Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  She had auditioned on tape for her small part in this somewhat shaggy comedy, and so had not met Clint previously. Nor had she seen more than a couple of his films. All she had to go on “was, you know, ‘tough guy Clint Eastwood, blah-blah-blah.’ ” But her first thought was, Well, he doesn’t seem so tough. He looked, in fact, extremely attractive, and eventually she made her way to him, hopping over a small Jacuzzi to introduce herself. “He looked right at me, the way he does every other woman in the world, but it got to me, too. I mean, when he turns it on, he can turn it on, and I just went, Oh my God, look at that. There was a human being there—I just saw such beauty in his presence. And I felt like a big piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.”

  In other words, it was love at first sight—on her part; almost certainly not on his. Fisher is an intense and willful woman, who wears her emotions very openly. Thirty-six years old at the time, and a New York actress in the fullest sense of the term—Actors Studio, Off Broadway, low-budget independent movies—she had recently moved to Los Angeles hoping to establish a more mainstream career. The product of a wandering childhood—her father had been a construction engineer, working all over the world—she had been married once, very briefly, but had been single for more than a decade and a half. Now with her biological clock beginning to tick loudly she quite frankly wanted a man, a child and a more settled life.

  She proposed a date. She had never been to Reno before and asked Clint if he would show her the sights. He called for her at her room a couple of hours later. They had dinner. They danced. They made love. She had a week’s work in the film, and they kept company during that period. Later in the shoot he called her in Los Angeles and asked her to rejoin him for another week, which she did.

  He was, she says, both frank and not frank about his personal situation. He said he was seeing other women, but he did not specifically mention Sondra Locke. And Fisher—surprisingly—did not think to ask about her. She saw, or thought she saw, only “this lost, lonely, shutdown person,” whom she was convinced she could “open up.”

  Having made the instant judgment that “this was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with,” she told Clint, in their first week together, “everything I wanted in my life. I said, ‘I want you to know everything about me, and I want to know everything about you.’ ” This was not necessarily “the worst thing I could have said to him,” but it was certainly risky.

  It was also attractive to him. While they were together, people who did not know her kept insisting that Frances and Sondra were alike. But beyond a certain superficial physical resemblance—blond hair, fine features—they are in most respects entirely different. Frances is more sturdily built (one of Clint’s nicknames for her was “Muscles”), and no one would ever describe her spirit as “ethereal.” The contrast obviously interested Clint.

  Still, he maintained a certain reserve. When the picture wrapped, he saw Frances when he was in Los Angeles, but never at his house, never exclusively and, it would seem, always on his timetable. She remained, she says, unaware of Locke’s significance in his life until their breakup became public in the spring of 1989, which is hard to believe, though given Clint’s capacity for selective silences—and his confusion of feelings at this time—not entirely implausible.

  It is clear that, like most people who are not emotionally confrontational, Clint was hoping that time was on his side. Perhaps, sensing the growing chill between them, Sondra would look elsewhere for warmth, or beat a defensive retreat. His largest hope in this regard was professional preoccupation, for she was prepping her next directorial assignment, a picture called Impulse, which their mutual friend, Al Ruddy, was producing for Warner Bros. The film was to star Theresa Russell, playing an undercover cop who feels herself succumbing to the lures of the illicit life. Alas, at this early stage it did not fully command Locke’s attention, and a series of incidents ensued that assured a bitter estrangement between her and Clint.

  The first of these involved his relationship with Kyle. He was now twenty, attending USC and living in the Bel-Air house with Clint. This pleased him, for like all divorced dads he was always looking for ways to make up for lost time with his kids. It displeased Sondra, who began inquiring about apartments for Kyle with real estate agents. When Clint discovered this, he was furious. “Never come between blood and blood,” he says grimly.

  Around this time another unpleasant outburst occurred. The holidays tend to make Clint a little edgy, and he usually retreats to Sun Valley for a fresh-air cure. This time he invited both children as well as Sondra and assorted friends, including his old pal Jane Brolin, to join him. On New Year’s Eve day she and Sondra squabbled. Clint hints that Locke may have heard of his involvement with another woman—not necessarily Frances—and that she may have been trying to enlist Brolin on her side. Their discussion grew heated, and Clint finally intervened: “Why don’t you both get the hell out of here? I just want to be here with my kids. Leave me alone. Let me have a nice holiday.”

  New Year’s Eve found Sondra alone and visibly distraught in the tiny Sun Valley airport, where she was observed by several people who knew her, a scene that was subsequently reported in the gossip press. In other circumstances, says Clint, this quarrel might have been patched up after a week or two of mutual sulking, except that “the relationship was long deteriorating at that point.”

  They scarcely saw each other in the months that followed; Clint was away much of the time in early 1989, in Carmel, and also, briefly, in Europe, where Bird was opening. In Rome, Sergio Leone called him, the first time in some years he had attempted to get in touch. He asked Clint to meet him for lunch, and he found the director in a mellow and nostalgic mood, the bitterness of his public comments about Clint now dissolved. They had such a good time that they agreed to meet again for dinner, to which Leone brought his friend Lina Wertmüller, the director. He was mortally ill, knew it, but said nothing. It was not until he died, a couple of months later, that Clint understood Leone had been making his final farewells.

