Clint got his first role around the time the studio renewed his option, in the fall of 1954 (he got a raise to one hundred dollars a week). The part was given to him by William Alland, who, with another producer, Albert Zugsmith, had joined Lubin as Clint’s chief studio supporters. Alland was perhaps overqualified for his job (a longtime associate of Orson Welles, he had served as dialogue director in Citizen Kane while playing the inquiring reporter). Now casting the sequel of his very successful Creature from the Black Lagoon, he offered Clint a one-scene part in Revenge of the Creature, which was shot in 3-D. He was to play Jennings, a lab assistant to John Agar’s research scientist (even the B-picture leads at Universal were bland), who is studying the half-man, half-fish creature, which eventually escapes and terrorizes a town.
Basically, Clint had to play dumb. One of the lab’s white rats is missing, and Jennings not illogically blames a cat that has been placed in the cage with them: “Doc, there were four rats there in that cage when I changed my lights. Now there are only three. It’s my considered opinion that rat number four is sitting inside that cat.”
The scientist inquires if Jennings is certain he fed all the rodents earlier. “Here, I always feed them,” Clint begins, groping in his lab-coat pocket to show what he’s been giving them. But as he feels around, he encounters something soft and furry. “Uh-oh,” he says, pulling out the missing rodent. He gives a nonplussed look and delivers a line to cover his embarrassment. End of Clint Eastwood’s movie debut.
He almost didn’t get that far—not in this picture, anyway. The day before the scene was to be shot, Alland took him down to the set to meet the director, Jack Arnold, another former actor now in the early stages of a directing career that would include some of Universal’s better genre films, The Mouse That Roared and uncounted television episodes. Director and producer immediately fell to wrangling about the scene Clint was supposed to do. Arnold thought it irrelevant and was refusing to shoot it. Alland liked it for some reason—perhaps it was his own invention; he has story credit on the film—and insisted that it be made.
“They were arguing like crazy,” Clint remembers. “It was nothing against me, but meanwhile I’m just standing there, this big, gawky kid getting more kind of anxious about the whole thing. Finally, Arnold says, ‘OK, I’ll shoot it, but we’re not gonna use it in the goddamn picture.’ So I just said, ‘Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Arnold.’ ”
But as they were leaving the stage Alland told him, “Don’t worry about it, you should be there tomorrow morning.” But, of course, he did worry: “My first scene in my first picture, and here I got a director who hates the scene and doesn’t want to shoot it. You can imagine how adverse those circumstances were.” They did not improve when he set to work: Clint blew his lines on the first two takes. From his position by the camera the crusty Arnold could be heard muttering, “That’s great, that’s just great.” Oh, shit, Clint said to himself, I’m really in this over my head. But John Agar—“bless his heart”—reassured him: Don’t worry about it, don’t listen to him, just relax.
“So I sucked my gut in and jumped in there and did it. And afterward nobody said goodbye or anything. I left there with my confidence knocked back about three notches, because I felt if in every picture we had to go through that, that’s kind of an exhausting process.”
In time he would make his peace with Arnold. “I joked with Jack about it years later when he came on and did some Rawhides. “It wasn’t a bad deal like Abner Biberman or something.” A sometime actor and coach in the Universal talent program, now turning to directing, Clint approached Biberman for a part in Running Wild, an exploitation picture about delinquent adolescents that he was casting. He was curtly dismissed. Jesus Christ, that was a short career, Clint remembers thinking. He also remembers thinking that a former actor, who must have known his share of rejections, might have put this turndown more kindly, instead of making Clint feel like “a punk kid, hanging around.” Years later, when Biberman was working in episodic television, his name appeared on a list of potential Rawhide directors that Clint happened to spy in a producer’s office. He took out a pencil and drew a line through it. “I’m not a vindictive person, but I just didn’t want to see that face on the set.”
