American Rebel (7 page)

W
hen Clint got his first look at the advance fall 1958 schedule of TV shows and didn’t see
Rawhide
anywhere on it, he broke out in hives. Filming the first episodes had been a difficult and awkward process; everybody was just beginning to get to know one another, and the kinks were still being worked out of the characters and scripts. Worse, even after production began, the network couldn’t make up its mind whether the show should be an hour or a half hour or even on the air at all. Warren had wanted a full hour and a half, which Paley might have actually gone for if Phil Silvers wasn’t doing as well as he was in the coveted Friday-night prime-time nine o’clock slot.

In 1958, in what was supposed to have been
Rawhide’s
first season, a little less than one-third of all prime-time network TV shows (30 out of 108) were westerns; that was a problem. Advertisers felt the market was oversaturated and preferred a new genre of shows that was about to break big, crime and law-and-order programs. Nine one-hour episodes had been completed (the producers figured on the middle ground; one hour could easily be cut down to a half hour or expanded to ninety minutes); the network had spent a fortune shooting on location in Arizona; Warren had hired his old friend Andrew V. McLaglen (veteran film actor Victor McLaglen’s son) to come in and direct a couple of episodes on a play-or-pay basis; and some of Hollywood’s biggest, if slightly over-the-hill, movie stars, including Dan Duryea, Troy Donahue, Brian Donlevy, and Margaret O’Brien, appeared in guest roles. Yet the network remained divided over the fate of
Rawhide
.

Weeks of delay passed into months. Clint became notably frustrated as his big break seemed to be slipping away, and at times he was visibly angry. He’d be in a restaurant and in the middle of a conversation might clear the table with his arm, sending everything on it crashing to the ground. One night he had such a severe anxiety attack
that ambulances came screaming up Ventura Boulevard to his home. When they arrived, they gave him a bag to breathe into until he was able to regain his equilibrium.

Other programs were offering Clint small parts, most of them arranged by Lubin, and he could have taken at least one major film role.
^*
But by contract, he could not accept any other work on television or in the movies that CBS did not first approve, and they were stingy with their potential star-in-the-making. When the Broadway team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse offered him the starring role in a big-screen adaptation of the novel
Tall Story
, the network forced him to turn it down. The role went instead to Tony Perkins.

For Christmas 1958 Clint and Maggie decided to take a train to Piedmont, to visit friends and his family who had moved back from Seattle. Clint was looking forward to the peace and quiet of the scenic ride, hoping to get away from everything. On the way, while on board the train, a telegram arrived for him stating that
Rawhide
had been put on the January replacement schedule and that on the first day of the new year he was to report for the resumption of production. Paley had overridden everyone else and insisted the show be added in a one-hour version to the midseason schedule. Clint whooped when he read the news, and then ordered a bottle of champagne for himself and Maggie. The celebration lasted the rest of the way to Piedmont.

On January 1 Clint joined the cast in Arizona, where the show’s permanent outdoor set had been erected. Besides Rowdy Yates and Gil Favor, the series’s other regular characters included an Indian scout, a cook, his helper, and some “grizzled” cowhands, as the production notes describe them. The scout was played by Sheb Wooley, an actor/country singer who had made an indelible impression as one of Frank Miller’s gang of killers in Fred Zinnemann’s iconic 1952 western
High Noon
. Wooley had worked for Warren before, and the two had become friends. Warren had insisted Wooley be given his part on the show. For the cook, Wishbone, intended as comic relief, Warren turned to Paul Brinegar, and as the cook’s helper, Mushy, James
Murdock. Steve Raines and Rocky Shahan became, respectively, cowhands Jim Quince and Joe Scarlett.

