Clint Eastwood (24 page)

“That was a great experience for me,” says Clint, “watching other people, seeing them operate, watching the different techniques.” What was true of the actors was equally true of the directors. “I just would watch everything,” Clint says, “the old-timers and the new-timers and some of the hacks, too.” Besides those already mentioned for their work on the early episodes of the series, Clint cites as exemplars Tay Garnett, Stuart Heisler and his old Universal nemesis, Jack Arnold, all of whom had extensive experience in features. Clint also remembers as conscientious craftsmen Christian Nyby and Laslo Benedek, both former editors. These men may not have been “auteurs,” but they were repositories of vast amounts of professional lore, craftsmen who knew how to stage action or to extract what values there were in sketchy dramatic scenes efficiently, effectively, unpretentiously, and whose pride in their professionalism—in doing their best within whatever limits were imposed on
them—armored them against cynicism. It’s impossible to say how consciously Clint took in their underlying—dare one say it?—aesthetic values, since in this crowd it was a point of pride not to speak of these matters openly. But he did assimilate the working attitudes of the best directors: their belief that even in cliché forms respectable work can be accomplished if you are knowledgeable and well prepared, their contempt for time wasted on theoretical chat, for money wasted on making the producer feel important or the star more secure. The point—no, the morality—was simple: Get the work and the money on the screen.

It is, of course, equally useful to learn how not to make a film, and
Rawhide
was richly provided with dull directors dutifully, ineptly grinding their way through whatever pages the day’s schedule required. “
You do 250 hours of television, you learn what makes one prop man good and another fair and another lousy, and what makes one cameraman better than another one,” Clint once said. “You learn about leadership, how one week a crew can move very fast and efficiently and the next week drag. About 90 percent of the time, it’s the fault of the director.”

Many of these “turkeys,” Clint once recalled, “
didn’t direct much; they’d just come in and set up the shots and not tamper too much. And we were regular characters who ran throughout the show, so pretty much you had to guideline your own performance.” That, as it happened, turned out to be the most useful experience of all for a man who would eventually direct himself in so many films; it developed the inner eye he keeps trained on himself.

None of this should be taken to imply that Clint Eastwood was every day in every way a nice guy. He could not always guard his temper. He lost it most memorably on location in Arizona in the early days, of the show. Clint had twisted his ankle rather severely, making it uncomfortable for him to stand. He had to do a riding shot and asked an assistant director to bring a chair out and hide it behind a tree where some camera gear was stored, safely out of the shot, so he could rest for a minute before going on to the next one. Arriving at his destination, Clint found no chair. He sought out the AD and asked, “Did you think I was kidding when I said I wanted a chair over there?” The man was smoking a cigar, and he took it out of his mouth, started waving it in Clint’s face and telling him off. Clint shoved him. The man charged him, and Clint dropped him. This set off a quite satisfying general brawl.

Clint’s larger dissatisfactions with the show, though growing steadily, were expressed only in the most guarded terms outside the company. In
a 1961
TV Guide
profile of Clint, Bill Warren chose to understand Clint’s complaints as the kind that one learns to expect from actors working in a long-running series. “
Like any other actor, he beefs now and again, but they’re generally justifiable beefs. If he thinks his part is too small in any given script, I’ll hear about it.” Possibly so. But Clint’s restiveness had other, more compelling sources.

Clint rather diffidently mentioned one of them in this same article, which described him as “an amiable, quiet-spoken giant,” and made much of his habit of picking struggling bees and grasshoppers off the water in swimming pools and returning them to their natural habitats. (“I always feel they were put here for some purpose and it’s not my business to let them drown,” he said.) Buried well down in the anonymously written piece was this quote: “I’m under contract to CBS, and sometimes they won’t let me do an outside show because of what they call ‘sponsor conflict.’ ” This, Clint felt, was “farfetched.” But he quickly added that “it’s really not all that important, so I let it go.” The reporter also let it go, having bought Clint’s self-description—“dull but happy”—and constructed his lackadaisical profile around it.