Clint also remembers a certain nameless Universal executive: “This guy saw me coming and he’d start throwing rocks.” A few years later, when Clint was starring on Rawhide and his old nemesis had become an agent, they encountered one another on the M-G-M lot, where Clint’s program headquartered for a while, “and you’d have thought I was his long-lost son he had never seen.” Where was this guy when I needed him? Clint wondered. He understands that most of the time an actor cannot fit the image a director or a producer has in his mind for a particular role. But that is scarcely the actor’s fault, and he doesn’t understand why people need to get nasty about it.
He has, however, an equally long memory for kindnesses past. Arthur Lubin, for example, recalled getting a phone call from Clint a couple of nights before he won his Academy Awards for Unforgiven. Clint had been remembering the director’s lonely staunchness in these early days and wanted him to know that he was still grateful. And, indeed, it was Lubin who cast Clint in his longest role of this period, that of Jonesy in Francis in the Navy, sixth in the seven-picture series. Lubin directed all but the last of them, developing his curious specialty in verbalizing fauna; a little later he produced and directed Mr. Ed, the long-running television series about a talking horse, as well as The Incredible Mr. Limpet, a Don Knotts feature for Disney, in which the star was transformed into a talking fish.
Francis had been the subject of a novel by a writer named David Stern, the rights to which Lubin purchased, hoping to interest Universal in putting the talking mule on film. The studio resisted, largely because of the problem of making the animal’s lips move so that dialogue could be persuasively synchronized with them. But the director persisted and prevailed—though he always refused to divulge the secret of the illusion.
The basic joke of the series is that Francis is the grown-up, making variously wry and wise observations (drawling Chill Wills supplies his voice) on the childlike behavior of the humans around him. His straight man (except for the last film in the series) is Donald O’Connor, who plays army lieutenant Peter Sterling, always getting into unlikely scrapes and always frantic to cover up the fact that his best pal (and sometime conscience) is this unlikely creature.
In this eighty-minute film designed for the bottom of double-feature bills, Francis finds himself, for reasons the picture does not make entirely clear, in the navy’s charge. Apparently he can read and write, too, for he summons his friend Sterling to rescue him. He, however, looks exactly like Slicker Donevan (also played by O’Connor), a rather mean-spirited bosun’s mate, who is a womanizer, slacker and general con artist. Much merriment is supposed to ensue from this confusion of identities.
Jonesy, Clint’s character, is one of Slicker’s navy buddies, none of whom ever quite grasps the situation. Along with two or three other actors, his function is largely to supply reaction shots when things go amiss. He never has more than two sentences of connected dialogue, though his part does run through most of the picture, and because of his size, the eager alertness he brings to his role—no one’s going to accuse him of inattention—and with Lubin favoring him in some group shots, he is noticeable. More so than his two army friends, Martin Milner, who plays one of Slicker’s other pals, and David Janssen, who plays a junior officer. Toward the end of the film, Clint climbs from a landing craft to a truck ahead of it in a traffic jam and is last seen handsomely semaphoring farewells from that vehicle when it turns onto a side road.
It was a brief but pleasant experience. As he already knew, Lubin was a “very straight-ahead, professional guy, and very encouraging. All the cast and crew thought he was great.” Best of all, Clint had billing in the main titles—fifth position—the only time that happened at Universal. That was not bad for a beginner, even in this
distinctly minor context. (“Lubin, who has megged all ‘Francis’ offerings, fails to insert his usual punch,” Variety opined, fair-mindedly enough.)
It was, though, Clint’s high-water mark at Universal. Lubin cast him as the “First Saxon” in a Technicolor epic, Lady Godiva, which starred Maureen O’Hara making the legendary bareback ride in a bodysuit, with “a hair wigwam” (as the Hollywood Reporter reviewer called it) artfully arranged to create an illusion of nudity rather than to cover it. Buddy Van Horn, who would become Clint’s regular stunt coordinator (and three times his director), worked as a rider in the film and remembers Clint as “a skinny-legged kid in tights, saying ‘They went that-away.’ ” Actually, what he said to George Nader, chief of the Saxon rebels opposing their Norman oppressors, was “A column of soldiers is approaching.” It was one of his two lines in a part which consisted mainly of intermittent appearances among the yeomen.
