by Marc Eliot
TWENTY-ONE
Clint and Meryl Streep on set during the shooting of The Bridges of Madison County. Warner Bros.
If I start intruding and getting fancy and trying to dazzle people with whatever tricks I may or may not have as a director, I’m tampering with something … I revere the performances and I don’t want people to visualize a camera and a camera operator and a guy with a focus-thing, and another person there … I just want people to visualize the movie, so I keep things as subtle as I can, at the same time punctuating the points I need to punctuate.
—Clint Eastwood
On August 7, 1993, Clint quietly became a father for the sixth time when Frances Fisher gave birth to a baby girl they named Francesca Fisher. He had already begun to emotionally pull away from Frances. One reason may have been a souring on the notion of romance by his endless battles with former lover Locke. More likely, though, the cause was the arrival in his life of Dina Ruiz, who would eventually become the second Mrs. Eastwood.
Ruiz, born and raised in California of African-American and Japanese descent on her father’s side and Irish, English, and German on her mother’s, first crossed paths with Clint in April 1993, when she interviewed him about his recent Oscar triumph for KSBW, the NBC TV affiliate in Salinas. Having graduated from San Francisco State in 1989 and apprenticed with KNAZ, a small station in Flagstaff, Arizona, Ruiz had landed the job at KSBW, and one of her first assignments was to interview Clint Eastwood.
The first piece went so well, Ruiz asked Clint to answer more questions so she might expand it into two or three parts. The two met several times more, and the interviews show clearly that Ruiz, twenty-eight years old, and Clint, sixty-three, had very good chemistry. Ruiz readily admitted to Clint that she had seen few of his movies (“zero” was the number she used) and was in love with her boyfriend. However, even though Clint was about to become a father again, this time with Frances Fisher, the two agreed to stay in touch, which Clint normally did not do with reporters.
Ruiz and Clint met again in mid-1994, just after Clint finished A Perfect World, which starred Kevin Costner, who was still hot off the 1990 Academy Award–winning Dances with Wolves.* Costner had continued to appear in big, successful movies—Kevin Reynolds’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), and Mick Jackson’s The Bodyguard (1992)—that had made him one of the biggest stars in Hollywood for the first half of the 1990s. When Costner approached Clint about the possibility of directing A Perfect World, Clint read the script and was attracted to the plot’s familiar escaped-convict tropes, especially the relationship between the pursued, Butch Haynes (Costner) and his pursuer, Red Garnett. Clint said yes, if he could play Garnett and, of course, produce it through Malpaso.
Filming on location in Martindale, Texas, proved more difficult than Clint had anticipated. His hurry-up directorial style clashed with Costner’s snail’s-pace multiple-take perfectionism. (During the making of Dances with Wolves more than one participant had complained, off the record, that the endless retakes had driven everyone crazy.) According to one story, Costner angrily walked off the set during a shoot, and Clint used Costner’s stand-in to finish shooting. Afterward, when Costner complained, Clint told him that as far as he was concerned, he could take a walk off the set or off the film—either way was fine with him. Costner did no more complaining after that, and the film was finished without further incident. It opened on Thanksgiving weekend, becoming one of Warner’s big fall releases of 1993; it grossed $30 million in its initial theatrical release and more than $100 million worldwide.
In 1994, after the arrival of little Francesca, Clint finished a showcase film for Fisher’s talents that he had produced but not appeared in, for Malpaso (only the third time this had happened so far in Malpaso’s twenty-seven-year career—Ratboy [from which he eventually detached himself] and Bird were the other two films). The Stars Fell on Henrietta, an early-America oil drama starring Robert Duvall, Aidan Quinn, and Fisher, would not get released until fall 1995. It came and went quickly and without much notice, or any special effort by Clint to promote it.
Before it even opened, Clint was off on another project, one that had been brewing for a long time and promised to be even bigger than Unforgiven, with a role that just might deliver to him the one Oscar he still didn’t have, and perhaps the one he wanted most, Best Actor.
