American Rebel (27 page)

It was also reported in the
Herald-Examiner
, but denied by Clint, that he had had a face-lift.

    
I
n the summer of 1978, shortly after they had completed work on
Every Which Way but Loose
, Locke became pregnant. The situation left Clint ice-cold. He had never wanted children, he told her, and had had them after more than a decade of marriage only because Maggie had insisted. (The child with Roxanne Tunis was a subject that apparently did not come up.) Now, he told her, fatherhood was out of the question, and he urged her to have an abortion. Although she did not want to do it, after considering all that it meant to Clint, she agreed. For a while afterward everything between them seemed all right again. Then shortly after production was completed on
Escape from Alcatraz
, she became pregnant again.

Once again Clint insisted she have an abortion, and once again she reluctantly did so. When she came out of the hospital, as if to reward her or compensate her for her loss, he bought her the new home in tony Bel-Air she wanted. And apparently feeling generous (and also not wanting him to be anywhere near the Bel-Air house), he threw in one for her husband as well, in less upscale West Hollywood. At the same time he bought another house for himself in Carmel, by the ocean, where he could stay by himself when Locke was stuck in Hollywood on business. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is; in his early years with Maggie, Clint kept various fortresses of solitude, in Hollywood and in Carmel, allowing him the freedom to spend time not just with himself but with other women, if he so chose.

    
H
is next film,
Bronco Billy
, began with a script that came to him after a casual conversation during an informal dinner with friends at Dan Tana, a popular film industry red-gravy hangout on the edge of Beverly Hills. “When I was sent the script by Dennis Hackin,” Clint later recalled, “at first I thought it was about Bronco Billy Anderson, the silent movie star. I devoured it at one sitting and I immediately thought it was the kind of film [Frank] Capra would do today if he were still making movies.”

When he finished reading it, he gave it to Locke, who shared his enthusiasm. Five and a half weeks later production began on
Bronco Billy
near Boise, Idaho. Clint starred as the down-and-out star and owner of a Wild West show that is as faded as the times it seeks to glorify, and the spoiled society girl he falls in love with along the way is played by Sondra Locke.

In
Bronco Billy
the central character is in show business, playing two-dimensional re-creations of western heroes, surrounded by a band of loyal players. He falls for Antoinette Lily, another in a long string of imperfect, socially outcast women. It turns out she is married to a man she does not really love, who has now abandoned her and apparently swindled her out of her fortune. Billy helps her by letting her join the show as the target for his sharpshooting and knife-throwing stunts. Eventually she straightens out her money and marital problems and returns to her life in New York City, only to realize she was really in love with Billy all along. Leaving everything behind, she rushes to rejoin him and the show.

If the movie also sounds like a lot of other Hollywood films, it’s because it does resemble several of the great ones, including Clint’s role model for it, Capra’s
It Happened One Night
(1934), which featured a wealthy but unhappy woman on the run from her husband who is aided (rescued and ultimately redeemed) by a poor but honest workingman (a newspaper reporter). It also echoes Preston Sturges’s 1941 on-the-run romantic comedy
Sullivan’s Travels
. Clint’s by-now-familiar cynical view of modern urban city life appears, cloaked here in the familiar poor-but-happy, rich-but-miserable themes that especially appealed to the working-class audiences at whom this film, like
Every Which Way but Loose
, was aimed.

By now, Clint once more felt strong and self-assured enough to
direct himself. He bolstered the sound track with a lot of country music produced once more by Snuff Garrett, highlighted by a duet he sang with Merle Haggard that rose to number one on the country charts. Figured into the film’s profits, it helped increase its bottom line.
Bronco Billy
, released in the spring of 1980, gained Clint some of the best reviews of his career. The critics liked this Clint more than the public did, but no one liked him more than Clint, who had found a comfort zone parodying the very western characters that had first brought him to the attention of the public.

    
O
n May 31, 1980, a few weeks before
Bronco Billy
opened and flopped at the box office, Clint began to make wholesale changes at Malpaso. Many of the original members of the production team were let go. Frank Wells, Malpaso’s best ally at Warner, took off, he said, to fulfill his dream of climbing the highest mountains on each continent. Robert Daley’s “voluntary” departure may have been due at least in part to his growing objection to Locke’s presence and apparent influence on Clint. Some felt she had taken him away from his mon-eymaking tough-guy characters, softening him up and pushing away his core audience.

    
T
o mark Clint’s birthday and the onset of the new decade, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) scheduled a one-day tribute to him with a marathon screening of four of his films,
A Fistful of Dollars, Escape from Alcatraz, Play Misty for Me
, and
Bronco Billy
. The museum was most likely celebrating Clint the populist actor, “who has given his personal imprint to a host of movie genres,” as the program put it, and who earlier that year had been named by Quigley Publications as the number one box-office star of the 1970s. But the Clint who showed up for the tony audience’s Q and A was not the hotheaded action hero but the self-styled auteurist.
^*

And he showed up alone.

