by Marc Eliot
Since the end of Hollywood’s studio era, a new logic had taken over the industry. Paint Your Wagon was (at least ostensibly) a “western”—another troubled genre, thanks mostly to the proliferation of westerns on TV. So the studio wanted the last big Hollywood “cowboy” star around, Clint Eastwood, to help revive both genres. To get him, they created a role, Pardner, that had not existed in the original Broadway version. Pardner was a curious mixture of the “good” Rowdy from Rawhide and the “bad” Man with No Name from the spaghetti westerns. The producers paired Clint with Lee Marvin, who had played “grizzled” to Oscar-winning perfection in Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou (1965). In Hollywood terms, it was “can’t miss” casting. Added to the mix was Pulitzer Prize–winning director Joshua Logan,* whose film versions of several other Broadway musicals, including the mon-eymaking Camelot (1967), seemed like the financial icing on the cake.
Clint very much wanted to be a part of this project. He had always liked Joshua Logan’s films, believing he was an actor’s director, and felt he needed to work with someone like that after Brian Hutton’s mechanical directing on Where Eagles Dare. He also very much looked forward to working with screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who promised a radical rethinking of the original Broadway book that would make it infinitely more screen-friendly. And finally Clint liked Andre Previn’s easygoing musical style; Previn had been hired to write several new songs specifically for Clint, and he promised to make them close to the quiet, jazzy style Clint favored and that was easy for him to sing.
Irving Leonard managed to get $500,000 up front for Clint, a figure still considerably below his sought-after million, but Leonard had so constructed the deal that much of Clint’s salary would be deferred for tax advantages and he would have a hefty participation in the expected profits. Leonard also managed to get Clint cast-approval, which was how actress Jean Seberg managed to land the role of the Mormon wife Pardner decides to buy, and who subsequently becomes part of a three-way relationship. Lerner had created this character to juice up the film a bit for younger audiences, and Clint insisted that it be played by Seberg.
The actress was widely believed to be French because of her roles in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957), his in-French production of Bonjour Tristesse (1958, aka Hello, Sadness in English), and especially Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking French Breathless (1960, À Bout de Souffle), one of the jewels of the French Nouvelle Vague that became an international sensation and inspired the post-Bonnie and Clyde generation of independent American filmmakers. In fact, Seberg was born in Iowa and had moved to Paris during her appearances in Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse and lived there for a while after Breathless. By the time she agreed to appear in Paint Your Wagon, her career was on the decline due mostly to her active involvement with various leftist radical organizations and her outspoken support of the widely feared American Black Panther Party. That support caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who many believed used the Bureau to hound her until she committed suicide in 1979 at the age of forty-one from an overdose of sleeping pills.
But at thirty-one she was still a ravishing beauty, with big eyes, high cheekbones, and a European-acquired air of sophistication that, when he first met her during the casting, nearly drove Clint wild. At his insistence she was hired, and the two immediately began an on-set affair that they hid from no one. They carried on even as the film itself escalated out of control under the direction of Logan, whose manic-depression went wildly unchecked. The result was a budget that escalated to $30 million, to produce a film that had as much life as an embalmed body.
Seberg and Clint stopped carrying on only when Maggie showed up to pay a visit at the Oregon location shoot, infant in tow. As soon as she left, the entire cast and crew let out a collective sigh and the affair resumed—until the film ran out of location money amid script differences between Logan, Chayefsky, and Clint, and the cast had to return to the soundstages of Hollywood to finish the shoot. At that point, perhaps feeling he was too close to home, and also near the end of the shoot, Clint dropped Seberg. Already in a troubled marriage to Romain Gary, Seberg’s heart was broken.
After five grueling months of work it became clear that Logan had no idea what to do with the growing financial monster that was Paint Your Wagon. The film was unofficially finished by assistant director Tom Shaw. By now Paramount, the studio financing the film, just wanted it to end, believing, as did everyone involved, that it was going to be one of the most expensive Christmas turkeys ever given to the filmgoing public. Although it grossed a respectable $14.5 million in its first full year of domestic release—helped by charitable reviews and Clint’s undeniable box-office pull—it came nowhere near its breakeven point, which, because of all the cost overruns, was somewhere close to $60 million.* In the years to come the film’s critical response would not improve. (The Times always runs the same blurb about it whenever it shows up in its TV listing: “California gold rush musical. Elaborate but squatty, and Clint sings like a moose.”)
Paint Your Wagon, while not an out-and-out disaster, was undoubtedly a downward turn in the otherwise steadily rising arc of Clint’s career. Now, as the 1960s cross-faded into the 1970s, and as independent film was gaining its strongest foothold in Hollywood since the beginning of the studio-dominated century, Clint decided to make a giant leap forward. A studio effort like Paint Your Wagon was, he felt, now a dinosaur from an industry that had long ago lost its hold on fresh and independent moviemaking. He was sure he could do better.
In other words, he wanted to direct.
But to do so he would have to also produce, as no one was about to hire him despite his star-status, and with no previous directing credits, to helm a movie with a budget of several million dollars. He would have to find the money himself and use it to deep-seed Malpaso. In the interim he would watch, listen, produce, and star in the films of other directors from whom he thought he could learn something.