Thereafter, Bill Alland gave him another day’s work in Jack Arnold’s Tarantula, about a deadly spider mutated to gigantic size by misapplied atomic energy (a favorite science-fiction theme in the fifties and a reflection of everyone’s anxiety about the newly freed atom). Clint, almost unrecognizable in a flight helmet, plays the pilot leading a group of jets in an attack on the creature and has a couple of lines of radioed cross talk.
But after this little rush, Clint seemed to get less work, and nothing that can be seen as progress in his career. The studio was using its contract people ever more sparingly and was beginning to drop them from the payroll, too. There were also changes in the talent program faculty. Sympathetic Katherine Warren left, and her place as the acting coach was taken by a man named Jess Kimmel, who was less encouraging to Clint. In the spring of 1955, when it came time to renew Clint’s option, he was told that it would be picked up again, but that there would be no raise this time.
This did not improve his morale, but he said, “‘Yeah, I’ll stay,’ and I had no regrets. I just kind of figured, I’ll know as much as I can when I leave here. But I know my ass is out of here in six months.”
Despite this accurate assessment of his immediate prospects, Clint got his best assignment a couple of months later. The studio had cast Steve Allen, the first star of The Tonight Show, in The Benny Goodman Story, largely because of his physical resemblance to the eponymous figure. To promote the film Universal arranged for a program called “Steve Allen in Hollywood” to be broadcast on Max Liebman Presents, a variety hour produced by the man who had gained fame as the producer of Your Show of Shows, the now-legendary Sid Caesar program. Various Universal stars did bits of one kind and another in the show, and then, having sung a song (something of a surprise), Jeff Chandler addressed the audience: “We’d like to present now, live, one of the highlights from the film Bright Victory [one of the studio’s 1951 releases]. The three young men featured in this scene—Rex Reason, Grant Williams and Clint Eastwood—were discovered and developed right here on our lot. We hope you, too, will share the excitement and enthusiasm we feel for their future.”
Clint had the least of the three roles in what followed, playing a young noncom in an army hospital escorting a blind soldier (Williams) to visit a psychologist (Reason). The handicapped soldier is understandably bitter about his lot and has been refusing to communicate with his family. The doctor places a call to them on his behalf, but he refuses to speak to them, and Clint is summoned to escort him back to his ward. “Well, how did you and the lieutenant get along?” the latter inquires after they leave the office. “Oh, just great, he had all sorts of solutions to my problem. He’s just like all the other people around here. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Clint fixes him with the first recorded example of that hard stare that would become one of his acting signatures and replies: “That’s funny. You’d think he’d know something. He’s as blind as you are.” Sting in the score! Astonishment on Williams’s face! Then a manly embrace. And he returns to the doctor’s office to make his confessional call.
In context, Clint’s underplayed naturalism had a ring of truth about it. It was the only role he got at Universal in which he was able to show, however briefly, a certain mature masculinity, as opposed to youthful gawkiness. And his selection for this showcase appearance—there were, after all, plenty of other contract players who could have done the role—seems to suggest that someone in the studio actually felt some “excitement and enthusiasm” for him. But it was just a television bit, and one you had to look pretty hard to find. In the few months remaining on his studio contract he got nothing as good.
The most visible of his later Universal roles (about thirty seconds of shared screen time) was in Never Say Goodbye, a quintessentially inane fifties romance—a remake of the 1945 This Love of Ours, which was in turn derived, unlikely as it may seem, from a Pirandello play. Set in equally unpersuasive back-lot versions of postwar Vienna and American suburbia, it starred Rock Hudson as an insanely jealous doctor—an emotion he could not imagine, let alone play.
