Clint Eastwood (23 page)

Each year Clint stayed with
Rawhide
his salary improved, reaching the neighborhood of about $100,000 a year toward the end of the run. CBS offered to defer part of his salary, and he took the network up on it. It saved taxes, and the money accrued interest while the network held it for him. But more important, “When the series was over I’d be able to sit back rather than have to take the first job that came along.” His idea
was to escape the television rut by having the financial wherewithal to wait for good parts in feature films. In those days, he recalls, he and Maggie lived very comfortably on a few hundred dollars a week. And, indeed, in
Rawhide
’s second season they were able to move out of their Arch Drive quarters into a larger Studio City apartment.
A Sunday supplement picture story shows them miming bourgeois ordinariness there: He helps her hang a picture she has painted, looks dubiously at a dress she bought, grumpily goes over the month’s bills, which are spread out on a card table between them.

A couple of years later, they bought their first home, a comfortable, but by no means overbearing, three-bedroom house located on a cul-de-sac about halfway down the north slope of Beverly Glen, with a pleasant view of the San Fernando Valley from its terrace. Clint and his friends dug the swimming pool (it was the occasion for a memorable party), and he put in a gym above the garage. In this period, too, the Eastwoods began renting a retreat in Carmel, where they eventually purchased land, intending to build what they said would be their principal residence—a project that was held in abeyance for years because of zoning squabbles.

They delayed having children. At some point in this period Maggie contracted hepatitis—as Clint says “
almost as badly as you can get it without ceasing to exist”—and the disease lingered for more than a year. Clint subsequently suggested that her illness and their fear of its aftereffects was one reason they did not begin a family. He also alluded to his desire not to face the problems his parents had confronted trying to provide for children when they were not solidly established financially. But one has to believe it was the commitment children represented that caused him to hesitate, for his commitment to this marriage was not wholehearted. His need to come and go as he pleased, without offering lengthy explanations to anyone, had not abated. It was the way he had conducted his life since adolescence, and he was incapable of altering a pattern that, indeed, persists to this day. He and he alone controls his calendar, and though he rarely breaks dates, he is also reluctant to make them very far in advance. It is one of the ways he defines freedom.

This does not mean that he was, in these days, constantly out with other women. Sometimes he was out with the guys. Sometimes he was out with guys and gals in an innocently mixed group. Sometimes he was out at Jack Kosslyn’s acting classes. Sometimes he was just out at the movies. But, yes, he was sometimes out alone with some woman. He was incapable of remaining completely faithful to his wife. It was the unspoken secret of their relationship, though he once came close to revealing it. In his 1974
Playboy
interview, which contains his most extensive
public comments on the marriage, the subject of “open” relationships came up, and he characterized Maggie as “a woman who knows how much room I need.” She put it differently some years later: “
He had this thing about being a loner, like I kind of didn’t exist sometimes. He’s a very complex person.”

Clint was by all accounts affectionate with “Mags” or “Magoo” as he sometimes calls her, and when he spoke publicly about their marriage, he stressed its companionability. “Everybody talks about love in marriage, but I think it’s just as important to be friends,” he said in 1974. He was careful to consult her about career decisions, and she went so far as to attend a few beginner’s classes at Kosslyn’s studio, trying to gain a better understanding of his work.

In the
Playboy
interview, he stressed Maggie’s freedom to do as she pleased, to take up any job or avocation she liked without consulting him. He also mentioned his own lack of sexual jealousy and authoritarianism. “
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.” He suggested that this was one of the reasons the marriage had lasted as long as it had.

But there was more to it than that. Besides being careful not to order her husband around, Maggie was also careful to avoid asking him difficult questions. Possibly she was naive. Perhaps she was, as we would now put it, in denial. But the fact is that she seems not to have inquired into his endless comings and goings very often or very deeply. “She had an incredible eraser,” says Fritz Manes.

“
I was never very realistic about some things,” she said some years later. “I used to always hope for the best. I wanted to protect myself. I wondered about it, but I didn’t dwell on it, because it probably would have driven me insane. I’m sure there must have been times, but I just preferred to hang in there and not worry too much about it.”

It was well along in the
Rawhide
years when she drew Manes aside at a party and rather diffidently asked him if he thought Clint was “playing around.” She accepted his reassurances (though he knew otherwise), and he believes that Maggie did not fully admit to herself that Clint was unfaithful to her until the late seventies, some time after his relationship with Sondra Locke was well established and widely rumored. Don Kincade, Clint’s other old high-school friend, who remained close to both Eastwoods, thinks Clint’s unfaithfulness placed a strain on their marriage much earlier.

But whatever the case, promiscuity was not, for Clint, one of the prerogatives of his newfound fame. It had been “habitual” for him before his marriage, and it would remain so after it ended: “It just becarne
… I don’t know … addictive … like you have to have another cigarette.” It consumed half of his life, some thirty years in his estimation.

But “consumed”—a word that implies obsession—is perhaps not quite the right word. His manner when he makes this admission is neither boastful nor regretful. Certainly it appears to be untouched by guilt. The need to have many women was a fact of his life, his nature if you will, and it remains an undeniable fact of his history.