  Returning home, Clint resolved to make his final farewells to Sondra. Clint, who had long been threatened by celebrity stalkers, was at this point receiving particularly menacing death threats by phone. Seeking clues to their source he asked a friend of his, an electronics expert, to place a tap on his phone. He learned nothing about the stalker, but he did discover, to his amazement, that Sondra was making calls from his house to a divorce lawyer, discussing what charges she might or might not bring against him in a palimony action. She discussed the same matter with Gordon in other recorded conversations. Shortly thereafter, she was seen entering the lawyer’s office (somebody’s legal secretary spoke to someone else’s legal secretary), and Clint was advised by his attorneys to ask Sondra to give up her keys to his house and remove her belongings from it. He summoned her to the house early on the morning of April 3 and broached the matter. (“I told him I couldn’t believe that was all he had to say to me after thirteen years,” she averred in a statement she filed in court later that month.) She had been night shooting the previous evening, had only had four hours of sleep and easily persuaded him to delay this discussion until her picture was in the can.

  There, perhaps, the matter should have rested. But lawyers will lawyer, and so a week later, a legal letter, addressed to Mrs. Gordon Anderson, was delivered to Locke on the set. It read, in part: “Mr. Eastwood has asked you to vacate the premises. You have refused to do so. This is to let you know that in view of your intransigence, the locks on all the entrances to the house have been replaced.… Accordingly, your belongings will be placed in storage.”

  She said she fainted. But she awoke with the upper hand in the battle of the tabloids that was soon joined. He looked like the very gunslinger Eileen Padberg had warned him not to seem when he ran for mayor. She looked like the fragile victim of a rich and insensitive man. “They don’t call him ‘Dirty Harry’ for nothing,” read one fairly typical lead to a story about the case.

>   In her initial filing, leaked to the Los Angeles Times, Locke requested that Clint be barred from the house in Bel-Air (the house at which she, not he, was the visitor) “because I know him to have a terrible temper … and he has frequently been abusive to me.” Contradictorily, she also stated that “from the start of our relationship Clint told me that he wanted us always to be together and that he would take care of me forever,” adding that “Clint repeatedly assured me that regardless of whether we were married, everything he had was ours together.…” Most damagingly, she also alleged that over the years she had endured two abortions and submitted to a tubal ligation at his request.

  By the standards of the game they were playing, her settlement proposal, reflecting the weakness of her position that her marriage imposed, was relatively modest: title to both the Bel-Air house and the one Clint had given her and Anderson, an immediate cash settlement of $250,000 and seven years of further support—$15,000 per month for five years, $10,000 in the sixth year, $7,500 in the final year.

  Clint, nevertheless, was outraged. She had not fully shared his house or his life during their relationship, and he also felt that over the years he had given generously at the office. About this, however, he said nothing for publication. “I was not going to get down in the muck with her,” he says. What he did respond to—forcefully—were her allegations about the abortions and the tubal ligation. “I adamantly deny and deeply resent the accusation that [they] were done at my demand, request or even suggestion,” he said in his court filing. These decisions were, he insisted, “entirely hers.” He issued his only public comment through a press agent: “I am deeply disappointed and saddened that she’s taken this kind of action. It will soon come to light that these accusations are unfounded and without merit, however this matter will be dealt with in an appropriate legal arena.”

  He was not, however, as flinty in private as he was in public. In the spring of 1989 he was a man obsessed by this conflict. Sooner or later he would bring any conversation around to it, and to his sense of betrayal by this woman he had once loved. Months later he would tell a reporter what he said to friends at the time: “I felt so disappointed. And the disappointment was with myself. How could I have spent so many years with Sondra? How could I have been such a bad judge of character?”

  At the time, however, he was unable to muster even that much reflective calm. His manner was like that of a kid falsely accused of cheating in school, but unable to prove that he had not. All he could do was keep reassuring friends and loved ones that there was another side to this story while maintaining his public silence.

  He had been maneuvered into a position where a quick settlement, on her terms, was the only way to end the flow of calumny against him. The parties engaged a jurist to arbitrate the case privately and on May 31—his fifty-ninth birthday—gathered in a courtroom in Woodland Hills to try to reach an agreement. Nothing conclusive resulted. It was reported that the case would probably go to trial in the fall.

  It did not. But neither was it settled. It would linger unresolved for almost two years. In the interim, Locke was diagnosed with breast cancer—she said stress contributed to her condition—and underwent a double mastectomy. It would appear, however, that her illness added impetus to the search for a resolution, and someone, probably Al Ruddy, who confessed to engaging in “shuttle diplomacy” between Clint and Sondra, suggested that a development deal with Warner Bros. might break the impasse.

  It made sense. She had all along stressed her desire to achieve professional autonomy. The chance to make pictures of her own choosing, for a studio whose executives she knew well, and who appeared sympathetic, was more attractive to her than a settlement consisting solely of cash and property. She would later quote Terry Semel saying, “It makes us happy that this ugly scenario can end,” and adding, optimistically, “You have top talent and promise as a filmmaker.”

