American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  Clint’s initial reaction was that they should have kept Favor and lost Rowdy. Shortly after the changes were announced, the Los Angeles Times dispatched Hal Humphrey to get Clint’s reaction. He began by asking him if he was happy about becoming the top star of his show. “Why should I be pleased,” Clint answered, not yet used to the fact that every word he said could and would be reprinted. “I used to carry half the shows. Now I carry them all. For the same money.”

  Clint was angry and had a right to be. Fleming’s salary had been much higher than his ($220,000 per season, against Clint’s $100,000 a season), and now he was expected to fill those big boots without a raise—a detail that CBS had significantly left out of its revamping of the show.

  If the season began in turmoil, it descended rapidly from there. After only two episodes, the network announced that it was bringing back Sheb Wooley. Then it announced it wasn’t. Both decisions had been made by Paley, without consulting Brady, who abruptly resigned. CBS then brought Bohem back, who said he wanted to relocate the show to Hawaii. He quickly retreated from that idea and resigned. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to save the show, CBS inexplicably moved Rawhide out of its regular Friday-night slot to Tuesday, opposite ABC’s hotshot Combat, a hit World War II action series starring Vic Morrow, just as Vietnam was beginning to burn itself into the hearts and minds of the American public. After thirteen more episodes, Rawhide was canceled by CBS. The 217th and last first-run episode, “Crossing at White Feather,” aired December 7, 1965, after which the series entered the ether of syndicated reruns.

  Clint could not have been happier. Within days of shooting his final scene, he flew back to New York to meet with producer Dino De Laurentiis, who said he had a proposition for Clint, the starring role in a new, big-budget movie to be shot in Europe and intended mainly for European audiences. Disappointed but resigned, Clint took the job, believing that big-screen Hollywood stardom was out of his reach.

  *Aka Ben-Hur, a Tale of the Christ.

  *Aka Fistful of Dollars.

  † Kurosawa insisted that the primary source of his script was always and only Yojimbo.

  *Clint, like most actors, is superstitious. According to the Internet Movie Database, he used this poncho in all three Leone movies and insisted it never be washed or cleaned.

  *The Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) was the set of industry censorship guidelines governing the production of American motion pictures. The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), which later became the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), adopted the code in 1930, began effectively enforcing it in 1934, and abandoned it in 1968 in favor of the subsequent MPAA film rating system. The Production Code spelled out what was morally acceptable and unacceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States.

  *He later tried to reconcile with Clint, who eventually did get him a few days’ work as stunt coordinator on A Fistful of Dollars. Despite that assignment and the subsequent success of the film, Thompkins was unable to regain a professional foothold in Hollywood. He died of injuries he sustained in a 1971 automobile accident.

  *Leone’s original titles had been The Magnificent Rogues, and The Two Magnificent Tramps, which he spontaneously changed at the meeting.

  †Grimaldi sold the world rights to UA for an additional million-dollar guarantee and 50 percent of the profits, excluding Italy, France, Germany, and Spain. Not long afterward the lawsuit with Kurosawa was settled and Krim and Picker purchased the rights to Fistful of Dollars, giving Krim and Picker North American rights and a percentage of world rights to the trilogy, as well as the right to decide the American release dates for all three. Not long after UA’s settlement, Jolly Films, meanwhile, which had produced Per un pugno di dollari (1964), came out with a film called The Magnificent Stranger, which was actually two episodes of Rawhide (1959) edited together. Eastwood sued Jolly Films, and The Magnificent Stranger was quickly withdrawn.

  SIX

  French movie poster for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1967

  I came back and did a very small-budget picture, called Hang ‘Em High … the movie business … was still thinking of me as an Italian movie actor.

  —Clint Eastwood

  De Laurentiis was on a mission to sign Clint, believing that, once the Leone westerns were released in the States, he would be box-office gold anywhere in the world there was a movie screen. De Laurentiis thought Clint could be his generation’s Gary Cooper, and he wasn’t shy about telling him so. Like any good hustler, he knew how to seduce to get what he wanted.