As early as 1992, Steven Spielberg had approached Clint about starring in the film version of Robert James Waller’s hugely popular 1992 novel The Bridges of Madison County, which Spielberg himself intended to produce and direct. At the time Clint was busy making Unforgiven, and Spielberg was fully and emotionally absorbed in his wrenching production of Schindler’s List, but they agreed to talk again after their respective films had opened.
Spielberg and Clint were not strangers. They had met and worked together in 1985, when Clint directed that episode of Spielberg’s TV series, Amazing Stories, called “Vanessa in the Garden,” featuring Sondra Locke. While the series and Clint’s episode were quickly forgotten, his friendship with Spielberg remained. The two had wanted to work together on a feature ever since, and six years later Spielberg’s production company, Amblin, obtained the prepublication rights to Waller’s novel, which would go on to sell ten million copies.
The Bridges of Madison County is essentially a modernized version of Noël Coward’s one-act play Still Life, which he turned into a screenplay in 1945; it became David Lean’s Brief Encounter, set in London, about the desperation, guilt, and temptations of two married people who meet, fall in love, commit adultery, and then separate forever. In The Bridges of Madison County, Robert Kincaid, a roaming, rootless photographer, passes through Madison County on a photographic assignment and has a brief but intense love affair with a lonely and unhappily married woman before traveling on. (“The bridges” refer both to the physical structures of the county and to the emotional bonds between the two.) Spielberg approached Clint about the possibility of playing Kincaid.
Clint, who saw in the role a chance to once more display his best persona, that of the quintessential loner, quickly agreed. But when Schindler’s List proved a more difficult shoot than Spielberg had anticipated, he approached Sidney Pollack about directing The Bridges of Madison County. Pollack in turn wanted Robert Redford to play Kincaid. Both Pollack and Redford eventually fell away, after which several big names were considered. Finally, to direct it, Spielberg signed Bruce Beresford, best known for Driving Miss Daisy, which had won the Best Picture Oscar for 1989. Not long afterward Clint signed on to play Kincaid, but he wanted to co-produce it as well, with Spielberg, as an Amblin-Warner-Malpaso co-production.* Spielberg, who had always wanted Clint for the lead, following Clint’s winning the Oscar for Unforgiven, quickly agreed, and production was set to begin late in the summer of 1994.
Clint, however, was still unsatisfied with the script, and, in an unusual move for him, not only wanted it rewritten, but wanted to do it himself with Spielberg, even though they were on opposite sides of the country and neither especially wanted to travel to work with the other.
The three or four different versions of the screenplay they had were all over the place, and one or two of them changed the storyline completely. That didn’t seem adequate so Steven and I rewrote it ourselves. He was back east at the time, in the Hamptons for the summer, and I was up in Northern California at Mount Shasta, so we wrote it by fax machine. I’d dictate some pages and then fax them to him, then he’d make some changes and fax them to me. We did this for about a week and then we agreed, this was the screenplay.
But even before the cameras were set to roll, Clint and Beresford clashed over the casting of the crucial female lead. Beresford, an Australian, had a vision of the film that directly conflicted with Clint’s, over who should play the crucial role of the lonely, frustrated, and sexually available Francesca. Beresford had preferred two Swedish-born actresses for the role, Lena Olin, best known in America for her performance in Philip Kaufman’s T
he Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and Pernilla August, a Swedish star virtually unknown in the States. Neither appealed to Clint, who had final say in casting, and insisted the role had to be played by an American—that was the whole point of the movie as far as he was concerned (despite the act that in the novel Francesca is Italian). Beresford offered up Isabella Rossellini as his compromise, Ingrid Berman’s model-actress daughter, who was very popular in America but had a decidedly Swedish accent. Clint said no to her as well. Two weeks before the film’s scheduled August 1994 start, Beresford was out and Clint took over as director, with Meryl Streep set to star opposite him. (Fisher had pressured Clint unsuccessfully to cast her in the role.)
