For six months after the TV Guide profile appeared, Clint’s mood could no longer be called “amiable.” “Calm on the outside and boiling on the inside” is how one trade-paper columnist put it, “livid” because CBS refused to allow him to make features or appear on other television programs as a guest star. The network, Clint said, offered him “excuses you wouldn’t believe” to justify a policy Clint claimed violated his contract, and he was no longer going to put up with it. “Maybe they really figure me as the sheepish nice guy I portray in the series, but even a worm has to turn some time.” Having thoroughly mixed his metaphors, he said he was prepared to go on suspension until an adjustment was made. If he could not work in the United States he claimed—exaggerating hugely—he had movie offers from London and Rome that he was prepared to take.
This tempest was calmed. In the spring of 1962 Clint was permitted to take an outside assignment—on Mr. Ed, which after a year in syndication was now in its first season on CBS. Sonia Chernus cowrote “Clint Eastwood Meets Mr. Ed,” which had its obvious uses for the network as cross-promotion and as a means of placating Clint.
It was not exactly what he had been looking for. It was, he recalls dismissively, just something that Sonia talked him into doing—the fifty-first of the 143 episodes (every one of them directed by Lubin) in an entirely inconsequential series that has since become something of a cult favorite (it reran for years in the eighties and early nineties on the Nickelodeon cable channel, and it remains a steady seller in the international market). But in some ways Chernus and her collaborator, Lou Derman (the show’s head writer), served Clint rather well. He looks swell in modern mufti (golf sweater and slacks for most of the show, a suit in its last sequence), gets to play outrage, comic befuddlement and, in the end, clever authoritativeness. He even gets to be something more than a straight man for two or three brief moments.
As the title suggests, Clint plays a bachelor version of himself, newly moved into the neighborhood where Wilbur and Carol Post (Alan Young and Connie Hines) live in suburban sterility. They have the standard TV neighbors, Roger and Kay Addison (Larry Keating and Edna Skinner), who drop in to comment dryly on their confusions. This episode opens with Carol angry at Wilbur, thinking perhaps he’s been out with another woman, when in fact he’s been chasing the errant Ed. The horse has wandered off angry because Clint’s horse, Midnight, a larger and more glamorous creature (“next to him I look like a poodle”), has been making out with the neighborhood fillies. (Besides accepting the absurdity of a talking horse, viewers had to accept the idea of a suburb full of horses casually dropping in on one another.) In revenge, Carol has proposed Wilbur as writer and star of an amateur show. Mr. Ed, too, has a dark plan in mind—to drive Clint and his horse out of his territory.
He arranges with the phone company to get on Clint’s party line. When a movie producer calls to offer Clint a part in a feature—Chernus providing her pal a little wish fulfillment—Ed sabotages the conversation by speaking for Clint: “But you couldn’t afford me, you cheap old windbag,” he tells the producer. Needless to say, Clint doesn’t get the job. A little later his girlfriend (seen stretched out, femme fatale style, on a chaise longue cuddling a lapdog) gets the same treatment. Ed pretends to be the father of a rival and says, “Listen, little girl, if you’re smart you’ll cut this con artist off right now. He’s been promising to marry my daughter for over a year.”
Clint traces the calls to Wilbur’s house and threatens to punch him out, but, of course, peace is quickly made. The central conceit of the series is that only Wilbur knows Ed can talk, so he can never fully explain the mischief he causes. But, in the horse’s hearing, Clint mentions that Midnight is going to work in a film abroad and that he is replacing him with “a pretty little filly.” This causes Ed to relent and nuzzle him affectionately. That relation squared away, Clint supplies Wilbur with a script for the charity show, and in the course of directing it patches up the quarrel between the Posts.
