Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Moving on to his tormentors, he demands an apology on behalf of his animal: “You see, my mule don’t like people laughing. He gets the crazy idea they’re laughing at him.” The gunmen eye him quizzically. He is perhaps a harmless, certainly a self-destructive, lunatic. It is their last, erroneous thought before he throws back his serape and almost literally blasts them out of their boots. This performance serves as a sort of audition for the Rojos, with whom Joe will forge a false alliance, the better to sow the seeds of the anarchy from which he hopes to profit. More important, the scene establishes his preternatural cool: Walking back past the carpenter, he apologetically murmurs, “My mistake—four.”

  This attitude was not unprecedented. The gunfighter is traditionally given to understatement, which is intended to cause underestimation on the part of his enemies. But there was, in the staging and the playing of this sequence, a black humor entirely new to the genre. Moreover, as Clint says, “Leone had a great visual sense as well as a sense of humor. He was extremely bold. He was never afraid to try anything new.”

  The contrast between this picture and Rawhide, “where everything was regimented,” was naturally vivid to Clint. An example he likes to cite is Leone’s staging of gunfights. Television had adopted the rule of the old Motion Picture Production Code: If a gun was fired you were not allowed to show its human target in the same shot. You had to show the shot being squeezed off, then cut to the staggering and falling victim. It was an utterly pointless gentility, of course, but for all his studies of the American western Leone had either failed to observe it or didn’t understand that it was a near-sacred convention. “So,” says Clint, “I didn’t tell him. This was fun, because we were breaking all the rules.”

  Actor and director had their differences, of course. Clint recalls, for example, that they argued about his performance a little bit at the beginning. Leone “wanted me to do a lot of Mifune’s type of deals. He liked Mifune’s gestures, and I told him, ‘Sergio, I’ve got to do my own thing here. I mean, Mifune was wonderful in the movie but it’s a different view, different times, different cultures.’ ”

  They also continued their argument about the script’s lengthy rationalizations of Joe’s behavior. This disagreement came to a head when they began to work on the passage where Joe finally rescues the tormented Marisol, who has by this time been abducted from the Rojos by the Baxters, then offered back to them in an exchange of prisoners.

  According to Clint, a prologue had been written for the picture in which a young Joe’s mother was killed in a similar situation. That was never made, and the exposition Leone had written for this sequence was supposed to convey that history. Clint argued that “it doesn’t matter where this guy comes from. We can leave it all in the audience’s imagination. We can just hint that there’s some little incident, some little parallel, and just kind of let the audience draw in the rest of the picture.”

  Leone, however, remained dubious until Clint at last won him over with a different argument: “OK, Sergio, look. In a B movie we tell everybody everything. But in a real class-A movie we let the audience think.”

  This, it might be noted, was not the end of attempts to supply Joe with conventionally moral motivation for his activities. Years later, when the movie was sold to American television, a network executive, in order to placate his standards and practices department, had yet another prologue shot. In this one, a man in a serape (not Clint) was seen from the back as a prison warden commutes his sentence on condition that he go to San Miguel and clean it up, in effect licensing his subsequent killings—and confusing some subsequent critical discussions of the movie, since this corrupted print played widely on TV.

  Be that as it may, in the film Leone delivered, when the rescued woman tries to express her gratitude to Joe and asks why he helped her, he simply says: “Because I knew someone like you once and there was no one there to help.” It is the only time that he openly acknowledges either past or principle, his only humane moment, really, and it is the more effective because of its terseness and brusqueness.

  Clint thinks his other major contribution to the way Leone realized the film may have been stylistic. The middle distance was never territory the director comfortably inhabited, and in Colossus of Rhodes he had already demonstrated his predilection for extreme wide shots and extreme long shots. “He really liked panorama, and he knew how to do panorama,” is the way Clint puts it, adding that herein lay Leone’s largest influence on him as a director. Close-ups, however, were rare in that film, and that concerned Clint. Having determined to play his character as stoically as possible, a distantly placed camera would not be able to read his minimal expressions. So he went to Leone and “told him I thought I could sell this character better in close-up.”

  Most actors, of course, will tell a director something like that—“in all objectivity and sensitivity,” as Clint ironically puts it. But in this case he felt he had a legitimate argument, especially given the Italian custom of recording no more than a guide track on location and postsynchronizing all dialogue later on a dubbing stage, where another actor would do the lines. If he was going to be deprived of his own speaking voice, he was determined that his subverbal expressions be understandable. (When the film was released in the United States, three years later, Clint rerecorded his dialogue, relying on notes he made every night about the day’s divergences from the script, glad he had been forewarned by his friends in Rome that the Italians would inevitably lose the guide tracks, which they did.)

  Leone was receptive to him on this point. “He believed, as Fellini did, as a lot of Italian directors do, that the face means everything. You’d rather have a great face than a great actor in a lot of cases.” Of course, once Leone realized that he was going to be tight on his leading actor so often, he had to accord the same privilege to his other players if he was to achieve some kind of visual balance. Thus did a directorial signature, the alternation of extreme wide shots with extreme close-ups, begin its evolution.