  De Laurentiis had been in a successful film business partnership with Carlo Ponti, who in the mid-1950s had decided to turn his wife, Sophia Loren, into Italy’s finest screen actress by having her play working-class Italian women and allowing her real-life glamour to peek out like expensive lingerie. She often starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni, who could effortlessly flip back and forth between glamour and working class, comedy and drama. Under Ponti’s guidance, both Mastroianni and Loren became world famous and (along with Ponti) extremely wealthy.

  De Laurentiis envisioned the same thing for himself and his new wife, Silvana Mangano. Another icon of postwar Italian cinema, she had gained international fame with her performance in Bitter Rice (1949), written and directed by Giuseppe De Santis and produced by De Laurentiis. At that time “anthology” films were the rage in Europe, so he decided to put together five of the best directors and have them each make a short film with Mangano. Each would reflect, like a highly polished diamond, a different facet of her ability.

  And he didn’t want any superstar like Mastroianni to steal his wife’s thunder. After searching among suitable actors he could afford, De Laurentiis decided that Eastwood might be right. He knew he wasn’t the best actor—a plus, to De Laurentiis—but he was one of the hottest faces in Europe. His popularity could only help his box office, but his acting, De Laurentiis was confident, could never overshadow Mangano’s.

  To entice Clint, De Laurentiis laid out the proverbial red carpet for his arrival in New York. He put Clint in a five-star hotel and drove him all around the city in a black stretch limousine, talking up the “great” script he had in mind. Then he closed in for the kill. De Laurentiis, who had done his homework, knew that Clint loved cars and so offered him his choice of two deals: $25,000 for one month’s work, or $20,000 and a brand-new Ferrari. Clint grabbed the Ferrari deal (knowing he wouldn’t have to pay an agency fee on it if it was listed as a gift).

  That February 1966 Clint flew to Rome, a city that by now he knew quite well and had come to like a great deal, to appear in one episode of De Laurentiis’s planned five-part epic, Le streghe (The Witches). His episode was to be directed by Vittorio De Sica, who had made his name helming one of the defining films of postwar neorealism, The Bicycle Thief (1948).*

  “A Night Like Any Other” (aka “An Evening Like the Others”), nineteen minutes long, featured Clint in modern dress, with button-down shirt and slicked-back hair, trapped inside a loveless, unfulfilling marriage to Silvana Mangano. Only when he is asleep does he “live,” as the sex star of his wife’s fantasies; the episode climaxes with a self-imagined suicide, while his wife “dances” for dozens of men in a flesh club. This description does too much justice to the actual piece of film.

  The film’s American rights were acquired by Krim and Picker’s UA on the strength of Clint’s appearance. They were hoping to cash in on their eventual release of the Leone trilogy, but it was not officially released in the United States until 1969.†

  According to Clint: “The stories [of the five episodes] didn’t mean a whole lot. They were just a lot of vignettes all shuffled together. I enjoyed them, they were fun to do. Escapism.”

  It wasn’t a total loss, though. When the film premiered in Paris (dubbed inexplicably into English), Clint met and had a brief but passionate affair with Catherine Deneuve that both managed to keep from the public. And there was also
the new Ferrari, which he shipped home to Carmel while he remained in Rome to begin production on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Filming began at Cinecittà in May 1966, after a short delay during which Clint refused to report for work because Leone had yet to agree to his demand for $250,000 and another new Ferrari. Soon enough Clint got everything he wanted, and with cigarillo in place and fake guns strapped to his body, he slid himself back into his European cinematic saddle.

  Early into production of Leone’s third spaghetti western, Clint began to feel the same vague discontent he’d experienced with Rawhide: that the film was bloated, rather than expansive; that the script was far too wordy (something he would clamp down on for virtually every film he would eventually produce); and that the only fully fleshed character was “the Ugly” (Eli Wallach), while “the Good” (himself) and “the Bad” (Lee Van Cleef) were more caricatures than characters, without enough satiric heft to make that approach workable. Leone still didn’t (or perhaps preferred not to) speak a word of English, despite the fact that this film depended far more than the first two on the spoken word than on the visual image.

