by Marc Eliot
Instead he played off an orangutan.*
Jeremy Joe Kronsberg’s screenplay concerns a two-fisted truck driver who travels from town to town making money in bare-handed pickup prizefights; he is accompanied by, of all things, an orangutan he has won in a previous fight. He falls in love with a country-western singer, loses her, wins her, and loses her again. Clint may have first come across the script from a secretary who was a friend of Kronsberg’s wife. Everyone at Malpaso was against the project except Clint, and Locke had liked it as well. He took it to Warner to find the funding for it.
Warner, eager to get another Eastwood film in theaters, was nonetheless split on this one. The new head of production, John Calley, wanted to pass, but Frank Wells, Clint’s steadfast ally at the studio, thought it might be a good commercial departure for him. After a lot of back-and-forth, Warner finally said yes and put up the production money. Shooting began shortly thereafter, in April 1978, in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and Denver—the stops along the trucker route in the film. The film’s production caravan eventually wound up in Los Angeles, both for additional locations and the sound-stages of Warner.
To direct, Clint brought back James Fargo, who had last worked with him on The Enforcer—someone who, essentially, wouldn’t get in the way. Wanting country music to be played throughout, he hired Snuff Garrett from the old Rawhide days to write some tunes, and chose the title of one, “Every Which Way but Loose,” as the title of the film (originally called The Coming of Philo Beddoe). He then cut a publishing deal with Warner and used all of their artists on the soundtrack album. The title track, by Eddie Rabbitt, was released as a single a month before the film came out, became an unlikely cross-over hit, and provided free promotion every time it was played on the radio. In the film Locke’s character, Lynn Halsey-Taylor, sings two songs, something she didn’t particularly want to do nor was especially good at, but Clint hired a singing coach, in this case Phil Everly of the famed Everly Brothers, to work with her until Clint thought the songs, and the scenes, were good enough.
Although Sondra Locke was cast as the female country-singer-love-interest, as usual in an Eastwood film, the woman was part of the back-story rather than the major plot line, dominated here by the orangutan. Working with animals is always iffy, and Clint knew it. He had worked with animals before, as far back as his all-but-invisible part in the Francis the Talking Mule series, but felt he could pull it off. His costar was an orangutan called Clyde in the movie (three orangutans were used in the production, but one, whose real name was Manis, was on-screen most of the time), a Las Vegas–trained performer with whom audiences immediately fell in love.
Clint, with perfectly understated comic timing, played to the film’s lowbrow mentality, up to and including the simplified moral—what life lessons man learns from an orangutan. The set piece that everyone remembers most happens when Clint points his fingers like a gun at Clyde and yells bang, to which Clyde responds by pretending to fall down dead. That bit of comedy, plus tough-guy motorcycle gangs, bare-chested fistfights, insincere women, and a buddy-buddy “’tan more faithful than even Tonto was to the Lone Ranger,” added up to an improbable hit but a box-office sensation. Women, who ordinarily stayed away from the harder Clint movies (unless dragged to them by their husbands or boyfriends) loved this one and helped drive the movie’s take into the stratosphere.
But the reviews were almost universally awful: “The film is way off the mark” (Variety). “This is a redneck comedy with no stops pulled. If I could persuade my friends to see it, they would probably detest me” (Stuart Byron, Village Voice). “A Clint Eastwood comedy that could not possibly have been created by human hands … One can forgive the orangutan’s participation but what is Eastwood’s excuse” (David Ansen, Newsweek). “The latest Clint Eastwood disgrace” (Rex Reed, New York Daily News). Nonetheless, Every Which Way but Loose grossed an astonishing $124 million in its initial domestic release, about eight times what The Gauntlet had done, making it the second-biggest Warner film of the year, behind Richard Donner’s Superman, whose title character Clint had seriously considered playing.*
Early in 1979, after a year of negotiations, Clint thought he was ready to agree to a divorce settlement. He would pay Maggie a lump sum of $25 million and allow her to keep the big house in Carmel and have the kids live with her; Clint would be able to freely come and go with them, something he insisted on. While he was never around all that much, he still loved and felt close to them. He kept his brand-new $100,000 Ferrari Boxer. He then assigned Locke the job of finding a new house for them, promising her that “it would be theirs forever, together in retirement.” There was, reportedly, no anger or vicious-ness between Clint and Maggie. A coolness coated the wall between them, but for the sake of himself as much as (he claimed) the kids, and to keep the prying press off both his and Maggie’s necks, he was determined to melt it.
