American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  In addition, a sense of political and social resurrection floats like a mist throughout the film, suggesting a post-Vietnam metaphor: the ghosts of the American war dead seem to live on, performing heroic deeds for the landowners, the South Vietnamese people, caught in a battle with the North not just over land rights but over the definition of what the law of the land will be. On that zeitgeist level, in its belief in the spiritual power of the defenders of the land, the film is pure Reagan-era fantasy.

  Heady stuff, to be sure, but also the makings of a terrifically entertaining movie, which Pale Rider turned out to be. While they were making it in Sun Valley, the cast and crew felt that Clint was in a great groove, undergoing a resurrection of his own with this return to his most familiar genre and role, the western tough guy.

  When he was invited to go to Cannes that spring to show Pale Rider, prior to its official commercial release, he took up the offer. “I enjoyed going there because I was taking a western. No one ever takes an American western. It was kind of fun and the film was received rather well. They gave me a thing called The Chevalier of Arts and Letters, and later on The Commander of the Arts and Letters.”*

  Pale Rider opened in June 1985 to raves. Vincent Canby went all out in his praise:

  An entertaining, mystical new western … played absolutely straight, but it’s also very funny in a dryly sophisticated way that—it’s only now apparent—has been true of Mr. Eastwood’s self-directed films and of the Eastwood films directed by Don Siegel … like all Eastwood productions, Pale Rider is extremely well cast beginning with the star. Mr. Eastwood has continued to refine the identity of his western hero by eliminating virtually every superfluous gesture. He’s a master of minimalism. The camera does not reflect vanity. It discovers the character within. Pale Rider is the first decent western in a very long time.

  And Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice:

  On the whole Eastwood’s instincts as an artist are well-nigh inspiring in the context of the temptations he must face all the time to play it completely safe. Consequently, even his mistakes contribute to his mystique … Eastwood has managed to keep the genre alive … through the ghostly intervention of his heroic persona.

  But as always with Clint’s movies, it was the audience that spoke the loudest. Pale Rider, which cost less than $4 million to make, was the top-grossing release its first week, raking in an amazing (for 1985) $9 million, and it brought in $21.5 million in its first ten days. It would go on to gross more than $60 million in its initial domestic release, a figure that would more than triple by the time it played on screens worldwide, everywhere to wildly enthusiastic reviews.

  Typical of the international adulation was a piece in a French magazine that declared, “Clint Eastwood, depuis 15 ans, la star de cinéma le plus populaire du monde! ”*

  Clint had made a spectacular return to form, and in more ways than one. On location in Sun Valley it was an open secret on set that there was a new “main squeeze” in Clint’s life, a pretty young woman he had met at the Hog’s Breath by the name of Jacelyn Reeves, an airline stewardess hose home base was Carmel.

  And he kept at least one other woman (as he had kept Tunis, Rose, Reeves, and even Locke for a while) in a “regular rotation.” Jane Brolin, an actress who had married James Brolin in 1966, had known Clint since his Universal contract-player days, when they had first met on the grounds of the studio. After the breakup with Brolin, Jane had run into Clint, and before long they had become romantically involved.

  Around this same time Clint began receiving anonymous “hate mail” regarding Sondra Locke. Some close to the situation suspected the letters were coming from Jane, despite the fact that Locke was on shaky terms with a fast-cooling Clint. He refused to believe it, and the matter was never satisfactorily resolved.*

  On March 21, 1986, Jacelyn Reeves, who had become pregnant by Clint, gave birth to a son she named Scott. The registered birth certificate shows the baby was delivered at Monterey Community Hospital. The name of the father is omitted.

  In the midst of all this, Clint decided to do something about both the ice cream ordinance and the one that was preventing him from expanding the Hog’s Breath: he threw his hat into the ring for mayor. Almost immediately campaign posters with his picture that looked like a cross between Ronald Reagan and Dirty Harry began to appear on the sides of buildings and streetlamps. Bumper stickers bore the slogan “Go ahead, make me mayor!” With Ronald Reagan’s improbable leap from movies to the White House still fresh in everyone’s minds, the news that Clint had “entered politics” filled the front pages of newspapers around the world. (He ran as a nonpartisan, as the office of mayor does not require a political affiliation.)

