American Rebel (23 page)

“It’s been a gold-mine,” Maggie happily told Bacon.

Clint’s rare inclusion of Maggie in an interview (probably in order
to “humanize” him after the accident) prompted Bacon to portray her as Clint’s partner in the fun-and-games pastime of running this other family business. In truth, she was increasingly frustrated by her continued marginalization in her marriage and in Clint’s life. Clint brought her along to another interview to promote the film; she told Peter J. Oppenheimer in an off-the-cuff response how she handled Clint’s propensity for “danger” in his moviemaking: “There’s nothing I can do about it.” It was a strikingly apt response as well as a reflection on her life with Clint—an innkeeper hostess while her husband costarred with nice asses. In the same interview Clint described his home life as sheer perfection. Asked why he shot some of the sequences for
The Eiger Sanction
back in Carmel, Clint replied, “Because I have a home in Carmel and this way I can stay home with my family and bounce my kids on my knees.”

Lippman, who was also interviewed for the piece later on, claimed—doubtless in a joking manner that somehow did not come across—that Eastwood was a “romantic Casanova at the pub. He chats up all the girls. Especially the blondes. Clint likes small or slight women—he calls them ‘squirts’ or ‘shrimps’ and ‘spinners.’” Lippman also claimed that he and Clint “often double-dated and compared notes the morning after, while watching cartoons.”
^*

    
T
o Clint’s great surprise and disappointment,
The Eiger Sanction
proved a dud at the box office, earning fully a third less than
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
. After its initial domestic release, it settled in at a little more than $6.5 million in sales, to
Thunderbolt’s
already modest $9 million. Five years away from fifty, with his career on the decline, and a marriage that served only to scrub his public image, Clint allowed himself to be lured back to Warner by Frank Wells, who vowed to resurrect his fading star.

To do so, Wells insisted, Clint should revisit the money franchise,
Dirty Harry
, hoping that it would return him to the top of the box-office heap, flush with cash, fame, and all the eager young blondes he could handle.

Part of Clint’s deal was a new suite of offices on the Warner lot, a re-creation of his old Malpaso offices at Universal, down to the same
knickknacks dotting the place. Warner is only about a mile away from niversal in Burbank, California; he would remain in that office for the next quarter-century.

But before Clint could do another
Dirty Harry
, a suitable script had to be written and developed. Restlessly, he asked Wells if he had anything ready to go. When Wells said he didn’t, Clint went in-house to Sonia Chernus, whom he had made head of Malpaso’s story department as payback for her help in getting him the part of Rowdy Yates. As it happened, in keeping with Malpaso’s bare-bones makeup, Chernus
was
the story department. She did have an outline and story treatment of a novel that had come in unsolicited—such over-the-transom submissions were usually rejected unread and returned. But Chernus had taken a quick look at this one, liked it, and now felt it might be of interest. The tentative title was
The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wells
.
^*

Chernus was proven correct when Clint had Malpaso take out an option on the rights to the unpublished book. Wells agreed to fund the movie if Clint could bring it in at $4 million. Once the money was in place, Clint went to the William Morris Agency in search of a writer and director to develop the project. They put Philip Kaufman up for the job, who in 1972 had written and directed
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
, a bank-robbery western drawing on the seemingly endless adventures of Jesse James.

Clint hired him with the expectation of a quick return, but Kaufman’s deliberate preparations made Clint antsy. He was used to filming unpolished scripts, like
The Eiger Sanction
. But because of that film’s failure, he was willing to give Kaufman a little more breathing room.

When he finished the script, wearing his director’s cap, Kaufman boldly cast Chief Dan George in the key role of Lone Watie, the Cherokee
companion, and conscience, of Josey Wales. (The chief gave the ilm a bit of a wounded–Native American authenticity that would be echoed in Kevin Costner’s 1990
Dances with Wolves
, which owes more than a little of its physical look, directorial style, and thematic story line to
The Outlaw Josey Wales.)
As Wales’s mission progresses, he and the chief pick up stragglers along the way, which gave the film a light coating of Christian allegory—unusual for a Clint Eastwood film, which usually emphasized physical revenge over moral redemption. In the end the film is less Jesus than journey, as the conquest of a mountain, à la
The Eiger Sanction
, leads to a greater understanding between the two.

To play the role of Laura Lee, another convert to Josey’s bandwagon of soul-searching Civil War survivors, Clint wanted Sondra Locke, the actress he had once considered for
Breezy
. Her career had languished since her Oscar-nominated performance in
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
, but she had managed to hang on to the fringes of the business, and when Clint saw her, he immediately remembered her. Despite the seventeen-year difference between them (or because of it), he was strongly attracted to her, and she to him. He pushed Kaufman to green-light Locke, but it seemed the more he did, the more Kaufman resisted. So Clint went directly over his head and hired her anyway—which he had every right to do but was considered poor form.
^*

Locke remembers that moment of their connection this way: “‘So what have you been up to since I saw you last,’ Clint asked as if it were just last week.” Locke was given the part, and a few nights later Clint called to ask her out for dinner. “‘I gave the orders to hire you …’ ‘Really?’ ‘I never forgot meeting you for
Breezy
, Sondra.’ ‘But you didn’t hire me for that film, did you,’ I teased. ‘No. I didn’t. Big mistake … but I’ve hired you now.’ ‘I’m glad.’ I genuinely blushed.”

