American Rebel (30 page)

Edwards had, apparently, used Locke as a way to get to Clint, to secure a deal with Malpaso, which in turn would secure the funding, and along with it a firm commitment from the two stars to appear in the movie that Edwards would direct.

Even before the film went into production, the triangle of Edwards, Eastwood, and Reynolds ran into a Cinemascope-size brick wall. Both Clint and Reynolds had script approval, and each was interested in making sure he came out looking and sounding better than the other. Reynolds’s changes stretched into months of delays that drove Clint
crazy, but allowed him to spend ample chunks of time on the nearest golf course. Reynolds continued to suggest changes. The two men fought indirectly over every nuance in the script, using Edwards as their reluctant intermediary.

Edwards had directed Reynolds in a movie the year before,
The Man Who Loved Women
, and so had experienced the difficulties and learned how to deal with his short fuse. But he didn’t know how to handle Clint and may have assumed he had to wear the same kid gloves.

The problem was that Clint, always impatient with weakness, interpreted Edwards’s running everything by him as just that. Once Clint green-lighted a production, he liked to go out and make it. The more Edwards equivocated, the less Clint believed he could get the job done. Then just before shooting was finally about to begin, Edwards, having had all he could take of Reynolds’s ego and Clint’s impatience, quit the film. “Creative differences” was the official reason given for his departure, but unofficially insiders talked of one final blowup with Clint that resulted in Edwards either being asked to leave the film or simply walking out on it.

According to Reynolds, in his memoir, Clint actually orchestrated the removal of Blake by goading him into quitting, in favor of Richard Benjamin, a less intense, more likable, and less expensive director. The original title,
Kansas City Heat
, was now changed at Clint’s directive to the simpler and more marquee-friendly
City Heat
. The ever-reliable Fritz Manes replaced Edwards as the line producer, and Edwards’s screenplay was credited to Sam O. Brown, a Screen Writers Guild-approved pseudonym.
^*

Naturally, Reynolds saw all this as nothing less than a takeover of the project by Clint, which upset the delicate balance of power between the two superstars. In addition, during the long preproduction, actors and actresses with other commitments waiting for them came and went like bowling pins on a Saturday night. The final
supporting-roles cast was set only days before filming began: Madeline Kahn, Jane Alexander, Rip orn, Irene Cara, Richard Roundtree, and Tony Lo Bianco.

The plot was as leaden as it was pedestrian—a Depression-era detective, Mike Murphy (Reynolds), discovers that his partner, Dehl Swift (Roundtree), wants to buy some ledgers from the bookkeeper of a gangster “godfather,” to sell to his rival gang leader. That leads to Swift’s swift demise. Soon enough Murphy gets the ledgers, and with them a death sentence from the godfather (Lo Bianco). He kidnaps Murphy’s girlfriend (Kahn) and enlists the help of his former police force partner, Lieutenant Speer, played by a dark-fedoraed Clint, who managed to keep his eyes shaded for almost the entire film, as if he didn’t want anyone to recognize him in it. The film ends with an explosion that explains nothing and only provides a way to halt, if not end, these confused, unfunny, and uninvolving events.

The on-screen chemistry between Reynolds and Clint was, not surprisingly, zero-minus-a-hundred, which may help to explain the nearly career-ending accident that occurred while they were filming a bar scene in which Speer punches Murphy in the face. During the fight a stuntman mistakenly used a real chair instead of a fake, “breakaway” chair to hit Reynolds. It badly broke Reynolds’s jaw and developed into temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), which affects both balance and sensory perceptions. Reynolds’s physical health deteriorated after that, and rumors ran rampant in the press that he had developed AIDS, a supposition supercharged by his dramatic loss of weight. (He was unable to eat solid food through his damaged jaw.)

It was, for all intents and purposes, the end of Reynolds’s run as a major Hollywood movie star. Eventually he would recover and work, most notably in Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Boogie Nights
(1997), for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and in a couple of TV series, but he never again placed on a national film-star ranking. A lot of people believed that Clint had delivered the punch that did Reynolds in, that he had punched him out of commission for good.
^*

Meanwhile Locke, left out of both
Tightrope
and
City Heat
, went by herself to the William Morris office in search of a project she might be able to direct. (Clint would later claim that he had suggested she move into directing, but according to Locke, she came up with the idea first and Clint encouraged her.) At the agency she came across a script that had been lying around in development hell for years, something called
Ratboy
, by Rob Thompson, which was about just what the title suggests, a boy who is half-rat, half-human. Nikki, a small-time promoter, comes across Ratboy and decides to promote him into a big star. Along the way she falls in love with Ratboy and is then redeemed for her exploitative desires. The script was
Beauty and the Beast
crossed with
King Kong
.

