Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Needless to say, they patched up this silly quarrel, but the issues it symbolized were not so easily ameliorated. Sondra or no Sondra, they were drifting toward an event not uncommon in the prospering classes—the dream-house divorce. In this scenario, the new home is supposed to compensate for years of hard work, sacrifice and disappointment and at the same time signal arrival at unshakable stability. When it does not, the inevitable question arises: “All that for this?”

  Indeed, what matter decor and amenities when the things that were wrong before you moved in remain wrong? By this time, according to Don Kincade, Clint’s old friend, who would remain affectionately loyal to both parties in the future, Maggie could no longer deny his infidelities —and, denials or no, this latest one was far more obvious than the others. Fritz Manes was staying in the Eastwoods’ Los Angeles home in this period, his own marriage in temporary disarray. When Maggie called there looking for Clint when he was out with Sondra, Manes tried to cover for him—not very plausibly.

  Clint, however, maintained his silence about Sondra, merging it into his larger silences, which surely played their part, too, in the sundering of this marriage. In recent years he has become a little more emotionally open, but this has always been hard for him. “Women,” Clint says, a sort of sad befuddlement in his tone, “always want to know what you’re thinking.” It is a mystery to him, this desire to penetrate the deepest reserves of his privacy. It is equally a mystery to him why anyone would think that bringing things up out of this murk and discussing them would profit either party. At our cores, he believes, for whatever reasons, we are what we are, and there is nothing much to be done about that—beyond simply accepting the hard facts of personality. For this realist, that may be the ultimate reality. For a marriage, of course, it is the ultimate peril.

  One will never know from them precisely why or when Clint and Maggie finally agreed to abandon their marriage. But in early 1979 the Eastwoods would announce their legal separation. Clint was now routinely referred to in the press as one of the world’s richest actors, and the property settlement that followed a year later reflected the truth of those reports. Maggie, it was said, received at least $25 million under this agreement. In the years thereafter, they restored their friendship. Clint has recently said that their relationship after marriage was much better than it was during it, and their son, Kyle, has said: “It wasn’t bad as divorces go. There was no weird custody thing. We lived with my mom and saw my dad whenever we wanted to.” It seems to have been a little harder on Alison, then only seven years old, her bond with her father not as fully formed as her brother’s was (they began sharing a passion for jazz when Kyle was very young). But no one who knows Clint has ever doubted the strength of his affection for his children or his eagerness for them to share in his life, which meant sharing his work. As a little girl Alison was often on his sets, frequently wielding the slate that marks the beginning of a take. Each child would eventually be given a major role in one of his pictures.

  If early in 1978 Clint was still being circumspect about the state of his marriage, there was nothing cautious about his choice of projects, for this was the year he costarred with an orangutan. Every Which Way but Loose had come to him through one of his secretaries, whose husband hoped to produce the Jeremy Joe Kronsberg script. According to Manes no one at first thought of it as a likely prospect for Clint. Its proprietors hoped he might pass the script on to Burt Reynolds. Riding the seventies crossover of country music and cultural style into the mainstream, Reynolds had just had a $100 million grosser with Smokey and the Bandit. But Clint, as it turned out, was not uninterested in doing something basic and blue collar.

  Feelings about Every Which Way but Loose were, however, decidedly mixed among Clint’s advisers. Daley read it and loathed it; Manes read it and liked it—“this is us growing up in Oakland,” he remembers saying, not entirely inaccurately. Lenny Hirshan thought it was awful, as did Bruce Ramer, Clint’s attorney, and most of the studio brass. Sondra, however, confirmed Clint’s impression that there was “something hip about it in a strange way.” It was “the entertainment piece” he had been looking for, full of action, but all of it comic and more overtly subversive of his macho image than anything he had yet tried.