For that reason, and because Maggie’s lawyer was demanding 50 percent of everything Clint had earned while they were together, he suddenly reversed his stand and no longer pressed for a final divorce. Instead, he felt a longer separation was needed so that both could have time to think, giving an ironic meaning to the newest Clint Eastwood-inspired catchphrase, “every which way but loose.”
*Fargo had served as AD on Joe Kidd, High Plains Drifter, Breezy, The Eiger Sanction, and The Outlaw Josey Wales.
*Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, and The Enforcer had all been huge-grossing Warner/ Malpaso Christmas-holiday-release pictures.
*The deal for The Car had made the duo “hot” in the industry, not the actual script or the film that was made from it. As ever in Hollywood, money talked, and more money meant more power, one of the reasons Clint never liked to pay that much to writers. He had formed Malpaso to ensure his own autonomous power base (and financial stronghold) and did not like to give up a great deal of money, because that meant, to him at least, surrendering authority, or power, to underlings.
*She lost to Ruth Gordon in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. The other nominees were Lynn Carlin in John Cassavetes’s Faces, Kay Medford in William Wyler’s Funny Girl, and Estelle Parsons in Paul Newman’s Rachel, Rachel.
*The primary difference between Wayne and Clint was that Wayne’s movies deliberately proselytized über-patriotism, roughly from David Miller’s Flying Tigers (1942) through Wayne’s self-directed Vietnam War opus, The Green Berets (1968). Clint preferred to explore the flaws of individual characters in his films rather than deliver an explicit message. Both actors (and directors) may have achieved similar results—some might say Dirty Harry is more political than The Green Berets, but as artistic statements, the films, taken out of their social context, reflect far different creative approaches and artistic results.
*Clint’s character, Philo Beddoe, was twenty-nine years old in the original script. During production, writer Jeremy Joe Kronsberg teased Clint that the script would have to be revised to make Philo older so that he could be believable as a Clint Eastwood character. When Clint asked how much older, Kronsberg replied, “About thirty-five.”
*Every Which Way but Loose earned more than $200 million in its first year of international release.
PART II
FROM ACTOR TO AUTEUR
THIRTEEN
Spanish movie poster for Bronco Billy, 1980
I’ve been advised against nearly everything I’ve ever done.
—Clint Eastwood
There was no part for Sondra Locke in Clint’s next movie, Escape from Alcatraz, his thirty-fourth feature film in twenty-five years. The virtually all-male adventure was based on the true story of Frank Lee Morris and John and Clarence Anglin’s 1962 escape from the notorious island prison located in San Francisco Bay. While Clint was in production, Locke looked for a new house where they could live together. She did not say what if anything she intended to do about her husband, although he was, at this time, living with another man.
The film was based on J. Campbell Bruce’s 1963 nonfiction boo
k Escape from Alcatraz: A Farewell to the Rock. Richard Tuggle, the editor of a small magazine devoted to health, had initially bought it to break into the movie business. Tuggle wrote his own screen adaptation and, when he was satisfied it was good enough, sent it to the one director he thought might like it enough to make it.
Tuggle had a lifelong fascination with prison stories, both true and fictionalized, and considered Don Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) the best of the genre; film producer Walter Wanger had conceived it after being released from prison for shooting a man he suspected was having an affair with his wife. While incarcerated, Wanger found the living conditions so appalling, he wanted to expose them to the public. The result was one of the toughest and most brutally realistic prison dramas ever filmed.
