American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

Early on tensions rose between Clint, Reynolds, and the director, Blake Edwards, who had also written the script. The central issue was on casting, but the real problems ran much deeper. To begin with, Edwards had originally given the script to Locke, rather than Clint, in one of the typical sleights-of-hand that take place in Hollywood every day of the week. Edwards had asked her if she would read his script, suggesting that she would be perfect in the role of Caroline, Murphy’s (Reynolds’s) girlfriend. He said he had seen her performance in Bronco Billy, loved it, and wanted her to costar in his new film. To seal the deal, he suggested that her appearance would once and for all take her out of the giant shadow cast over her career by Clint’s.

  Not surprisingly, Locke jumped at the chance. That was when Edwards pulled the switch and asked Locke if she would mind passing the script along to Clint. “Before I knew it,” Locke said later, “Blake and his wife, Julie Andrews, were having dinner with Clint and me. Then Burt Reynolds was suddenly brought in, and within a few weeks I was simply out of the mix and forgotten.”

  Edwards had, apparently, used Locke as a way to get to Clint, to secure a deal with Malpaso, which in turn would secure the funding, and along with it a firm commitment from the two stars to appear in the movie that Edwards would direct.

  Even before the film went into production, the triangle of Edwards, Eastwood, and Reynolds ran into a Cinemascope-size brick wall. Both Clint and Reynolds had script approval, and each was interested in making sure he came out looking and sounding better than the other. Reynolds’s changes stretched into months of delays that drove Clint crazy, but allowed him to spend ample chunks of time on the nearest golf course. Reynolds continued to suggest changes. The two men fought indirectly over every nuance in the script, using Edwards as their reluctant intermediary.

  Edwards had directed Reynolds in a movie the year before, The Man Who Loved Women, and so had experienced the difficulties and learned how to deal with his short fuse. But he didn’t know how to handle Clint and may have assumed he had to wear the same kid gloves.

  The problem was that Clint, always impatient with weakness, interpreted Edwards’s running everything by him as just that. Once Clint green-lighted a production, he liked to go out and make it. The more Edwards equivocated, the less Clint believed he could get the job done. Then just before shooting was finally about to begin, Edwards, having had all he could take of Reynolds’s ego and Clint’s impatience, quit the film. “Creative differences” was the official reason given for his departure, but unofficially insiders talked of one final blowup with Clint that resulted in Edwards either being asked to leave the film or simply walking out on it.

  According to Reynolds, in his memoir, Clint actually orchestrated the removal of Blake by goading him into quitting, in favor of Richard Benjamin, a less intense, more likable, and less expensive director. The original title, Kansas City Heat, was now changed at Clint’s directive to the simpler and more marquee-friendly City Heat. The ever-reliable Fritz Manes replaced Edwards as the line producer, and Edwards’s screenplay was credited to Sam O. Brown, a Screen Writers Guild-approved pseudonym.*

  Naturally, Reynolds saw all this as nothing less than a takeover of the project by Clint, which upset the delicate balance of power between the two superstars. In addition, during the long preproduction, actors and actresses with other commitments waiting for them came and went like bowling pins on a Saturday night. The final supporting-roles cast was set only days before filming began: Madeline Kahn, Jane Alexander, Rip orn, Irene Cara, Richard Roundtree, and Tony Lo Bianco.

  The plot was as leaden as it was pedestrian—a Depression-era detective, Mike Murphy (Reynolds), discovers that his partner, Dehl Swift (Roundtree), wants to buy some ledgers from the bookkeeper of a gangster “godfather,” to sell to his rival gang leader. That leads to Swift’s swift demise. Soon enough Murphy gets the ledgers, and with them a death sentence from the godfather (Lo Bianco). He kidnaps Murphy’s girlfriend (Kahn) and enlists the help of his former police force partner, Lieutenant Speer, played by a dark-fedoraed Clint, who managed to keep his eyes shaded for almost the entire film, as if he didn’t want anyone to recognize him in it. The film ends with an explosion that explains nothing and only provides a way to halt, if not end, these confused, unfunny, and uninvolving events.

