Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Her opinions about his work aside, Clint agreed with many of Kael’s judgments on Paint Your Wagon. In a general way, indeed, he agreed with her view of the Hollywood system; it was slow, cumbersome, often stupid in its decisions. He did not, however, think it was ripe for revolution. What he guessed was that a cooler, more amiable and self-interested kind of subversion might be practiced on it by a man increasingly confident of his own skills, power and judgment, and increasingly wary of other people’s opinions about what he should and should not be doing.

  EIGHT

  I’M AN ACTOR, YOU KNOW

  Autonomy was a dream easier to define than to realize. It would take Clint a half decade to attain the kind of control over his professional destiny that he wanted, mostly because of his long-term commitment to Universal. The projects this hierarchical and routinizing studio urged on him were generally unimaginative and often vexed—sometimes by scripts in need of major revision, sometimes by inept producers, most often by indifferent handling when they went to market. On the other hand, when Clint developed projects he thought were more interesting, they were treated as indulgences more to be patronized than enthusiastically supported. It could be argued that all the films he made at Universal were useful to him in that they firmed and settled his relationship with his audience, but the history of this period is, from his point of view, one of increasing fractiousness and restlessness.

  The first of the two films Clint made in 1969, Two Mules for Sister Sara, would prove to be a case in point. In some measure the movie owed its existence to him. While Where Eagles Dare was in production, Elizabeth Taylor showed him an early version of the script, which producer Martin Rackin was set to do at Universal, and they made a handshake agreement to costar in it. When Don Siegel arrived in London to do some looping for Coogan’s Bluff, Clint gave him the screenplay, and he said he’d like to direct it. Unfortunately, there were already complexities about this project of which they were unaware.

  There is certain irony in this, for the story they all liked is very basic and straightforward. It recounts the adventures of a seemingly mismatched man and woman who meet under desperate circumstances—he rescues her from an attempted rape—in the Mexican desert, circa 1865. Hogan, as Clint’s character was eventually called—curious how many figures with Irish names this Wasp has played—is an American mercenary who has sold his services to the Juaristas rebelling against the dictatorship of the French puppet government of Emperor Maximilian. He is supposed to dynamite a fort, abscond with its treasure of gold and receive half of it for his troubles. Sara is, supposedly, a nun (she turns out to be a whore in disguise), idealistically committed to the Juaristas’ cause and seeking funds for them, while the French try to apprehend her. Along the trail, this odd couple shares many adventures, some comical, some suspenseful; in the end, of course, the fortress is very satisfactorily blown up, she reveals her true occupation, he turns out to be not quite so hard a case as he had seemed and they ride off into the sunset together.

  This story, at least in its broad strokes, was the work of Budd Boetticher, director of those admirably austere Randolph Scott westerns of the fifties, and one imagines from his dismayed comments about the final version of Sister Sara that he had something like their tone in mind for this film. Certainly he had it in mind to direct it. Unfortunately—and here is where some of the film’s troubles began—he sold his material to Rackin, a sometime screenwriter and studio production chief who had recently had the effrontery to remake Stagecoach and the chutzpah to announce that this time they were going to do it right. An almost parodistic version of a Hollywood operator—all gold chains, sunlamp tan and tough talk—he quickly fired Boetticher and turned to Albert Maltz for a rewrite.

  Maltz, an occasional playwright and novelist, is best known today as one of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned and then blacklisted for their refusal to testify to their Communist political convictions before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, and this would be his first credited screenwriting in more than two decades. His draft suited Rackin well enough, but Siegel and Clint thought it still needed work. More than they initially imagined, for Elizabeth Taylor now rather mysteriously disappeared from the project. Siegel believed she might have quit when the studio refused to shoot the picture in Spain when Richard Burton was also scheduled to be working there. Clint thinks the disastrous reception of Boom! may have affected her standing at the studio, especially given the scarcely less dismaying prospects Universal must have seen in Secret Ceremony, which it was soon to release. Her movie career was spiraling downward as quickly as her husband’s.

  Besides, Shirley MacLaine was available, and she seemed to be hot. She had just finished Sweet Charity, which, for reasons known only to motion-picture executives, they were certain was going to be a huge hit, and they wanted a quick follow-up for her. Or maybe they were just typecasting; the Bob Fosse film was the third in which she had played an adorably indomitable hooker.

  The part as originally written had called for a Hispanic woman, and it had been thought that Taylor might just get away with such an impersonation. The red-haired, fair-skinned MacLaine obviously could not, and anyway, there was something about her spirit and manner—so feisty and forthright, so essentially comic—that made her nun’s masquerade implausible at first glance. So in the next rewrite, Sara became an American expatriate, and instead of holding back her true identity until the end of the picture, as Boetticher had intended, broad hints that she was not what she seemed to be were almost immediately dropped—Sara puffing on a cigar or swigging liquor when Hogan’s back was turned or using bad language to his face. Also lost was a mutual-redemption theme dear to Boetticher, in which “one who you believe is a nun becomes a beautiful person because she falls in love with a bum, who becomes a beautiful person because he is in love with an unobtainable person.” From his point of view there was worse to come.