  Clint concedes that the director might have come to it anyway, given his Italianate love of gargoylish human expression, the fact that he was, by nature, a man of extremes and perhaps above all because of the luck of this particular shoot. The extras and small-part players Leone recruited on location in Spain were mostly drawn from the Gypsy population of Andalucia, and they lacked the practiced anonymity of professional extras. They offered instead the fierce watchfulness, at once stoic and angry, of disenfranchised people who had been ill used for generations.

  With his brutally tight close-ups of them Leone created what might be termed a “landscape of masks” that outlined the unforgiving psychological terrain of San Miguel as no amount of verbiage could have. And from his placement of these figures in his frames he derived much of the famous “operatic” quality of his work. For they are like the chorus and supernumeraries of opera (or a passion play, since there is something so ritualistic about this drama), functioning as living scenic elements, primarily present to lend grandeur to the occasion.

  This is particularly true at its conclusion, when San Miguel becomes the unlikely site of nothing less than a resurrection. Joe and the Rojos having fallen out, they torture him almost to death before he makes a painful escape, aided by his only ally, the town’s saloon keeper. The sadistic gang, believing he has crawled away to die, greet his reappearance, obviously intent on vengeance, as a return from the dead. And when they fire on him, they cannot kill this unholy ghost. They can knock him down with their pistol fire, but he keeps getting up. And he keeps coming toward them. Joe has fashioned a metal breastplate while recovering from his wounds, making himself literally bulletproof. Only Ramon discovers it—the last thing he learns on this earth. Again, this is not an entirely novel invention. But it is an effective one, and its overtones would, as the film scholar Edward Gallafent observes, echo through Clint’s career. The power of Clint’s Stranger does not entirely depend on his skill with weaponry; it derives as well from “his unbridgeable distance
from the world of San Miguel. A figure with no past or future related to the town, he is envisioned for a moment as a gothic avenger from some other plane of being.” Clint would establish a similar distance (and offer reincarnations or pseudoreincarnations) in Hang ’em High, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider and Unforgiven.

  Clint has always shied away from such interpretations of this seminal work (as well as of the films he went on to make himself). He makes no authorial claims regarding A Fistful of Dollars. He believes he was always supportive of his sometimes-hard-pressed director, his suggestions specifically practical, aimed at keeping the film within his most effective range. If he was aware of the many subtexts viewers of the movie have since discovered, he said nothing about them. If Leone was consciously aware of them, he apparently said nothing to Clint about them.

  Since Clint’s recollections of this and their other collaborations have always been generous to Leone and modest about his own contributions, the director’s latter-day attempts to diminish those contributions (and Clint’s talent) are puzzling and rather dismaying. But they are spread across the record. He told Iain Johnstone, author of a short biography of Clint, that “I take the real life actor and mold the character from him,” implying that Joe might have been a more articulate and principled figure if only he had had an actor who was up to those qualities. In Frayling he is quoted thus: “In real life, Clint is slow, calm, rather like a cat. During shooting he does what he has to do, then sits down in a corner and goes to sleep immediately, until he is needed again. It was seeing him behave like this on the first day that helped me model the character.” The language barrier, rendering it impossible for Clint to join in the camaraderie of the set, may have caused him to withdraw somewhat, but he has another catlike quality, curiosity, and one cannot quite imagine him snoozing the days away. It seems likely that he kept a quiet, watchful eye on a filmmaking process unlike any he had ever previously known.

  Later, Leone’s sly digs would give way to outright contempt. After he had directed Robert De Niro in Once upon a Time in America, the journalist Pete Hamill asked Leone for a comparison between his first star and (as it turned out) his last one, and he unloaded at length—unguardedly and rather unpleasantly—on Clint. “In reality, if you think about it, they don’t even belong in the same profession. Robert De Niro throws himself into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with elegance, while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang. It’s exactly that lowered visor which composes his character. And that creaky clang it makes as it snaps down, dry as a martini in Harry’s Bar in Venice. Look at him carefully. Eastwood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same—a block of marble. Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers. Clint yawns.”

  Speculating a little sadly on Leone’s comments, Clint recalls: “When we were working together he had great things to say. Then later on, after the picture was a success, he tried to say how he developed the performances. And no director really does. They can give you ideas that might make something work. But they’re not acting for you.” As for the invidious comparison between himself and De Niro, he says, simply, “It was a crack out of envy. People asked me what I thought, and I said I didn’t think anything of it. I couldn’t tell them that it was just a guy who hadn’t been prolific as I had been.” Clint adds: “He [Leone] was having a rough time getting things going,” because, he thinks, he had difficulty making decisions and “was more afraid to go to the post.” Leone also developed a taste for epic filmmaking. These large-scale productions were time-consuming to set up, and both Once upon a Time in the West and Once upon a Time in America, each in its way a masterpiece, were brutally reedited by their American distributors with the result—almost inevitable when movies are tainted by this kind of tampering—that they fared badly with reviewers and audiences, which, in turn, further embittered the director.