Which is why, having decided to move out of the Hollywood mainstream, he figured the quickest and most expedient way to get what he wanted was to dive even deeper into it.
*They were The Peacemaker (1956) and The Legend of Tom Dooley (1959).
*The character’s name, Cooper, recalls Gary Cooper’s tall, silent-type western heroes, most notably Will Kane in High Noon.
*The concept for the film survived later on as a TV show called McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver (Chester of Gunsmoke fame), created by and credited to Miller. The screenplay underwent at least seven full revisions, and final on-screen writing credits went to Herman Miller, Dean Riesner, and Howard Rodman, story by Herman Miller.
*Siegel remembered it a little differently: “There was a mix-up at Universal. Clint Eastwood, whom I not only did not know but had never seen in person or on film, was considering two directors for his first starring feature at Universal. Their names were Alex Segal and Don Taylor … In the basement of the Black Tower [Universal Studios corporate headquarters] there existed proudly a brand-new computer. Two names were fed into it—Alex Segal and Don Taylor … the name that appeared was Don Siegel. Clint asked the executive producer, Dick Lyons, ‘Who the hell is Don Siegel?’ … when I found out he had screened three of my pictures and wanted to know if I was interested in directing Coogan’s Bluff, I responded that I’d like to see the three Sergio Leone pictures.” Don Siegel, A Siegel Film: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 294.
*The daughters, Kate and Jessica, were from his first marriage, to actress Sybil Williams.
*Burton was Taylor’s fifth and sixth husband (she married him twice), following her brief marriage to singer Eddie Fisher.
†Probably The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), directed by Joseph Losey.
*Clint’s stunt-heavy action scenes were done by veteran stuntman and second-unit director Yakima Canutt, best known for creating the chariot-race sequence in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959).
*Logan shared the Pulitzer Prize awarded for helping to bring Rodgers and H
ammer-stein’s South Pacific to the Broadway stage in 1949.
*In many overseas markets, the film was released with all its songs removed, in the hope it might attract loyal Clint Eastwood western fans. Clint later tried to defend the decision: “In Italy they did that on the first release. That’s common practice. Musicals have been terrible flops in Europe, with the exception of West Side Story. Most times, they omit all the music.” Quoted by Dick Lochte in Los Angeles Free Press, April 20, 1973.
EIGHT
With Shirley MacLaine, in a role originally intended for Elizabeth Taylor, in Two Mules for Sister Sara, 1970.
I feel Don Siegel is an enormously talented guy who has been deprived of the notoriety he probably should have had much earlier because Hollywood was going through a stage where the awards went to the big pictures and the guys who knew how to spend a lot of money. As a result, guys who got a lot of pictures with a lot of effort and a little money weren’t glorified. So Don had to wait many years until he could get to do films with fairly good budgets. He’s the kind of director there’s not enough of. If things don’t go as planned, he doesn’t sit down and cry and consider everything lost, as some directors do.
—Clint Eastwood
Seeking to capitalize on his growing popularity and steadily growing box-office clout, Clint wanted to make pictures that showed off his best qualities without turning him into a perpetual cartoon version of the Man with No Name. While others in Clint’s position might have happily accepted simple, popular, gritty western after gritty western and enjoyed a single-persona run (as Arnold Schwarzenegger did until the novelty wore off and his film career ended), Clint was after something different, even if he wasn’t sure yet exactly what that was. Having attained the level of a legitimate Hollywood star, he would surely remain there—going back to pumping gas held no allure at all.
As an actor, Clint knew that the Man with No Name held audiences’ interest because of his unique imperfections (no family, no woman, no past, and no future) rather than the standard-issue imperfections (heartbreak, separation, and desperation). He understood that it was their fascination with this unique character that had ignited his rising star.
But as a filmmaker, Clint had no interest in perpetuating that character until it became a caricature. Instead, he wanted to get behind and inside of the image he projected onto the screen. To do so, he needed to generate work that not only suited this goal but was within his grasp.
Despite his surprise success with the spaghetti westerns, his journey of cinematic self-exploration had thus far been neither quick, nor easy, nor smooth. Now the well-intentioned misadventure of Paint Your Wagon had nearly wrecked all that he had previously achieved. The artistic failure of that film, even more than the financial one, convinced him once and for all that no one in Hollywood knew anything, certainly no more than he did and probably a lot less, about how to make a good film that could earn a decent profit.
Still, he had a lot to learn about putting what was in his head onto the screen, and he had five years to learn it. His nonexclusive 1968 contract at Universal (Lang had gotten him to sign it by doubling his salary for Coogan’s Bluff to $1 million) would expire in 1975 at the earliest, depending upon how many pictures he made for them during that time. It would not be easy to make the films he wanted. Disappointments came early, as the projects he brought to the studio were met with little or no support. To make matters worse, in December 1969 Irving Leonard—Clint’s longtime business manager, the president and primary of Malpaso, and a true friend—died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three. Few events outwardly affected cool-customer Clint, but the loss of Leonard visibly shook him up.