No, it definitely isn’t Seinfeld. Indeed, looking at something like Mr. Ed today, one can’t help but reflect on how quick the turnover is in pop culture. Connie Hines’s bras turn her breasts into unyielding missiles, the art direction turns her house into an unlived-in, shop-window vision of middle-class life, and the scripts turn her into a child, alternately sulky and hysterical. This is perhaps because her only real function is to make sandwiches for a husband who is a wimp and an incompetent (when Clint at one point slaps him on the shoulder, he nearly falls over; at another moment when he playfully punches the guest star in the stomach, his hand is stung by its hardness). Indeed, the show runs on the irony that its only fully human character—libidinous, cynical, imaginatively unfettered—is, in fact, a horse. In the fifties and early sixties, television dared not give those qualities to any creature who might believably, threateningly, act on them.
It cannot be said that his Mr. Ed appearance did much to resolve Clint’s career frustrations. If anything, its demographic profile was less elevated than Rawhide’s, and he was still trapped in low-key amiability. On the other hand, the show gave him the full star treatment. When Carol and Kay realize that a real TV star is standing in the former’s living room, they go all swoony, which gives him a chance to demonstrate that he is just a nice, ordinary guy. This was—for that matter, remains—the standard way of presenting celebrity guest performers on sitcoms. When the show’s regular cast gets to know the famous person, he always turns out to be very like the best self he presents in whatever role he plays, but charmingly less impressed with himself than the cast is. It could be said, indeed, that this was a historic occasion: the first public acknowledgment of Clint Eastwood as a celebrity.
On Rawhide, such concessions as he obtained remained small and grudging, his attempts to assert himself often frustrated. This was now more than a matter of having his ideas about how his character might be developed taken seriously; a desire to direct, animated in part by his belief that the show needed to be reenergized visually, was growing in him.
When the company was on location in Paso Robles earlier that season shooting a cattle stampede, Clint was in the middle of it thinking, God, there’s some great shots here, and I’m in a position to get them. So he went to Warren and pointed out that if he was given a handheld camera he could ride low in the saddle or even dismount and move among the animals, getting close-ups that the stationary cameras, set up on the periphery of the action, could not possibly obtain. “I’ll get you some really great shots,” he promised Warren. No, came the reply, and an excuse was invented about not being in the camera union.
His disappointment grew when he formally sought permission to direct. While the producers and the network executives mulled it over, one of the performers on Frontier Circus went over schedule a day or two in his directorial debut—“something that would have been astronomical for a television show in those days,” says Clint—and so the network issued an edict: Henceforth no series actors would be permitted to direct their own shows. Or so Clint was told by his producers. They did let him direct some promos for the show, but they were merely placating him, and he knew it.
“At that point I sort of lost my spirit,” Clint says. He realized that they were never going to “change the energy” of the show. “Everything had to be the same format. Why tamper with success?” The network had no motive to do so. Rawhide ended that season, the last in Charles Marquis Warren’s tenure as producer, sixth in the Nielsen ratings. On the other hand, Clint’s instincts were correct, as events were about to prove. The next year, with agreeable Endre Bohem, who had been the program’s story editor from the start, taking over as producer, the program began what proved to be an irreversible slide in the ratings. It was thirteenth in 1961–62. The following year it was twenty-second, the year after that forty-fourth, a position from which it never rallied appreciably. Each season from 1961 onward there was a new producer, and each year there were changes in emphasis. Play up the guest stars, play down the guest stars; stic
k more closely to the cattle drive, get away from the cattle drive; have more comedy, have less comedy. Still later, in Rawhide’s last seasons, there would be additions to and subtractions from the regular cast. But nothing seemed to make much difference; the program’s popularity just kept dwindling.
This could not be blamed entirely on content. Episode to episode the show’s quality varied greatly, but no more than that of any long-running dramatic series under pressure to grind out thirty shows a year on six-day schedules. Sampling the series one sometimes finds quite interesting work: a memorably affecting James Whitmore, for example, as a cavalry officer who has lost his command in a battle with Indians and now wanders the plains seeking (and finally finding) redemptive martyrdom; or a stern James Coburn as another soldier whose unyielding inhumanity to a captive Indian child alienates his wife. On the other hand, the show often strained too hard for serious contemporary relevance, and its attempts at comedy were nearly always disastrous. Worse, as the years wore on, the show became repetitive as Gil, Rowdy and the rest of the drovers reencountered all the standard western clichés.