  But as their first picture together wrapped in Spain, the possibility of a future conflict between them was unimaginable to Clint, and doubtless to Leone as well. Indeed, it seemed unlikely to Clint that they would ever work together again, for he was confused about the film at that time: “I’d go through various feelings—this thing could be something, this could be nothing.” His confidence was not enhanced by the response of Columbo and the rest of the producers. “Jesus, this is a piece of shit,” he recalls them saying as they looked at unedited dailies drifting back from the lab. Flying home after a brief stopover in London Clint concluded that what he had imagined as the worst-case scenario for his project was probably about to be enacted—limited release in a few countries, and limited response from audiences, reviewers and the rest of the industry. It would probably not harm his career, but it certainly would not enhance it.

  Back home, when people asked him about his summer job, he remained noncommittal: “I had a good time,” he would say, or “The picture was a little discombobulated, but it seemed to work all right.” The questions soon died down, but Clint then began wondering why there was no word from Rome—no calls, no cables, no letters, nothing.

  “‘Come over here, I want to show you something.’ One of those jobs. ‘C’mere, I’ve got something to show you.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘C’mon over.’ ‘Oh, OK.’ ” Thus does Clint Eastwood recall the first teasing announcement of the last thing he expected to be—a father.

  When Roxanne Tunis presented Kimber to him, he was stunned. Groping for a way to express his feelings he refers to an accident he had sustained on the Leone shoot: “I was lying on the ground with the wind knocked out of me.” He laughs, ruefully. “It’s happened frequently in my life—sometimes some physical impact, sometimes mental.”

  Arrangements were made. There was never any question of his supporting the child. But as things worked out over the years, there was not much chance of his seeing her very frequently, either. Roxanne for a time reunited with her estranged husband, whom Clint says he never met, and then moved about a good deal. His own career kept him away from Los Angeles for long periods of time, and he and Maggie were spending more and more time in Carmel, too. In any case, Clint says, Roxanne did not press him to spend more time with them. He saw their child when they all happened to coincide in Los Angeles. Basically, however, the situation remained what it was from the beginning—“awkward” and “confusing emotionally,” in his words.

  Secrets always are, and the fact remains that only a few intimates knew this one, even though, over the years, Roxanne remained, as Clint says, “a friend,” occasionally visiting him on his sets, calling on him in his office. (Fritz Manes remembers her bringing picnic lunches to share with Clint.) It was not until the period immediately after Clint’s bitter and very public breakup with Sondra Locke in 1989, when the gossip press was for the first time baying at his heels, that someone—probably a sometime friend of Roxanne’s—broke the silence.

  This, in turn, encouraged Kimber to grant some interviews, in which her highly ambiguous feelings about her father surfaced. She insisted to one reporter that Clint “was always there” for her emotionally and financially when she was growing up, asserting that she saw him every three or four months, remembering the cuddly animals he brought her, and her mother preparing his favorite pasta dishes when he stayed for dinner. At some point in her adolescence he invited Kimber and her mother to join him on a ski weekend in Vail. And when she was approaching her sixteenth birthday he called to ask her what her favorite color was; she told him yellow, and a couple of months later a Camaro of that hue was delivered to her. In 1984 he gave her a job in the production office of Tightrope when it was shot on location in New Orleans.

  But Kimber told less happy tales to the press as well: “I guess we never had the greatest relationship,” she once admitted. She has also said that after the press revealed her parentage she and Clint had a dinner at which she begged him to spend more t
ime with her, that he agreed to do so, and she felt certain he meant it. She added, however, that “I have tried to make an appointment to see him and he always has other commitments.” At various other times Kimber has criticized Clint for lack of generosity, for disapproving when she married and had a child while still in her teens, for failure to support her ambitions as an actress. What she has said about her father has rather obviously depended upon when she was asked and what the state of their relationship was at that particular moment.

  Clint has preferred not to say anything beyond briefly acknowledging the facts of the matter. It is simply impossible to state what his deepest feelings about Roxanne and Kimber may have been or are now. Aware of his daughter’s fluctuating emotions toward him, and that she has yet to settle into a coherent career, he enters no plea—guilty, innocent or extenuating circumstances—about the way he has conducted his relationship with her.

  After learning of her birth he returned to the routines of Rawhide gratefully, for it appears that he took more than his usually conscientious interest in it as filming for the new season began in the summer of 1964. This was not entirely a matter of escaping from the complications of his private life. Since Charles Marquis Warren had left the show there had been a new producer every season, and this year was no exception. Only this time it was a team of them—Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski, who had a company called Unit Productions, which subcontracted to CBS to handle the program. They, in turn, hired Del Reisman, who had been a story editor on Playhouse 90 and on The Twilight Zone, to perform the same function for them.