Gunsmoke, 50, 53, 54–55, 56n, 62

Guns N’ Roses, 305

Guns of Navarone, The, 122

Haber, Joyce, 131, 132

Hacienda Este Madera, 369–70, 454, 456–57n

Hackman, Gene, 135, 220, 331, 339, 340, 342, 343, 378

Hader, Bill, 461

Haggard, Merle, 239, 240

Haggis, Paul, 410, 413, 419–21

Hakin, Dennis, 231

Hall, Jason, 465

Hamilton, LisaGay, 384–85

Hamlet, 300n

Hammer, Armie, 449, 450, 451

Hammett, Dashiell, 74

Hamm, Jon, 483–84

Hammond, Pete, 491

Hancock, John Lee, 345, 352, 381

Hang ’Em High, 113–14, 118–19, 127, 132–34, 135n, 182, 184, 189, 338

Hankin, Larry, 230

Hanks, Tom, 439, 471–73

Harden, Marcia Gay, 391–92, 400, 406, 408, 409

Harmon, Frank, 180, 193

Harner, Jason Butler, 441

Harris, Ed, 378

Harris, Jo Ann, 128, 147, 159

Harris, Kamala, 302n

Harrison, Jim, 297

Harrison, Richard, 79

Harris, Richard, 331–32, 339, 340

Hartman, Elizabeth, 147, 159

Hartman, Johnny, 357, 376

Hasselhoff, David, 101

Hateful Eight, The, 431n

Hauser, Paul Walter, 483–84

Have Gun—Will Travel, 53, 54, 62

Hawaii, 189, 223, 265, 370, 380, 420

Hawke, Ethan, 300n

Hawks, Howard, 13–14, 57, 120, 261, 469

horses, 16, 16n, 63n

Hawthorne, Nigel, 252

Hayes, Ira, 419, 422–23, 423n, 427–28, 428n

Hayford, Kelsey, 350, 480

Haysbert, Dennis, 378, 445

Hearn, George, 422–23

Hearst, Patty, 216, 303

Heartbreak Ridge, 292–94

Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The, 208–9

Heaven’s Gate, 192n, 200n, 347n

Heims, Jo, 150, 151, 152–53, 156, 179–80

Helgeland, Brian, 397–98, 399, 401

Hell Is for Heroes, 120

Hellman, Monte, 84n

Hell on Devil’s Island, 48

Hendrix, Jimi, 237

Hepburn, Audrey, 350n

Hepburn, Katharine, 319

Her, Ahney, 444

Hereafter, 446, 447–48, 471

Heston, Charlton, 186–88, 284, 342–43

Hickey, John Benjamin, 422–23

High Noon, 92, 178, 190, 275, 276

High Plains Drifter, 177–79, 180, 181n, 183–86, 214, 266, 339, 340, 341n, 488

“High Plains Drifter” (song), 396

Highway Patrol, 42–43

Hill, Bernard, 384–85

Hill, Chuck, 22

Hill, George Roy, 198

Hill, Jonah, 480, 482

Hines, Gregory, 394

Hingle, Pat, 119

Hirshan, Lenny, 120, 122, 145, 151, 179, 423

His Girl Friday, 402

Hitchcock, Alfred, 38, 155, 212, 214, 262, 267, 317, 318, 371

Hoffman, Dustin, 418

Hoffman, Philip Seymour, 394

Hog’s Breath Inn, 174–75, 280, 282, 290, 302

Holbrook, Hal, 194

Holden, William, 180–81, 192, 193, 354

Hollywood, 28–29, 321–22

Hollywood Reporter, 67, 450, 477, 481

Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, 271n

Hombre, 176

Honkytonk Man, 248–49, 252–54, 277, 308

Hooper, Tobe, 277n

Hoover, Herbert, 376

Hoover, J. Edgar, 132, 448–51

Hoover, Mike, 200–201, 201–2, 352–53

Hopkins, Linda, 253, 254

Hopper, Dennis, 119, 313, 394

Hopper, Hedda, 37, 105

Hopper, Jerry, 38

Hornaday, Ann, 442, 472

Horn, Alan, 416, 421

horses, 16, 16n, 63

Horse Whisperer, The, 383n

Hoult, Nicholas, 488–89, 493

Hounsou, Djimon, 409

Howard, Ron, 437–38

Howards End, 341, 342, 343

How the West Was Won, 102

Hudson, Rock, 29, 38, 139, 188

Huffman, Phyllis, 299–300, 400, 411, 422, 423–24

Hughes, Howard, 57, 113, 417

Hunter, Ross, 129, 151

Hunter, Stephen, 385

Hunter, Tab, 46

Hurt Locker, The, 470

Hussey, Olivia, 209n

Huston, Anjelica, 317n, 318, 355, 397–98, 418

Huston, John, 22n, 182, 317–19, 319n, 321–22

Hutton, Brian, 124–25, 128–29, 138–39, 185

Hutton, Timothy, 277n

Hyams, Joe, 205, 241, 343

Iceman Cometh, The, 190

Ice Station Zebra, 122

Ihara, Tsuyoshi, 424, 429

Imperative Entertainment, 478

Impulse, 311, 314–15, 317, 323–24

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 317

Infante, Guillermo Cabrera, 353

“In the Jailhouse Now” (song), 253

In the Line of Fire, 340–41, 345–49, 361, 378

“Into the Sunset” (song), 69n

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 120

Invictus, 445, 446–47, 453

Iron Maiden, 137

Irwin, Hale, 280

Ishiguro, Kazuo, 353

“I Talk to the Trees” (song), 141, 141n

Ivory, James, 343

Jackson, Peter, 409

Jack Valenti Humanitarian Award, 435

James Bond, 81, 96, 97, 107n, 109, 194, 221–22, 252

Jameson, Joyce, 215

Janssen, David, 22, 30, 34, 46, 64

jazz music, xvii, 12–14, 18–19, 22, 26, 54, 69, 296–301, 299–303, 323, 376–77, 432

J. Edgar, 448–51

Jeremiah Johnson, 182

Jerry Maguire, 486

Jersey Boys, 463–64, 465, 467, 480

Joe Kidd, 176–77, 179

John Paul II, Pope, 298–99

Johnson, Albert, 163

Johnson, Ben, 119

Johnson, Beverly, 352

Johnson, Edith, 27

Johnson, Mark, 345

Johnstone, Iain, 390

Jolie, Angelina, 438, 441–42, 442n

Jolly Films, 78–79, 81, 91, 111

Jolly, Pete, 265, 403

Jones, Freddie, 252

Jones, Harmon, 66, 66n

Jones, Kitty, 72

Jones, L. Q., 119

Jones, Paula, 378

Jones, Tommy Lee, 391–93, 394

Juan Carlos I of Spain, 299

Judge, The, 478

Julia, Raul, 325

Junior, 358–59

Jurassic Park, 349, 355

Juror #2, xx, 488–89, 491–94

Kael, Pauline, 141, 168–69, 195–97, 228n, 249, 272, 305, 306, 404, 468

Kahn, Madeline, 264n

Kamp, Irene, 146

Kastner, Elliott, 124

Kauffmann, Stanley, 335, 404

Kaufman, Philip, 209–13

Keach, Stacy, 362

Keaton, Michael, 400

Kehr, Dave, 272, 279–80, 294, 306, 335

Keitel, Harvey, 278

Keith, Toby, 479

Kelly, Gene, 113

Kelly’s Heroes, 128–29, 139–40, 147–48, 148n, 394

Kempley, Rita, 392

Kennedy Center Honors, 393–94

Kennedy, George, 199

Kennedy, John F., 303, 340, 341, 345

Kennedy, Kathleen, 446

Kennedy, Robert F., 171

Kennydale Beach, 18

Kenny, Glenn, 486

Kenton, Stan, 13, 21

Kershner, Irvin, 155

Kesey, Ken, 211

Kiarostami, Abbas, 353

Kidman, Nicole, 159n

Kieslowski, Krzysztof, 303, 353

Killers, The, 120, 121

Kincade, Don, 12, 175

King, Billie Jean, 436n

King, Carole, 225

King, Graham, 463–64

King, Henry, 261

King, Larry, 438

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 171, 449

King of Kings, 81

Kingsley, Ben, 409n

Kline, Kevin, 300n

Klute, 163

Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé, 457

Knowles, David, 201–2

Koch, Howard, 186, 188

Koopmans, Cleo, 490, 491

Koopmans, Tanner, 490

Korean War, 19

Kosslyn, Jack, 35–37, 38, 72, 83, 162, 185, 276

Kral, Irene, 357

Kristofferson, Kris, 148n

Kroft, Steve, 379–80

Kronsberg, Jeremy Joe, 222

KSBW-TV, 367–68

Kubrick, Stanley, 171n, 238–39, 435, 447

Kuribayashi, Tadamichi, 421, 423, 428–29

Kurosawa, Akira, 102, 429, 430

Yojimbo, 74, 77, 78, 86–87, 92, 97, 106, 107

Kusama, Karyn, 410n

Kyle, Chris, 465–70

Lacey, Ronald, 252

Lady Chablis, The, 382, 383

Lady Godiva of Coventry, 33–34

Ladyhawke, 329

La Farge, Peter, 428n

Lafayette Escadrille, 45

LaGravenese, Richard, 354, 355–56, 364, 366–67

Laine, Frankie, 59

Lakeshore Entertainment, 410–11

LaLanne, Jack, 164

Lancaster, Burt, 156, 485

Lane, Anthony, 467

Lange, Jessica, 355

Lang, Fritz, 390

Lang, Jennings, 119–20, 122, 146, 155, 176

Lang, Mike, 265

Lansbury, Angela, 393

Laos, Operation Lazarus, 255–57

Larch, John, 59n, 162

Lasker, Alex, 248n

Last American Hero, The, 190

Last Picture Show, The, 190

Last Samurai, The, 409, 423–24

Laub, Paul, 286, 287n, 288, 295

Laurel, Stan, 6n

Laurie, Piper, 29

La vampira Indiana, 75–76

Law, Jude, 409n

Lawrence of Arabia, 81

Leaf, Earl, 43–44

League of Women Voters, 287

Leary, Denis, 384–85, 386

Lee, Spike, 431

left-handedness, 11

Legion of Honor, 435, 435n

Lehane, Dennis, 399, 406, 407

Le Mans, 176

Lemmon, Jack, 164n

Lenz, Kay, 180, 181, 192, 193

Leonard, Elmore, 176

Leonard, Irving, 46–47, 56, 74–75, 99, 139, 145, 204

Leone, Sergio, xviii, 73–88, 123, 127, 133, 152, 184, 192, 266, 467

background of, 75–78

For a Few Dollars More, 91–94, 96–97, 104, 109–11

A Fistful of Dollars, 78–88, 90–93, 107–9

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 97–103, 114–18

Once Upon a Time in the West, 118, 275, 304

Leone, Vincenzo (Bob Robertson), 75–76, 86–87, 86n, 88

Lerner, Alan Jay, 126, 130

LeRoy, Mervyn, 77

Letterman, David, 361

Letters from Iwo Jima, 423–24, 426–31

Lever Brothers, 58

Levinson, Barry, 313

Lewis, Geoffrey, 185, 185n, 199, 224

Lewis, Jerry, 47, 63, 101, 154

Lewis, Juliette, 185n

Lhoest, Anita, 72

Libertarianism, xvi, 171, 237, 439–40

Library of Congress, 170n

Licorice Pizza, 180n

Life (magazine), 161

Life Extension (Pearson and Shaw), 250

lifeguarding, 18, 20–22, 26

Lindbergh, Charles, 31–33

Lindfors, Viveca, 65

Linney, Laura, 378, 400, 404, 472

Lippman, Paul, 162, 174–75

Little Big Man, 213

Locke, Sondra, 207–10

background of, 207–8

Clint and Carmel politics, 282–83, 290, 295

death of, 477

movie career of, 208–9, 263–64, 277, 277n; Amazing Stories, 277–78; Bronco Billy, 238–42; The Enforcer, 216–17; Every Which Way But Loose, 224–25; The Gauntlet, 217–19; Impulse, 311, 314–15, 317, 323–24; The Outlaw Josey Wales, 209–12, 213–15; Ratboy, 278–80, 290, 298; Sudden Impact, 257–58