In
Honkytonk Man,
1982

E
ven as Clint was being honored by MOMA,
Bronco Billy
, despite its good reviews, was bombing at the box office. It wound up grossing a little over $18 million, even with the profits from the hit song it produced factored in. To some, it signaled a backlash of sorts against Clint’s image-shifting. The critical intelligentsia thought it a violation of some elemental truth that Clint was spoofing his own assumed redneck persona, a sure sign to them that neither the film nor the image was true. No less a cultural arbiter than Norman Mailer sniffed sarcastically at Clint’s notable lack of heated hipness: “Eastwood is living proof of the maxim that the best way to get through life is cool.” Even more biting were James Wolcott’s cutting remarks in
Vanity Fair
about New York’s newest cultural darling:
“Bronco Billy
was an awkward, bow-legged bit of Americana, with Eastwood’s girlfriend, Sondra Locke, giving her usual shrill, nostrilly performance.”

Clint was already in production on a sequel to
Every Which Way but Loose
, called
Any Which Way You Can
, despite Warner’s loud disappointment that he was not instead making the next Dirty Harry movie. Some at the studio held fast to the idea that
Every Which Way’s
success had been a fluke, due more to the presence of a cute orangutan than anything else; they thought that if Clint continued down that road, as he had with
Bronco Billy
and now with
Any Which Way You Can
, it could very well mark the irreversible decline of one of its biggest franchise stars.

Clint, on the other hand, was convinced that he was on the right career track. He sent out missives of his own rumbling that he was thinking of severing all of Malpaso’s remaining ties with Warner. The first official comment from Warner came by way of outgoing Malpaso producer Bob Daley, who struck a melancholic note in his defense of Clint’s career: “Clint Eastwood brought in
Bronco Billy
13 days ahead
and $750,000 under budget of the $5,000,000 film, and it’s not because we over-skedded [budgeted] it … I’ve known [Clint] for 25 years, since he was digging pools and I was in the budget department at Universal. We talked efficiency all the time. When he got on ‘Rawhide,’ he never went to his dressing room—but stayed on the set and observed.”

Clint then stepped directly into the fray, such as it was. “We’ve done okay,” he told one reporter. “Everyone expected
[Bronco Billy]
to be another
Every Which Way But Loose
, but what is? We’ve gotten a little different audience. I’ve branched out a bit. It’s not going to lose any money—it only cost $5,200,000 … and I’ve never had better reviews. I think it worked out well.” These comments triggered a corporate showdown between Warner and Malpaso, scheduled to take place at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. There Frank Wells was called in from his mountain-climbing midlife crisis to orchestrate a peace powwow between Clint and the studio.

Clint, meanwhile, continued to consolidate his power at Malpaso by shedding several more longtime employees. On the strength of
Every Which Way but Loose
, Clint had asked Jeremy Joe Kronsberg to write another script along the same lines, to be called
Going Ape
, which he intended to direct. Kronsberg, meanwhile, having no idea he was slated to do a sequel, had signed a deal with Paramount to develop a similar type of film, with the promise that he could produce as well as write it. When Clint found out about it, he severed all ties with Kronsberg and brought in first-time screenwriter Stanford Sherman to write the
Every Which Way but Loose
sequel. Sherman’s previous credits were mostly for the small screen—four episodes of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
, one episode
of The Rat Patrol
, and eighteen episodes of
Batman
. Nonetheless Clint gave him the plum assignment to write
Any Which Way You Can
.

To direct, Clint chose Buddy Van Horn, primarily a stuntman whom Clint had known since the
Rawhide
years at Universal, and although he had virtually no experience as a director, Clint liked and trusted him. Besides, Clint would be the unofficial director of the film. If it scored, he could take the credit. If it didn’t, the critical hammers would fall on Van Horn. Sondra Locke’s character, Lynn Halsey-Taylor, was brought back from the first film to continue her on-again-off-again relationship with Philo, as were Ruth Gordon
and Geoffrey Lewis. For the now-obligatory musical number, Clint hired Ray Charles and once more assigned music production to Snuff Garrett.

But as Warner had predicted,
Any Which Way You Can
performed like a typical sequel, costing twice as much and grossing less than the original. Despite having the coveted first-up Christmas-release position, it barely broke the $10 million mark at the box office. The small profit it showed had more to do with the film’s low budget than with box-office activity. If Clint had had any plans for an
Any Which Way
franchise, they evaporated after the poor box-office showing. Warner now hoped that Clint would realize his mistake, return to form, and make another Dirty Harry movie.