  On the morning of January 30, 1986, after completing his round at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament and just hours before the deadline, Clint dropped off his petition of thirty signatures (ten more than the minimum required), and his name was put into official nomination. In his first interview after declaring himself a candidate, Clint told the local Carmel newspaper why he had decided to run:

  I don’t need to bring attention to myself. I’m doing this as a resident. This is where I live; this is where I intend to live the rest of my life. I have a great affinity with the community. There used to be a great deal of camaraderie, a great spirit in this community. Now there is such negativity. I’d like to see the old spirit come back here, that kind of esprit de corps … I can recall a time when you could walk down the street in Carmel and pick up an ice-cream cone at a shop—now you’d be fined … the city will be my absolute priority. I’ll be a lot less active in films than I have in the past.

  It was a startling statement. That he would put the brakes on his more-successful-than-ever film career in favor of small-town politics sounded like a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life. The lines between his roles and his real life were blurring. In his films Clint was, in one way or another, always the defender of the people. Now he wanted to defend them in real life. At nearly fifty-six, when most men started to at least think about retirement, Clint was proudly and publicly opening up a new avenue and going so far as to suggest it meant a major career change.

  Change was indeed in the air for Clint that year, although not entirely the change he had in mind.

  On April 8, 1986, he won the $200-a-week mayoral post handily, spending more than $40,000 on his campaign; his opponent, incumbent Charlotte Townsend, spent $300. Clint got 2,166 votes, or 72 percent of the total cast. Townsend got 799. Clint voted before breakfast, after driving in a beat-up yellow Volkswagen convertible through a massive press gauntlet.

  The next day he received a call from President Reagan, who congratulated him by asking, tongue firmly planted in cheek, “What’s an actor who once appeared with a monkey in a movie doing in politics?” The not-so-inside joke was, of course, that Reagan had made Bedtime for Bonzo. Jimmy Stewart, the star of It’s a Wonderful Life, who wasn’t in politics but, true to his image, was the best friend of the president, also called to congratulate Clint.

  At his swearing-in for his two-year term, his mother, his sister Jeanne, more than a thousand townsfolk, and at least that many paparazzi showed up to watch Charlotte Townsend hand over the symbolic gavel of power.

  Even before he dealt with the ice cream crisis, one of the first things the 1985 box-office champion did as mayor was to fire the heads of the four planning commissions that had turned down his proposal to build the office addition next to the Hog’s Breath.* The reversal of the anti-ice-cream ordinance followed, sparking a noticeable rise in sidewalk cone sales.

  Soon after the election, Clint turned his day-to-day mayoral responsibilities over to Sue Hutchinson, a sixty-something consultant he had hired to organize his campaign. Her strong organizational skills were ideal for the job. She wasn’t someone with whom he could possibly become involved, but she knew how to run a screw-tight ship. With Hutchinson firmly in place, he increasingly boarded the Warner corporate jet that was always avail
able to him and flew to his Malpaso offices in Burbank, to turn his full-time attention back to filmmaking.

  The first post–Pale Rider project he liked (one of the two feature films he would make while ostensibly serving as the mayor of Carmel) was a military-themed script called Heartbreak Ridge. Warner had sent him the script, written by James Carabatsos, a Vietnam veteran who had drawn upon his own experiences once before in a 1977 movie called Heroes, directed by Jeremy Kagan.† Distributed by Universal, Heroes had caught the eyes of the Warner executives who were interested in producing Kagan’s next film, especially after the success of Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter made Vietnam a hot-button topic for mainstream films.

  Nonetheless, Warner had problems getting a “name” interested to star in Heartbreak Ridge, a problem that often arose when a project was purchased without a star already attached; the reasons usually quickly became apparent. In the case of Heartbreak Ridge, very few actors wanted to play age against youth, presenting their own aging facade against a bunch of scene-stealing newcomers. Clint, however, was not afraid to age on-screen and did not make conventional love stories; he was looking for just such a script, and as always one by a writer with little or no clout to challenge him.