His opportunities increased as his “following” increased, and when he became, as he puts it, “a motion-picture actor of some renown, traveling to locations around the world all the time by yourself,” the temptations were almost daily. (Sometimes these reached comical levels. A friend of his recalls sharing a hotel elevator after a banquet in his honor in Paris, and a grinning Clint pulling three room keys out of his pockets; all had been placed there by women he had met at the dinner.) We are perhaps in the realm of evolutionary psychology here. As its great explicator Robert Wright tells us, prominent males, like dominant primates, are designed to capitalize sexually on their status. Fame, power and riches draw the attention of women, their own neurochemistry urges such men on and all the rest is easy moralizing and/or spiteful envy. Given Clint’s cool realism, especially about his own needs, it is a plausible explanation of his sexual behavior.

But if that seems too coldly rational, one might resort to John Updike. The writer, who is of Clint’s generation and is perhaps the novelist who has most accurately portrayed the sexuality of its men, wrote of one of his protagonists: “
What he wanted was for women to stay put, planted in American plenty, while he ambulated from one to another carrying no more baggage than the suit on his back and the car keys in his pocket.” It fits Clint—so amiable, so uninsistent, so lacking in macho poses. It fits many men formed by his times.

A modern feminist may deplore this mind-set (as many have deplored Updike’s failure to write judgmentally about it). A male may envy another man who is able to act on it so casually. But such evidence as there is suggests that he made no promises, held out no hopes, that he could not fulfill. And the discretion with which he conducted his romantic transactions is obvious, since no public unpleasantness, certainly no scandal, attached to them until his famous falling-out with Sondra Locke in 1989. “
Sex is a small part of life,” he was once quoted as saying. “It’s a good thing—great—but 99.9 percent of your life is spent doing other things.”

He was obviously a man who knew how to keep things in perspective. Work included. Work especially. Making a television series, like low-budget moviemaking, is potentially a trap. If its repetitiveness does not turn a series lead into a raging egomaniac it can quickly turn him into a hack if he succumbs to its numbing routines.

This was potentially a threat to Clint. Fleming’s querulousness and Warren’s manipulations aside,
Rawhide
was a comfortable place to work. It would have been easy to sink into laziness and inattention, and sometimes they did. Everyone, for instance, liked fooling around with their omnipresent six-shooters. “I was fairly adept with it,” Clint remembers, “because you’d do it all day. You’d have nothing to do but drawing guns, twirling and stuff. You’d have calluses on your hand.” While the show was headquartered at M-G-M this activity drew something of a crowd, because people like Elvis Presley and Sammy Davis Jr. loved fast-draw and would drop over to practice with the guys. The latter, in fact, left a pistol of his, which had once belonged to Gary Cooper, to Clint in his will.

But all the idle hours were not idly occupied. If you are alert and open to its processes, filmmaking on this level can offer a practical education that no film school, no dramatic academy, can duplicate. Clint puts it this way: “It’s not like you get to wear a different wardrobe each time, or go to a different location. It is like factory work. So how do you take an assembly line job and make it more exciting for you every day?” His technique was to look at an episode from the director’s point of view one week, then the next, see how he could vary his character a little bit—“sort of self-experimentation all the time.”

Clint never really liked the character of Rowdy Yates. He concedes that over the run of the show Rowdy “grew a little bit,” in that he developed from his original incarnation as “a young guy who was not too swift, not too educated, just drifting along wanting to be in the cattle business.” From representing “impetuous youth, going off without thinking it through” he became someone “they started giving more responsibility to.” But still—“I never got to really play a character with him that I wanted.” By that he means that there was no darkness in him, not even some odd quirks. “
I kept thinking,” Clint once told an interviewer, “wouldn’t it be great to play the hero sort of like the villain is normally portrayed, and give the villain some heroic qualities.”

But no matter how they fuss and fume actors are finally powerless to alter television formulas. The best they can hope to do is point up a scene here, a moment there. “That was the big challenge,” says Clint, “to take a scene that was really bad and make it a pretty interesting
scene—or at least passable. It’s like taking an F grade and making it a C-minus.”

There were times when such craftsmanlike pleasures were satisfying enough. “We were still young, naive people, and we were going around saying we were looking for a great play to do, a great movie to do. And I said, ‘You know, there’s something about having to do shit every week and trying to put perfume on it and it still may end up being a hog.’ ” Or as he once put it somewhat more formally: “
Having the security of being in a series week in, week out, gives you great flexibility; you can experiment with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, ‘Well, I won’t do that again,’ and you’re still on the air next week.”

Besides learning by doing, Eastwood could study acting by observing. Over the years, as Clint puts it, “Every kind of person imaginable came through.” All ages were represented, every kind of experience, every possible approach to the craft. Older movie stars—Barbara Stanwyck, Mary Astor, Brian Aherne, George Brent, Walter Pidgeon, Cesar Romero—worked the show. So did veteran movie character people—Peter Lorre, Walter Slezak, Agnes Moorehead, Claude Rains, Ralph Bellamy, Victor McLaglen, Burgess Meredith. On the other hand, the “New York actors” (as they were then referred to)—the likes of Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, John Cassavetes, E. G. Marshall, Rip Torn, Pat Hingle, George Grizzard—people out of quite a different acting tradition, often signed on. And then there were the young Hollywood comers, actors like Beau and Jeff Bridges, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Blake, on the way to star careers of their own. There were also what might be called novelty acts: Frankie Avalon, Shelley Berman, Dean Martin.