But perhaps the biggest single ingredient in making the show a hit was Dimitri Tiomkin’s
Rawhide
theme. In the 1950s and 1960s, every TV show had to have identifiable theme music that opened and closed it under the credits. Many of these signature show themes went on to become pop-culture classics
—I Love Lucy’s
bouncing Latin-tinged theme, the whistle at the beginning of
The Andy Griffith Show
, the brassy horns of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, the thunderous theme of
Bonanza
, the high-stringed opening of
The Fugitive
, and the pulse-pounding Lalo Schifrin theme for
Mission Impossible
. Tiomkin’s theme song for
High Noon
had won him and his writing partner Ned Washington a Best Song Oscar (while he won a solo Oscar for Best Score); now he reteamed with Washington to create the
Rawhide
theme, with its unforgettable “Roll ‘em, roll ‘em, roll ‘em, keep those dogies rollin’
… Rawhiiide …,”
sung by Frankie Laine, sounding as if he were being dragged to the electric chair. The song was so energetically catchy, it became a hit single and helped make
Rawhide
a welcome weekly guest in living rooms across the country.

In the beginning,
Rawhide
was unquestionably Fleming’s show. He was the star, hero, leader of the herders, narrator, and main interest of the story lines of many early episodes. Clint, meanwhile, played his mostly silent (at first) sidekick, rough, tough, cute, and slim, with a fast gun and faster fists. But as soon as the executives at CBS, especially William Paley, saw the first show, they knew they had found something special in their new leading man—not Fleming but Clint—who brought something to
Rawhide
that Fleming didn’t, or couldn’t: youthful appeal, in the new culture that had grown up in the aftermath of Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. Young boys
and
girls quickly became the main demographic of the show, and Clint, not Fleming, was the reason. By the end of the first year his $600-a-week salary was doubled, and by the end of the show’s run he was making six figures annually.

    
A
fter his second season on
Rawhide
, Clint felt secure enough in CBS’s projection of a long run that he bought a house in Sherman Oaks near Beverly Glen Boulevard—a vast improvement in neighborhood and living quarters, and with a pool all his own. Maggie
retired from her various jobs and devoted herself to turning their new house into a real home. But even with paintings, photos, and furniture, one essential of their new life was missing for her. Married seven years now, Maggie was, at her husband’s insistence, still childless.

At least one reason may have been psychological. Clint told biographer Richard Schickel that the lingering insecurity of being a Depression baby, of having to watch his parents struggle to keep food on the table and clothes on their backs, had affected all the Eastwoods. The sentiments sound genuine, but his star was on the rise, and money, fame, and stability tend to allow one to conquer one’s childhood fears and rages. While Clint’s fears may have been so deeply embedded that physical security could never adequately make up for what he lacked in childhood (a childhood that wasn’t all
that
bad, considering the times), more likely, something was fundamentally wrong with the marriage.

Despite his newfound fame, money, and home, Clint’s sexual appetites remained unchecked and unclassifiable; the only measure of morality he understood or was willing (or perhaps able) to respect was discretion. In a February 1974
Playboy
magazine interview, Clint indirectly alluded to an understanding between him and “Mags” (or “Mag” as he sometimes called her) about the special openness of their marriage. The
Playboy
interviewer, film critic Arthur Knight, asked Clint about his “fairly open relationship with Mag,” to which he replied, “Sure. Oh, yeah, we’ve always had—I’d hate to say I’m a pioneer with women’s lib or whatever, but we’ve always had an agreement that she could enter any kind of business she wanted to. We never had that thing about staying home and taking care of the house. There’s always a certain respect for the individual in our relationship; we’re not one person. She’s an individual, I’m an individual, and we’re friends … I’m not shooting orders to her on where she’s supposed to be every five minutes, and I don’t expect her to shoot them at me.” When asked if he preferred blondes like Maggie, Clint replied, “For marriage, no. For fooling around, sure, fooling around a little, hanky-panky, you know, sitting in the saloon with that old patter, ‘Do you come here often’ … I think friendship is important. Everybody talks about love in marriage, but it’s just as important to be friends.”

If this sounded a bit disingenuous, it’s because Clint was fairly certain Mags would never talk in public about such things. Instead, a
combination of denial and rationale served as her survival mechanism. At least part of the problem was that his new success allowed Clint to slide into the saddle of the emerging sexual zeitgeist of the 1960s, while Maggie remained firmly planted in the uptight culture of the 1950s. Nonetheless, each satisfied some need in the other that allowed them, despite Clint’s indiscretions, to continue to operate as a couple, as parents without children, as friends, or perhaps more accurately, as parents to each other.

