Mind of an Outlaw (57 page)

Is he very good-looking?

I’m not used to thinking of men as that good-looking, but he is.

And you liked him?

He’s marvelously friendly. Just saying hello. He has no fear of others. At least, he shows none. I tell you, it was splendid. I rarely liked a man so much on first meeting.

Good Lord. What did you talk about?

Well, Eastwood said right off, “Do you know I tried to get into
The Naked and the Dead
back when they were making a movie of it years ago, but they didn’t want me.”

“That’s fair,” I told him, “we tried to get you for
The Executioner’s Song
. I wanted you to play Gary Gilmore.”

Had he read the book, my dinner partner wanted to know.

I don’t think so. Clint only answered: “What would you say Gilmore was like?”

“Oh,” I said, “he was a funny man, Gilmore. Very spiritual on the one hand with a real mean streak on the other.”

Eastwood gave a happy grin. “Sounds as if he would have been just right for me.”

That conversation took place outside a shabby Spanish-style stucco motel near the beach in Santa Cruz, California. Eastwood was on location making his latest movie,
Sudden Impact
, and the small crowd watching us stood outside the company barrier. They had been hanging around for hours in the hope they would get a look at him. In the background you could smell boardwalk popcorn and hear the downrush of the roller coaster after a long clanking up the first rise. Some kids with orange hair were standing
next to a black girl outside the movie company rope, and a couple of old ginks with slits in their sneakers and patience in their eyes were waiting beside blank-faced kids, all waiting behind the rope, never getting bored. Once in a while, Eastwood walked in and out of the movie trailer trucks or mobile dressing rooms parked along the side street off the motel, and it was then they would have their glimpse of him. He might even offer a line as he went by. “Still with us?” he would ask. “Oh, yeah, Clint,” they would reply. Merely by standing behind this rope, they felt glamorous.

One fellow, tall, not bad-looking, with a dark suntan to set off his dark goatee, was brought up to Eastwood by one of the company people. “Clint, this fellow has a gift for you.”

It was a short leather cape of the sort Eastwood used to wear in Sergio Leone westerns near to twenty years ago when Clint played the cowboy who had no name, rarely spoke, and walked about with the stub of a pencil-thin cigar in his mouth. A killer stared back at you then—the stills taken from those spaghetti westerns certainly made him famous in Italy, then all Europe, then the world.

Now, Clint Eastwood said softly to the man bearing him the gift, “You keep this.”

“I want you to have it, Clint.”

“Better not. You might change your mind in time to come.”

“I never wear it,” protested the man with the goatee. “This cape is right for you.”

Eastwood, however, was accepting no gifts he would cast away later. That could leave a bruise on the mood. “No,” he said softly, “I really don’t need it. I have a number of capes already.”

You make him sound good, my partner remarked.

Since we were warmed up, I went on about commanders in forward companies during the Second World War and how you could tell at once if they were respected from the mood that came off the first gun trained on your approach. Forward companies in Luzon lived on outposts miles apart in the hills and sometimes had no visitors for a week at a time. To drop in on them was a little like boarding a ship. You never had to guess
about morale. The mood told you immediately how the men felt. If the company commander was well liked, morale was as high as the greeting you get from a large, happy, impressive, slightly crazy family. Everybody feels manic in the wealth of their people.

The same, I suggested, could be said of movie sets. They are able to offer great morale, awful morale, or anything in between. Eastwood might be renowned for bringing in pictures ahead of schedule and under budget, but he was also most popular with his crew. That was apparent. They adored him.

Of course, not everyone might wish to be adored by a movie crew. They have a great sense of humor for jokes that go with a few beers, but little tolerance for a fancy mix. They are good enough trade unionists to suspect that art is phony and would never trust any male who could not lift his own weight in movie equipment.

His crew obviously loved him. Eastwood could put back a few brews himself. Beer was his drink of choice. Besides, for movie crews, he had another virtue—he knew how to use animals. In the movie he was making now, there would be a big, doddering old English bull, fat, short-legged, asthmatic, pooped-out, and smelly. This dog would be a total hit onscreen. The script called for the English bull to piss on cue. At each right moment, the beast would raise one mournful leg and make water on a fallen villain. The crew loved the idea. That was cutting the mustard.

But how do you train an animal to do such things on cue, asked my partner.

I had put Eastwood to the same question. He came back with a glint in his eye. The modesty of the solution appealed to him. “Oh,” he said, “you attach a monofilament to the leg and give a tug.” He had to grin before the powers of conditioned reflex.

To fill the pause that followed, my partner now said: You do seem sure of a lot of things about Eastwood.

Well, I know him, I guess.

You said you didn’t.

I do, I confessed. Eastwood is an artist. So I know him well. I know him by his films.

I also like his films, said my partner, but surely you aren’t going to say he’s much of an artist?

I’ll go further. I’ll say that you can see the man in his work just as clearly as you see Hemingway in
A Farewell to Arms
or John Cheever in his short stories. Hell, yes, he’s an artist. I even think he’s important. Not just a fabulous success at the box office, but important.

You do admire him.

No, I said, I’m angry at him. He doesn’t know how good he is. I don’t think he tries hard enough for what’s truly difficult.

Did you tell him that at lunch?

No. He was making a movie.

Our discussion was now at an impasse. Besides, it was time to talk to the partner on the other side. So the conversation on Eastwood was never finished. I had to think about it later, however. A talented author once remarked that he discovered the truth at the point of his pencil in the act of writing. It occurred to me that I usually came across the truth while talking. I would say things and by the tone of my voice they would seem true or not. When I said Clint Eastwood was an artist, I liked the ring. It was true. It might also be true that he was a timid artist.

