Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  When they returned to CBS and the small studio where the tests were being filmed, Clint discovered he was going to be up first, took a deep breath and went for it: “I just built up a lot of energy, came running in there [and] blew off steam, tearing those words a whole new rear end.”

  “That’s fine. That’ll do it. Thank you,” said Warren, but Clint caught a dubious look on his face. “I mean, those words—I’ve just violated everything.” He left the studio in that state of ambivalence so familiar to auditioning actors, pleased with some of his work—in this case the dynamism he had brought to the scene—and anxious about what he had left out, in this case, the boss’s writerly nuances.

  While Clint was changing back into his street clothes, Fleming did his reading (also a long monologue), and as Clint stepped out of the dressing room he overheard one of his own rivals’ test. It was not encouraging: “This guy had it word for word—every single word.” And his efforts were appreciated: “That’s wonderful, Tom, that is wonderful,” he heard Warren say. “I go home and I’m saying, Gee, I blew that one, didn’t I? I came so close and I blew it.”

  Cut now to a screening room at CBS a few days later. Gathered there are Sparks, Warren and a delegation headed by Hubbell Robinson, the network’s programming chief, out from New York to make decisions about the fall season. The projectionist in the booth, running footage and listening in on their conversations, was, as it happened, an army acquaintance of Clint’s (he can no longer recall his name). The man was somewhat startled to see Clint up on the screen. He was not surprised at the silence that followed the test’s running. On these occasions everyone waits for power to speak. After a moment, it did. Said Robinson: “That’s the guy. I don’t need to see anyone else. I like him.” The customary chorus of approval immediately arose.

  All of this, of course, was reported to Clint some time later, when he encountered his friend somewhere along the long Rawhide trail. According to him, Bill Warren never volunteered any opinion about the tests and was never asked for it, either. Clint speculates, doubtless correctly, that Robinson was completely uninterested in Warren’s text and whether or not it was correctly spoken. He was concerned only with the first impressions made by the actors. By showing himself, instead of Warren’s words, in the best available light, Clint had made the right choice.

  Word that the part was his came from Clint’s agent, and it was better than he dared hope. The network, which owned the show outright, was hinting that if the pilot looked good it would immediately commit to thirteen episodes, even if no sponsor was signed on. This, of course, was something Clint desperately needed at this stage of his career—steady work (at a starting salary of $700 an episode) and steady exposure in a part that would establish him in the industry, if not necessarily in the world at large.

  The Rawhide crew was soon off to Arizona to shoot the first episode as well as stock footage of the cattle herd moving cross-country toward the railhead it never seemed to reach. Joining Clint and Fleming as a costar was Paul Brinegar, in the role of Wishbone, the cook (he had played a similar part for Warren in Cattle Empire). Others in the regular cast for much of the show’s run included Sheb Wooley (also a song writer, most famously of “Purple People Eaters”), who played Pete Nolan, the scout; James Murdock as Mushy, Wishbone’s slow-witted helper; Robert Cabal as Jesus (always pronounced “hey-zoos”), the wrangler, and Steve Raines and Rocky Shahan (also out of the Cattle Empire cast) as the most prominent of the trail hands.

  The pilot was well received at the network, which ordered up twelve more episodes immediately. Ironically, Rawhide headquartered at Universal in these early days, and driving on this lot as a series lead just three years after he had been casually dismissed from it pleased Clint inordinately.

  CBS was generous with the show in its early days, spending somewhat more than usual on its first episodes. Although Warren directed the pilot and several more in this first batch of shows, others were handled by well-regarded television directors, among them Richard Whorf (who had also done some major features), Andrew V. McLaglen (the actor Victor McLaglen’s son, who was beginning to make features) and Ted Post (who had been Warren’s principal directorial replacement on Gunsmoke and would work regularly on Rawhide during much of its run). The well-known guest stars included in these first episodes Dan Duryea, Troy Donahue, Brian Donlevy and Margaret O’Brien—people with solid motion-picture credits and recognition value with the television audience.