relationship with Clint, 209–10, 212, 218–19, 220, 223–24, 225, 231–33, 246–47, 277–80, 290, 303, 310–16, 319–20, 323–25, 359, 456; lawsuit, 324, 358–59, 372–75, 373n; pregnancies and abortions, 223, 231–32, 315

relationship with Gordon, 207–8, 212, 218, 246–47, 279, 310, 314–16, 320, 324

Stradella Road house, 233, 246–47, 313–16, 319–20, 344

Logan, Joshua, 125–26, 130–32, 140

London, Julie, 66

Long, Richard, 22

Look Back in Anger, 124

Lord of the Rings, The, 408, 409

Loren, Sophia, 91, 137

Lorenz, Rob, 454–55, 457

Lorre, Peter, 66, 121

Los Angeles City College, 22, 26, 27, 30, 39

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 449

Los Angeles Film Critics Association, 341–42, 431

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 100

Los Angeles Olympics (1932), 421

Los Angeles Olympics (1980), 394

Los Angeles Times, 46, 64, 69n, 106, 109, 115, 134, 142, 147, 160, 163, 168, 177, 179n, 183, 192, 194, 196, 200, 202, 208, 213–14, 227, 241, 244, 252, 256, 258, 260, 274, 282, 289, 305, 306, 315, 320, 334, 335, 363–64, 368–69, 372, 373, 378, 382, 398, 426, 447, 455, 468, 475, 481, 486

Losey, Joseph, 125

Love of Life, 153

Lowe, Chad, 416

Lowell, Ronald, 197

Lowry, Rich, 453

Lowther, T. J., 346, 351, 352

Lubin, Arthur, 29–34, 37, 39, 43–44, 43n, 45, 54, 56, 67–68

Lucas, George, 164n, 361–62, 391–92

Lumenick, Lou, 446–47

Lumet, Sidney, 313, 405, 418, 484–85

Lynch, David, 320

McCarthy, Todd, 335, 364, 378, 392, 412, 422, 426, 450, 480–81

McCloud, 135n

McCullers, Carson, 208

McDermott, Dylan, 341

McGee, Vonetta, 203

McGilligan, Patrick, xx–xxi, 26, 298, 334, 390–91

McGoohan, Patrick, 229

McGraw, Charles, 119

McKean, Michael, 384–85, 386

Mackenna’s Gold, 118, 118n

MacLaine, Shirley, 137–38, 145, 169, 171n, 199

McLaren, George, 446

McLaughlin, Stacy, 312, 312n

MacLean, Alistair, 122–23

McPherson, Charles, 308

McQueen, Steve, 56n, 111, 156, 176, 217–18, 220, 221, 396

McShann, Jay, 377, 403

Made in U.S.A., 120

Madigan, 120

Mad Magazine, 118

Mad Men, 428n

Maggi Productions, 64

Magnificent Seven, The, 102, 176

Magnificent Stranger, The, 73, 74, 111

Magnum Force, 181–83, 189–90, 193–95

Maguire, Jeff, 340–41

Maguire, Tobey, 417

Mahoney, John, 341

Mailer, Norman, 44–45, 48n, 259–60

“Make my day,” 258, 265, 271, 285, 460

Malden, Karl, 36

Malick, Terrence, 156, 447

Malkin, Michelle, 453

Malkovich, John, 341, 347, 348, 438, 441–42

Malpaso Company, 113–14, 118, 129, 176, 177, 200, 204–5, 215, 222, 248, 261, 271–72, 277, 298, 312, 323, 362. See also specific movies

Malpaso Records, 357

Maltz, Albert, 146

Mandela, Nelson, 445, 446–47

Manes, Fritz, 12, 15, 16, 47–48, 175, 206, 228, 255–56, 264, 278, 293, 297–98, 390, 391

Mangano, Silvana, 94

Manis (orangutan), 224, 240

Mann, Anthony, 61

Mann, Delbert, 428n

Mann, Michael, 405

Man Who Loved Women, The, 263, 264n

Man with No Name, 84n, 93, 104, 104n, 117–18, 165, 330n

marijuana, 48, 237

Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots, 64

Marriage Italian Style, 91

Marshall, E. G., 378

Marshall, Frank, 471

Martindale, Margo, 415

Martin, Dean, 66, 171n

Marvin, Lee, 92, 126, 130–32, 139–41, 141n, 145

masculinity, xiv, xv–xvi, 195–97

Maslin, Janet, 229, 244, 253, 267–68, 279, 306, 320, 350–51, 364

Mason, Marsha, 293

Massara, Mark, 436

Mastroianni, Marcello, 97

Matheson, Tim, 194

Matthau, Walter, 182–83

Maverick, 56, 111

May, Elaine, 164n

Mazzocco, Robert, 260

Meet John Doe, 121

Mercer, Johnny, 381, 432

Messina, Chris, 488

Metallica, 450n

Method acting, 35–37

Middle Tennessee State University, 207–8

Midler, Bette, 224–25

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 381–83, 384, 405, 432, 493

Mifune, Toshiro, 74, 97, 140

Miles, Vera, 66

military service, 19–22, 25–26

Milius, John, 156, 182

Milk, 448–49

Miller, Arthur, 38

Miller, Henry, 203

Miller, Jack, 231

Miller, Sienna, 466, 470

Million Dollar Baby, 409–18, 419–20

Mills, Donna, 153–54, 162, 181

Milner, Martin, 22, 34

Milsap, Ronnie, 239

Minnelli, Liza, 188, 377

Miracle at St. Anna, The, 431

Mission Ranch, 295–96, 357, 384, 403, 415, 418, 437, 455, 490

Mister Ed, 67–68, 119

“Misty” (song), 154–55

Mitchell Gertz Agency, 44

Mitchum, Robert, 47, 125, 155, 485

Mo’ Better Blues, 431

monogamy, 40, 278, 370, 384

Mono Lake, 178–79, 178n

Monterey Herald, 285, 302

Monterey Jazz Festival, 432, 491

Moorehead, Agnes, 66

Moore, Tim, 479

Moravia, Alberto, 77

Moreau, Jeanne, 146, 441

Moreno, Catalina Sandino, 417

Morgan, Peter, 445–46

Morgenstern, Joe, 140, 426, 442, 483

Moriarty, Michael, 266, 275

Morricone, Ennio, 86, 86n, 96, 107, 110, 115, 184, 431n, 467

Morris, Frank, 225–26

Morris, Wesley, 385

Moseley, Bill, 46n

Moseley, George, 46

Mrs. Doubtfire, 351

Mrs. Eastwood & Company, 454–56, 456n

Mule, The, 478–82

“Murder Wall,” 198, 201–2

Murray, Bill, 409n

Murray, Laurie Alison, 349–50, 379n, 390, 408, 479, 480n

Murray, Lowell “L.T.,” IV, 350, 455n, 480n

Murray, Thomas, 349–50

Museum of Modern Art, 306n, 343, 350, 350n

music, xvii, 9–10, 12–14, 15–16, 18–19, 69–70, 402–3. See also jazz music

My Darling Clementine, 78

My Favorite Year, 265

Mystery Science Theater 3000, 33

Mystic River, 399–409, 419, 458

awards, 407–9

background, 399–400

casting, 400–401

production, 401–2

reviews, 404

themes, 404–7

Nashawaty, Chris, 468

Nash, N. Richard, 485

Nash, Thomas, 289–90

National Council for the Arts, 172

National Enquirer, 249–50, 360, 361

National Society of Film Critics, 342, 407, 416

Navy Log, 47

Neeson, Liam, 305

Nelson, Adam, 406

Nelson, Ricky, 69

Nelson, Willie, 349, 392

Neun, Brian Keith, 333

Never Say Goodbye, 38

Newman, Paul, 36, 45–46, 135, 156, 182, 198–99, 211, 220–21

New Orleans, 262–63, 269

Newport Jazz Festival, 376

New Republic, 335, 404

Newsday, 106, 133–34

Newsweek, 131, 140, 163, 227, 241, 257–58, 287, 351, 412, 441

New York City blizzard of 1967, 106

New Yorker, The, 141, 195, 389, 404, 467, 468, 492

New York Film Critics Circle, 342, 416

New York Film Festival, 306, 323, 404

New York Morning Telegraph, 106

New York Post, 334, 368, 446, 455

New York Review of Books, 260

New York Shakespeare Festival, 300n

New York Times, 46, 61, 101–2, 106–7, 109, 115, 131, 134, 136–37, 140, 147, 148, 159, 163, 168, 176–77, 183, 192, 194, 200, 202, 210, 213, 217, 219, 227, 229, 231, 238, 244, 252, 253, 258, 267–68, 270, 271, 274, 277, 277n, 279, 294, 306, 317, 320, 334, 335, 347, 350–51, 354, 364, 404, 425, 430, 447, 453, 455, 468, 472, 476, 478, 486, 492