  The on-screen chemistry between Reynolds and Clint was, not surprisingly, zero-minus-a-hundred, which may help to explain the nearly career-ending accident that occurred while they were filming a bar scene in which Speer punches Murphy in the face. During the fight a stuntman mistakenly used a real chair instead of a fake, “breakaway” chair to hit Reynolds. It badly broke Reynolds’s jaw and developed into temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), which affects both balance and sensory perceptions. Reynolds’s physical health deteriorated after that, and rumors ran rampant in the press that he had developed AIDS, a supposition supercharged by his dramatic loss of weight. (He was unable to eat solid food through his damaged jaw.)

  It was, for all intents and purposes, the end of Reynolds’s run as a major Hollywood movie star. Eventually he would recover and work, most notably in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and in a couple of TV series, but he never again placed on a national film-star ranking. A lot of people believed that Clint had delivered the punch that did Reynolds in, that he had punched him out of commission for good.*

  Meanwhile Locke, left out of both Tightrope and City Heat, went by herself to the William Morris office in search of a project she might be able to direct. (Clint would later claim that he had suggested she move into directing, but according to Locke, she came up with the idea first and Clint encouraged her.) At the agency she came across a script that had been lying around in development hell for years, something called Ratboy, by Rob Thompson, which was about just what the title suggests, a boy who is half-rat, half-human. Nikki, a small-time promoter, comes across Ratboy and decides to promote him into a big star. Along the way she falls in love with Ratboy and is then redeemed for her exploitative desires. The script was Beauty and the Beast crossed with King Kong.

  Locke quickly made a deal to take over the rights and then brought the script to Terry Semel, at Warner. Semel gave it a green light, as long as she would agree to two conditions. First, Locke had to appear in the picture as well as direct it. She had no problem with that—she would play Nikki.

  The second, that Clint would produce.

  This condition made nobody happy. Clint did not want to work with Locke anymore, and Locke felt that as soon as Clint’s name was attached to Ratboy, her project would turn into “A Clint Eastwood Picture” and defeat her attempt to emerge from his giant shadow. Clint’s solution was simple; he would put his name on the picture but actually assign the line-producing chores to Fritz Manes. But Malpaso would not be involved: Clint, wanting to put physical and professional distance between himself and Locke, decided to create a new production company within Malpaso for this one picture.

  Then, likely putting the final nail in the coffin of her relationship with Clint, Locke cast her husband, Gordon, to play Nikki’s brother.

  Predictably, Clint was vehemently opposed. An angry back-and-forth ensued: Clint accused Locke of nepotism. Locke reminded Clint that he had used his son and his daughter in two of his films. Clint insisted that he hadn’t used either in his first film. Locke countered that her film wasn’t really intended for the mainstream so it didn’t matter. Clint said he didn’t want Gordon in the film and halted all further development of the script until Locke agreed.

  Having come to an impasse, Locke dropped her next bombshell: she had cast Sharon Baird (S. L. Baird in the credits), one of the original Mouseketeers, in the title role. Clint couldn’t believe it. He quietly reminded her that the film was called ratboy, not ratgirl.

  On it went, with Clint trying to maintain absolute control of every aspect of the film. By the time it was finished, Locke felt that her creative input h
ad been totally buried. Being invited to the Deauville Film Festival in France, where the film received good notices, did nothing to soothe her.*

  For its commercial release in 1986, Warner Bros. chose to open Ratboy in only one theater in Los Angeles and one in New York City and the top development executives at Warner—who included Semel, Lucy Fisher, and Mark Canton—agreed to a first-look, first-refusal deal for anything else Locke brought them.

  From the beginning of the project, in 1984, Clint had not been easy for Locke to work with, but the deterioration of their relationship may not have been the only reason. Just as Clint had gotten involved with the film, Maggie officially filed for divorce and publicly announced her intention to marry Wynberg. Estimates ran the value of the original 1979 settlement agreement up to around $28 million in cash, plus property and child support.†

  By the time Clint was ready to make his next movie, he had become involved with a new woman, Jacelyn Reeves, who was to become the mother of his next child. The film was called Pale Rider. The state of affairs was chaos.