  Clint’s character, Philo Beddoe, lives in a tumbledown house with his pal Orville (Geoffrey Lewis), Orville’s harridan mom (played with wonderful relish by Ruth Gordon) and his pet ape, Clyde (who was played mostly by an immature male named Manis, though two other orangs were used for special tricks). Philo makes his living as a trucker and as a bare-knuckle boxer, under Orville’s dim management. He falls in love with aristocratic-seeming country-western singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor (Locke), who sleeps with hunks who happen to catch her fancy, but is also mysteriously committed to a sexually enigmatic male friend, to whom she returns after her fling with Philo (art imitating life, Clint thought). He decides to pursue her, accompanied by Clyde, Orville and the latter’s girlfriend, Echo (Beverly D’Angelo). In the course of this odyssey he fights a few bouts, incurs the enmity of a pair of dim-witted cops and a gang of over-the-hill bikers who call themselves the Black Widows, but doesn’t get the girl.

  This sounds more coherent than it plays: The construction of Every Which Way but Loose was every which way but tight, except in one particular—Philo’s hugely comic, strangely touching relationship with Clyde. The orang is gentle, cuddly, somewhat mysterious, occasionally mischievous, completely faithful and, above all, a good listener whose needs are uncomplicated and easily satisfied. Putting sex aside, he offered everything guys dream of finding in gals and rarely do; everything guys hope to find in other guys and sometimes do.

  The terms of their endearment are established early on, when Clyde gets in trouble by stealing Oreos from Orville’s mother. After placating her, Philo encounters his pal and points a menacing finger at him. The ape throws up his arms in surrender. Philo goes “bang,” and Clyde flops down, pretending to be shot. Oh—somebody’s sending up his image and, as the movie proceeds, masculine ways in general. When Orville lets Clyde have a few brews in a bar, Philo is outraged: “How many times have I told you—I don’t want him drinking beer except on Saturday night.” When Philo takes Clyde to meet Lynn he lectures him: “Clyde, Clyde, you’re going to meet a lady now. I want you to handle it. No spittin’, pissin’, fartin’ or pickin’ your ass.”

  All that goofiness aside the picture actually has a point to make. At the end, Philo throws a big fight he’s in the process of winning, for the best of reasons. He doesn’t want to be a marked man, somebody everyone feels obliged to challenge. Maybe, one thinks, he’s smarter than he looks. And maybe this movie is smarter than it looks. Its charm lies precisely in its obliviousness to its own “hipness,” its refusal to nudge and wink at the audience. It lets them recognize that quality—or not—in their way, in their own good time.

  For Clint, the charm was working with Manis. The creature was part of an animal act owned and trained by Bob Berosini, who mostly worked Las Vegas and had been recommended to Clint by the director of a primate lab he consulted, and he turned out to be, for Clint, something of a soulmate.

  “The orang is an introvert, and the chimp is an extrovert. Chimps love to perform, roll their lips back and do all that kind of stuff. But orangs are kind of cool. They love to study things, and they’re kind of shy. You have to coax them into it. I didn’t get overly friendly. I’d always pretend I didn’t notice him, then he’d start studying me, because I wasn’t looking at him and staring him down. I’d feel him start picking at my ear and looking in my ear, you know, doing little things like they do to you. And always grabbing my Adam’s apple. Eventually he got to really like me. In fact, it used to make Berosini jealous, because sometimes he’d be calling him and I’d call him and he’d come running to me.” This relationship worked so well, as Clint admits, because Manis was young and innocent. You can’t, he says, work this way with a fully mature orangutan, because “they start exercising dominanc
e. They’re liable to take your head off when you least expect it.”

  This, of course, was a trait not unknown to mature actor-filmmakers. Once again, Clint fell into disagreement with his director, Jim Fargo. Mainly this was because Fargo, as Alain Silver, one of his assistants, puts it, “had the notion that he was directing the movie.” He perhaps overstates the case slightly, but the point needs stressing: For all the amiability between them, authority on Clint’s sets resides in only one place. It can be reasoned with, but it cannot be ignored without predictable consequences. It is, as we have seen from the outset, the first principle in dealing with a man who must assert what control he can over the uncontrollable world.