Nichols, Mike, 313

Nicholson, Jack, 164n, 221, 341, 343, 371, 390

Niehaus, Lennie, 21–22, 262, 264, 265, 278, 301, 339, 349n, 357, 377, 402, 422

Ninomiya, Kazunari, 424, 429

Nishi, Takeichi, 421, 424, 429

Niven, David, 350

Nixon, Richard, 64, 170, 171, 172, 376, 451

Novak, Kim, 284n

Nyby, Christian, 63

Oakland, 4–6, 9

Oakland Technical High School, 14–15, 17, 163

Oates, Warren, 95

Obama, Barack, 439–40, 452, 453, 458–62, 458n

O’Byrne, Brian, 415

O’Connor, Carroll, 139

O’Herlihy, Dan, 36–37

Oh, God!, 219

Old Yeller, 49

Oliansky, Joel, 297, 299

Oliveira, Manoel de, 484n

Olyphant, Timothy, 362, 362n

Omar Club, 15–16

Once Upon a Time in the West, 118, 275, 304

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 215

Operation Lazarus, 255–57

O’Reilly, Bill, 453

Orion Pictures, 324

Orlando, Tony, 277n

Oscars. See Academy Awards

O’Toole, Peter, 265

Outlaw Josey Wales, The, 206, 209–12, 213–15, 263, 344

Outsider, The, 428n

Overtone, 453–55

Owen, Clive, 417n

Ox-Bow Incident, The, xvi, 14, 45, 338

Pacific Palisades, 6–7

Pacino, Al, 343

Page, Geraldine, 146–47, 158–59

Paint Your Wagon, 126, 128, 130–32, 134, 138, 140–41

Palance, Jack, 92

Pale Rider, 266–67, 271–76, 330, 405

at Cannes, 271–73

reviews, 273–74

Paley, William S., 89

Palmer, Arnold, 394

Palomino Club, 64, 224, 225

Paramount Pictures, 29, 130, 131, 424n, 425

Malpaso Company, 226–27, 226n, 231

Parker, Alan, 272, 313

Parker, Charlie “Bird,” 13, 297, 299–303, 306–9, 312–13, 323

Parrish, Avery, 377

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 94n

Patch of Blue, A, 147

Patrick, Robert, 422–23

Patriots Day, 471, 471n

Paul Marsh and Associates, 47

Paul’s Boutique (album), 396

Pearson, Durk, 243, 250, 296

Pebble Beach Company, 394–95, 457

Pebble Beach Golf Links, xx, 25, 99, 99n, 149, 175, 280, 285, 394–95, 436–37, 457, 464–65

Peck, Gregory, 118n, 186, 350n

Pelle the Conqueror, 303, 304

Pendleton, Harry, 12

Penn, Arthur, 110n, 213

Penn, Chris, 266

Penn, Sean, 180n, 400–402, 405–9, 417, 419

Penny, Sydney, 275

People (magazine), 41, 218, 287, 290

Peoples, David Webb, 329–31, 333–34, 343

Pepper, Barry, 422–23

Perfect World, A, 345, 349, 350–52, 404, 470

Perkins, Pinetop, 403

Perry, Benjamin J., 494

Peru, 95n

Pesci, Joe, 464

Petersen, Wolfgang, 340–41

Philadelphia Warriors, 64

Phillippe, Ryan, 422

Phillips, Michael, 468, 476, 481

Phipps, Keith, 457

Photoplay, 40

Pickpocket, 230

Picnic, 125–26

Piedmont, 4–5, 9, 10, 11, 14, 14n

Piedmont Community Church, 5, 5n

Piedmont High School, 12–13, 14

Pillars of the Sky, 38

Pink Cadillac, 46n, 309–10, 317, 360

Platoon, 294, 299

Playboy (magazine), 209, 232, 374

Playing the Enemy, 445

Play Misty for Me, xviii–xix, 59n, 150–53, 161–64, 165n, 297

Poitier, Sidney, 135, 445

Police Athletic League, 170

politics, 171–72, 237, 247–48, 255–57, 283–84, 302, 395, 439–40, 452–53

Carmel mayoral campaign of 1986, 284–90

Republican National Convention (2012), 458–62

Pollack, Sydney, 182, 354

Popwell, Albert, 194n, 216n, 258n, 305n

Post, Ted, 118–19, 123, 133, 182, 189–91, 216, 257

Powell, Michael, 75

Preminger, Otto, 131

presidential election of 1972, 172

presidential election of 2012, 458–62

Presley, Elvis, 63, 72, 150

Presnell, Harve, 140–41, 422

Prestige, The, 425

Price, Ray, 248–49, 253, 254

Producers Guild of America, 384

Pryor, Richard, 297

Psycho, 155, 163

Puig, Claudia, 467

Pujo-Perissere, Henri, 174

Pullman, Bill, 363

“Purple People Eater, The” (song), 64

Purple Rose of Cairo, The, 272

Puttnam, David, 301

Quinn, Aidan, 362

Raging Bull, 414

Rails & Ties, 479

Rango, 362n

Ratboy, 278–80, 290

Rawhide, xvii, 73–74, 78, 111, 112, 118–19, 303, 377

casting, 50, 55–56, 57

eighth season, 95–96

Leone and A Fistful of Dollars, 73–74, 78, 79–80

music, 69–70, 86n, 126

pilot, 57–59, 60–61

ratings, 61–62, 73, 90

second episode, 61

second season, 62–68

seventh season, 89–90

sponsors, 58, 58n, 59

Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites, 70

Ray, 416n, 417, 418

Ray, Billy, 482

Reagan, Ronald, 260, 376, 436n

Gritz mission, 256, 256n

movie career of, 121, 222

political career of, 172, 237, 247–48, 256, 258n, 283–84, 285, 288

SAG and, 283–84

Rea, Stephen, 342

Rebel Without a Cause, 386

Redford, Robert, 182, 199, 200, 353, 354, 383n

Red Harvest (Hammett), 74

Redman, Joshua, 377, 392

Red River, 57, 63n, 78

Reds, 342

Red Sun, 140

Reed, Rex, 131

Reeves, Jacelyn, 290–91, 316, 370

Regal Pictures, 48, 48n, 57n

Reghin, Cathy, 128

Reiner, Rob, 340

Reitman, Ivan, 358

Republican National Convention (1972), 172

Republican National Convention (2012), 458–62

Republican Party, 171–72, 222, 237, 287n, 288, 395

Revenge, 297

Revenge of the Creature, 33

Reynolds, Burt, 56, 135, 222, 228, 260, 264n, 268, 277n

at Academy Awards (1973), 186, 187

City Heat, 263–65, 270

Smokey and the Bandit, 221

Richard Jewell, 482–84, 492

Rich, Charlie, 224, 228

Rich, Frank, 229

Ricker, Bruce, 323, 376–77, 403, 432

Rickles, Don, 139, 295, 371, 394

Ride, Sally, 436n

Riesner, Dean, 122, 152, 156, 257

Rififi, 230

Rifleman, The, 53

Rijker, Lucia, 415

Riot in Cell Block 11, 120, 226

Rising River Ranch, 225, 231, 252, 255–56, 310

Rissient, Pierre, 273

Riverside International Raceway, 220–21

River Wild, The, 356

RKO Pictures, 43, 121

Roaring Twenties, The, 121

Robbins, Marty, 248–49, 253, 254, 349

Robbins, Tim, 400–402, 404, 406–9, 419, 438

Roberts, Julia, 417–18

Robertson, Bob, 86

Robertson, Cliff, 79, 156

Rock, Chris, 416

Rocky, 252, 467

Rodriguez, Paul, 398

Roeg, Nicolas, 272

Rogers, Ginger, 43

Rogers, Roy, 424

Rome, 76–77, 93

Romeo and Juliet, 209n

Romney, Ann, 461

Romney, Mitt, 458–62

Ronzio, Frank, 230

Rookie, The, 325–26

Rosemary’s Baby, 209n

Rose, Megan, 334

Rosenbaum, Art, 25

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 320

Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story, 277, 277n

Rossellini, Isabella, 355

Rossi, Franco, 94n

Ross, Steve, 344

Round Midnight, 297

Route 66, 22

Rove, Karl, 453

“Rowdy” (song), 69

Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 121

Rubinek, Saul, 339

Ruddy, Albert, 188, 311, 324, 409–11, 418, 485

Ruiz, Dina, 394, 490

background of, 367

Clint’s movie career, 371, 377, 408, 416, 417

Mrs. Eastwood & Company, 454–56, 456n

Overtone, 453–55

relationship with Clint, 367–68, 369–70, 379, 380, 383–84, 473

relationship with Scott Fisher, 456, 473

Ruiz, Dominic, 454

Runner, Charles “C. C.,” 4–5

Runner, Sophia, 4–5

Runner, Virginia, 4–5, 10

Runner, Virginia McClanahan, 5

Runner, Waldo, 4–5, 10

Rush, Barbara, 30

Russell, David O., 465

Russell, Rosalind, 172, 402

Russell, Theresa, 311

Russo, Joey, 464

Russo, Rene, 341, 371

Russo, Vito, 199n

Ryan, Paul, 461

Ryan, Robert, 92

Rydell, Mark, 121–22

Sadler, Anthony, 474–75

Sad Sack, The, 47

Sahl, Mort, 215n

Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, 6

Saint James, Susan, 128

St. John, Marco, 268n

salary, 30, 95, 99, 118, 134, 145–46, 151, 164, 173

Salerno, Enrico Maria, 82

Salwen, Kevin, 482

Sam O’Rorke and the Indians, 47

Sampson, Will, 215

Sandera, Christina, 473–74, 479, 490

Sandoval, Arturo, 479

San Francisco, 4, 9, 160–61

San Francisco Bay, 4, 23–24

San Francisco Film Festival, 163

Sanjuro, 97

San Onofre State Beach, 436

Sarandon, Susan, 262–63, 355, 365n, 409

Sarkozy, Nicolas, 435n

Sarris, Andrew, 106, 168, 217, 223

Saturday Night Live, 461

Savalas, Telly, 139

Saving Private Ryan, 406, 419, 422, 425, 427

Saxon, John, 30, 176–77

Sayre, Nora, 194

Scarface, 258

Scatman Crothers, 238–39

Scent of a Woman, The, 343

Schacter, David, 372–73

Schenk, Nick, 439–40, 478–79, 481, 485

Schepisi, Fred, 313

Schickel, Richard, xx–xxi, 41, 256n, 272, 314n, 332, 363, 371–72, 373n, 390

Schifrin, Lalo, 148n, 258, 353

Schindler’s List, 355

Schrader, Paul, 272, 303, 329

Schreiber, Liev, 300n

Schwartzbaum, Lisa, 404, 442

Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 135, 311, 319, 324, 358–59, 361, 436, 485