Locke quickly made a deal to take over the rights and then brought the script to Terry Semel, at Warner. Semel gave it a green light, as long as she would agree to two conditions. First, Locke had to appear in the picture as well as direct it. She had no problem with that—she would play Nikki.

The second, that Clint would produce.

This condition made nobody happy. Clint did not want to work with Locke anymore, and Locke felt that as soon as Clint’s name was attached to
Ratboy
, her project would turn into “A Clint Eastwood Picture” and defeat her attempt to emerge from his giant shadow. Clint’s solution was simple; he would put his name on the picture but actually assign the line-producing chores to Fritz Manes. But Malpaso would not be involved: Clint, wanting to put physical and professional distance between himself and Locke, decided to create a new production company within Malpaso for this one picture.

Then, likely putting the final nail in the coffin of her relationship with Clint, Locke cast her husband, Gordon, to play Nikki’s brother.

Predictably, Clint was vehemently opposed. An angry back-and-forth ensued: Clint accused Locke of nepotism. Locke reminded Clint that he had used his son and his daughter in two of his films. Clint insisted that he hadn’t used either in his
first
film. Locke countered that her film wasn’t really intended for the mainstream so it didn’t matter. Clint said he didn’t want Gordon in the film and halted all further development of the script until Locke agreed.

Having come to an impasse, Locke dropped her next bombshell: she had cast Sharon Baird (S. L. Baird in the credits), one of the original
Mouseketeers, in the title role. Clint couldn’t believe it. He quietly reminded her that the film was called
ratboy
, not
ratgirl
.

On it went, with Clint trying to maintain absolute control of every aspect of the film. By the time it was finished, Locke felt that her creative input had been totally buried. Being invited to the Deauville Film Festival in France, where the film received good notices, did nothing to soothe her.
^*

For its commercial release in 1986, Warner Bros. chose to open
Ratboy
in only one theater in Los Angeles and one in New York City and the top development executives at Warner—who included Semel, Lucy Fisher, and Mark Canton—agreed to a first-look, first-refusal deal for anything else Locke brought them.

From the beginning of the project, in 1984, Clint had not been easy for Locke to work with, but the deterioration of their relationship may not have been the only reason. Just as Clint had gotten involved with the film, Maggie officially filed for divorce and publicly announced her intention to marry Wynberg. Estimates ran the value of the original 1979 settlement agreement up to around $28 million in cash, plus property and child support.
^†

    
B
y the time Clint was ready to make his next movie, he had become involved with a new woman, Jacelyn Reeves, who was to become the mother of his next child. The film was called
Pale Rider
. The state of affairs was chaos.

So naturally Clint decided to run for mayor of Carmel.

A middle-aged Clint begins to deal with issues of mortality in
Pale Rider,
1985

T
he mayoral adventure began because of ice cream cones, or more accurately, their unavailability on summer afternoons, because the city fathers of Carmel-by-the-Sea (the town’s legal name) had passed an ordinance prohibiting the storefront sale of ice cream cones because they felt that eating them in the street was “undignified.” To Carmel’s most celebrated citizen, who happened to like eating ice cream cones in the summertime, this was one civil outrage too many, and no matter what, he was not going to let it stand.

He had had his troubles with the town council before. In June 1983 he had applied for permission to build a two-story freestanding addition to the Hog’s Breath—and been denied. The council cited problems with the design and the materials. Moreover, it said, San Carlos Street, where the Hog’s Breath was located, already had too many glass and concrete structures and not enough wood. In the early spring of 1984, shortly after the completion
of City Heat
and a series of back-and-forth maneuvers, Clint made a final, personal appeal to the council, which promptly rejected it. Angry and frustrated, he threatened to file suit against the city council of Carmel, claiming the regulations the council used as the basis for its decision were “vague and subjective.”

Not long after the start of the ice cream battle, with his Hog’s Breath Inn situation also still unresolved, Clint was sitting around the inn with some friends when someone suggested he ought to run for mayor. Once he got elected, they said, he could change the rules. It may have been a joke, but no one was laughing, least of all Clint.

But he had more pressing, if not bigger, things (to him) to deal with at the moment. That spring he was being honored at the prestigious Paris-based Cinémathèque Française, which was to culminate in a special European preview screening of
Tightrope
. This invitation was especially important because he was going to be decorated as a
Knight in the French Order of Arts and Letters, an honor that he had won only with much outside support.
^*

His film career meant a lot to him. Even if some critics still didn’t take his movies seriously, or the subjects were socially distasteful, he was very proud of them. As he told one interviewer during this period, “Maybe there were certain prejudices in the times of
Dirty Harry
in 1971 that don’t exist now, or are changing now, or times are changing. Maybe I’m older, more mature, maybe the audiences are changing and I’m changing. It’s just circumstances … I’ve never begged for respectability.”