Clint Eastwood (17 page)

It was, though, Clint’s high-water mark at Universal. Lubin cast him as the “First Saxon” in a Technicolor epic,
Lady Godiva
, which starred Maureen O’Hara making the legendary bareback ride in a bodysuit, with “a hair wigwam” (as the
Hollywood Reporter
reviewer called it) artfully arranged to create an illusion of nudity rather than to cover it. Buddy Van Horn, who would become Clint’s regular stunt coordinator (and three times his director), worked as a rider in the film and remembers Clint as “
a skinny-legged kid in tights, saying ‘They went that-away.’ ” Actually, what he said to George Nader, chief of the Saxon rebels opposing their Norman oppressors, was “A column of soldiers is approaching.” It was one of his two lines in a part which consisted mainly of intermittent appearances among the yeomen.

Thereafter, Bill Alland gave him another day’s work in Jack Arnold’s
Tarantula
, about a deadly spider mutated to gigantic size by misapplied atomic energy (a favorite science-fiction theme in the fifties and a reflection of everyone’s anxiety about the newly freed atom). Clint, almost unrecognizable in a flight helmet, plays the pilot leading a group of jets in an attack on the creature and has a couple of lines of radioed cross talk.

But after this little rush, Clint seemed to get less work, and nothing that can be seen as progress in his career. The studio was using its contract people ever more sparingly and was beginning to drop them from the payroll, too. There were also changes in the talent program faculty. Sympathetic Katherine Warren left, and her place as the acting coach was taken by a man named Jess Kimmel, who was less encouraging to Clint. In the spring of 1955, when it came time to renew Clint’s option, he was told that it would be picked up again, but that there would be no raise this time.

This did not improve his morale, but he said, “‘Yeah, I’ll stay,’ and I had no regrets. I just kind of figured, I’ll know as much as I can when I leave here. But I know my ass is out of here in six months.”

Despite this accurate assessment of his immediate prospects, Clint got his best assignment a couple of months later. The studio had cast Steve Allen, the first star of
The Tonight Show
, in
The Benny Goodman Story
, largely because of his physical resemblance to the eponymous figure. To promote the film Universal arranged for a program called “Steve Allen in Hollywood” to be broadcast on
Max Liebman Presents
, a variety hour produced by the man who had gained fame as the producer of
Your Show of Shows
, the now-legendary Sid Caesar program. Various Universal
stars did bits of one kind and another in the show, and then, having sung a song (something of a surprise), Jeff Chandler addressed the audience: “We’d like to present now, live, one of the highlights from the film
Bright Victory
[one of the studio’s 1951 releases]. The three young men featured in this scene—Rex Reason, Grant Williams and Clint Eastwood—were discovered and developed right here on our lot. We hope you, too, will share the excitement and enthusiasm we feel for their future.”

Clint had the least of the three roles in what followed, playing a young noncom in an army hospital escorting a blind soldier (Williams) to visit a psychologist (Reason). The handicapped soldier is understandably bitter about his lot and has been refusing to communicate with his family. The doctor places a call to them on his behalf, but he refuses to speak to them, and Clint is summoned to escort him back to his ward. “Well, how did you and the lieutenant get along?” the latter inquires after they leave the office. “Oh, just great, he had all sorts of solutions to my problem. He’s just like all the other people around here. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Clint fixes him with the first recorded example of that hard stare that would become one of his acting signatures and replies: “That’s funny. You’d think he’d know something. He’s as blind as you are.” Sting in the score! Astonishment on Williams’s face! Then a manly embrace. And he returns to the doctor’s office to make his confessional call.

In context, Clint’s underplayed naturalism had a ring of truth about it. It was the only role he got at Universal in which he was able to show, however briefly, a certain mature masculinity, as opposed to youthful gawkiness. And his selection for this showcase appearance—there were, after all, plenty of other contract players who could have done the role—seems to suggest that someone in the studio actually felt some “excitement and enthusiasm” for him. But it was just a television bit, and one you had to look pretty hard to find. In the few months remaining on his studio contract he got nothing as good.

The most visible of his later Universal roles (about thirty seconds of shared screen time) was in
Never Say Goodbye
, a quintessentially inane fifties romance—a remake of the 1945
This Love of Ours
, which was in turn derived, unlikely as it may seem, from a Pirandello play. Set in equally unpersuasive back-lot versions of postwar Vienna and American suburbia, it starred Rock Hudson as an insanely jealous doctor—an emotion he could not imagine, let alone play.

Cast again as a lab assistant, Clint is required to hand over some X rays to Hudson in an early scene and wish him luck on a speech he is going off to make. When Clint reported to the set for his day’s work the
director, Jerry Hopper, said: “I’d like to see some kind of character. I’d like to see you wear glasses or something.” (Quick fixes of this kind are what directing consists of when the basic job is to keep moving through the schedule on time.) Jesus, Clint said to himself, I got a nice bit and here I’ve got to wear glasses. But dutifully he went off in search of the propman and tried on a selection of eyewear until he found something that seemed all right; maybe better than all right. Glancing in a mirror, he thought he didn’t look bad in glasses. He wore them around on the set while the scene was being set up, and the more he did, the happier he became. Indeed, he began to imagine a whole new image for himself, maybe even a whole new career. This will be great, he thought, because if I start doing more charactery things, then they’ll use me in more stuff around the lot, and then they won’t can me. He even started to wonder if a new hairstyle might be worth a try.

Finally, they were ready to shoot. Clint was introduced to Hudson, and the director started outlining their business. As he was absorbing these instructions, Clint noticed Hudson looking at him rather curiously. Finally, just as they were ready to go, Hudson said, “Where are
my
glasses?”