Scola, Ettore, 303–4

Scorsese, Martin, xix, 277n, 329, 402–3, 405, 417, 463

Scott, A. O., 404, 447, 476, 486

Scott, George C., 156

Scott, Jimmy, 377

Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 283–84, 401n

screen tests, 25–26, 31, 50, 55, 62

Scruggs, Kathy, 484

Seattle, 17, 18–19, 22

Seattle University, 19, 26

Seberg, Jean, 130–32, 140

Segal, Alex, 119–20

Sergeant York, 13–14, 16, 469

Serra, Junipero, 299

Seven Letters to Susan, 46–47

Seven Samurai, The, 102

Seven Year Itch, The, 31

77 Sunset Strip, 362

Shaft, 177

Shane, 78, 266, 274–75, 276

Sharif, Omar, 118n

Sharp, Leo, 478–79

Shatner, William, 256–57, 347

Shaw, George Bernard, 131

Shaw, Sandy, 243, 250, 296

Sheehan, David, 196n

Sheen, Charlie, 326n

Sheen, Martin, 221, 326n

Sherman Oaks, 62, 71, 212, 231, 232, 233n, 246, 298, 473

Sherman, Stanford, 228–29

Sherry-Netherland Hotel, 105

Shiffrin, William, 54, 55–56

Shining, The, 238

Shockley, Ben, 217

Shoeshine, 96

Shootist, The, 183n

Shore, Dinah, 186

Shriver, Bobby, 436

Shriver, Maria, 311, 319

Shryack, Dennis, 266

Shyamalan, M. Night, 446

Shyer, Christopher, 451

Sideshow Collectibles, 489

Siegel, Don, xviii, 65, 120–23, 128, 140, 145–46, 177, 182–83, 192, 269, 340

background of, 120–21

The Beguiled, 158, 159, 160, 272n

Coogan’s Bluff, 121–23, 125, 135

Dirty Harry, 155, 160–61, 162, 167, 169, 225

Escape from Alcatraz, 225–27, 229–31, 269

Magnum Force, 182–83, 189–90

Misty, 152

The Outlaw Josey Wales, 214

Two Mules for Sister Sara, 128, 137, 146–48

Sierra Club, 389, 436

Silberling, Brad, 363

Silver Linings Playbook, 465, 469n

Simmons, J. K., 488, 493

Simpson, O. J., 369

Sinatra, Frank, 113, 155, 171n, 224, 440

Sinclair, Reginald “Duke,” 45–46

Sirk, Douglas, 38

Siskel, Gene, 163, 168, 192, 229, 272, 304, 323, 335

Sixth Sense, The, 446

60 Minutes, 379–80

Skarlatos, Alek, 474–75

Skolsky, Sidney, 105

Slade, Bernard, 129

Slattery, John, 422–23, 428n

Sleepless in Seattle, 349

Slezak, Victor, 366

Smith, Allen E., 226

Smith, Jedediah, 221

Smith, Keely, 128

Smith, Will, 457

Smith, William, 245

Smothers, Dick, 220

Snodgress, Carrie, 266, 275

S.O.B., 263, 265, 265n

Sodom and Gomorrah, 77

Sometimes a Great Notion, 211

Sony Pictures, 378

Soul, David, 194

South Pacific, 125–26

Soviet Union (Russia), 172, 247–48, 252

Space Cowboys, 391–94, 398

Spacey, Kevin, 381–82

spaghetti Westerns, xviii, 77–78, 90–91, 101, 127. See also specific movies

Spielberg, Steven, xix, 345, 361–62, 371, 419, 445–46, 463, 465

Amazing Stories, 277–78, 277n

The Bridges of Madison County, 353–55

Saving Private Ryan, 406, 419, 422, 425, 427

Spirit of St. Louis, The, 31–33

squint, the, xiii, 60, 117, 243, 305, 310

Stafford, Jim, 240

Stagecoach, 78

Stallone, Sylvester, 268

Stanton, Harry Dean, 66, 84n

Star Is Born, A, 457

Stark, Ray, 297, 317

Stars Fell on Henrietta, The, 362–63

Stars in the Dust, 37–38

Star Trek, 252

Starwave, 363

Staunton, Imelda, 417

Steiger, Rod, 36

Stempel, Tom, 260–61

Stern, Tom, 407, 414, 417, 479

Stevens, George, 266

Stevens, Inger, 119

Stewart, Jimmy, 33, 125, 133, 139, 288, 295, 313

Sting, The, 199

Stinson, Joseph, 257, 258, 265

Stone, Oliver, 294

Stone, Spencer, 474–75

Story of G.I. Joe, The, 14, 45

Stovall, Red, 248–49, 253

Straczynski, J. Michael, 437–38

Stradella Road, 233, 246–47, 313–16, 319–20, 344

Strangers on a Train, 347

Streep, Meryl, 355–57, 364–67, 369

Streisand, Barbra, 171n, 218, 343, 418, 457

Sturges, John, 176

Sturges, Preston, 238, 241

Sudden Impact, 215n, 257–59, 277

Sullenberger, Chesley “Sully,” 471–73

Sullivan, Ed, 138

Sully, 471–73

Sunol, 10

Sun Valley, 225, 246, 266, 310–13, 342, 352–53, 370, 384, 458

Super Bowl XLVI, 452–53

Superman, 221, 228

Surtees, Bruce, 147, 153, 167, 179, 211, 258, 267, 274, 278, 300, 414

Sutherland, Donald, 139, 371, 391–94

Sutherland, Kiefer, 488

Swain, Sandy, 289–90, 296

Swank, Hilary, 411–18, 438

Symbionese Liberation Army, 216

Szabó, István, 272, 303

Taradash, Daniel, 186

Tarantino, Quentin, 353, 371

Tarantula!, 34

Tavernier, Bertrand, 297

Taxi Driver, 329, 396

Taylor, Bill, 394

Taylor, Elizabeth, 123, 123n, 125, 137, 171n, 251, 303, 371

Tehama, 389, 437, 485, 490–91, 494

Tehama Productions, 296

Telluride Film Festival, 330

Thalberg Memorial Award, 361–62

Thelma and Louise, 268

Thelonious Monk, 323

“They Call the Wind Maria” (song), 130

Thomas, Craig, 248

Thomas, Kevin, 109, 134, 147, 160, 168, 177, 192, 196, 202, 213–14, 217, 241, 244, 258

Thomson, Desson, 378

Thornton, Billy Bob, 362

Threat, The, 150

Three Kings, 221, 465

3:10 to Yuma, 176

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, 190–92, 192n, 199–200, 333

THX 1138, 164n

Tiberi, Jean, 393

Tidyman, Ernest, 177–78, 227

Tightrope, 195, 261–63, 267–70, 275, 380

Tillis, Mel, 224, 228

Tiomkin, Dimitri, 86

Titanic, 369

Tony Awards, 467

Toole, F. X., 410, 418

Top Gun, 252, 293–94

Torn, Rip, 66, 95

Townsend, Charlotte, 282, 285–89, 287n

Tracy, Spencer, 125

Transcendental Meditation (TM), 198

Traverse, Claude, 146, 146n

Travolta, John, 284n

Trouble with the Curve, 454–55, 457–58, 466n, 477

Trudeau, Garry, 287

True Crime, 384–86

True Grit, 139, 209

Trump, Donald, 483

Tucker, Tanya, 249–50

Tuggle, Richard, 226, 261–63, 268, 269

Tunis, Roxanne, 72–73, 89, 126, 198, 290–91

Tupper, James, 184n

Turan, Kenneth, 272, 335, 363–64, 378, 382, 398, 426, 447, 468, 475, 481

Turner, Lana, 113

TV Reader’s Digest, 43

Twain, Mark, 150, 248

20th Century Fox, 48, 394

“Twist, The” (song), 69

Two Mules for Sister Sara, 125, 128, 137–38, 146–48, 199

Ueberroth, Peter, 394–95

Ulmer, Edgar G., 272

Unforgiven, 329–40, 349, 359, 407, 475

awards, 341–44

background of, 329–31

casting, 331

gala premiere, 335

production, 331–33

promotions, 334–35

reviews, 335–36

script and themes, 336–40

Unforgiven (2013), 429n

United Artists (UA), 97, 104, 114, 117–18

United Pool Company, 47

Universal Pictures, 29, 37–39, 121

Malpaso Company, 129, 204–5

Universal Studios Tour, 203

Universal Talent School (UTS), 29–31, 35–36, 39, 41, 56, 65

University of California, Berkeley, 26–27

University of Southern California (USC), 310–11

“Unknown Girl of My Dreams” (song), 69

Ure, Mary, 124

Urich, Robert, 194

Valcarenghi, Edvige, 75–76

Valdes, David, 267, 313, 343, 454–55

Valli, Frankie, 463–64

Van Cleef, Lee, 92–93, 94, 98, 110–11, 110n, 115, 116, 117, 275

Van Doren, Mamie, 30, 41

Vang, Bee, 444

Van Horn, Buddy, 179, 240, 303, 309, 317

Van Peebles, Mario, 294

Van Sant, Gus, 404n

Variety, 35, 61, 73, 88, 91n, 97, 115, 133–34, 136, 137n, 140, 147, 159, 162–63, 168, 183, 192, 200, 208, 213, 217, 227–28, 229, 240–41, 252, 253, 267, 270, 273–74, 283, 303, 304, 320, 323, 335, 348, 364, 378, 392, 412, 426

Venice Film Festival, 393

Venora, Diane, 299–300, 300n, 307, 313, 371, 385, 386

Venus, Brenda, 203

Verdict, The, 121

Vieira, Meredith, 408n

Viertel, Peter, 317–19, 320

Vietnam War, 20, 148, 172, 184, 196, 255, 292

Village Voice, 106, 163, 168, 207, 217

Vincenzoni, Luciano, 98

Virginian, The, 89

Visconti, Luchino, 94n

Viva Records, 240, 253

Voight, Jon, 171n, 459

Volonté, Gian Maria, 82, 108, 110–11

Wagner, Richard, 78

Wagoner, Porter, 248–49, 253

Wagon Train, 53, 62

Wahlberg, Mark, 471n

Walken, Christopher, 464

Walker, Alice, 436n

Walker, Paul, 422–23

Wallach, Eli, 102–3, 112, 115–18, 371, 401, 407

Waller, Robert James, 354, 364, 365, 366

Waller, Thomas Wright “Fats,” 9, 394, 403

Wall Street Journal, 426, 442, 483

Walsh, Raoul, 14, 48n, 77, 120

Walt Disney Company, 146, 352, 353

Walt Disney Presents, 60

Walter, Jessica, 153–54, 161–62, 163

Ward, Clint, 494

Ward, Fred, 227

Warner Bros., 22, 45, 121, 221, 228–29, 297, 333, 378

American Sniper, 468–69

Bird, 309

Discovery Inc. and, 486–87

Eastwood Scoring Stage, 386, 403

Flags of Our Fathers, 421

Juror #2, 491, 493, 494

Locke lawsuit, 324, 358–59, 373–75, 477

Malpaso Company and, 204–6, 215, 222, 261, 271–72, 463, 470–71, 488

Million Dollar Baby, 412, 416

The Mule, 479–80

Mystic River, 399–400, 401, 410

Richard Jewell, 482, 483

Warren, Charles Marquis, 50, 54–56, 55n, 57, 61, 89–90

Warren, Clyde and Helen, 349–50

Warren, Katherine, 30–31, 35

Washington, Dinah, 357

Washington, Isaiah, 384–85

Washington Post, 227, 241, 244, 258, 306, 317, 348, 378, 385, 392, 442, 472

Wasserman, Lew, 151–52

Watanabe, Ken, 409, 423–24, 429, 429n

Watts, Naomi, 449

Wayne, John, 57, 84, 135, 136, 139, 155, 173, 183, 183n, 195, 209, 262, 294, 428n