Shortly after Clint signed on Locke, Kaufman privately told a friend that Clint’s going over his head was “the worst thing that anybody’s ever done to me. He cut my balls off.”

Production began in October 1975 on location in Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming. Clint was holding a script in one hand, so he could study his lines, a stopwatch in the other, so he could bring the film in on or under budget and thereby keep Wells to his financial commitment. But Clint fumed at Kaufman’s snail-pace style of directing, considering it a sign of his lack of talent.

Some believe that what happened next was solely attributable to Kaufman’s failure to assert his authority from day one, beginning with Clint’s hiring of Locke. Passivity was a quality Clint had little use for in a director. Clint always preferred the shoot-the-film-now, ask-questions-later kind of moviemaking—not a style in which the director contemplated his ammunition.

The situation took a nuclear leap in the wrong direction when Kaufman (despite being married and having his wife along for the shoot) asked Locke out to dinner—on the same night Clint had. Locke, no fool she, turned down the director for the producer. Kaufman claimed he needed extra time to work with Locke on her characterization, but a testosterone-fueled battle had clearly erupted between Kaufman and Clint.

A few days after his faux pas with Locke, Kaufman, appearing timid and confused on set, totally messed up her rape scene by letting the camera roll too long and apparently confusing the word
cut
with the word
action
. Finally, his inability to catch a golden-hour sunset during another important scene proved the breaking point for Clint. Kaufman was nowhere to be found—he had apparently gone to another location—so an impatient Clint shot the scene himself. The next day he angrily handed Kaufman his walking papers.

Clint was furious about Kaufman’s apparent bungling, but the Directors Guild of America (DGA) did not sanction the firing. All directors’ contracts, they said, contain a clause that says if a director completes preproduction and has begun shooting, he or she cannot be fired at an actor’s command. The fact that Clint was also the producer only made matters worse, and the film’s production nearly came to a halt. Finally Wells frantically negotiated a buyout for Kaufman and accepted a DGA penalty for Clint of $50,000 (which Warner almost certainly paid).

Kaufman’s firing angered some among the cast and crew and
frightened others. To many it looked as if Clint had had Kaufman do all the preparation work on the film—which was a lot—so he could then come in and get all the so-called glory. Although Kaufman to this day has never spoken about the incident, he did not direct another movie for nearly three years, and when he did it was, ironically, a 1978 remake of Don Siegel’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.
^*

No matter who is right and who is wrong, when a director takes a case to the DGA, it is a serious act not soon forgotten by producers. The
Josey Wales
incident resulted in the Eastwood Rule—a DGA mandate that no current cast or crew member could replace the director of a production.

    
T
he Outlaw Josey Wales
opened to mixed reviews but did phenomenal box office.
(Time
magazine called it one of the year’s ten best.) Audiences thought the “old” Clint Eastwood had returned; the antisocial, violent, cynical antiromantic loner they had all missed so much. The rentals from the initial domestic release reached $14 million, good enough to reestablish Clint as a legitimate box-office power.
^†
It also brought him once more to the attention of Pauline Kael, who complained that with
Josey Wales
, Clint had established himself as the “reductio ad absurdum of macho today.” Kael’s continual attack-dog reviews disturbed Clint greatly.

    
W
ith his career back on the winning track, Clint shifted his concentration to the building of his Carmel dream house, now in its seventh year of construction. Between sessions of Transcendental Meditation (to which he had recently become devoted) and Malpaso business, he had been increasingly absent from the homestead.

He spent some time, too, in Las Vegas, anonymously. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Up in San Francisco he began to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Ronald Lowell, who, regarding Kael’s reviews, told Eastwood, “What Kael says is actually 180 degrees the opposite of what she says, and … often a man or woman obsessed with preaching great morality is more interested in amorality.” A bit later at a speaking appearance, Clint pointed out to the audience that while Kael hated his movies for their maleness, she had adored Bernardo Bertolucci’s
Last Tango in Paris
, wherein Paul (Marlon Brando, a Kael darling) has anal intercourse with Jeanne (Maria Schneider), in a relationship dictated by Paul to be based only on (debasing) sex. So much for her neofeminist tirades, Clint said, chuckling. The audience chuckled with him.

    
C
lint was forty-six now and feeling every second of it. A preoccupation with age, or more precisely aging, is a universal occupational hazard for performers in Hollywood, and it became one of his most favored subjects whenever he did grant the occasional interview. “I don’t have any new properties on my mind right now,” he told one writer. “One thing about getting old is that I’ve developed patience over the years.”

Patience with everything and everyone, perhaps, except his desire for Sondra Locke, whom he was now seeing as often as he could. It was a relationship that he could not resist, and it was about to effect an extraordinary shift in the dynamics of his work and his life. It would change forever the lives of all three of its principal players—Clint, Locke, and Maggie—casting them in a real-life melodrama that would make
Breezy
seem wistful by comparison.