  Director and star fell out in particular over a sequence in which the biker gang menaces Locke’s character. Fargo set up its crucial shot, in which a shotgun is suddenly stuck out the window of her truck to drive the Black Widows away, in such a way as to disguise the fact that she is with another man. Clint thought this revelation should be made, and that the gun should not be wielded by Lynn. “It was very clear,” says Silver, “that he didn’t want any violence attached to her.” Unfortunately, he did not discover what Fargo had done until the bikers—whose last day on the production this was—had been released and sent home. They had to be called back, amid a certain amount of producerly fuming. And, ultimately, with a predictable consequence. As Silver says, “Once you’re on Clint’s bad list, you don’t come back.” Fargo never did.

  This despite the fact that he was the director of record of what is, dollars in, dollars out, the most profitable movie Clint Eastwood ever made, returning more than $51 million—about ten times its cost—in domestic theatrical rentals alone. This was an astonishing figure, especially considering that when it was first screened for the studio’s executives one of them firmly pronounced the film unreleasable and that when it was first screened for critics it was considered unspeakable. “Alarming,” “blundering,” “lumpy,” “a junk heap,” “a disgrace”—these are a fair representation of the descriptions applied to it. Rona Barrett told her readers that Clint’s fans deserved an apology.

  But Barry Reardon, newly installed as Warner’s head of distribution, had from the start thought otherwise. At that first executive screening he remembers saying, “That picture’s going to make us a fortune.” Terry Semel, who had just moved up from Reardon’s job to become the studio’s chief operating officer, agreed. Together they decided to open Every Which Way but Loose simultaneously in both small towns and in the big cities. This was then a novel release pattern, as was the size of the national television-ad campaign they mounted for the film. Clint, who had been afraid his movie would be shunted aside in favor of the much more expensive and risky Superman, which was opening almost simultaneously, was delighted. “That’s where it played, out in mid-America. People would go back. And it would play for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.”

  By the time Every Which Way but Loose was ready for release, Clint had completed principal photography on the last of his five collaborations with Don Siegel and the first of two collaborations with screenwriter Richard Tuggle, which would have a significant impact on his career.

  Escape from Alcatraz was the first script Tuggle ever attempted, and for once the movie gods looked down from their heavenly screening room and decided to reward innocence. Working as an editor for a health magazine in San Francisco in the seventies, Tuggle one day took the tour of abandoned Alcatraz, where he heard the story of a hard-case armed robber, Frank Morris, who in 1962 had masterminded the only escape from the Rock on which the file was not closed; the authorities had neither recaptured Morris and his confederates nor recovered their bodies from the icy waters of San Francisco Bay. It was just barely possible that they had accomplished the impossible.

  Intrigued, Tuggle went looking for an out-of-print book about Alcatraz escape attempts by J. Campbell Bruce that recounted the story in more detail. Suddenly fired from his job, Tuggle, a lifelong film buff, decided to use his free time to write a screenplay about the incident. When it was done, he secured movie rights to the book from Bruce (who lived nearby in Berkeley), moved to Los Angeles and endured a succession of rejections from studios and TV networks until Bruce told him that when it was first published he had sent his book to Don Siegel and had received a mildly encouraging response from him. Tuggle, who admired Riot in Cell Block 11, ascertained that the director was represented by Lenny Hirshan and sent his work to the agent. He glanced at it and judged it worth passing on to his client, who for the first time in his career invested money of his own—$100,000—to secure the property. Naturally, Siegel showed the script to Clint, who agreed to play Morris—subject to his approval of some rewrites.

  At which point what had been a straightforward success story veers into murky territory. Something went wrong between Clint and Siegel. The former says that the problem centered mainly around the rewrite. The latter, in his memoir, hints that his reluctance to set up the project at Warner Bros. was the issue. The director was angry about its failure to mount an Academy Award campaign for Dirty Harry and, moreover, had been flatteringly pursued by Paramount.