  The contract they eventually signed was for a standard development deal, in which over the course of three years the studio agreed to underwrite her salary and expenses, at a cost of $1.5 million, while she worked up projects on which it would have first look. The studio could, as well, present her with ideas it thought suited her. The arrangement was unusual in two respects. One of them is obvious: Players of her modest standing generally do not get deals of this kind. The other is less so: Unknown to Locke it was being underwritten by Clint Eastwood.

  Protective silence was maintained on this point. And why not? It was such a neat solution to such a vexing issue. For a while things went smoothly enough. In the spring of 1991 Clint and Sondra achieved a settlement. Though they agreed not to discuss its terms publicly, it was reported that she received title to the home she shared with Gordon Anderson, while surrendering claim to the Bel-Air house. Clint also paid her a lump sum of $450,000, which she claimed, and he denied, was due her for previous services to Malpaso. There was also, undoubtedly, an agreement for monthly support payments. That behind her, and now fully recuperated from her illness, Locke proceeded to try to fulfill her studio contract.

  That is to say, she entered into “development hell.” She had in hand over the next three years at least a couple of films that were ultimately produced—one as Junior, the Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy; the other as The Specialist, a Sylvester Stallone action film—but not, apparently, in the form she offered them. Clint says that he supported her cause, in particular recommending her to direct the American version of La Femme Nikita, which was not completely dissimilar in tone from Impulse, which within its limits she had handled quite adroitly. Locke remembers showing him a script called Paperback Hero, getting an enthusiastic response and a promise to recommend it to the bosses.

  Nothing came of it. Nothing came of any of the thirty-odd projects she proposed to Warners. They were subsequently represented by studio spokesmen as gloomy and unsympathetic, without significant popular appeal. Locke said that her efforts to see material the studio owned that she might undertake were rebuffed. After her contract expired, she sued Warners, charging breach of contract and good faith as well as sexual discrimination and fraud.

  This action was summarily dismissed in 1995, but Locke brought another suit against Clint, charging fraud, seeking some $2 million in damages and claiming she would not have agreed to their earlier settlement had she known he was standing behind her Warner Bros. contract. For, she contended, his underwriting virtually guaranteed that the studio would not move forward with any of her projects.

  Her reasoning was that Clint was ultimately liable for all her development costs if she made no pictures, but that if she made one, those costs would be shifted to its budget and borne by Warner Bros. Ergo, it was in the studio’s interest not to produce anything of hers and to let Clint cover the cost of her contract. At the very least, she came to believe that the production hurdle was higher for her, by however many feet or inches $1.5 million translated to, than it was for other producers.

  Possibly so, possibly not. She reckoned without Clint’s clear-cut economic interest in her success and Warner’s close ties to him. Its executives would not have been eager to stick one of their most valuable assets with a $1.5 million tab. That’s chump change in studio terms—many films carry much higher development charges—thus nothing that would greatly influence its decisions. It can also be said that it is not uncommon for very little to develop from development deals, and that Clint paid a steep price for this failed compromise; most, if not all, of the studio’s expenses were ultimately deducted from his Unforgiven takings. Worse, he was forced to settle Locke’s civil suit for an undisclosed sum in September 1996, when it became clear that a jury was going to find for her. In interviews with the press, jurors made it clear that Clint’s angry appearance on the stand, where he made much of Locke’s earlier campaign against him in the gossip press, combined with her well-projected air of victimization, weighed heavily with them. In her testimony she had referred to Clint as “the unfightable one” and in her comments to reporters later she
called hers a victory for “the little person.” Assuredly it was a loss for a powerful and manifestly aggravated man to whom it was easy to impute devious motives.

  All of that was far in the future in the spring of 1989, when contentiousness between Clint and Sondra was at its height. His other preoccupations included performing his hostly duties for the Gary Cooper: American Life, American Legend documentary (one of his rare television appearances), preparing White Hunter, Black Heart, which was scheduled to begin shooting in Africa in June, and readying Pink Cadillac for release.

  Neither the critical reception nor the box-office performance of the latter would do anything to lighten his mood. Directed by Buddy Van Horn, it is the story of a skip tracer named Tommy Nowak, who falls into unlikely love with Lou Ann McQuinn (Bernadette Peters), a woman he is assigned to apprehend. John Eskow’s script was pressed on Clint by the studio, which thought, as he did when he read it, that it had something of the knockabout spirit of the orangutan films. Clint—as we know, a man not insusceptible to the joys of Groucho glasses—liked the fact that Tommy employed outlandish disguises in his work. At various points in the film he appears as a cowbell-wielding radio personality, a rodeo clown, a casino sharpster wearing a gold lamé jacket and a pencil mustache and a brain-dead bumpkin. He also thought Peters’s character was an excellent foil for him. Fleeing with her baby from an abusive husband, who is also a right-wing crazy of the survivalist persuasion, not knowing that her eponymous vehicle contains $250,000 belonging to his organization’s treasury, she may look like trailer-park trash, but she has a ferocious spirit—especially when the survivalists kidnap her baby. Finally, perhaps most important to Clint, the film had the kind of range—farce, romance, crazy action—that he likes in comedies.