  Then with only nine episodes shot, it all stopped. Clint and the rest of the company were told that CBS had been unable to interest sponsors in the show and that production was being suspended until some advertising time was sold. They were told to hold themselves available, in anxious limbo.

  The advertising community was proving ambiguous about the show. In the medium’s earliest years westerns had been strictly kid stuff, and pretty occasional, featuring such childhood favorites as the Lone Ranger, Gene Autry and, of course, that early TV sensation, William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy, which began by recycling his old B-movie westerns, then continued with a series of fifty-two half hours made specifically for television. Gunsmoke and Cheyenne, both of which began airing in 1955, changed all that. These were “adult” westerns, and they touched a fifties nerve.

  While public discourse of all kinds was at this time straitlaced, not to say prim, the consumer culture was, in contrast, quite self-indulgent. You could see it in the clothes of the New Look, swathing women in extraneous yard goods, in the sculptured voluptuousness of automobile design, in kidney-shaped coffee tables and swimming pools, in the emphasis on ease and convenience in products ranging from frozen foods to power mowers. The TV westerns satisfied both sides of this conflict. Shot in austere black and white, portraying a harsher landscape in which actions could have unambiguous (and often mortal) consequences, they reminded people that they were not that far removed historically from harder times, harder choices. Yet these shows did not render the past in an unbearably realistic light; they tamed the West to suit the mild taste of the time.

  In any event, the 1956 and 1957 seasons saw the western cycle gathering power, with such new programs as The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Broken Arrow, Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Californians and Wagon Train reaching the air. In 1958, as the first Rawhide episodes were being shot, The Rifleman, Bat Masterson and Wanted Dead or Alive (the vehicle that made Steve McQueen a star) were added to the networks’ schedules. And this represented just the top of the line. By 1959, the peak year for the genre, the networks were programming no fewer than twenty-three westerns every week, consuming close to a quarter of the available prime-time hours. In the late fifties and early sixties, westerns, on average, commanded audience shares of about 33 percent. Later in the decade these figures dropped somewhat, but until the early seventies there were typically four westerns listed among the top twenty-five shows in the Nielsen ratings. As Richard Slotkin, the best critic-historian of our western mythology, has commented, “No other type of action/adventure show in this period … commanded so consistently high a share of prime time over so many years.”

  Herein lay the problem for Rawhide. There was obviously no pressing need for yet another western, yet given the genre’s popularity, it made equally good sense to go ahead with the show. Who knew what this market might bear? As this matter was debated, Clint Eastwood despaired. He remembers this period as psychologically devastating, more difficult to endure than his firing by Universal or his jobless year. He had been able to maintain the illusion that he was doing something about these circumstances simply by going out on auditions. In this case he had no alternative but to stay home and fret, listening to rumors about the show’s fate.

  Worse, he began to feel he had his “whole career sitting in the basement down there in a bunch of cans at CBS.” He could mention Rawhide when he was being interviewed for a part, but the network refused to let him show any of its footage to other producers. And he was forbidden to pu
rsue or accept a lengthy role in a feature film because the network kept insisting he might be called back to resume work on the series at any moment. Approached about playing the lead in Tall Story, a Broadway comedy about a college basketball player dealing with a bribe offer, which Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse had adapted from a novel by the poet Howard Nemerov, Clint asked his agents to see if CBS would release him. They were rebuffed, adding to his stress.

  The strain eventually told on him physically. One day, for example, he and Maggie were having a drink in a bar with Fritz Manes and his wife, Audrey, when, suddenly, Clint slammed his fist down on the table, yelling a stream of expletives, as dishes and glasses bounced every which way. He had looked down at his hand and seen hives suddenly developing there—“one hundred percent nerves” as Manes puts it. On other occasions Maggie told Audrey Manes he had waked in the night hyperventilating.