Weaver, Dennis, 62, 64, 135n

Webster, Ferris, 179

Wedding of Rat Holla, The, 35

Wein, George, 376

Weir, Peter, 272

Welch, Raquel, 188

“Welcome to the Jungle” (song), 305

Welles, Orson, 215, 215n, 371

Wellman, Wendell, 248n

Wellman, William, xvi, 14, 45–46

Wells, Frank, 204–6, 239, 311, 352–53

Wells, John, 82

Wells, Luanne, 311

Welty, Eudora, 172

Wenders, Wim, 403

Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, 306n

Westerns. See also specific movies and TV shows

overview of, 53–54, 77–78

West Point, 45

Wheel of Fortune, 380n

“When I Loved Her” (song), 148n

Where Eagles Dare, 122–23, 126, 131, 136–37, 139, 151

Whitaker, Forest, 299, 301, 303–4, 307, 313, 394

Whitaker, Rodney William, 198n

White Dawn, The, 209

White Hunter Black Heart, 317–19, 320–22

Whitford, Bradley, 346

Whorf, Richard, 60–61, 95

Wiest, Dianne, 479

Wild at Heart, 320

Wild Bunch, The, 85

Wilde, Olivia, 483, 484

Wilder, Billy, 31–33, 488

Wildlife Conservation Network, 490

“Wilhelm Scream,” 57n

Willamette Valley, 18

Willard, 209

William Morris Agency, 120

Williams, Alan, 389

Wills, Bob, 19

Wilmington, Michael, 272, 274, 305, 320

Wineville Chicken Coop murders, 437–38, 437n

Winslet, Kate, 369, 417, 442n

Winters, Shelley, 29

Wise, Robert, 77

Witches, The, 94, 96, 97, 137n

Witherspoon, Reese, 438

Witness, 272

Women’s Army Corps, 21

Wood, John Belden, 189, 424–25

Woods, James, 384–85, 386

Woodward, Joanne, 36

Wooley, Sheb, 57–58, 57n, 64, 69, 89, 215, 224

Woolvett, Jaimz, 339

work ethic, xv, xvi, xix–xx, 7, 18, 20, 370, 384

World Journal Tribune, 106

Wright, Samuel E., 300

Wyler, William, 77

Wynberg, Henry, 251, 265, 266n

Wynn, Steve, 370

Yankee Doodle Dandy, 121

Yeats, William Butler, 414

Yimou, Zhang, 353

Yojimbo, 74, 77, 78, 86–87, 87n, 92, 97, 106, 107

Yorkin, Bud, 311, 319

Yorkin, Cynthia, 311, 319

Young, Faron, 59

Young, John Lloyd, 464

Young, Lester, 13, 307

Young Man with a Horn, 296–97

Z (movie), 147

Zacharek, Stephanie, 425, 441, 476, 483

Zanuck, Lili, 311, 354, 365

Zaslav, David, 486–87, 488, 491–92, 494

Zax, Steven, 243

Zebra murders, 170

Zellweger, Renée, 409n

Zelniker, Michael, 300

Zemeckis, Robert, 277n

Zinnemann, Fred, 77

Zombieland, 478

Zwerin, Charlotte, 323

Photo Section

Baby “Samson,” 1930.

(Archivio GBB / Alamy Stock Photo)

“Two years to the day”—Fort Ord, early 1950s.

(Courtesy of the author)

Young, fit, and in love, with Maggie, mid-1950s.

(Photofest)

Standing out in the crowd (rear, dead center), listening to guest speaker Marlon Brando (seated, checked shirt) at a Universal Talent School session.

(Photofest)

Tall, in the center once again, in a typical early role.

(Courtesy of the author)

Alongside (from left to right) Ruth, Clint Sr., and Ginger Rogers, star of The First Traveling Saleslady.

(Courtesy of the author)

Health food nut.

(Photofest)

In action in the worst Western ever made, Ambush at Cimarron Pass.

(Courtesy of the author)

Visiting Japan with Rawhide co-stars Eric Fleming (center) and Paul Brinegar.

(Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images)

Talking pistols with fellow quick-draw artist Sammy Davis Jr.

(CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images)

Funny money—the title trio of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (from left to right: Clint, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef) with director Sergio Leone.

(Collection Christophel / Alamy Stock Photo)

Shooting golf balls into the Spanish desert while making big plans.

(Reporters Associati & Archivi, via Getty Images)

“Siegelini” and “Clintus”—Don Siegel and his star—on the set of Dirty Harry.

(Photofest)

A camera of his own—directing Play Misty for Me.

(Photofest)

Dream home in Carmel, mid-1970s.

(John Bryson, via Getty Images)

Passing on his piano chops to his son Kyle.

(John Bryson, via Getty Images)

Sondra Locke and her men: with Clint on the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales . . .

(Photofest)

and with Gordon Anderson at the New York City premiere of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

(Ron Galella, via Getty Images)

Mr. Mayor.

(Courtesy of the author)

Friends forever . . . ? With Fritz Manes on the set of Sudden Impact.

(Photofest)

Enjoying the high life on his first visit to Cannes, 1985.

(Jacky Coolen, via Getty Images)

In a scrum of reporters after his testimony in Sondra Locke’s lawsuit, 1996.

(Vinnie Zuffante, via Getty Images)

“We all got it comin’ . . .” Directing Unforgiven.

(Courtesy of the author)

“A beast of a piece”—directing Sean Penn (center) and Kevin Bacon in Mystic River.

(Photofest)

On Mystic River’s big night at the Oscars, with (from left to right) long-lost daughter Laurie Murray, mother Ruth, and wife Dina.

(Ron Galella, via Getty Images)

Alone with his inspirations: composing the score to Mystic River . . .

(Photofest)

and giving an empty chair a hard time at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

(ZUMA Press Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo)

The eight Eastwood kids at the 2019 premiere of The Mule (clockwise from left): Kimber, Kyle, Francesca, Laurie, Scott, Morgan, Kathryn, and Alison.

(Eric Charbonneau, via Getty Images)

With Christina Sandera.

(ImageCollect)

Still suiting up for action—with Bradley Cooper on the set of American Sniper.

(Photofest)

With Jane Goodall in Carmel, 2024.

(Mega Agency)

About the Author

SHAWN LEVY’s books include the bestsellers The Castle on Sunset; Rat Pack Confidential; Paul Newman: A Life; King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis; and Dolce Vita Confidential. A former film critic for The Oregonian, he has written for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, American Film, Interview, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, the Black Rock Beacon, and the Hollywood Reporter. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

About Mariner Books

MARINER BOOKS traces its beginnings to 1832 when William Ticknor cofounded the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, from which he would run the legendary firm Ticknor and Fields, publisher of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Following Ticknor’s death, Henry Oscar Houghton acquired Ticknor and Fields and, in 1880, formed Houghton Mifflin, which later merged with venerable Harcourt Publishing to form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. HarperCollins purchased HMH’s trade publishing business in 2021 and reestablished their storied lists and editorial team under the name Mariner Books.

Uniting the legacies of Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt Brace, and Ticknor and Fields, Mariner Books continues one of the great traditions in American bookselling. Our imprints have introduced an incomparable roster of enduring classics, including Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thoreau’s Walden, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Ann Petry’s The Narrows, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, and many others. Today Mariner Books remains proudly committed to the craft of fine publishing established nearly two centuries ago at the Old Corner Bookstore.

Also by Shawn Levy

In On the Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy

A Year in the Life of Death: Poems Inspired by the Obituary Pages of “The New York Times”

The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont

Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome

De Niro: A Life

The Rat Pack

Paul Newman: A Life

The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

Ready, Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London

Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey and the Last Great Show Biz Party

King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis

Copyright

CLINT. Copyright © 2025 by Shawn Levy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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*As of this writing! So long as he draws breath, I am hesitant to count the dude out.

*Or, more precisely, this trio of characters; they are, technically, different men with different names—all of ’em.

*And another important one after an eight-year hiatus.

*Again: as of this writing.

*Known for much of its later history, through today, as the Piedmont Community Church.

*And also for the record—and this is a bizarre thing to have to point out—he is not the biological son of Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame, a long-lived rumor that began in an Italian newspaper in the mid-1960s when some wiseacre cracked that he bore a facial and tonsorial resemblance to the comedian; one of the people most amused by this crazy talk would be Ruth herself: “I always admired the man, but I never met him, let alone had his child.”

*There was at least one perk to the job, per Clint: “I remember him telling my mother when I was just a little kid that some ancient actor or other had come in to get gasoline.”

*Even to this day, Clint owns it and keeps it in playable order.

*Later in life, as evidenced by little things he does in his films, like throwing a stick of dynamite, he was still more comfortable with his left hand than his right.

*There was one possibility, but . . . “One of the schools I went to had a great gymnastics program,” he remembered. “So I diddled with that for a while. I wasn’t particularly suited for it, because I was so tall, but I liked it.”

*Piedmont’s official housing covenants outright banned Black, Asian, or Latino home ownership until the latter half of the twentieth century.

*Years later, Clint would meet Hawks at a party and ask the director if he remembered the incident; he did not.

*And, true to his vow, he would serve, as he remembered, “two years to the day.”

*Among the films that he frequently ran was The Battle of San Pietro, a World War II documentary shot on location during the Allied campaign in Italy, directed and narrated by John Huston, whose idiosyncratic voice stuck in his head.

*Anderson ultimately did get called up to combat, and he was reported lost at sea off Korea in January 1953.

*In addition to tuition, he’d get $100 per month to live on.

*As it happened, that movie did shoot at Fort Ord, but only after Clint was discharged.

*As he would reveal later, he had absorbed some of the soft, unforced texture of jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, whose work he knew very well.

*He also made his TV debut, brief and uncredited, as part of a strange program called Allen in Movieland, in which Steve Allen, then hosting The Tonight Show on Universal’s unofficial sister network, NBC, toured the studio to learn the movie biz before starring in The Benny Goodman Story. At the end of the episode, when all the performers who’d appeared throughout the hour stand around listening to a jazz band playing a Goodman tune, Clint is easily spotted right in the center of the frame, bopping along, as was his wont, to the jam session.

*At least one of Clint’s biographers suggests strongly that Lubin, who was gay, was romantically attracted to his protégé and that the two may even have consummated their relationship sexually. This awful film, in which Clint is photographed so flatteringly and Channing so indifferently, could provide fodder for that theory.

*More than thirty years later, Moseley’s grandson Bill Moseley, another Yale man and an actor, would play a small role in Clint’s film Pink Cadillac.

*Among them was a chance to audition for a part in the film version of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead; he didn’t, he later told the novelist, even make it so far as to meet the director, the legendary Raoul Walsh.

*The title Ambush at Cimarron Pass was a generic one that Regal had already considered for a different film altogether, with a different crew, cast, and plot.

*“I can hardly wait,” Clint said, laughing, after describing his first impression of Warren to a journalist, “until he reads his description in this interview.”

*Gunsmoke, which ran on the same network from 1955 to 1975, was a half-hour program until 1961.

*He also appeared in a nonspeaking role—as a newspaper reporter typing at a desk in the background—in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that aired in May 1959 and starred Steve McQueen as a journalist interviewing a man who claims to be a Martian.

*Around $7,500 in contemporary terms.

*Like Ambush at Cimarron Pass, Cattle Empire was a product of the hamburger factory Regal Pictures, suggesting that Warren might well have had a look at Ambush despite what he told Clint.

*Wooley’s most lasting—if uncredited—claim to fame would be an audio clip, the immortal sound effect known as the “Wilhelm Scream,” a shout of pain and anguish that has appeared in hundreds, maybe thousands, of movies, TV shows, and video games, most notably the very first Star Wars film.

*A last-minute replacement for Robert Carricart, who appeared in the pilot and whom the network didn’t approve of. The pilot was refilmed with Brinegar and aired as the seventh episode of the first season.

*At the time, a great many TV shows owed their existence to single sponsors who effectively subsidized production and were the sole advertisers during the shows’ airtime.