  Lenny Hirshan: “I called up Mike Eisner [then in his early days as Paramount’s head of production]. I say, ‘Mike, Don found a script and it’s terrific and I’d like to send it to you this afternoon and hopefully we can do it.’ And he said, ‘What’s the name of it?’ and I said, ‘Escape from Alcatraz,’ and he said to me, ‘You got a deal.’ I said, ‘Mike, you’ve got to read the script first.’ He said, ‘Don Siegel directing a picture entitled Escape from Alcatraz, you got a deal.’ I said, ‘Please, Mike, take a read. I’m sending you the script.’ He called me the next morning. He says, ‘I told you, you got a deal.’ ”

  What they very soon did not have was a star, and there is implicit agreement among those close to the scene that what Clint and Siegel were really arguing about, albeit indirectly, was control of the production. To oversimplify the matter, Dirty Harry had made Clint a superstar, and it had made Siegel an A-list director. “Their relationship, in the beginning, had been more father-son,” says Tuggle, “but as Clint had gotten more successful, as had Don, there got to be a competitive feel. And so, basically, Clint felt to some extent he probably didn’t need Don to do this movie, and Don felt to some extent he didn’t need Clint.” Eisner agrees with this observation, at least as it applies to Siegel. He appreciated Clint’s growth as “an artist and director,” but “may have been more interested in getting the performer, not the artist.”

  Other actors were approached, but all of them turned down the project, and the agreed-upon start date, in October 1978, was fast approaching. So Eisner reminded Siegel that whatever their current differences, he and Clint were really still friends and that it was time to make peace. According to Tuggle, Siegel replied that he couldn’t, that “it’ll look like I’m crawling on my hands and knees.” “Don,” said Eisner, “in my job I do that every day.”

  Shrewd Michael Eisner has the engaging habit of cloaking the voice of power in disarming man-to-man vernacular. So Siegel made an appointment to join Clint for a sandwich and a beer in his office—where he was made to wait in the anteroom for forty-five minutes (according to Tuggle). But he emerged from their meeting with a deal, and, more important, a reconciliation.

  The film was as physically arduous as any either of them had ever worked on, for the chill is perpetual on Alcatraz, and they were working in the late fall, usually at night in order to avoid the tours that constantly interrupted their day shoots. The cold and the dampness seemed almost to seep into Bruce Surtees’s film stock.

  As Siegel has said, he made a black-and-white film that happened to be photographed in color. He also made a coolly objective film, with the camera backed off as much as possible, away from the characters, so we are always aware of the walls and bars that confine them. Morris is very often seen in low angles suggesting that this is a man who will not easily be overmastered by this massive constru
ct of stone and steel.

  The film’s perfectly matched visual and emotional tones are established in a great opening sequence, virtually without dialogue, during which a handcuffed Frank Morris is escorted from a police car to the Alcatraz launch, then into the prison building, where the rough initiatory formalities are conducted. They conclude with him stripped completely naked and being conducted down “Broadway,” the wide corridor running between tiered cells in which most of the inmates are housed.

  It is a chilling study of dehumanization. The late Don Simpson, working for Eisner before beginning his famous action-movie partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer, called Clint and told him that they could excise his nude scene if he wanted them to. Clint, nearing his fiftieth birthday, replied, “Nah, this may be the last time I’ll be able to work bare-assed.” (Around this time rumors that Clint had had a face-lift began circulating, to which he responded, “If I lost my squint, I think my whole career would go down the tubes.”)

  Realism, in short, continued to be something more than an aesthetic with him, even as he approached an age when it is in short supply among actors, even when it was becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, especially in action releases. It is hard to think of a major American film of its moment, intended for a broad audience, that was more austere in design or development than Escape from Alcatraz.

  Its incidents are archetypal: Morris fending off first a sexual attack in a shower, then a vengeful one in the yard from a brute named Wolf (Bruce M. Fischer); a terrible stay in solitary; a prisoner (Roberts Blossom) cutting off his finger when the sadistic warden (Patrick McGoohan, relishing every mean bone in his body) takes away his painting privileges; another prisoner (Frank Ronzio) tormented by the warden, running amok and succumbing to a heart attack. Frank’s developing friendships are based mainly on tersely whispered, emotionally unrevealing exchanges with these men along with Charley Butts (Larry Hankin) and the Anglin brothers (Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau), with whom he will make his escape attempt, and, most notably, English (Paul Benjamin), a black man who runs the prison library and whom he goes out of the way to ally himself with by deliberately invading black “territory” in the prison yard.