Leonard was irreplaceable in his uniquely combined roles as father-figure and mentor and pervasive guiding light. But to try, Clint chose entertainment lawyer and now his resident producer, Bob Daley, whom he had known since Rawhide days, when Daley was a cost analyst at the studio, working his way up to unit manager. His job had been to control the flow of money during productions, including Rawhide. Clint had always liked Daley’s business style and acumen, keeping costs low and cutting out the usual ego-stroking expenditures like providing limos for stars and other perks. Daley’s job now at Malpaso would be to continue to help Clint find great projects he could star in and produce and help him handle his daily finances and act as go-between with Malpaso’s accounting firm, Kaufman and Bernstein.*
The first film that Clint decided to pursue after Leonard’s passing was the one Elizabeth Taylor had brought to him, Two Mules for Sister Sara. He had run it by Leonard, who approved of the idea shortly before he died. Clint wanted to make it because he felt the character was a more humanized, in-depth version of the Man with No Name. The film’s producer was Marty Rackin, a screenwriter who had enjoyed a fair measure of success in the 1950s before turning to full-time producing—he held the option on the original script, written by veteran writer-director Budd Boetticher. Clint and Taylor were his first choice to star in the film.
Then Taylor informed Rackin that she wanted the production transferred from Mexico to Spain, but Rackin insisted on keeping the location in Mexico, to be faithful to the script and to keep production costs down. Taylor was also experiencing some of the recurring “health problems” that had plagued her throughout her career. When the insurance for her alone proved beyond the film’s budget, Rackin and Universal decided to cut her loose.* Clint agreed to stay on, as long as he could have a say in who would direct. Rackin had no objections to bringing in Clint’s first choice, Don Siegel.
To replace Taylor, Universal chose Shirley MacLaine, a Broadway dancer who had become a glittering movie star after her performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955). Now that she had just finished making Sweet Charity at Universal for Bob Fosse, the studio, believing that was going to be huge, pushed for her to be in the picture. Clint, Rackin, and Siegel all agreed, and MacLaine was in.
“There was no question that Shirley was a fine actress with a great sense of humor,” Siegel later recalled.
But her skin was fair, her face—the map of Ireland. She most likely would look ridiculous if she played a Mexican nun. Nevertheless, Shirley was assigned to the picture … naturally the script had to be rewritten to fit her appearance … After working with Marty and Clint on the script, I made a startling discovery. Budd Boetticher, in addition to writing the story, had also written the script. He was a well-known director and a good friend of mine … I asked him why he wasn’t considered to be the director, and he claimed that Marty never gave him a straight answer. He needed money, so he sold his story and script to Marty, who took the property to Universal, got their okay, and hired Albert Maltz to write another script. I felt funny about being his director. Budd laughed and told me that everything was settled with Marty long before I appeared on the scene. We remained good friends.
As shot by Siegel, the film resembled nothing so much as the Man with No Name trilogy cut with the moral high ground of Coogan’s Bluff. Siegel deepened Clint’s familiar cigar-chomping character (here called Hogan), contemporized and Americanized his feelings toward women, expanding his need for self-redemption by rescuing them. What had been a one-line backstory in the Leone films now became the main plot in Two Mules for Sister Sara, which couldn’t have pleased Clint more.
The setting of the film is mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, during the Juarista rebellion to oust Napoleon’s occupying French army. A plan is in the works to attack a French army post in Chihuahua. Hogan (Clint) is an American mercenary (as was the Man with No Name) who comes upon a group of outlaws about to rape a woman (MacLaine). In a quick but fierce gun battle (like the opening sequence in A Fistful of Dollars) an unshaven Hogan, smoking a cigar butt and wearing an approximation of the Man with No Name’s iconic poncho, kills the men and agrees to help the woman to safety after he discovers she is a nun trying to escape the French who want to kill her for having aided the Juaristas. Along the way he discovers she is no ordinary nu
n. She swears, she drinks, she seems comfortable with her womanliness, and she uses all of her considerable charm to get him to help her sabotage a French supply train. Hogan is wounded during the attack, and Sara nurses him back to health. Then he discovers Sara is really a prostitute disguised as a nun. They fall in love, and when the mission is completed, this curious and mysterious couple ride off together, disappearing into the beautiful Mexican terrain.
The film was scored by Ennio Morricone, who had written the unforgettable scores for the Leone trilogy, further linking Hogan to the Man with No Name and making the film an informal kind of Americanized sequel. Said Clint:
I think [the Leone films] changed the style, the approach to Westerns [in Hollywood]. They “operacized” them, if there’s such a word. They made the violence and the shooting aspect a little more larger than life, and they had great music and new types of scores. I wasn’t involved in the music, but we used the same composer, Ennio Morricone, in Sister Sara … They were stories that hadn’t been used in other Westerns. They just had a look and a style that was a little different at the time: I don’t think any of them was a classic story—like [John Ford’s 1956] The Searchers or something like that—they were more fragmented, episodic, following the central character through various little episodes … Sergio Leone felt that sound was very important, that a film has to have its own sound as well as its own look.