  After a couple of rewrites with specific verbal suggestions from Clint, an exasperated Carabatsos begged off any further work on Heartbreak Ridge, claiming other commitments. Clint promptly enlisted Dennis Hackin, who had written Bronco Billy, to punch up the action and the comedy. Still not satisfied, Clint next brought in Joseph Stinson, who had written Sudden Impact. Finally Clint and Megan Rose laid out pages from all the versions and cobbled together something they felt was at least filmable. Clint then brought back Hackin and Stinson and asked them to work on the script together. That marked the end of Rose’s involvement with Clint, and the start of an ongoing dispute over who was responsible for the final shooting version.*

  One reason the script may have been so hard to tailor to Clint’s satisfaction was that few, if any, of the writers understood how personal, rather than genre-driven, the film actually was. Clint’s days as a leading man were all but over, and even the facade of his long-standing relationship with Sondra Locke was gone. According to Clint:

  Heartbreak Ridge [is about] what warriors do when they haven’t got a war. That’s always interested me. And I thought, here’s a character, let’s see how he interacts with people, especially with women. It was an interesting story, also about a solider who hasn’t ever done anything but fight wars, and he discovers that he’s reached the end of his career, and he has nothing to look back on and nothing at all he can concentrate on now.

  In its final form, an aging drill sergeant has separated from his wife and fears his time is just about up. He won the Medal of Honor at the battle of Heartbreak Ridge during the Korean War but has now been reduced to training new recruits, transforming boys still wet behind the ears into combat-ready Marines (for the invasion of Granada that took place in 1983). If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because a similar story had been made in 1982 by Taylor Hackford, An Officer and a Gentleman, that starred Richard Gere as a punk runaway who is turned into a “real man” by his discovery of true love (via Debra Winger) and a tough-guy gunnery sergeant played by Louis Gossett Jr. It was Gere’s picture, but Gossett Jr. took home a Best Supporting Oscar for his performance.* Perhaps ego, and Clint’s long-simmering anger at the Academy for failing to recognize his achievements, were what really attracted him to a role very close to the one that had brought the elusive statuette to Gossett.

  Besides the heavily doctored script, and Clint’s clenched-teeth style of acting that made him seem now more doddering than daring, the production ran into trouble with the U.S. Defense Department. They had at first agreed to cooperate with the film but withdrew after seeing the final cut because of the excessive use of profanity and unfair combat tactics. (An Officer and a Gentleman’s below-the-belt training methods were unhampered by the military, as it was made without their cooperation.) One thing the DOD most objected to was Sergeant Highway (Clint) pumping an extra bullet into the back of an enemy soldier who had already been shot. Another was the fact that the Marines, in the real-life invasion, got to Grenada via Beirut, which Clint eliminated from the film. Soon enough Clint grew tired of the military’s constant bickering. When hey pointed out that the army, not the Marines, had rescued the medical students in Grenada, he drew the line. He actually threatened to call Ronald Reagan and have him intervene if the military did not get off his back, and most of the military’s requests were quietly agreed to.*

  When the film finally did open, for the 1986 holiday season, it did surprisingly well, although more than one critic questioned that someone of Clint’s age (which he had done nothing to disguise) would be involved in the film’s action sequences. Heartbreak Ridge wound up doing almost as well as Tightrope, grossing over $70 million in its initial domestic release and double that overseas, where no one cared how old Clint looked or how accurate the film’s depiction of the military. All foreign audiences wanted was to see their hero, Clint Eastwood, in action, and that’s what they got.

  Warner mounted a heavy and expensive campaign to promote Heartbreak Ridge for Oscar consideration, but all the heat that year went to Oliver Stone’s Platoon: it won four Oscars, including one for Stone as Best Director and one for Best Picture, and it was nominated for four more. Heartbreak Ridge managed only one nomination, for Best Sound, which it lost to Platoon.

  According to sources, Clint was angered all over again by what he considered to be this latest snubbing by the Academy and looked for someone besides himself to blame. He pointed his finger indirectly at the Department of Defense and directly at Fritz Manes, whose job as executive producer, Clint insisted, was to “handle” these kinds of situations. Manes had been on the outs with Clint since he had enthusiastically supported Locke and her Ratboy film. After that debacle everyone at Malpaso thought Manes, one of Clint’s oldest and closest friends and one of his most trusted employees, became a scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong with Heartbreak Ridge.