*Every episode of seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 was titled “Incident” “at” or “of” or “with” something/someone; for seasons 4, 7, and 8, the formula was dropped.

*One of the prisoners is played by the very busy actor John Larch, who would later appear as a detective in Play Misty for Me and as the chief of police in Dirty Harry.

*Sammy and Clint bonded over their love of the sport of quick-draw, and Sammy’s 1990 will bequeathed to Clint a gun that Gary Cooper had given to Sammy.

*And who, it happened, served as editor on Howard Hawks’s Red River and thus knew his way around a cattle drive.

*Who directed 13 of the show’s 217 episodes.

*Remarkably, the series had been inspired by Walter R. Brooks’s Freddy the Pig books, which Clint had devoured as a boy. (Remember, too, that Lubin directed the first six of the seven Francis the Talking Mule films; dude knew his lane.)

*The Los Angeles Times had reported that that second session would include one of Clint’s own compositions, “Into the Sunset,” which has thus far not appeared in the world.

*If only the Coen brothers had used this version of that latter tune, and not the classic recording by the Sons of the Pioneers, to open The Big Lebowski . . .

*About $150,000 in contemporary terms.

*Around $2 million in contemporary terms.

*In August 1977, the film aired on ABC, which felt entitled to add an “explanatory” five-minute prologue to it, without the consent of Leone, his producers, or Clint. Under the direction of the esteemed Monte Hellman, the esteemed Harry Dean Stanton plays a warden who releases the Man with No Name (played by an actor who wears a hat similar to Clint’s original and a copy of the famed poncho and smokes a little cigar, but whose face is never shown) and sets him off on a mission to clean out a dirty town in exchange for a pardon. There are a couple of cutaways to the real Clint’s squinting eyes in extreme close-up, but the character never speaks.

*Years on, Clint would claim that he had suggested that Leone come in super-close on his eyes to compensate for the lack of spoken dialogue. This would not be the only discrepancy in their accounts of working together, a set of disagreements that would eventually estrange them for some twenty years.

*Who, by the way, had written the music for the Rawhide theme song.

*Albeit, perhaps for contractual reasons, once again under the pseudonym Dan Savio, which name he would trot out periodically for another year or so.

*Leone’s father, Vincenzo, had directed mostly under the pseudonym Roberto Roberti, which roughly translates as “Robert of the Robertses,” or, more colloquially, “Bob Robertson.”

*As Clint liked to tell it, “Halfway during the picture, Sergio Leone came to me and said, ‘By the way, don’t mention that this is from Yojimbo. We have a little problem with the Japanese. . . . We haven’t quite ironed out all the contracts yet, but that’ll be done in a few days.’ It took two years.”

*Such were the times that Variety reported a shortage of temporary housing for movie crews in the area around Almería, Spain. Construction of hotel rooms couldn’t keep up with the film boom.

*Or, as in an oft-reproduced paparazzo shot of him, skateboard along it.

*Other episodes would be directed by Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi, and Mauro Bolognini—De Laurentiis did these things first class all the way.

*The car turned out to be a 1966 model 275GTB, painted Grigio Notte gray with a black leather interior. When he got it back to California, Clint had the carmaker to the stars George Barris paint it emerald green. It still exists today, in that color, in private hands in Europe.

*He went off to make movies, or so he hoped. He appeared in a small role in the 1966 Doris Day comedy The Glass Bottom Boat (a part that Clint once suggested he was up for) and in a pair of episodes of Bonanza, in which he played a ruthless lawman and a besieged Mormon settler, respectively. In September 1966, he was in a remote region of Peru filming sequences for a nature documentary. During production on the Huallaga River, Fleming was aboard a canoe that got swept up in rapids so fierce that even the locals feared them. The canoe became inundated with water, and Fleming, a former Navy Seabee and experienced surfer, leaped into the river to get free of it, intending, it appeared, to swim to shore. He never surfaced. His body, pummeled by boulders and gnawed by piranhas, was recovered downriver a couple of weeks later by tribesmen. He was forty-one.

*Not in Spain, though: Despite being locally made productions, Fistful and A Few Dollars were banned by censors there as sacrilegious.

*For the record, Floyd won twenty-two PGA tour events and four major tournaments, but he never won at Pebble Beach with Clint as his playing/playing-around partner.

*It is now named for its sponsor, AT&T.

*The paper wouldn’t run proper reviews of the films until they premiered in New York.

*In fact, Clint’s character(s) are exactly named: Joe in Fistful, Manco in A Few Dollars, and Blondie in GBU. But print the legend, yeah?

*All of this makes the titles feel akin to those of the James Bond films, with their animated crawl of blood down the screen and the brass-and-electric-guitar sounds of Monty Norman’s famed theme.

*He wouldn’t have to suffer the prospect for very much longer. By the end of the year, after he became similarly agitated and indignant over Arthur Penn’s celebrated Bonnie and Clyde, which he railed against in a string of reviews and think pieces, the Times assigned him away from the film desk after twenty-seven years of service.

*His character repeatedly calls Manco “son,” a term of friendship that Manco reciprocates by calling him “old man”; in reality, Van Cleef was a mere five years Clint’s senior.

*Including running time: 132 minutes to Fistful’s 99.

*Especially in the restored three-hour cut that is widely available today.

*Mackenna’s Gold eventually appeared in 1969, with Gregory Peck in the role Clint had been offered and Omar Sharif as his rival. It did about $3 million in business against a $7 million budget.

*He wrote a novelized version of the script almost concurrently.

*And eventually, after a divorce, number six as well.

*One of his co-stars on the film, Bruce Dern, was impressed with Clint’s taste for a blend of macho and masochism: “I pushed his face in that sand,” he remembered, “and he came up sputtering and trying to blow sand out of his mouth, and he just got on with the scene.”

*More specifically, it became the basis for McCloud, the popular, long-running police drama from Universal Television that hit the air in 1970 and starred Dennis Weaver as a New Mexico lawman on loan to the NYPD, a very rare instance of an idea conceived as a TV series then transforming into a movie that in turn launched a TV series.

*Clint believed the box office was hurt because the film was released not only opposite Hang ’Em High, which was still doing business, but on a weekend when the Jewish High Holidays fell and the World Series was being played.

*Canby reported him saying “a vulgar eight-letter comment.”

*More than $256 million in contemporary terms.

*And while all of these were in theaters, The Witches, the anthology film in which he was directed by Vittorio De Sica, was released in U.S. theaters, almost two years after its Italian release. Almost nobody saw it or reviewed it, but Variety caught it at a public screening in New York during its fleeting run and was unimpressed.

*It also, bizarrely, sold records. In England, a 45 rpm single of Marvin singing “Wand’rin’ Star,” with Clint crooning “I Talk to the Trees” as a B-side, was the NUMBER ONE hit for two weeks. In Italy, with the lineup reversed to reflect Clint’s star status there, it also charted in the top ten.

*That is, Universal, which was headquartered in a black glass office tower.

*Despite which, Traverse would not receive screen credit—nor, for that matter, did Maltz or Kamp, who were offered credit but chose to take it under the pseudonyms John B. Sherry and Grimes Grice.

*There was a bizarre sidebar to Kelly’s. The soundtrack, largely written by Argentinean composer Lalo Schifrin, included a song called “Burning Bridges,” with lyrics by the music producer Mike Curb and vocals by his singing choir, the Mike Curb Congregation. A small music label out of Nashville, formed by a company that made blank recording tape, cut a single of Clint singing the tune (complete with an original B-side, “When I Loved Her,” written by no less than Kris Kristofferson and also sung by Clint). The company literally folded while Clint was flying home from the recording sessions. The single was released but, predictably, sold bubkes.

*About $17,000 in contemporary terms.

*The Finks would be credited for the script and story, and they would receive credit for conceiving the central character of the film on each of its four sequels, presumably with some financial considerations as well. They would receive only one other screen credit not related to this one for the rest of their careers.

*When she first discovers the wounded McBurney, Amy is startled that he kisses her right on the lips. Eleven-year-old Ferdin was equally startled when, at Siegel’s behest, Clint did that very thing on the first take, despite having kissed her chastely in rehearsals. Her real-life shock is captured in the footage used in the finished film.

*Two wee bits worth mentioning: Clint’s wispy singsong of the traditional ballad “Dove She Is a Pretty Bird” (with these lines prominent: “Come all you pretty fair maids, come walk in the sun, / And don’t let your young man ever carry a gun”), and the title sequence, composed of sepia-toned Mathew Brady–style photos of the Civil War, one of which shows a wounded soldier who is the absolute spitting image of Clint and that Siegel swore was an authentic find.

*This indeterminate quality is, surely, one of the reasons that Sofia Coppola chose to remake it in 2017, with Colin Farrell in Clint’s role, Nicole Kidman in Page’s, Kirsten Dunst as Edwina, and Elle Fanning as the sexually charged teenager.

*He wasn’t the only actor to debut as a director that year: Jack Lemmon (Kotch), Jack Nicholson (Drive, He Said), Peter Fonda (The Hired Hand), Alan Arkin (Little Murders), and Elaine May (A New Leaf) all made their first feature films behind the camera that year—as did, it happens, Steven Spielberg (the TV film Duel) and George Lucas (THX 1138).

*Behind Harry, visible in a few quick glimpses during this scene, a movie theater marquee boasts its current attraction: Play Misty for Me.

*The lurid image was designed by the great Warner Bros. in-house artist Bill Gold, who said that Clint took one look at it and declared, “Don’t change a thing.” Gold would wind up designing the posters and ads for almost every one of Clint’s films for the next thirty-five years.

*$270 million and $31 million, respectively, in contemporary terms.

*In 2012, its influence was recognized in yet another way: induction by the Library of Congress into its National Film Preservation Board’s registry of notable American movies.

*Among his fellow signatories were such diverse notables as James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Liz and Dick Burton, Noël Coward, Joe DiMaggio, Henry Fonda, Quincy Jones, Stanley Kubrick, Shirley MacLaine, Dean Martin, Arthur Miller, Roman Polanski, Vidal Sassoon, Frank Sinatra, Sonny and Cher, Lee Strasberg, Barbra Streisand, and Jon Voight.

*A healthy 7 pounds, 4 ounces (thanks, Mr. LaLanne), and, like her dad, with no middle name.

*There was a side benefit to working at Mono Lake. The great director Frank Capra, who hadn’t made a feature since 1961, had a home nearby, and Clint dropped in on him a few times to chat.

*The spectacle was so striking that the Los Angeles Times sent a photographer and models to the set for a fashion shoot—printed in color—before the conflagration.

*A sense of who Holden was at this moment in his life is captured in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, in which Sean Penn plays a boozy wild-man movie star based loosely on Holden at roughly this time.

*Technically, however, he can be seen in a Hitchcockian cameo as a man on a pier about midway through the film, making 1988’s Bird the first film that truly fits this description. He also appears on a movie poster when the unlikely couple go on a date to see High Plains Drifter.