Clint was adamant about casting Streep, although at first she turned the role down, saying she didn’t like the book. According to sources, she was offended that Beresford had not first offered her the role. Everyone who read the book assumed she was going to play Francesca Johnson, rather like the national mandate that erupted, demanding that Clark Gable play Rhett Butler, when Margaret Mtchell’s Gone with the Wind was first published. She demanded $4 million and a percentage of the profits, something that was normally anathema to producer Clint; but he wanted her so badly that he, Spielberg, and Warner all agreed to her terms, and she came aboard. Clint had wanted Streep for several reasons, not the least being the age factor. He thought Francesca should be a few years older than she was in the book, so the age discrepancy between her and Clint’s Kincaid wouldn’t be as noticeable on-screen. Meryl Streep was forty-five years old; Clint was sixty-four.
Production started the second week of August, on location in Des Moines, amid unfounded rumors that Streep and Clint were having an affair; the speculation was fueled when Clint discouraged Fisher from coming to visit him on location. But to Streep, it was all business. She had an interesting take on Clint’s abilities as a director: “The reason he can direct himself and a film and take himself outside of it and put himself inside is I think he views himself at a distance.” The notion of separating one from one’s self was a variation on the loner concept and also a convenient way of excusing one’s own behavior by blaming the other self for anything that shouldn’t have happened.
Those on set may have correctly sensed that Clint and Fisher were over, but it wasn’t Streep Clint was now interested in. It was Ruiz. By the time the film opened, Fisher had moved out of Clint’s house on Stradella—the same one that Locke had lived in for so many years—and Clint was openly dating Dina Ruiz.
Just as the film was wrapping, Warner began a massive PR campaign to get Clint named as the recipient of the 1995 Irving J. Thalberg Award, given out annually at the Oscars ceremony to honor a producer’s overall body of work. The award is named after the legendary 1930s MGM producer who is credited with elevating that studio’s artistic level and Hollywood films as a whole. Thalberg was unusually modest—he never took an on-screen credit, which is one reason producing is said to be the least visual aspect of modern filmmaking. To Warner, the announcement by the Academy shortly before the annual gala that Clint was to be that year’s recipient provided the perfect synergistic run-up to The Bridges of Madison County. Planned for release in June 1995, it would surely be one of that summer’s biggest movies.
The Academy Awards ceremony took place on March 27 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. For the glittering occasion Clint was accompanied only by his eighty-six-year-old mother—in Hollywood, a clear signal that his relationship with Frances Fisher was over. When it came time for the Thalberg Award presentation, Clint was introduced with a compilation of scenes from his movies put together by Richard Schickel, and then, when the lights came up, Arnold Schwarzenegger brought him onto the stage. After a solid ovation, Clint acknowledged the fabulous history of the Academy Awards and thanked Darryl F. Zanuck, Hal Wallis, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and Alfred Hitchcock, “the people I grew up idolizing.” The tribute was brief, respectful, and well received. As the audience applauded, he strode off the stage holding his first noncompetitive Academy Award, hoping he would be back on the same stage a year later for his performance in, and direction of, The Bridges of Madison County.
The film opened on June 2 to less than rave reviews. The New York Times liked it, as did Newsweek, although both had reservations, and the rest of the critics gave it the same half-cocked thumb-up. It stayed in theaters through Labor Day, grossing $70 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, and it would go on to do another $200 million overseas. Those were impressive numbers for a film that was unlike anything Clint had done before—a soft, gentle romantic love story between an older man and a “younger woman,” with not so much as a single punch thrown or a single gun fired in angry vengeance.
That September Clint did a monthlong promotional tour for The Bridges of Madison County’s overseas debut, which took him through England, France, and Italy. Ruiz and two other couples, longtime friends from Carmel, accompanied him. When the tour ended and everybody had returned home, Clint took Ruiz to his winter retreat in Hailey, Idaho, near Sun Valley, for the holidays. On December 29 he proposed marriage to her with a diamond and ruby ring.