Doubtless this reliance on thrice-told tales took its toll on the audience. Clint was right when he argued that Rawhide’s often poky manner of presenting them was unhelpful. But these were problems it shared with all its competitors. Therefore, one probably has to look to Eric Fleming and his failure to establish his character as a figure whom audiences could take to heart as the program’s chief defect. He was not doing what a series lead must do; he was not carrying the show.
By the early sixties the network and the producers were completely aware of this issue, and their attempts to deal with it made their prickly star more and more angry. This relationship—essentially a downward spiral—became the production’s central, hidden drama. Clint did his best to absent himself from it. When the other actors felt they weren’t getting the screen time they deserved, he would sometimes intercede for them. When a script didn’t seem quite right he would occasionally retreat to his dressing room and try to improve it. But there is not the slightest evidence that he tried to take advantage of his costar’s weakening position. When they started shooting for the 1963–64 season Clint’s disaffection from Rawhide seemed to have been expressed largely as a kind of polite resignation. But he was looking for distraction.
The story of how, in his restlessness, he redeemed his career by taking a chance on what was by any standard the most marginal of opportunities has often been told; it is central to the Clint Eastwood legend. But the events occurring in his personal life at this time, when “Maggie and I weren’t doing too well,” were for a quarter of a century entirely unremarked in the press. They have since been alluded to only occasionally, and then in understandably distant and puzzled terms. But they, too, would have their long-term effects on his life.
Clint’s affair with Roxanne Tunis, which seems to have begun sometime in 1963, was not a great passion—at least on his part. “We were friends more than anything” is the way he describes it now. She was at the time twenty-nine years old, a tall and attractive brunette who worked in film and television as a bit player and stuntwoman and was fairly regularly employed in those capacities on Rawhide. She had been married, but was now separated, and Clint found her company easy and comfortable, for she was a woman of independent mind and considerable self-sufficiency—far more so than he was as yet aware.
For in the fall of 1963 she discovered that she was carrying his child—and did not tell him about it. Instead, she simply disappeared from his life for a time. It perhaps says something about the nature of their relationship that he did not inquire too deeply into the reasons for her withdrawal. In his mind at the time this was yet another of his casual affairs, if perhaps a little more affectionate than most. “I didn’t know how I fit into the picture” is what he says now.
He would not discover that picture’s full dimensions until almost a year later, well after the birth of their child. It is difficult to understand the motives for Roxanne’s silence. Perhaps she was afraid of what his response would be. Or perhaps she was utterly confident of it. That is to say, confident that he would, as he did, accept responsibility for the child. “It’s sort of an odd story,” he says, understating the matter. “I don’t know what to say about it, other than what it is.” As we will see, however, the long-term consequences of this initial silence would be serious, both for his daughter, Kimber, who was born June 17, 1964, at Cedars Sinai hospital, and for Clint Eastwood.
In everyone’s defense it must be said that in the early sixties matters of this kind were not openly admitted and discussed, as they are now. Public figures had a reasonable expectation that their privacy would be respected, and a reasonable fear that if it was not the revelation of an illegitimate child—or even an unconventional living arrangement—would adversely affect their standing with the public. The habit of secrecy was easily embraced, particularly by someone as reticent as Clint was, and is, about personal matters.
Moreover, at the time Roxanne disappeared from his life, he was distracted by professional considerations. For, of all things, he finally had an interesting offer of outside work, not on its face a good one, but somehow an intriguing one. It came to him casually enough. He was now represented by the William Morris Agency, oldest and at the time most powerful of the major agencies, and sometime in the winter of 1963–64 it received an inquiry about Clint from its branch office in Rome. The Italian-German-Spanish coproducers of a low-budget western with the working title of El Magnifico Stragnero (The Magnificent Stranger), to be directed by one Sergio Leone, had for some time been looking for an American actor to play its leading role—an inexpensive American actor, someone who did not command a major star’s salary, but who was well enough known to bolster international sales.