Cast again as a lab assistant, Clint is required to hand over some X rays to Hudson in an early scene and wish him luck on a speech he is going off to make. When Clint reported to the set for his day’s work the director, Jerry Hopper, said: “I’d like to see some kind of character. I’d like to see you wear glasses or something.” (Quick fixes of this kind are what directing consists of when the basic job is to keep moving through the schedule on time.) Jesus, Clint said to himself, I got a nice bit and here I’ve got to wear glasses. But dutifully he went off in search of the propman and tried on a selection of eyewear until he found something that seemed all right; maybe better than all right. Glancing in a mirror, he thought he didn’t look bad in glasses. He wore them around on the set while the scene was being set up, and the more he did, the happier he became. Indeed, he began to imagine a whole new image for himself, maybe even a whole new career. This will be great, he thought, because if I start doing more charactery things, then they’ll use me in more stuff around the lot, and then they won’t can me. He even started to wonder if a new hairstyle might be worth a try.
Finally, they were ready to shoot. Clint was introduced to Hudson, and the director started outlining their business. As he was absorbing these instructions, Clint noticed Hudson looking at him rather curiously. Finally, just as they were ready to go, Hudson said, “Where are my glasses?”
“What are you talking about?” Hopper asked.
“Well, you know, I’m playing a physician in this film. Don’t you think I ought to have glasses?”
It’s possible the star was afraid of being upstaged by a handsome unknown who had found himself some interesting spectacles. In any event, a halt was called, and Hudson and Hopper went through the same twenty pairs of glasses that Clint had examined earlier. None was judged satisfactory. “Finally,” says Clint, “they take mine off. He puts them on. Perfect!”
Needless to say, both actors in the scene could not wear glasses, so Clint worked without them. “By that time I really wanted to wear them.” His consolation was that the little scene went off without further incident. It might be noted, incidentally, that never thereafter in the picture is Hudson to be seen with glasses.
Alas, the rest of Clint’s career as a Universal contract player also went off without noticeable incident. By this time Jack Kosslyn had taken over Kimmel’s classes, and that represented an improvement for Clint, but he still felt he was just playing out his string. He managed to get two more on-screen jobs in his last months there, but they were the least visible of all.
He was one of a group of sailors down in the hold of a World War II supply ship in Away All Boats, a 1956 release starring Jeff Chandler as a Captain Queeg figure. Clint vaguely recalls that his one line consisted of calling for a medic, but it is impossible to pick him out of the crowd in the flooded darkness belowdecks. Still, this was one more line than he had in Star in the Dust, in which Al Zugsmith cast him as a ranch hand. Clint is only marginally more visible here than he was in Away All Boats.
No one looking at his scattered work could say that he was a rising personality, certainly not as a studio executive might define the term. So on September 22, 1955, this one-sentence memo circulated from in-tray to out-tray in the front office: “Please be advised that we will not exercise our option on Clint Eastwood.” A little later a payroll termination notice went out; it specified October 25 as “talent’s” last working day at the studio.
Clint was not overly discouraged, having seen the dismissal coming. People were always talking about the contract players the studio had let go, then been obliged to rehire at better salaries. Besides, he felt he had probably derived what good there was to be obtained from the program. He had learned something about acting, he knew how to find his way around a set and how to evaluate what was going on there, and he had some credits for his agents to mention to casting people. Most important, his spine was stiffened: “The more you struggle the more you kind of say, ‘I’m gonna make those people eat those words.’ And though you get depressed many times, and I had many moments of saying, ‘Well, this isn’t going anywhere,’ I think in the back of my mind I always felt I had something to offer somewhere down the line.”
It may be that the most important thing he got from this experience was a glimpse of the kind of community show business offers. Sometimes it seems like a large orphanage, harboring a disproportionate number of people damaged by the loss or emotional absence of a parent. Clint, obviously, had been fortunate in that regard. But until he signed on at Universal, he had not found a place where he could happily root himself. The studio, for all its blindness and crassness, suggested interesting possibilities in that regard.
Clint Eastwood Page 12