The next day they went to the county courthouse to apply for a marriage license. Everyone there was good-naturedly sworn to secrecy until the formal wedding, which was set for the following March, after Clint received the American Film Institute Achievement Award.
On March 31, 1996, Clint and Ruiz exchanged vows in Las Vegas, on the patio of Steve Wynn’s home. Clint’s mother was there, and his son Kyle was his best man. Ruiz was escorted down the aisle by her father, while the band played “Doe Eyes” and “Unforgettable.”
Later, the happy bride said of the momentous occasion, “The fact that I am only the second woman he has married really touches me.”
As for Clint, he had no problem being nearly sixty-six and marrying a thirty-year-old woman:
I don’t think about it. You’re as old as you feel, and I feel great. Certainly if you’re a man there are advantages to being older … none of us knows how long fate gives you on the planet. People get so concerned about age, about the future, they don’t live out their moment today. Moment to moment. I’m immensely happy with Dina, and I feel I’ve finally found a person I want to be with … This is it, win, lose or draw.
A few weeks later, back in L.A. after honeymooning in Hawaii, Dina was riding in a car with Clint when suddenly she asked him to pull over. “She was feeling a little nausea and asked me to stop at a gas station so she could buy one of those sticks,” Clint later recalled. “She came back and said, ‘We’re pregnant.’” It would be Clint’s seventh child by five different women, and her first.
That spring Clint went off to make his next movie, Absolute Power, to be filmed on location in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Like The Bridges of Madison County, Absolute Power was adapted from a powerhouse bestseller, by David Baldacci. It was a curious amalgam of several genres—jewel heist, assassination thriller, and family conflict melodrama—that reteamed Clint with his Oscar-winning Unforgiven costar, Gene Hackman. Also included in the stellar cast were Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Judy Davis, and E. G. Marshall. Two of Clint’s children, Alison and Kimber, appeared in minor roles.
Clint was intrigued by the problem of transferring such a complicated plot-driven piece to the screen: “With Absolute Power, I liked the whole setup and I liked the characters, but the problem was that all those great characters were killed in the book, so my question was, how can we make a screenplay where everyone that the audience likes doesn’t get killed off?”
To solve that problem, Clint—serving as director, producer, and star for Malpaso, which made the film in partnership with Castle Rock Entertainment (who owned the rights to the novel)—turned to William Goldman, the best screenwriter of his generation. Goldman decided to emphasize jewel thief Luther Whitney’s (Clint’s) relationship with his daughter (Laura Linney). He built the rest of the screenplay around the president (Hackman), who is having an affair wit
h a young woman. In a fit of rage, she tries to stab him with a letter opener (recalling Hackman’s great turn in Roger Donaldson’s 1987 No Way Out, as Defense Secretary David Brice, who murders his mistress). The Secret Service kills her, and Luther, during his last great heist, happens to witness the scene, and takes the letter opener as a form of life insurance. Once the president becomes aware there is a witness, he orders the Secret Service to track him down and kill him too. Meanwhile, Luther decides to reconcile with his daughter, who happens to be the district attorney. Eventually the real killers—including, improbably, the president—are brought to justice, Eastwood-style.
The story combines too many different genres and certainly presented its share of problems to Goldman—in his first draft, which was faithful to the novel, he had Luther killed off halfway through. Clint liked everything about it but that. He told Goldman that a Clint Eastwood character should never die in his films and then ordered the script rewritten so that Luther not only lives but plays a key role in solving the murder. Goldman worked at a furious pace to get the revisions done on schedule.
Absolute Power opened on February 14, 1997, and grossed $50 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and nearly double that overseas. That was okay for most films but disappointing for a Clint Eastwood movie—about half what The Bridges of Madison County had done. Critics were not overly receptive to the film—most agreed that despite the theme of reconciliation that permeated it, the film was basically an action genre picture that, following The Bridges of Madison County, seemed like something of a throwback. It was given the prestigious closing-night slot at the Cannes Film Festival, but in light of the blasé reviews, Clint canceled his much-hyped scheduled personal appearance.