  Locke says that as her relationship with Clint broke down, so did Manes’s:

  I had known Fritz as long as I had known Clint, and Fritz and Clint had been close friends since junior high days; it seemed a shame for things to deteriorate [between them] that way. Clint only replied, “Stay out of this. This has nothing to do with you! I don’t like the way he’s running my company. He’s not Malpaso. I am, nobody else.”

  Clint then began a campaign of collecting petty details to discredit Fritz … and then he learned that Fritz had let Judi, Clint’s own secretary, occasionally use the company gas credit card, and had let the accountant, Mike Maurer, and his wife make occasional long-distance phone calls that got charged to the company …

  Clint did not actually confront Fritz. He played cat and mouse. Once Fritz was safely fired, Clint … wanted Fritz’s car phone returned; he didn’t care that it was the old-fashioned kind that had been bolted down, he wanted it … He even concocted a scheme in which he wanted [my husband] to break into Fritz’s home and make a sample of the type on Fritz’s typewriter so that he could see if it matched that on the anonymous hate-filled letters he’d been receiving for several years.

  Not long after Heartbreak Ridge failed to make a dent with Oscar, the long and fruitful professional and personal relationship between Fritz Manes and Clint came to a permanent end.

  *The award was made by Pierre Viot, the former boss of the National Cinema Center and newly appointed president of the Cannes Film Festival, instead of Culture Minister Jack Lang, who excused himself due to a prior commitment. It was widely believed in France that Lang, who was a Socialist, did not want to honor an American star whose films frequently promoted a right-wing-leaning law-and-order view of society. In support of Clint were Terry Semel, Richard Fox (newly appointed head of WB International), and Steve Ross of Warner Bros. Their show of support for their star further affirmed that their p
ast troubles were, at least for the time being, set aside.

  *The French version of British knighthood.

  *“For the past fifteen years, Clint Eastwood has been the most popular film star in the world!”

  *Jane Agee Brolin died in a car accident in 1995.

  *The ordinance itself had actually been partially reversed the previous November. It had required the new addition be set back farther from the street, with less exterior glass and mostly wooden exterior. Clint rejected that offer, and even after his full tenure as mayor, the problem went unresolved until the mid-1990s, when it was finally built, mostly to the specs of the original compromised plans, “only uglier,” as one close to the project said.

  †Heroes was a vehicle for Henry Winkler, best known as “Fonzie” from television’s Happy Days.

  *The Rose affair began and ended in typical Clint fashion: it was heat-fueled, ran its course, and ended rather coldly, when Clint wanted it to end. When Unforgiven was finally made, nearly a decade later, Rose received no on-screen credit or compensation (no co-producer or finder’s fee). Meanwhile, she had moved on, left Warner Bros. after a brief but serious illness, then found a western vehicle for TV actor Tom Selleck, who was looking to move to the big screen. The script she found was Quigley Down Under (1990, Simon Wincer). She received co-producer credit. After Unforgiven was nominated for Best Picture, she hired a lawyer and asked for both the finder’s fee and the production credit. To avoid the lawsuit, Clint offered her instead $10,000 to serve as story editor on his next film (A Perfect World). On March 8, 1993, the story hit the gossip pages, beginning with the New York Post’s Page Six, and made its way through the snake-tunnel of gossip-and-whisper rags. Perhaps feeling the damage was done, Clint withdrew his offer. Eventually, Rose dropped her lawsuit and left Clint’s life and world for good. Rose’s contribution to the final script has been publicly questioned by the film’s executive producer, Fritz Manes. In the end, Carabatsos received sole screen credit, after objecting to Clint’s wanting to give Stinson a co-writer credit. The dispute went to SWG arbitration, which Carabatsos won. After the film opened, Clint continually referred to the contributions of Stinson, prompting an SWG official to advise Clint to refrain from any further public comments on the issue or face sanctions from the guild.