  Clint’s instincts as to the diminution of his character’s stature were essentially correct. In the first film he had been a loner, a man with practically no past and no foreseeable future. His singular stature suggested isolation, cynicism wrapped in heroic determination, and a forcefulness that made him—even with all his glamorized imperfections—irresistible to the audience. In the second film the Man with No Name had been forced to deal with and ultimately share his screen space with Colonel Mortimer (played by Lee Van Cleef, whose successful appearance in For a Few Dollars More had not only resurrected his film career but guaranteed his return in the last film of the trilogy). Now Van Cleef was playing someone named Sentenza, along with movie veteran (and inveterate scene stealer) Wallach. “If it goes on that way,” Clint grumbled to Leone, “in the next one I will be starring with the whole American cavalry.”

  Between takes Clint took to practicing his golf swing, a signal to Leone and everyone else that he was now so detached from the production that he no longer cared about his character, the other characters, the director, or the film itself. Later on, when Leone approached him about a fourth film, Clint would flatly reject the offer.

  During the filming, Clint and Wallach had become good friends, and Clint, who had a long-standing aversion to flying in small planes, convinced Wallach to drive with him from Madrid to Almeria. As production dragged on, Clint helped guide Wallach through the script, emphasizing the importance of action over dialogue, acting as Wallach’s personal director. Then, the week before filming finished, Clint and Wallach had dinner together. “This will be my last spaghetti western,” he told Wallach. “I’m going back to California and I’ll form my own company and I’ll act and direct my own movies.” Oh sure, that’ll be the day, Wallach thought to himself.

  Meanwhile Leone had visions of creating a second, more expansive trilogy. According to Leone,

  After The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I didn’t want to do any more westerns. I had totally done that kind of story and I wanted to do a picture called Once Upon a Time in America. But because people are not willing to forgive success, and to forgive failure, when I went to the States the first thing they said was do another western and we’ll let you do Once Upon a Time in America … at that point I needed to make another movie that was completely different from the first three and I thought of starting a new trilogy which started with Once Upon a Time in the West, developed with A Fistful of Dynamite and ended with Once Upon a Time in America.*

  While Clint knew this would be his last film for Leone, it was by no means his last western. He had had too much spaghetti and not enough hamburger; he was determined now to take the essential elements of the character of the Man with No Name, which had been so good to him in Europe, back to Hollywood, where it could be redeveloped and redefined.

  Home by July, Clint quickly grew restless in Carmel and frequently hooked up with old friends, including David Janssen, who had finished production on his fourth and final season as Dr. Richard Kimble on the hit TV show The Fugitive. The series had perfectly touched the boomer zeitgeist of the 1960s, made a cultural hero out of Kimble, and (for a relatively brief time) a star out of Janssen.

  Clint and Janssen got together often during these months, as Clint sought guidance from his friend, now a major TV star, for his own floundering career. (Clint had been offered, and accepted, the role of Two-Face on the campy Batman series, but it was canceled before he could do it.) Janssen, meanwhile, had just accepted an offer from John Wayne to appear in the upcoming Wayne-produced-and-directed The Green Berets, as a skeptical liberal newspaper reporter embedded with a unit of the Green Berets.

  And then on September 30, 1966, Clint was shocked to learn that Eric Fleming, while on location in Peru filming an MGM movie for TV called High Jungle, had died. About halfway through the shoot, Fleming’s canoe had capsized on the Huallaga River. With him was another actor, Nic Minardos, who managed to swim safely to shore. Fleming’s body was found two days later.* Clint found out by reading it in the newspaper.