  Of this Boetticher was at the time unaware; though he had a story credit on the film, he was not consulted at any stage of the production and did not see it in finished form until its Los Angeles premiere, where he sat fuming directly behind Clint and Siegel, incensed at what he saw as the spaghetti-like direction in which his material had been taken. Boetticher, who had a particular and often-expressed loathing for Leone, had “motivated” his protagonist in a way that he no longer was. “My men have become tough for a reason,” he would say, and though Hogan is presented as a former idealist soured by the slaughter he had witnessed in the Civil War, very little is made of the point. When Sara asks him, “If money’s all you care about, why did you fight in that war?” he replies, “Everyone has the right to be a sucker once.” The casual cynicism and brevity of the speech was entirely too Leonesque (perhaps by now we should say Eastwoodian) for Boetticher.

  In his study of Clint’s films, Christopher Frayling, relying heavily on an interview with Boetticher, adds that Hogan “seemed to be much more concerned about personal style—about cultivating his ironic, detached stance in order to enhance his status as a walking piece of mythology—than about behaving in a remotely credible way.” This, too, was Leonesque. Clint’s work for him always suggested that when there are no reliable values to resort to, heroes must fall back on personal style; it is what they have instead of personal honor in the modern world.

  Nor was that the end of the film’s “homages” to Clint’s movie past. Ennio Morricone supplied its score, and the visual connection between Hogan and the Man with No Name is stressed. He appears in his first sequence unshaven, wearing a serape-like vest and smoking a cigar. The three men assaulting Sister Sara are also out of the Leone school; third-world second heavies, if you will—dark, dirty, visibly Hispanic and intent on defiling a figure they take to be a holy woman. (Siegel would later write that he intended to cast Americans in these roles, but that Rackin, trying to save a few pesos, insisted on hiring locals for the parts.)

  Most significantly, Hogan confronts them with No-Nameish cool. After a minimal ex
change of verbiage he shoots two of them, whereupon the survivor grabs the almost-naked Sara to use as a shield. Hogan, however, pulls out a stick of dynamite, lights its fuse with his cigar and tosses it at their feet, confronting the bad man with a cruel choice: If he lets go of Sara and runs, he will be shot; if he holds on to her he will be blown up. He runs, Hogan shoots and then ambles casually down from his position on a rise to cut off the fuse with his knife, his pace being especially irritating to Boetticher, who found it—who would dispute him?—unrealistic.

  So is the dialogue that follows: “They said they were going to kill me.” “Well, they’re not saying much now.” It is the harbinger of many similarly brusque exchanges, with Hogan, in general, getting most of the toppers. She’s always either blithering idealism or quavering alarm, thus ever in need of a sharp slap with a smart line. These are well enough written, however, and since incident follows incident—they range from a confrontation with a rattlesnake to an Indian attack to the demolition of a railroad trestle to the final, suspensefully managed attack on the fort—at a very satisfactory clip, the movie is, in its entirely unambitious and predictable way, entertaining. A director like Siegel can always provide canny professional crispness in lieu of conviction.

  Stanley Kauffmann, when he reviewed the movie, was obviously aware of Boetticher’s complaints, but argued that newfangled stylistic tics or no, the film was basically “an attempt to keep the old Hollywood alive—a place where nuns can turn out to be disguised whores, where heroes can always have a stick of dynamite under their vests, where every story has not one but two cute finishes.” Clint too was aware that the movie had a certain lineage. “It’s kind of The African Queen gone West,” he told a journalist at the time. It also owed something to another John Huston film, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, his desert-island fantasy, set in World War II, in which Robert Mitchum (whom Boetticher said was one of the actors he had in mind as he wrote) played marine roughneck to Deborah Kerr’s nun. Clint’s attitude toward Boetticher’s script and its revisions was—and remains—quite neutral. “I read his script,” he says, “and it really wasn’t any better. It was a little different interpretation.”

  That reinterpretation was not easily arrived at. This was a rugged shoot, not made any more comfortable by MacLaine’s temperament. She is an actress who tends to question a director rather closely about every shot: Why do you want me to move now instead of then? Do we really need this line? Wouldn’t it be better if …? And she drove Siegel crazy. In her defense, it must be said that the location in and around Cocoyoc, thirty miles from Cuernevaca, was particularly difficult for her. She did most of her own stunts, some of which were quite taxing, and she proved to be especially sensitive to sunburn, so it was necessary for someone to trail her around with a parasol whenever they were shooting outside, which was, of course, most of the time. Moreover, she was by nature a nightbird, not entirely happy to arise early in order to catch the morning light—particularly, as Clint recalls, when her lover of the time, Sander Vanocur, the television newsman, visited her. Eventually she became ill and caused the picture to shut down for a few days.

  But Clint related to her affably enough. “Shirley was great fun,” he recalls. And though she scarcely discusses this film in her memoir of her acting life, she did write, in a picture caption, “I loved Clint even though he was a Republican.” All of her troubles were with Siegel, and they came to a head one day when, in order to hold everything he wanted in shot, he asked her to dismount from a mule on its off-side. This offended her sense of realism, a fight ensued, and she stormed off the set, with even Clint losing his customary cool and yelling imprecations after her. Siegel ordered him to stay out of it and then quit the set himself, intending, he said later, to quit the picture as well.