That made a nice paradox. For, by any physical terms, he was a brave man. Once, after a plane crashed at sea, he saved his life by swimming three miles to shore. He did a number of his own stunts in movies and learned to rock climb for
The Eiger Sanction
. The film was embarrassing, a prodigiously multicolored plot equal to ice cream on turnips, but Eastwood’s rock climbing was good. He rode a horse well. He did car racing. He even looked, on the basis of
Every Which Way But Loose
and
Any Which Way You Can
, as if he might make some kind of boxer. He had a quick left jab with good weight behind it. He could certainly draw a gun. If it came to great box office movie stars competing in a decathlon, Eastwood would hold his own.

He was also capable of fine acting. With a few exceptions, he invariably understood his role and did a good deal with the smallest moves. Critics had been attacking him for years over how little he did onscreen, but Eastwood may have known something they did not.

The plot of a film works, after all, for the star. The more emotion that a story will stir in an audience, the more will the audience read such feeling into the star’s motionless face. Sometimes the facial action of the movie star might offer no more movement than a riverbank, yet there is nothing passive about such work. A riverbank must brace itself to support the rush around a bend.

There is a moment in
Play Misty for Me
when Eastwood’s character, an easygoing disc jockey, realizes that he has gotten himself into an affair with a hopelessly psychotic woman. As the camera moves in, his stare is as still as the eyes of a trapped animal. Yet his expression is luminous with horror. He is one actor who can put his soul into his eyes.

The real question might have little to do, however, with how much of an actor he could be. What separated Eastwood from other box office stars was that his films (especially since he had begun to direct them) had come to speak more and more of his own vision of life in America. One was encountering a homegrown philosophy, a hardworking everyday subtle American philosophy in film.

Burt Reynolds also gives us a private vision of the taste of life in America, but it is not so much a philosophy as a premise. Eat high on the hog, Reynolds suggests. The best way to get through life is drunk.

Since it’s possible that half the male population of America under forty also believes this, Reynolds is endlessly reliable. Of
course, like many a happy drinking man before him, he takes no real chances, just falls and smacko collisions. The car gets totaled, but Burt is too loaded to be hurt. He leaps to his feet, pulls the fender off his neck with a sorry look, and we laugh. The best way to get through life is drunk.

Eastwood is saying more. If you discount his two worst films in these last ten years,
Firefox
and
The Eiger Sanction
, if you bypass
Dirty Harry, Magnum Force
, and
The Enforcer
as movies made to manipulate audiences and satisfy producers, you are also left with
High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Every Which Way But Loose, Bronco Billy
, and
Honkytonk Man
.

A protagonist in each of these five films stands near to his creator. Eastwood has made five cinematic relatives. They are spread over more than a hundred years, from the Civil War to the present, and the action is in different places west of the Mississippi, from Missouri to California. They are Okies and outlaws, truckers, rodeo entertainers, and country and western singers, but they come out of the odd, wild, hard, dry, sad, sour redneck wisdom of small-town life in the Southwest. All of Eastwood’s knowledge is in them, a sardonic, unsentimental set of values that is equal to art for it would grapple with the roots of life itself. “When things get bad,” says the outlaw Josey Wales, “and it looks like you’re not going to make it, then you got to get mean, I mean plain plumb dog mean, because if you lose your head then, you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”

One has to think of the Depression years of Eastwood’s childhood when his father was looking for work and taking the family up and down the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, out there with a respectable family in a mix of Okies also wandering up and down California searching for work. Those Okies are in Eastwood’s films, as must be the gritty knowledge he gained over the seven years he worked on
Rawhide
. How many bit players and cowboy stunt men passing through
Rawhide
’s weekly episodes were also a part of that migrating country culture that was yet going to present itself to us by way of CBs and pickup trucks and western music? “You’ve got to outlast yourself” was the only way to talk of overcoming fatigue. The words happen to be Eastwood’s,
but the language was shared with his characters, brothers in the same family, ready to share a family humor: it is that a proper orangutan will not miss a good opportunity to defecate on the front seat of a police cruiser, as indeed it did in
Every Which Way But Loose
. Small-town humor, but in
Honkytonk Man
, his last film before the one he was shooting now, it became art.

MAILER:
How did you feel about
Honkytonk Man
before it came out?

EASTWOOD:
I thought it was good, as good as I could do it. I did it in five weeks, five weeks of shooting, and I felt good about it. I felt it might find a small audience somewhere that might enjoy it. I wasn’t looking for a big film. I just figured sometimes you have to do some things that you want to do and be selfish about it.

Honkytonk Man
starts in the Oklahoma dust bowl of the Thirties and follows a drunk, all-but-destroyed country singer named Red Stovall on his car trip east to Nashville. He has been given an invitation to audition at the Grand Ole Opry and it is the most important event of his life. Red Stovall has very little left: ravaged good looks, a guitar, and a small voice reduced to a whisper by his consumptive cough. He’s a sour, cantankerous, mean-spirited country singer who smokes too much, drinks too much, and has brought little happiness to man or woman, a sorry hero but still a hero. He will die before he will deviate from his measure of things. So he drives over the bumpy stones of his used-up lungs to get to the audition.

On stage at the Grand Ole Opry, out front before the producers, there in the middle of singing his best, he has to cough. Worse. He is so stifled with phlegm that he must stagger off the stage. The picture is about to end in disaster. Still, he is given a reprieve. A man who makes records is also at the audition. He has liked Red’s voice and comes forward with a proposal. Red, given the treachery of his throat, can hardly perform before an audience, but maybe he can do a record session. They can lay the track between the coughs.

So he is able to sing on the last day of his life and makes one
record before he dies. His whispery voice, close to extinction, clings to the heart of the film.