  On January 18, 1967, A Fistful of Dollars finally opened in Los Angeles, followed by a national release a month later. The film’s stylized violence (which viewed today is neither all that violent nor all that stylized) had prevented it from being shown in America for three years. In 1966 Mike Nichols’s groundbreaking Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which vulgar language was crucial to the film’s story, had finally broken through the outdated restrictions of the Production Code. Thereafter Krim and Picker thought the time was right to try an American release for their Leone film.*

  And critics wasted no time in pouncing on it. Leading the parade of negative reaction was Bosley Crowther, the crusty film critic of the New York Times, who dismissed the film as “cowboy camp.” Judith Crist, the main film reviewer for the World Journal Tribune, called it “perfectly awful … an ersatz western … [where] men and women [are] gouged, burned, beaten, stomped and shredded to death.” Philip K. Scheuer wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Like the villains, it was shot in Spain … pity it wasn’t buried there.” Newsweek called it “excruciatingly dopey.” In almost every review, Clint received only casual mention, and Leone was barely mentioned at all.

  Yet, to everyone’s surprise, A Fistful of Dollars made money from its first day of release. If the critics didn’t get it, audiences did. They could sense the power of Clint’s character, the attraction of his strength and conviction, and the film’s original viewpoint on brutality. Moreover, every campus town in America had a revival theater that regularly played Yojimbo, so college audiences—who made up a large number of the film’s early faithful—were familiar with the tactics of the scenario. The artifacts of the Man with No Name’s character—the cig-arillo, the poncho, the wide-brimmed hat—all became elements of 1960s campus hip style.

  Meanwhile, Clint was having trouble getting work, or at least the kind he wanted—an American western with a toned-down version of his nameless hero—even as that May, United Artists, encouraged by the box-office take of A Fistful of Dollars, released For a Few Dollars More as one of their big summer movies, while A Fistful of Dollars was still holding on to a sizable number of its first-run screens. It had already grossed a hefty $3.5 million, which was excellent for a 1960s studio film and extraordinary for any foreign independent released in America.

  In between promotional interviews and extensive redubbing sessions for all three films, at UA’s expense (rather than using the more conventional and less expensive subtitles), Clint continued to meet with producers and directors and continued to be rejected by all of them. At best they considered his current movie success to be a fluke, the product of a novelty, and at worst they still thought of him as a TV actor, a ghetto from which few actors managed to escape.

  As the months passed, Clint formulated an idea that had been cooking since the days of Rawhide, when he had wanted to film t
hat cattle drive differently: to make a project of his own choosing, shot in the way he wanted it done. If American studios weren’t falling over themselves to latch on to Clint Eastwood Movie Star, then he would produce a film that would not only equal but surpass Leone’s achievement with the western genre.

  The project he had in mind was a script called Hang ‘Em High, an Americanized single-feature amalgam of the Leone trilogy. It had been written by Mel Goldberg in 1966, as a pilot for yet another western TV series. Clint thought it might be the right project to launch his Hollywood film career and approached producer Leonard Freeman, who had originally commissioned it as a pilot, about the possibility of turning it into a feature film. Freeman had already produced Mr. Novak, and co-created the idea for a new series, Hawaii Five-O, after which Freeman and Goldberg shelved Hang ‘Em High.

  The script had first come to Clint via Irving Leonard, who happened to be friends with Freeman’s agent, George Litto. Over dinner one night Litto had told Leonard about Hang Em High. Leonard thought it might be what Clint was looking for and asked if he could send him a copy. Litto sent it over the next day. Clint, rather than going back to the well with Leone, wanted to do it. “When [Leone] talked to me about doing Once Upon a Time in the West and what later became Duck, You Sucker, they were just repeats of what I’d been doing,” he said.*

  I didn’t want to play that character anymore. So I came back and did a very small-budget picture, called Hang ‘Em High, which had a little more character. Maybe it was time, too, to do some American films, because even though these films were very successful, the movie business for some reason was still thinking of me as an Italian movie actor. I can remember the field guys at Paramount years ago said they’d talk about using me but all they got was, “He’s just a TV actor.” I wasn’t marked to be accepted. There were a lot of other actors who were marked to succeed more than me.