Late in February 1978, when Tuggle sent the script to Siegel via his agent, Leonard Hirshan, at William Morris (also Clint’s agent), Hirshan sent it on to Siegel, who liked it but was tied up on another project, Das Boot, and had to pass. Then a severe illness struck one of the top executives at Bavaria Studios, in Germany, and Das Boot, already in production, had to be halted. Early in March Hirshan went back to Siegel and asked him to reconsider the project. Siegel told Hirshan he thought it would be perfect for Clint. Hirshan did and then sent it to Daley (annoying Siegel, who felt his relationship was strong and personal enough that the script should have gone directly to Clint). Clint read, loved it, and wanted Siegel to direct; he wanted to star in and produce it through Malpaso.
But Siegel, rather than taking an option on the script, had bought it outright for a cool $100,000 with the irreversible proviso that he would direct. He made an offer to Clint and Malpaso (and presumably Warner). Clint balked over the issue of who would have the final cut. Siegel (still miffed at Hirshan for not sending the script directly to Clint, or for not completely understanding the deal) heard nothing from either Clint or Hirshan about the terms he wanted. He then angrily took his offer off the table and moved the project to Paramount. The joint heads of that studio, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, had saved Paramount from going under by developing a highly successful TV unit and a series of in-house sitcoms. Now they were looking for the right project to restore the studio’s big-screen glory. They thought Escape from Alcatraz was the perfect choice. They made the deal and looked for a star in their own stable to play the lead.
None proved either interested or available. (Paramount especially wanted Richard Gere but he was not excited by the project.) Eisner then urged Siegel to reconcile with Clint and try to bring him to Paramount. Siegel was reluctant, but he had felt underappreciated at Warner: like Clint, he blamed the studio’s lack of a sufficient pre-awards-industry campaign for his not even being nominated for Dirty Harry. He bit the bullet, visited Clint at his Malpaso office for sandwiches and beers, and mea culpa’d his way into signing a joint venture between Malpaso, Siegel Film, and Paramount, with options for all parties to join in future projects together.
Moving to Paramount, even just for this picture, was a big deal for Clint. For the first time in nearly a decade his big summer 1979 release would carry Paramount’s name and its familiar circle and mountain logo. It was not only a victory for Paramount but also a slap in the face to Warner, which had enjoyed a steady stream of Eastwood holiday fare every year since Dirty Harry.
Clint had stayed away from Paramount for so long because of his grudge over the production delays and excess spending on Paint Your Wagon—two of the primary reasons he had formed Malpaso. He knew he was taking something of a risk returning to the studio, but this time he was at a far higher level of power in Hollywood, and his defection, as it were, from Warner might shake that studio up and remind them how valuable he really was to their bottom line.
Production on Escape from Alcatraz began in October 1978, and as Siegel had feared, the set turned into an ongoing battle between him and Clint for control over every aspect of filming. Clint apparently prevailed; Siegel left the production in anger before the completion of its all-important final cut. Clint, his longtime editors Ferris Webster and Joel Cox, and Jack Green, his cameraman, put it together.
Not surprisingly, the finished product looked less like a Siegel film than any of his four prior collaborations with Clint. In Siegel’s projected final version, the film had ended inside the prison, giving it an air of grim reality. In Clint’s a flower is left behind, indicating that the three escapees make it—the triumph of the outlaw over his society of imprisonment. This crucial change altered the entire meaning of the film. Both versions were dark: Siegel’s reflected the inescapable reality of Alcatraz, while Clint’s suggested the greater blackness of the escapees’ lives on the run, suggested by the black, murky waters that surround and engulf the flower. In this as in all Clint films, survival is sometimes harder and therefore more dramatic than death. (Clint dies in only three films in his entire career: The Beguiled, Honkytonk Man, and Gran Torino.) Asked by Time magazine about the darkness and the mood of the film and if it had any personal relevance, Clint responded with a succinct, end-of-conversation “I don’t know.”