  While he waited, he did appear on an episode of Maverick entitled “Duel at Sundown,” and it is probably his best early work. He plays a young gunfighter picking a quarrel with James Garner’s ever-charming, eponymous character, and for the first time there is some dangerousness in Clint’s portrayal—a touch of generational contempt for Bret Maverick, a bit of youthful insolence and unpredictability in his manner—and Maverick responds to him with a trademark trick, smooth talk not quite hiding cowardice. Even when he was “one of the young guys boppin’ around town on television series,” Clint likes to insist, “I always thought of myself as a character actor. I never thought of myself as a leading man.” This performance offers concrete evidence of that attitude.

  But it came and went in a hurry, and Clint sank back into his anxious idleness. “I didn’t want to see anybody; I just was feeling kind of sorry for myself,” he recalls. With Christmas approaching, Clint and Maggie decided to get out of town and spend the holidays with his parents, who had by this time moved back to Piedmont.

  They took a train north, and at one of the stops a telegram was delivered to him. It informed him that Rawhide was being slipped into the CBS schedule in a good spot, on Friday night between Hit Parade and The Phil Silvers Show. Production on new episodes was scheduled to resume in early January. It took Clint a few minutes to digest the news. Then as the train pulled out of the station and began gathering speed, he found himself leaning out the window, yelling crazily, obscenely, at the countryside flowing past. From that point on, he says, “it was a very nice Christmas.”

  Rawhide premiered on January 9, 1959, without anticipatory excitement and without generating any large critical enthusiasm. It was just another western, just another midseason replacement show in the eyes of the press. The first episode, “Incident of the Tumbleweed Wagon” (until the 1964–65 season all titles employed this “Incident of” device) was the last of nine programs shot before the hiatus had been imposed on production, and, in a way, it was a curious introduction to the series precisely because it contained so little introductory material—just a shot of Gil Favor and a brief voice-over monologue by him explaining the function of a cattle drive. Its plot also quickly separated Fleming and Clint from the rest of their outfit, leaving Paul Brinegar and other supporting players in dusty anonymity, their characters unestablished.

  The famous tag in which Favor commanded his drovers to “Head ’em up, move ’em out” was also missing. But the still more famous theme song (“Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, / Keep movin’, movin’, movin’, / Though they’re disapprovin’ / Keep those dogies movin’ ”), which was written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington, who had also composed the compulsive “High Noon” theme, was very much present, and very helpful in establishing the show, for the catchy, silly tune quickly became a hit, while its linkage to a musical convention then reigning in feature films suggested that Rawhide aspired to something like their status.

  This may well have been true. Warren was a striver, never modest about stating his belief that good, serious work could be done in a form more often patronized than appreciated. Indeed, Warren liked to tell interviewers that if the network would let him he would expand the show to ninety minutes, approaching feature length. He also liked to insist that in creating his show he had not ripped off old movies. No, he said, its source was a recently discovered diary kept by a Texas cattleman named George Duffield on a nineteenth-century trail drive to Abilene.

  He acknowledged, of course, that he was operating within severe limits. Television’s small black-and-white screen (which made it an antiepic medium), its low budgets (the typical Rawhide episode cost less than forty thousand dollars in the show’s early days and was made in six days), its implacable schedules (thirty new programs a year) and the restraints of a censorship more niggling even than that of the movies all worked against the achievement of consistent quality and the creation of a spacious mise-en-scène. But if the format of his show suggested, and Warren was trying to fight, these limits, it also, ironically, doomed him to frustration.