“What are you talking about?” Hopper asked.

“Well, you know, I’m playing a physician in this film. Don’t you think I ought to have glasses?”

It’s possible the star was afraid of being upstaged by a handsome unknown who had found himself some interesting spectacles. In any event, a halt was called, and Hudson and Hopper went through the same twenty pairs of glasses that Clint had examined earlier. None was judged satisfactory. “Finally,” says Clint, “they take mine off. He puts them on. Perfect!”

Needless to say, both actors in the scene could not wear glasses, so Clint worked without them. “By that time I
really
wanted to wear them.” His consolation was that the little scene went off without further incident. It might be noted, incidentally, that never thereafter in the picture is Hudson to be seen with glasses.

Alas, the rest of Clint’s career as a Universal contract player also went off without noticeable incident. By this time Jack Kosslyn had taken over Kimmel’s classes, and that represented an improvement for Clint, but he still felt he was just playing out his string. He managed to get two more on-screen jobs in his last months there, but they were the least visible of all.

He was one of a group of sailors down in the hold of a World War II supply ship in
Away All Boats
, a 1956 release starring Jeff Chandler as a Captain Queeg figure. Clint vaguely recalls that his one line consisted
of calling for a medic, but it is impossible to pick him out of the crowd in the flooded darkness belowdecks. Still, this was one more line than he had in
Star in the Dust
, in which Al Zugsmith cast him as a ranch hand. Clint is only marginally more visible here than he was in
Away All Boats
.

No one looking at his scattered work could say that he was a rising personality, certainly not as a studio executive might define the term. So on September 22, 1955, this one-sentence memo circulated from in-tray to out-tray in the front office: “
Please be advised that we will not exercise our option on Clint Eastwood.” A little later a payroll termination notice went out; it specified October 25 as “talent’s” last working day at the studio.

Clint was not overly discouraged, having seen the dismissal coming. People were always talking about the contract players the studio had let go, then been obliged to rehire at better salaries. Besides, he felt he had probably derived what good there was to be obtained from the program. He had learned something about acting, he knew how to find his way around a set and how to evaluate what was going on there, and he had some credits for his agents to mention to casting people. Most important, his spine was stiffened: “The more you struggle the more you kind of say, ‘I’m gonna make those people eat those words.’ And though you get depressed many times, and I had many moments of saying, ‘Well, this isn’t going anywhere,’ I think in the back of my mind I always felt I had something to offer somewhere down the line.”

It may be that the most important thing he got from this experience was a glimpse of the kind of community show business offers. Sometimes it seems like a large orphanage, harboring a disproportionate number of people damaged by the loss or emotional absence of a parent. Clint, obviously, had been fortunate in that regard. But until he signed on at Universal, he had not found a place where he could happily root himself. The studio, for all its blindness and crassness, suggested interesting possibilities in that regard.

Indeed, when he left Universal he looked for work as a contract player at Warner Bros., Columbia (where he did scenes with Felicia Farr and with his sometime neighbor Kathy Grant), Paramount (where one tried out in a room equipped with a one-way mirror, behind which the executives evaluated the hopefuls) and Twentieth Century-Fox, where for the first time in his memory he actually talked back to somebody in a suit. His audition piece was a scene from Sidney Kingsley’s play
Detective Story
, in which the eponymous protagonist must plead with his
estranged wife to return to him. Clint had studied the entire work carefully and correctly understood this figure to be a hard and inward man, not used to begging for anything, virtually strangling on the words he was compelled to speak. Clint’s auditor, the head of the studio’s talent program, disagreed entirely with this interpretation. He told Clint that he and his wife had recently come close to divorce, and that he had gone out and bought her a mink coat, dropped to his knees when he presented it and pleaded for forgiveness.

Clint was astonished. Such behavior was entirely beyond his ken. And so were such confessions from a stranger. “I was thinking, Boy, this guy’s pussy-whipped. But I kind of went along with it, because I’d never heard anybody talk like this.” When the man finished, Clint stammered objections: “‘I just can’t—this guy wouldn’t …’ and I went through the whole goddamn play with him,” pointing out all the reasons the character had to be played the way Clint had interpreted him. It was to no avail.

Nothing came of any of these encounters, but during this period Clint got a couple of jobs in episodic television, the first of which offered him what he would later claim to be the most memorable of these gigs. This was on
Highway Patrol
, and he got it because he knew how to ride a motorcycle, and the producers were too cheap to hire a stuntman. This was typical of Ziv, which produced inexpensive action shows mainly for the syndication market. Almost every actor of Clint’s generation passed through its humble portals, and everyone emerged with some story about the operation’s astonishing stinginess. And, if they worked
Highway Patrol
, they usually emerged with a story about the legendary drinking of its star, Broderick Crawford.

Clint is no exception. “I remember thinking it was odd, because I’d never seen a guy come in kind of pale in the morning and in a half hour have a glow on. The prop guy told me later what he did: He’d get a bottle of 7-Up, pour half of it out and put vodka in, so he had a shooter going. And then he could rattle off his lines.” To avoid memorization, the canny old actor, who was only a few years past his Academy Award-winning performance in Robert Rossen’s
All the King’s Men
, would take a scissors to his script, trimming all the margins off. After that, he would cut up his lines and place them strategically around the set—one perhaps on the wall next to where Clint was standing, another atop the papers on his desk, a third in the desk drawer he would open at the appropriate moment. “I was so fascinated I almost dropped out of the shot,” Clint says.