The problem was to get Clint, or any American actor of promise or standing, to commit to such a project. Working in Italian films was not considered to be a shrewd career move for an American actor, even though Rome was then the world’s most active center of international coproduction, and American companies had been shooting there since the early fifties, taking advantage of the favorable rate of currency exchange and the facilities at Cinecittà, the large and well-equipped Roman studio that Mussolini had built. Even without coproduction the Italian industry was doing well because its home market was extremely reliable, at this point quite unaffected by competition from television. Something like 20 percent of the films made in Italy eventually got released elsewhere, but if budgets were kept within reason producers could frequently turn a profit in their home territory alone.
The trouble was that many of these producers were given to odd, not to say downright crooked, practices. For example, they scratched together money for a week’s shooting, then showed that material to potential backers, hoping to gain enough financing to proceed for another week. If they were lucky, they would go on in this fashion until the movie was finished. If they were not, they simply abandoned the project and moved on to something else. Sometimes, too, they would shoot, say, five weeks of a six-week schedule, then claim poverty and ask their actors to finish the picture for nothing. Players working for them were always advised to collect their salaries on the first day of the week, before doing any work.
The films they made were mostly execrable. Moviegoers outside Italy think of its postwar cinema as one of high ambition and large influence around the world. It is after all the cinema of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Bertolucci. But these directors represented only the top of this industry’s line. Mostly it was devoted to much more popular—not to say vulgar—entertainments. In the fifties its dominant commercial genres were the films-fumetto (romantic weepies) and farcical comedies (often starring Toto), made mainly for domestic consumption. These gave way, in turn, to horror films along the lines of those produced by Hammer in Great Britain (but more grisly) and to the Sword and Sandal cycle, spectacles based—very loosely—on biblical tales and the legends of antiquity
. In the early sixties these shaded over into pure muscle-man epics, featuring such figures as Hercules (played by the sometime Mr. Universe, Steve Reeves), Maciste, Ursus and Sampson. These received wider international release, but by the midsixties they, too, were phasing out. Always on the alert for something that could be knocked off profitably, Roman producers began turning out vast numbers of James Bond-like espionage and crime fantasies, and they had themselves invented a curious genre, the “Mendo” pictures, largely faked documentaries of variously decadent “worlds.” Now they were beginning to make westerns as well.
Their immediate inspiration was the success of a group of films based on the works of Karl May, the nineteenth-century German author of many improbably romanticized tales of the American frontier. These pictures, some of which starred Lex Barker, the onetime Tarzan of American movies, were financed by a German production company, partially shot on location in Yugoslavia and played profitably all over Europe. It seemed to the hustlers of Cinecittà that there was room for more of the same, and in 1963 they produced something like twenty-five low-budget westerns, none of which was widely or immediately exported. They had done well enough in Italy, however, and the producers judged that the home market was still far from saturated. Among those sharing this thought were the managers of the curiously named Jolly Film, who put together a coproduction deal with Constantin, the Munich-based producer of the May films, and Ocean films of Madrid to finance the Leone project.
They had unsuccessfully offered The Magnificent Stranger to a number of actors before turning to Clint. He believes one of them to have been Rory Calhoun, who was one of several minor, fading American stars then working steadily in Italy; it was logical, for he had starred in the only previous film credited to Leone, The Colossus of Rhodes. Two men who would work for Leone later, when they were all better known, Charles Bronson and James Coburn, also rejected it. “It was just about the worst script I’d ever seen,” said the former, well after the fact. “I didn’t know who Sergio Leone was, and I’d heard nothing but bad about Italian filmmakers,” said Coburn when subsequently he came to contemplate his error of judgment.
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