*In a coda to this exchange, Wayne would soon go on to make his final film, the elegiac Western The Shootist, under the direction of none other than Don Siegel. When Wayne balked at a scene that called for him to shoot a villain from behind, Siegel thought he had a clever way to get him to see things differently. As Clint told the story, “Wayne is supposed to get the slip on him. Don says, ‘Come up right behind him and nail him.’ There’s a big silence, and then Wayne says, ‘I never shoot ’em in the back.’ Then Don makes a terrible error. He says, ‘Clint would shoot him in the back.’ Well, he said Wayne didn’t talk to him for a few days after that. It was kind of like [in a John Wayne voice], ‘I don’t give a crap what Eastwood would do, for crissake.’” (And, to close the circle, “The Hostiles” was eventually made—in 2009, for the Hallmark Channel—as The Gambler, the Girl and the Gunslinger, with Dean Cain and James Tupper in the roles meant for Clint and Wayne, respectively.)

*Father of actress Juliette Lewis, one of his nine children, at least six of whom grew up to work in film or music or both.

*Amid these are two others, reading “David Brown” (coincidentally, perhaps, the name of a producer at Universal with whom he would soon work) and “Mother,” about which it seems unkind to speculate.

*The characters’ names were borrowed from a pair of eighteenth-century highway robbers who escaped law enforcement in their homeland of Ireland and relocated to New England, where they resumed their line of work. The title was unusual enough for one film trade publication to announce that Clint and Cimino were making two films: “Thunderbolt” and “Lightfoot.”

*Cimino’s next film, The Deer Hunter, would win five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. But his follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, would become one of the most infamously over-budget, over-schedule films in Hollywood history. When it was released—a huge flop that took United Artists, the studio that financed and distributed it, down with it—journalists repeatedly asked Clint about the difference between the Cimino he’d worked with and the man who’d made such an epic bomb. “I didn’t see it in him at the time,” he said, in a typical response, “but then he wasn’t allowed to do anything excessive because the whole thing was very well organized.” As he explained, “My sanity would not have lasted through Heaven’s Gate.”

* For the record, the age of consent in California was lowered, in 1972, from twenty-one to . . . eighteen. So . . .

*Treating it as an art house film, Universal had Clint himself present it to students at the American Film Institute.

* One of the victims of the execution squad is a pimp who kills a prostitute by pouring Drano down her throat. The pimp is played by Albert Popwell, who played the bank robber faced down by Harry at the start of the previous film—the OG “Do [ya] feel lucky?” punk.

*He also made a habit a few years later of phoning in occasionally to film critic David Sheehan’s Los Angeles–based radio program to rebut, in a banterly way, some of Sheehan’s opinions of his films.

*Clint’s romantic partner at the time of this alleged call would claim that he confessed it never happened.

*Actually Rodney William Whitaker, a professor of theater at the University of Texas.

*There’s a strangely undigested homoerotic subtext running throughout the film that borders on homophobic but never feels either consciously intentional or realized. For instance, in the opening moments, fake preacher Thunderbolt declares, “The leopard shall lie down with the kid,” and the film cuts to Lightfoot in sexy leather gear; there’s much banter between the two stars about one another’s good looks; and Bridges abets the climactic caper by flouncing in drag. Several critics of queer cinema, including Vito Russo in his classic The Celluloid Closet, have commented at length on this undercurrent.

*His next two films, The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate, would clock in at, respectively, three hours and four minutes and three hours and thirty-nine minutes—after studios trimmed them.

*Pam Grier was, apparently, in the pole position for the role, but she showed up extremely late for an introductory meeting with Clint and lost the gig then and there.

*The self-published 1973 book would be reissued in 1975 under the title Gone to Texas.

*Both of the acting prizes went to Ruth Gordon for Rosemary’s Baby. The Newcomer prize was won by Olivia Hussey for Romeo and Juliet.

*For the record, Kaufman said of the finished product, “I’ve never seen the film. I just didn’t want to.”

*Clint and Welles socialized a little bit, having met through Merv. They took the occasional lunch at Welles’s haunt, Ma Maison, and Welles tried to get Clint (among a galaxy of stars he pitched) to star in one of his pet projects, a political drama called The Big Brass Ring. At around this same time, Clint enjoyed an equally unlikely friendship with satirist/comedian Mort Sahl, who sold a spec script to Malpaso and made a gift to Clint of a .44 Magnum Auto Mag pistol, which would appear in Harry Callahan’s arsenal in 1983’s Sudden Impact.

*Also on board: Albert Popwell, the “Do ya [feel lucky], punk?” guy who had been slain as a pimp in Magnum Force and would play a Black militant-leader-turned-informant here.

*To this point, he had not ever starred in a film shot entirely, or even mostly, in Hollywood or Los Angeles. They may have controlled the money, but no studio executives would ever be able to wander casually—or pointedly—onto one of his sets.

*The deal at Paramount, for his acting services and Malpaso’s production banner, was said to be for a flat $3.5 million and another $500,000 for every $10 million the film grossed above $30 million. That bought a lot of tolerance, apparently.

*Pauline Kael couldn’t be bothered to comment on it, leaving us without what surely would have been an epic takedown.

*Meaning approximately 4.39 million tickets were sold. In 2025 prices, that would translate to $52 million.

*About $63 million in 2025.

*Thirty-five, technically.

*Technically over $4 million in 2025 dollars, but more likely four or five times that, given Southern California real estate prices.

*The following month, he sold his Sherman Oaks house—the one he and Maggie bought when Rawhide came through—to Fritz Manes and his wife, Audrey, for $250,000.

*The title track resulted in another country number one.

*A name that Garrett had used for a previous endeavor and that had been in mothballs since 1972.

*In a curious coda, a musical adaptation of Bronco Billy would appear in Los Angeles in 2019, playing for two months. It was revived for a three-month run in the West End of London in early 2024.

*But he didn’t write the script, which was adapted by newcomers Alex Lasker and Wendell Wellman, a couple of students in the graduate film studies program at UCLA who’d pitched Clint an original screenplay and got the assignment to work up Firefox instead.

*He was less keen, apparently, to be known for his five convictions for such crimes as contributing to the delinquency of minors (sex and drugs), attempting to bribe police with the services of a prostitute, and, during his years as a used-car salesman, rolling back odometers, not to mention his history of judgments for breach of contract, fraud, and failure to pay child support. Real gem, this one.

*His solo recording of the song for the soundtrack LP was released just after his passing and became the last top ten country hit of his brilliant, decades-long career.

*Speaking in 1983 with a Rolling Stone journalist for a possible biography, Clint explicitly denied calling Reagan on behalf of Gritz, though he admitted, “I wouldn’t be averse to at least letting him know.” (That biography never materialized, and the interviews for it were eventually transcribed and published, in 2011, as Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 1979–1983.) A decade later, speaking with his authorized biographer Richard Schickel for a book that was published, Clint backtracked and confessed to speaking to the president about Gritz’s mission.

*Including Albert Popwell, the original “Do ya [feel lucky], punk?” guy, who has been promoted, character-wise, in his fourth Dirty Harry movie, to the thankless (and, inevitably, fatal) role of Harry’s partner.

*And, almost predictably, in a speech taunting his congressional enemies by President Ronald Reagan.

*Which, as Andrews and Reynolds hadn’t really vibed on The Man Who Loved Women, was eventually played by Madeline Kahn.

*Breezy had been shot entirely in and around Los Angeles, but not at a studio, and, of course, Clint didn’t act in it.

*When he claimed his screenwriting credit for the Clint/Burt picture, Edwards insisted it be in the name Sam O. Brown—or, of course, S.O.B.

*Maggie and Wynberg would divorce in 1989.

*The real bad guy is played by Marco St. John, an actor who specializes in cops and predators and who is most famous for playing the lascivious truck driver in Thelma and Louise.

*To this day, he does not have a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, even though he’s been nominated for the honor multiple times and has been assured that there is a space reserved for him in front of the Chinese Theatre. But, then, stars must pay ($75,000 as of 2025) to be immortalized on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard, so . . .

*He and Don Siegel had lobbied Universal to show The Beguiled there but were denied.

*Most often, megastars at the event to promote movies would be in town for just a day or three; directors of films in competition would spend at least a week on-site.

*The film aired on CBS in December 1982, with singer Tony Orlando playing Clooney’s tyrannical husband, José Ferrer. The New York Times deemed it “irritating,” while conceding that “Miss Locke captures the look and presence of Miss Clooney with remarkable precision.”

*Among the other directors were Spielberg himself, Martin Scorsese, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, Tobe Hooper, Burt Reynolds, Danny DeVito, and Timothy Hutton.

*In 2024, by a 3–2 vote, the city council would finally relent to the concerns of fire safety officials and others and start the process of assigning street numbers throughout the town.

*The suit was dropped in November 1985, when the plans were reconfigured, setting the building farther back from the street, with smaller windows and redwood siding instead of plaster.

*Full disclosure, she also cut a rug with John Travolta. And Clint and the princess would meet once again, eight years later, on a red carpet at the premiere of The Fugitive in London, for which he happened to be in town.

*Besides Clint, Paul Anka, Doris Day, Kim Novak, and Merv Griffin all famously lived in town.

*High, yes, but the average age of Carmelites at the time was in the fifties, meaning that almost everyone in town was old enough to vote.

*It should be noted, too, that the mayoral race was nonpartisan. In fact, Clint, Townsend, and Laub were all registered Republicans.

*Technically, he’d never divorced either of the first two—or was it three?—so . . .

*Venora was perhaps best known for being the first woman to play the lead role in Hamlet, at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1982; she would go on to play Ophelia opposite Kevin Kline’s Hamlet onstage in 1990, then Gertrude twice: opposite Liev Schreiber’s Hamlet onstage in 1999 and opposite Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet in a 2000 film.

*He did save one weekend to accept the Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment” at January’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony in Beverly Hills.

*Still, Clint hovered around the edges of it. In March 1994, he attended a surprise sixtieth birthday party for Speaker of the California State Assembly (and soon-to-be mayor of San Francisco) Willie Brown, who was accompanied by a young woman he was dating, whose name first appeared in a newspaper in an account of the event: Kamala Harris.

*The soundtrack also won a prize, awarded by a different panel, for the technical wizardry of recreating a new sound from old tapes.

*Somehow there was no part for Albert Popwell, veteran, in four distinct roles, of every previous Dirty Harry film.

*Hedging his bets, perhaps, he assured his legacy in other, more tangible fashions: He donated copies of all of his films as director to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and an archive of scripts, production materials, and memorabilia to the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives in Connecticut, the latter of which would only become available to researchers after his death.

*After a couple of years of stalled negotiations and litigation, during which time McLaughlin received payment for the repairs, a nonjury trial was held in which Clint admitted to the facts that her attorneys alleged. Despite this confession, the judge found that no additional payment was justified.

*There is a lot of he said / she said in this saga, and previous biographers of Clint have taken sides in ways that reflect their overall perspectives on the man. Fair enough. But Richard Schickel’s account of Clint’s behavior in this specific moment takes bias and opinion to a nauseating level: “Lawyers will lawyer,” he blithely declared.

*In 1992, Clint purchased a five-bedroom home in the Hollywood Hills that was principally intended for the use of twenty-three-year-old Kyle.

*According to Huston’s daughter Anjelica, her father read and approved the book before it was published and kept the signed copy of the first edition that Viertel presented to him in the guest bathroom of his house.