Although Clint did not officially direct the film (Siegel is credited as producer and director), its moody, grim level of intensity and the clear and imposing presence of his dark personality on-screen clearly identifies it as a Clint Eastwood film.
Upon its release in 1979, Escape from Alcatraz received mostly rave reviews, some of the best of Clint’s career. Vincent Canby of The New York Times led the way, omitting any mention of Siegel while emphasizing the importance of Clint: “This is a first-rate action movie. Terrifically exciting. There is more evident knowledge of moviemaking in any one frame than there are in most other American films around at the moment. Mr. Eastwood fulfills the demands of the role and the film as probably no other actor could.” Frank Rich, writing for Time magazine, called it “ingenious, precise and exciting.”
Clearly Clint had hit a critical nerve with Escape from Alcatraz, although audiences proved less interested. The film’s initial domestic gross was a relatively modest $34 million, about a third of what Every Which Way but Loose had taken in.* It also grossed less than one-fifth of that year’s biggest film, Richard Donner’s Superman, a Warner Bros. hit that made a star out of its title hero, Christopher Reeve, a role that Clint had repeatedly turned down. His disappointment at Escape’s soft box office, and his lingering ill feelings about how Siegel had put the deal together, especially buying the rights before coming to see him at Warner, made Escape from Alcatraz their last collaboration.†
If Clint as Frank Morris had to escape from an inescapable prison, Clint as Clint found real life even harder. Despite reported pressure from Locke for him to finalize his divorce from Maggie, Clint continued to drag his feet, perhaps ambivalent about ending his marriage to Maggie. Approaching fifty, Clint had found a new health regimen, and he was now said to be an enthusiastic devotee of the Life Extension program by Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, who theorized that human beings were capable of living to 150 years of age while retaining their physical and mental powers. The program required exercise and a regimen of pills and vitamins that the couple promoted.
“During [1978] Clint began a new obsession, to consume vast amounts of vitamins and amino acids,” according to Locke.
At first Clint explained his new “megavitamin” kick was part of getting beefed up and buffed out to play his character … He would keep large bowls of boiled potatoes in the fridge and eat them like popcorn throughout the day … he kept all the [rest of the] concoctions in enormous glass jars on the kitchen abinet shelves, and after carefully blending all the powders for our latest batch, we would sit on the living room sofa scooping and stuffing the miracle powder into these enormous clear gelatin capsules. Sometimes the two ends of the capsules would bend or refuse to fit back together and Clint would go ballistic … some of the mixtures that he consumed in such abundance began to worry me, like selenium and hydergine, L-arginine, Tryptophan, DMSO for bruises, so much carotene tha
t his hands turned orange … and gone were the days of red meat and any fat—even the avocados with the dollop of mayonnaise that we’d always had for lunch.
It was also reported in the Herald-Examiner, but denied by Clint, that he had had a face-lift.
In the summer of 1978, shortly after they had completed work on Every Which Way but Loose, Locke became pregnant. The situation left Clint ice-cold. He had never wanted children, he told her, and had had them after more than a decade of marriage only because Maggie had insisted. (The child with Roxanne Tunis was a subject that apparently did not come up.) Now, he told her, fatherhood was out of the question, and he urged her to have an abortion. Although she did not want to do it, after considering all that it meant to Clint, she agreed. For a while afterward everything between them seemed all right again. Then shortly after production was completed on Escape from Alcatraz, she became pregnant again.
Once again Clint insisted she have an abortion, and once again she reluctantly did so. When she came out of the hospital, as if to reward her or compensate her for her loss, he bought her the new home in tony Bel-Air she wanted. And apparently feeling generous (and also not wanting him to be anywhere near the Bel-Air house), he threw in one for her husband as well, in less upscale West Hollywood. At the same time he bought another house for himself in Carmel, by the ocean, where he could stay by himself when Locke was stuck in Hollywood on business. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is; in his early years with Maggie, Clint kept various fortresses of solitude, in Hollywood and in Carmel, allowing him the freedom to spend time not just with himself but with other women, if he so chose.