    
A
s Clint’s star continued to rise, one relationship that he had no interest or need in maintaining was with Bill Shiffrin. Once Clint had gotten what he wanted from Shiffrin, as with Lubin, he simply—some might say coldly—moved on. After all, Shiffrin had benefited from Clint’s being hired to play Rowdy Yates rather than actually causing it to happen. Clint replaced him with Lester Salkow, an agent with a strong relationship to Universal, where Clint hoped eventually to move back into feature films.

But Salkow quickly proved to be more a figurehead than a power agent. Clint soon discovered where the real power lay in Hollywood’s emerging post-studio era: the entertainment lawyers, who were increasingly playing the role of both manager and agent for their clients. Soon enough Clint attached Frank Wells to his expanding team of representatives. Both Leonard and Wells were up-and-coming Hollywood-based lawyers, and as soon as they connected with Clint, they edged out Salkow and took over virtually every aspect of his career. They financially restructured his income so that he could legally keep considerably more money for himself and pay less in taxes. They arranged salary deferments and the purchase of extensive and still relatively cheap land in Northern California, mostly in Monterey County, including land in Carmel, a still underpopulated area that Clint especially liked.

Leonard was primarily the moneyman, while Wells handled career decisions. Leonard arranged to have all of Clint’s income sent directly to him; he then dispensed what was needed for expenses, mostly to Maggie, who had taken over full-time management of the Eastwood household. Having retired from her “career,” such as it was, and having to deal with Clint’s increasingly long absences, it was a bit of a relief for her. She also developed an intense interest in tennis. To
accommodate Clint, Leonard reportedly kept two sets of books, one for the IRS and one for Maggie, so she would remain unaware of how much money Clint spent pursuing other women.

Meanwhile Clint’s fame was growing. He appeared on the cover of
TV Guide
several times, a sure sign of his entrance into the pantheon of TV royalty, sometimes alone and sometimes with Eric Fleming. Clint was always happy when he didn’t have to share the cover with Fleming, with whom it was widely believed he did not get along particularly well. They were never close, never buddies, did not travel in the same social circles, and did not share the same off-screen interests. Moreover, Fleming was fighting his career’s downward slope, even as its highlight was
Rawhide
. Clint, on the other hand, was on the way up, which did not sit well with Fleming.

Adding to their strained relationship, series television then, as now, was and is a grind, rather like baseball’s endless summers. No matter how much money he made, or how much extracurricular freedom it allowed him, Clint was still tied to a long workweek. Each season’s production schedule commenced in late July and did not finish until April, with frequent location trips. And playing the same character week after week, season after season, year after year, was unavoidably tedious.

After a long run in a series, audiences, as well as performers, tend to get trapped in a syndrome of expectations difficult to break. Clint instinctively understood this trap and was constantly trying to stretch the relatively rigid parameters of the character of Rowdy Yates; at the same time Frank Wells was hard at work trying to convince Universal to let Clint appear in movies during the show’s off-season. The network, however, continually turned all offers down, not wanting to have audiences see Clint Eastwood as anyone but Rowdy Yates.

    
T
he network was loath to tinker with the show’s successful formula and kept its brand-name characters and the actors who played them on a tight rein. They also saw to it that no one director became too valuable to the series (meaning too expensive). So the producers regularly chose from an informal team of TV (and occasional movie) journeymen that they kept in a steady rotation. They believed this system further diminished the chance of any stylistic flourishes and therefore potentially damaging digressions. Each director was given
a shooting script with pre-directions written into it—when to cut, when to pan, when to push in, when to pull out. Rather than creative directors, they were, in effect, formulaic technicians, required to closely follow the formula and the format.

The writing too was formulaic. Very little was ever revealed about the lead characters’ backstories. Eventually it did come out that Rowdy had been in the Confederate army, spent time in a northern prison, and was starting a new life as a herder. But there was never a lot of information given about any of the characters because, the producers felt, it wasn’t germane to the self-contained week-to-week story lines of the show.