*Among the concessions she would have to make was that she wouldn’t write a book or give interviews about their relationship.

*It’s curious that a man who has directed and appeared in so many films that address the subject of rape depicts himself as a victim of one while being sued by his romantic partner of over a decade.

*The one thing that could be said for it is that Clint took an avuncular interest in co-star Charlie Sheen’s well-being and was on hand soon after the shoot wrapped when Sheen’s father, Martin, staged an intervention for his son. He kept in touch later, phoning Sheen and telling him to go to rehab: “It’s thirty days, and it could add thirty years to your life. Just be a man, go in there like a man, and walk out like a man.”

*Of course, his status as the last great Western icon had never waned. In 1992, the new Disneyland in Paris opened, featuring seven hotels designed around themes of Americana. The Hotel Santa Fe, built in Pueblo style, sported a billboard-sized image of Clint as the Man with No Name—poncho, cigarillo, and all.

*To be clear, and not to discount her story, the script version dated 1984 that Francis Ford Coppola optioned and Clint first read is very much like the finished film.

*The trade publication had only recently begun to give full bylines to reviewers, who had been designated by abbreviations previously.

*He went on to relate a memory of seeing High Plains Drifter in the theater with his father: “I remember five or six minutes into the movie, after Clint had dropped about thirty people, my dad turned to me and said, ‘There’s not enough killing in this movie.’”

*And please do not forget that by the terms of his agreement with the studio, Clint was due 30 to 35 percent of the theatrical gross, which meant $30 million to $35 million, more or less, before such ancillary revenue streams as cable, TV, and home video or international box office. Dude made out.

*Costner had been so prone to reshooting scenes on Dances with Wolves that wags around Hollywood had referred to it, while it was still in production, as “Kevin’s Gate,” invoking Michael Cimino’s financially disastrous Western Heaven’s Gate.

*The previous honorees were Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, David Niven, and Gregory Peck.

*There’s a monograph to be written about Clint’s gift for directing children.

*En route to estimated global sales of more than 50 million copies.

*Another script that she championed and that the studio rejected was a romantic comedy eventually made by Warner Bros. in 1997 as Addicted to Love.

*Olyphant would in time provide the voice of a character known as the Spirit of the West, a caricature of the Man with No Name as an aged sage, in the great animated 2011 Western Rango, dispensing such wisdom as “It’s the deeds that make the man,” “No man can walk out of his own story,” and, when asked by the lead character if they were in Heaven, “If it were, we’d be eatin’ Pop Tarts with Kim Novak.”

*$100 in 2025 dollars.

*She lost to Susan Sarandon for Dead Man Walking.

*He didn’t, alas, sit with Douglas Thompson for his 1993 book Clint Eastwood: Sexual Cowboy, nor, for that matter, Stéphane Bouquet, author of the 2012 French-language monograph Clint Fucking Eastwood.

*More seriously, he barred all observers, including the press, from the courtroom when the jury was not present—that is, when he was ruling on motions about the admissibility of evidence and so forth. His strictness in this matter was so unusual that it became the basis of a series of lawsuits and appeals by the media against the court, a dispute in which, years later, the media triumphed.

*Again, not to batter Richard Schickel, but in his fawning over Clint, he refers to this fraudulent arrangement with Warner Bros. as “a neat solution to such a vexing issue.”

*The world did not yet know about Laurie Murray, his surprise first daughter.

*She eventually scored a long-running gig working in the makeup department of Wheel of Fortune.

*Warner Bros. had tried to get the film rights to Nicholas Evans’s big hit novel The Horse Whisperer as a vehicle for him to direct and star in, but they lost out to Disney/Touchstone and Robert Redford, who did the honors before and behind the camera.

*The name by which the girls knew their grandmother Ruth, well into her nineties and a regular presence in the house.

*There was an irony in Clint’s making this movie, his fourth as a director in which he wouldn’t appear, at this precise time: In January, the Screen Actors Guild had honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

*The Palme d’Or went to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, another sort of film about the cost and causes of American violence.

*This became a thing when Clint attended the Oscars and was seated near the front. Over the years, Meredith Vieira and Ellen DeGeneres also each took a moment to sit in his lap during Oscarcasts.

*Harden lost to Renée Zellweger for Cold Mountain.

*His fellow nominees were Johnny Depp (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl), Ben Kingsley (House of Sand and Fog), Jude Law (Cold Mountain), and Bill Murray (Lost in Translation).

*Karyn Kusama’s 2000 Girlfight, a Sundance hit that flopped commercially.

*It is simply unfair to talk openly about the last quarter or so of Million Dollar Baby in front of an audience that perhaps hasn’t seen it, so—MAJOR SPOILER ALERT—Maggie is sucker-punched by an opponent in the ring and paralyzed, and in her increasingly febrile state, she asks Frankie to euthanize her, which, after anguished soul-searching, he does.

*He gets the funniest line in the movie, and one of the funniest lines in all movies, when Maggie asks Frankie what he’s reading. Frankie growls, “Yeats,” and Freeman’s Scrap suggests, “Why don’t you talk a little Yeats to her, show her what a treat that is?” Never. Not. Funny.

*And played, of course, by an actor who became famous in the role of a man named Rowdy Yates.

*Poor thing went to see her big-screen debut in a theater and got a lesson about playing a villain: “I was sitting in the back and cheering for myself [and] all around me, everyone was pointing at the screen and shouting, ‘You bitch!’”

*ANOTHER MAJOR SPOILER: The final twist of the plot, Frankie’s decision to euthanize Maggie, brought major criticism on the film from disability rights groups, who thought the film was endorsing the message that it’s better to die than live as a quadriplegic. Some also believed that Clint was taking revenge on the disabled community after his Mission Ranch hotel had been sued in the late 1990s for failing to accommodate disabled patrons, a legal action in which Mission Ranch had triumphed.

*His score for the film was even nominated for a Grammy for Best Soundtrack, losing out to the music from Ray.

*His fellow nominees were Alan Alda (The Aviator), Thomas Haden Church (Sideways), Jamie Foxx (Collateral), and Clive Owen (Closer).

*The other nominees were Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda), Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland), and Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator).

*Evidence of his first visit to Iwo Jima, in the form of a present-day view from the summit of Mount Suribachi, is seen at the very end of the film.

*Scott Eastwood appeared in a brief role as well, in his film debut.

*One of the great things about the shot is that none of the six servicemen’s faces are visible, which meant that in the coming months and subsequent decades the identification of who was captured in the photo changed. Of the six men originally credited with being in the shot, only three were correctly named, and only one of those, Ira Hayes, survived the battle. Bradley and Gagnon, famous for being in the picture, were positively proven not to have been in it in 2016 and 2019, respectively.

*DreamWorks had been acquired by Paramount while postproduction on Flags was underway, meaning that Clint was at work on two feature films for two huge Hollywood studios in two different languages at the same time.

*And how canny/ingenious/fortunate to have John Slattery as the chief propagandist just two years before he was to premiere on TV as advertising executive Roger Sterling in Mad Men.

*Hayes, who died of alcohol-related effects of exposure in 1955 at age thirty-two, appeared in movies twice previously. He (along with Gagnon and Bradley and a few other Iwo Jima vets) played himself in Sands of Iwo Jima, Allan Dwan’s 1949 John Wayne vehicle. In 1961, a feature film about his life, war service, and death, The Outsider by Delbert Mann, starred that great Native American actor, um, Tony Curtis. Hayes was also immortalized in “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” written in 1961 by folk singer Peter La Farge and made famous in a 1964 recording by Johnny Cash.

*Watanabe was so able to channel something like Clint’s aura that he was cast in a Japanese remake of Unforgiven in 2013. The film was faithful to the original and received well by critics.

*Making Clint the first director in Hollywood history to have two films from two studios in two languages up for awards consideration in the same year.

*Clint did appear onstage that night, to present an honorary Oscar to Ennio Morricone for his lifetime of work; the great composer had been nominated for his music five times up to that point but never took home a prize. In 2016, he won a competitive Oscar for The Hateful Eight.

*Actually, there were a few, in non-speaking parts, early in Flags, but the point is valid.

*In 2009, he would be promoted in the Legion of Honor to the rank of Commander by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

*His fellow inductees included Ronald Reagan, Cesar Chavez, Amelia Earhart, Billie Jean King, Sally Ride, Alice Walker, Walt Disney, and Frank Gehry.

*The crimes so stained the name of the small town of Wineville that it changed its name permanently to Mira Loma in 1930.

*The film marked a curious shift in his focus. He would direct eleven films between 2008 and 2019, and all but two would have a nonfiction story as a basis (and one of those fictional stories would be inspired by real-life events). He had become someone more interested in the world as it was than in fabulists’ stories about it.

*Scott Eastwood was in for a scene as well, playing a kid finding himself in danger while strolling with Sue through gang turf.

*Jolie lost to Kate Winslet for The Reader; Changeling was also, also justly, nominated for Art Direction and Cinematography, losing both of those as well.

*SPOILER ALERT: With Gran Torino, the sixtieth feature film in which he acted, he dies for only the third time ever on-screen, after The Beguiled and Honkytonk Man. His character in The Bridges of Madison County has passed between the time we see him and the time his story is revealed. And, of course, no one knows if Frank Morris survived his Escape from Alcatraz.

*He finished in time to attend the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that April, escorting seventeen-year-old Francesca; he was photographed backstage talking with the likes of Kate Bush, Usher, and various members of Metallica.

*Though approximately 40 percent of political contributions in his name between 2000 and 2012 went to Democratic candidates on the state and local levels.

*It wasn’t the year’s only wedding. He attended the wedding of his grandson Lowell “L.T.” Murray IV, a union that didn’t last, as the lad would pop up in 2021 as one of the prospective beaux on a different reality show, The Bachelorette.

*Hacienda Este Madera, where they had lived together and which had served as the backdrop for Mrs. Eastwood & Company, was sold in 2017 for $9.75 million—about two and a half times what Clint had paid for it some twenty-three years prior.

*Of course, Romney also looked like Clint and nothing like the incumbent, Barack Obama, so . . .

*Not, notably, his son Scott, for whom there would easily have been a part in the military ranks. With Gran Torino, he was done acting for his father, and a brief scene in Trouble with the Curve was his last role alongside him (both of these facts qualified by the inevitable, when dealing with Clint, “to date”). Gran Torino was also, notably, the last film for which he was billed as Scott Reeves, the name by which he had long hoped to fly under the radar and make good on his own. Not that he had a choice. As he once put it, “My dad has never given me money. I’ve parked cars and bartended to pay the bills. He’s like, ‘Go be a man.’” And he did: As Scott Eastwood, he has appeared in dozens of films.

*He’d been nominated as Best Actor for Silver Linings Playbook in 2013 and Best Supporting Actor for American Hustle in 2014.

*It made its way to the screen in 2016, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Bacon.

*Missing were other grandkids: Laurie’s son L.T. and daughter Kelsey; Kimber’s son Clinton (himself a father twice over); and Francesca’s baby Titan, born just that year.

*The oldest director of a feature film anywhere was the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira, who released Gebo and the Shadow in 2012, when he was a spry one hundred and three years of age.