  So naturally Clint decided to run for mayor of Carmel.

  *Other factors may have contributed to the departure. At one point Edwards wanted to cast his wife in the film, but Clint vehemently objected, noting that he hadn’t put Locke in the film. Edwards had also made some requests that Clint, as executive producer, did not appreciate, like a car and driver to get him from Beverly Hills to Burbank; according to one source, that sent Clint through the ceiling. “Let him walk,” Clint was supposed to have said, “or get a horse.”

  *It remains unclear who threw the actual punch, if it was Clint or a stuntman, or even what caused the accident, the punch, or the fall. As for Edwards, his next theatrical feature that he both wrote and directed, the satirical A Fine Mess (1986), included a brief but scathing send-up of Clint as the Man with No Name.

  *The brother was played by Louie Anderson; Gordon became the voice of Ratboy. Gerrit Graham played Nikki’s other brother. Despite Clint’s strong objections, Baird appeared in the title role.

  †After a long and at times contentious battle, they finally divorced in May 1984. The monetary award was, reportedly, calculated on the basis of a million dollars for every year they were married, plus previously agreed-upon property divisions. Child custody was joint, with Maggie awarded physical custody. In an article in People magazine published shortly after the divorce was finalized, Maggie blamed Locke for her final breakup with Clint. But the divorce was reported as “friendly,” and she and Clint continued as partners in various business interests they shared. Maggie married Wynberg in 1984. They were divorced in 1989.

  SIXTEEN

  A middle-aged Clint begins to deal with issues of mortality in Pale Rider, 1985

  I’ve always considered myself too individualistic to be either right wing or left wing.

  —Clint Eastwood

  The mayoral adventure began because of ice cream cones, or more accurately, their unavailability on summer afternoons, because the city fathers of Carmel-by-the-Sea (the town’s legal name) had passed an ordinance prohibiting the storefront sale of ice cream cones because they felt that eating them in the street was “undignified.” To Carmel’s most celebrated citizen, who happened to like eating ice cream cones in the summertime, this was one civil outrage too many, and no matter what, he was not going to let it stand.

  He had had his troubles with the town council before. In June 1983 he had applied for permission to build a two-story freestanding addition to the Hog’s Breath—and been denied. The council cited problems with the design and the materials. Moreover, it said, San Carlos Street, where the Hog’s Breath was located, already had too many glass and concrete structures and not enough wood. In the early spring of 1984, shortly after the completion of City Heat and a series of back-and-forth maneuvers, Clint made a final, personal appeal to the council, which promptly rejected it. Angry and frustrated, he threatened to file suit against the city council of Carmel, claiming the regulations the council used as the basis for its decision were “vague and subjective.”

  Not long after the start of the ice cream battle, with his Hog’s Breath Inn situation also still unresolved, Clint was sitting around the inn with some friends when someone suggested he ought to run for mayor. Once he got elected, they said, he could change the rules. It may have been a joke, but no one was laughing, least of all Clint.

  But he had more pressing, if not bigger, things (to him) to deal with at the moment. That spring he was being honored at the prestigious Paris-based Cinémathèque Française, which was to culminate in a special European preview screening of Tightrope. This invitation was especially important because he was going to be decorated as a Knight in the French Order of Arts and Letters, an honor that he had won only with much outside support.*

  His film career meant a lot to him. Even if some critics still didn’t take his movies seriously, or the subjects were socially distasteful, he was very proud of them. As he told one interviewer during this period, “Maybe there were certain prejudices in the times of Dirty Harry in 1971 that don’t exist now, or are changing now, or times are changing. Maybe I’m older, more mature, maybe the audiences are changing and I’m changing. It’s just circumstances … I’ve never begged for respectability.”

  Respectability was the heart of the matter, and it no longer seemed out of reach. Most of the critics, who had been far behind audiences in recognizing Clint’s movies as terrific entertainments, were beginning to “get” that he was more than just a genre moviemaker, and that his films were about something, even if it wasn’t the usual boy-meets-girl love story.