  But that evening MacLaine knocked at his door to tender an apology, he invited her in for a session in which they both vented their grievances, and peace of a sort was restored, though even a few years later Siegel was still rankled by her. In 1974 he told his biographer, Stuart Kaminsky, “It’s hard to feel any great warmth for her. She’s too … unfeminine. She has too much balls. She’s very hard.” A couple of decades later, when he came to write his autobiography, Siegel’s opinion of her had softened somewhat. After their peace parley, he reports, “she was a doll. When working, she was most cooperative. My major regret was that I never really sat down and found out what made her tick.”

  Rackin, however, he never did forgive. Their problems had begun in Hollywood when he had inserted a page in the shooting script bearing this ominous legend: “There are to be no changes in the script, without exception, unless you obtain the oral or written approval of the Producer, Martin Rackin.” He and Siegel were discussing this directive in the latter’s office one day when Clint happened by. The director handed the script to him, pointing out the offending sentence. Clint eyed him blankly and said, “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  He got the reaction he expected from Siegel—barely suppressed apoplexy—then wandered toward a window, turned slowly back to face the two men and said, “There’s one way, Don, to handle situations like this.” At which point he ripped the page bearing the producer’s order out of the script, crumpled it up and tossed it across the room.

  This effectively backed Rackin out of the film’s creative process. But it did not prevent him from interfering in the production process. Trying to cut corners, he refused to pay for movie-trained horses, which do not shy around equipment. Riding one of them, Clint was thrown when a camera boom, swinging alongside him, spooked the animal. Later, when it came time to shoot the raid on the fort, Siegel found the set, on which Rackin had supervised construction, flimsy and inadequate. About the only argument he won was for his choice as cinematographer, the great Gabriel Figueroa, who had shot Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films and who, on Clint’s recommendation, would be employed on his next movie, too.

  Clint was loyal to his director in all of his disputes with Rackin, and they worked together companionably, with Clint full of suggestions, usually proposing the more complicated, time-consuming shot, feeling that if his friend had a flaw as a director it was his low-budget habit of opting for the simplest, cheapest setup. “He can dream up absolutely impossible shots,” Siegel told a visiting journalist, “but the trouble is that they sound good.” Of course, he slyly added, when they didn’t work, they were not discussed subsequently.

  Overall, the filmmaking process was very similar to the one they had endured on Coogan’s Bluff—messy, contentious, improvisational. And the results were about the same, too—modest profitability and mixed reviews when the film was released a year later. Clint, in the critics’ view, had settled down nicely after his boyish Italian escapades. If some agreed with Kauffmann about the regressiveness of Two Mules for Sister Sara, others found in it a certain classic grace. “A movie lover’s dream,” Roger Greenspun called it in The New York Time’s. “I’m not sure it is a great movie, but it is very good, and it stays in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do.”

  Many of the more serious reviewers tended to see Sister Sara as they had Coogan’s Bluff, more as a Siegel film than as an Eastwood movie, but in their eyes that at least placed Clint in good company. This was useful to him, because on the Sister Sara location, for the first time in Clint’s experience, the press flocked around, more interested in him than in any other aspect of the production, making their first crude sketches of his off-screen persona. Indeed, it could be argued that over the long run the movie is most interesting as the avatar of his primary celebrity image.

  Clint was not very helpful either to the reporters or to himself. He was obviously ill at ease in their presence, and innocent about their needs. Every star eventually has to supply the press with a basic personal narrative to work from, something that can support a simple, attractive image, and Clint did not yet have his story straight. In order to present him to their readers in an easily comprehended form, the journalist
s were obliged to adapt one of their standard formats to his case.

  They settled on a variation on what might be called the starlet-phenomenon yarn. In this tale, an attractive, but not obviously talented, individual—usually a woman—suddenly, mysteriously, seizes the public’s imagination, and the press, looking to find shrewd manipulation, either by the new star or by that creature’s handlers, seeks explanations. When the press’s subject is not forthcoming, or appears to be as puzzled as everyone else by his or her good fortune, much is made of this inarticulateness, and a sort of “lucky stiff” text emerges.

  Clint’s natural wariness with strangers was deepened by the fact that most of what had been written about him had been contemptuous reviews. He had no reason to think interviewers would be more kindly disposed. “You’ll find the conversation pours like glue,” one frustrated reporter told another as the latter approached her task in Mexico. To Wayne Warga of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote two pieces about him that summer, Clint said, “Actors have their bag, and journalists have theirs. I’m not that talkative, and their job is to get me talking. It may just become chic to blast hell out of me.” Then he waited a beat and added, “So permit me to introduce myself”—in a dead-on imitation of Bela Lugosi.

  But that moment aside, he didn’t really know how to let his playful, self-satirizing side out, and his interrogators, unaware of its existence, didn’t know how to bring it out. Some of them talked about his fitness regimen, some about his fondness for cars, and one of them, Aljean Harmetz of The New York Times, dug an observant quote out of Irving Leonard, who paired “his fussiness about his cars and his body.”