  For Rawhide was intrinsically more at odds with its medium than the other westerns. Its natural subject matter was obviously to be found in the normal perils of trail herding—bad weather, rough country, the spookiness and recalcitrance of livestock on the move. And from time to time the program took up these topics. But you needed to go on location to do so, and the show traveled to places like Nogales, Sonora and Pasa Robles only once a year, and then the cast and crew were obliged to gather stock footage that could be scattered through many episodes, leaving them time to do portions of only two or three of these more epic stories. The rest of the year the crew was confined to back-lot western streets, sound-stage green sets and the ranches most studios then maintained on the outskirts of Los Angeles for outdoor shooting (there was a small Rawhide herd on one of them). These tight spots, more than any other factor, imposed a modest scale on the shows. Something Rita Parks, a scholar of the western, wrote applies with particular aptness to Rawhide: “The scaling-down process that takes place in the television western … turns the bold colors and vibrance of the epic form into the leisurely pastels of the pastoral mode.”

  The typical Rawhide story involved the cowboys coming upon people along the trail and getting drawn into solving whatever issues they presented or were confronting. As a variant, someone from the trail drive (usually Rowdy) would venture into a town or to a ranch on some errand and encounter some trouble he needed to be extricated from before the herd could move on. The idea, obviously, was to come in from the great outdoors as soon and as often as possible into more easily managed environments.

  The episode chosen for the premiere was shot at a studio ranch and differs from the series norm because trouble comes to the drovers without their having to look for it. The tumbleweed wagon referred to in the title is a sort of jail on wheels, used to gather lawbreakers from far-flung prairie locales and transport them (in this case) to a territorial capital for a trial. It pulls up to a streamside campsite where Favor’s cowboys are settling down for the night, carrying human cargo mixed in the usual way: a man accused of selling illegal liquor to Indians, an army deserter, a silent Indian who has murdered his wife when he caught her with another brave and, more significantly, an English remittance man also accused of murdering his wife, a member of the Luke Storm bandit gang and a hellcatish woman named Dallas (Terry Moore, the program’s top-billed guest star), who is Luke’s wife, and a classically bitter good-bad woman (she has turned outlaw because her father was lynched by a vigilante mob for a crime he did not commit).

  An escape is attempted, in the course of which the marshal in charge of the wagon is grievously wounded, his deputy killed. Gil and Rowdy are obliged to leave their herd and escort the wagon to the nearest fort. Two more escapes are tried, and eventually Storm and his gang catch up with the wagon as the cowmen are trying to get it across a stream. The outlaw leader, who is a standard-issue psychopath, decides to murder Gil and Rowdy, but Dallas intervenes and is killed by her husband, who, in the subsequent confusion, is shot dead by Favor. The episode ends
with a low-angle shot of Gil and Rowdy riding off past the crude cross that marks Dallas’s grave.

  The failure of this episode to do much with Rowdy Yates was not entirely atypical, particularly in the early seasons. He is seen to be attracted to the captive woman, seen to be quietly rebellious toward Favor (instructed not to try chatting up Dallas, Rowdy tells the trail boss, “After dark, when I’m not on night herd, my time is my own”), and he gets the chance to wrestle with Dallas during the first escape attempt—sexless sexiness of the old-movie, old-TV kind. But for the most part Rowdy takes orders and seems to like them. “Rowdy Yates, trail flunky,” is how Clint says he used to describe his character, when he wasn’t calling him “Rowdy Yates, idiot of the plains.”

  You can tell from Clint’s modified ducktail haircut and from the fact that he alone among the drovers was allowed the occasional passing romance that Rowdy was intended to have a certain demographic appeal; he was supposed to attract young women to a program that had small intrinsic interest for them. That meant that he should have had a sort of mild, outlaw appeal. But Rowdy was never allowed his rowdiness, sexual or otherwise. One runs into women, now in their late forties and early fifties, for whom the young Clint Eastwood was a teen dream, but that was because he was—obviously—a really cute guy, not because of any overt sexiness on his part. Clint was aware at the time of what he was supposed to be doing (“Rowdy was sort of the bopper, but older gals liked Mr. Favor”), yet he was equally aware that for the producers this was dangerous country, occasionally approached but in the end always skirted.