  As one critic wrote during this period in the New York Times, where its mere inclusion was a benediction: “The Eastwood persona caught a blue-collar discontent with a country portrayed as being run by bleeding hearts.” In other words, Harry Callahan the immoral fascist had now turned into Harry Callahan the law-and-order hero.

  Even the über-liberal Norman Mailer had changed his opinion. “Clint Eastwood is an artist,” he said, and “he has a presidential face.” In fact, he said, “maybe there is no one more American than Clint.”

  After his triumphal visit to Paris, Clint returned home and went directly into pre-general-release work on Pale Rider, his first western since The Outlaw Josey Wales, nine years earlier. Meanwhile a new script came his way via Megan Rose, The William Munny Killings; she had read it and thought it perfect for Clint. Francis Ford Coppola had an option on it; when Rose showed it to ucy Fisher, a head of production and development at Warner, she agreed that it was a good choice for Clint. But he would never consent to being directed by Coppola, Fisher said. Their styles—Coppola’s painstakingly slow brand of perfectionism, Clint’s fast, instinctive method—were incompatible. Eventually Coppola let his option lapse, and as a 1984 Christmas gift to Clint, Rose put a copy of the script into his Christmas stocking. He liked it, bought it, and then put it away until he felt the time was right to make it. That time would come in 1992, when it was retitled Unforgiven.

  This time out, with his confidence bubbling like chilled champagne, he assured himself he would have no more problems with temperamental or inexperienced directors (or girlfriends with excessive proprietary claims). As his affair with Rose was ending, Clint made sure to keep sufficient distance from her. With Pale Rider he was going to produce, star in, and direct the whole picture; Manes would have the nominal role of Malpaso’s executive producer.

  To some, Clint’s choice to return to westerns (especially one tinged with a mysterious and elegant unearthliness) seemed odd, as the genre had been pronounced dead in the mud since Heaven’s Gate. Moreover, Pale Rider was in many ways yet another version of the true events that that film, and Shane, had been based on, the Johnson County War. Following his success with Tightrope (and forgetting his failure with City Heat), Pale Rider seemed, at best, an offbeat choice.

  Clint shifted the locale to Gold Rush California, where would-be instant millionaires are being terro
rized by a ship-mining corporation led by Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart). His conglomerate needs the land in order to survive. (In previous versions, including Shane and Heaven’s Gate, the battle pitted land-settlers against cattle-breeders.)

  On the miners’ side is Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty), a homesteader, who has a new girlfriend (Carrie Snodgress) and a daughter from his first marriage, Megan (Sydney Penny). Out of the mist comes a man known only as the Preacher (Eastwood), who succeeds in uniting the miners in a successful showdown with LaHood and his men, including on LaHood’s side an evil marshal (John Russell), all of whom the Preacher battled sometime in the past. In a series of strange and violent confrontations, the Preacher helps the homesteaders achieve peace. Despite Megan’s adoration of him, he rides off by himself into the sunset, a ghostly eminence who uses the violent ways of the lawless Old West.

  Like Shane, the Preacher seems to come out of the past to confront the evil cattlemen before he heads out, presumably to Boot Hill, the inevitable destiny of all gunfighters, even the Old West itself. In Pale Rider (as in High Plains Drifter), the Preacher is less a former gun-fighter than the ghost of a former gunfighter—perhaps, in the film’s pseudo-religious overlay, a descendant of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (The Preacher is seen riding past a window as Megan reads that passage aloud from the Bible.)

  A sense of the dramatic if ethereal power of the unexplainable, mystical, and supernatural pervades this film as it did The Beguiled, although here much more affectingly. Obvious earlier Eastwood-film allusions abound, from the vague history of the Man with No Name, to the brutal tactics of Harry Callahan and the aforementioned ambience of The Beguiled. The difference in Pale Rider is that the character is not merely out of the mainstream, he seems out of the stream of life itself.