Actually it was gnawing at him, this inability to expand beyond
Rawhide
. He and the other actors were encouraged to make personal appearances at rodeos—a pleasant way to earn an extra $1,500 now and then—and with Sheb Wooley Clint worked up a double act, singing and telling jokes. (Sometimes, they’d stop off in Las Vegas on the way to their gigs to steal material from the comedy acts there.) But this scarcely constituted a career move. These audiences already knew and liked Clint. He needed to expand his range, establish himself with a more upscale audience than his show attracted.

Curiously, the one show-business realm that was taking an interest in him was the recording industry. It was, as Clint says, “sort of fashionable to take anybody who had a little warmth going, who made it in a TV series or something,” and, if they could carry a tune, make a pop single or two to test their teen appeal. This was especially so after Edd (Kookie) Byrnes of 77
Sunset Strip
had a hit with “Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb).” So around the time
TV Guide
profiled him, Clint cut a single called “Unknown Girl of My Dreams,” backed by the standard “For All We Know.”

The record made no impact. “Unknown Girl” was strictly bubblegum, a plaint about an idealized dream girl for whom the singer yearns—not at all Clint’s kind of music. It wasn’t that he was bad; it was just that he was not very good or, perhaps one should say, not very singular. The disc sounds like a hundred, a thousand, virtually unheeded, long-since-forgotten pop records of the day. But he cut two more singles
in the next two or three years and a full-scale long-playing record,
Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Songs
.

On all of these records he demonstrates a nice boyish baritone, and there’s a musicianship about his work, which possibly surprised such listeners as he had, that is in keeping with his own seriousness about music. He strains a bit in the upper register and uses a certain amount of vibrato to disguise some insecurities of pitch. One feels about his singing what one feels about his early acting efforts—that he is giving it a good, serious shot, doing the best possible job in the circumstances (which includes arrangements that are utterly banal).

The album of cowboys songs is certainly the most ambitious of these efforts and the most conscientiously produced. The other singles are on the “Unknown Girl” level, with one of them offering a piece obviously written to order. “Rowdy” is—no other word for it—a hoot. And it is also, in its way, quite interesting:

And so forth. The tactic plea is, of course, to take the lonely, wandering lad to heart, something shrewd Tin Pan Alley judged mooning teenage girls ought to be eager to do. They weren’t. The recording went nowhere. What’s intriguing about the song is that in its banal and calculated way, it gave Rowdy Yates more of an inner life, more of a romantic spirit than the show’s scripts typically did. Imagine a Rowdy Yates who was not job and issue oriented, a man capable of long, sad thoughts as the campfire died. It might have been interesting—especially for the increasingly restless actor playing him.

For six months after the
TV Guide
profile appeared, Clint’s mood could no longer be called “amiable.” “
Calm on the outside and boiling on the inside” is how one trade-paper columnist put it, “livid” because CBS refused to allow him to make features or appear on other television programs as a guest star. The network, Clint said, offered him “excuses you wouldn’t believe” to justify a policy Clint claimed violated his contract, and he was no longer going to put up with it. “Maybe they really figure me as the sheepish nice guy I portray in the series, but even a worm has to turn some time.” Having thoroughly mixed his metaphors, he said he was prepared to go on suspension until an adjustment was made. If he could not work in the United States he claimed—exaggerating
hugely—he had movie offers from London and Rome that he was prepared to take.

This tempest was calmed. In the spring of 1962 Clint was permitted to take an outside assignment—on
Mr. Ed
, which after a year in syndication was now in its first season on CBS. Sonia Chernus cowrote “Clint Eastwood Meets Mr. Ed,” which had its obvious uses for the network as cross-promotion and as a means of placating Clint.

It was not exactly what he had been looking for. It was, he recalls dismissively, just something that Sonia talked him into doing—
the fifty-first of the 143 episodes (every one of them directed by Lubin) in an entirely inconsequential series that has since become something of a cult favorite (it reran for years in the eighties and early nineties on the Nickelodeon cable channel, and it remains a steady seller in the international market). But in some ways Chernus and her collaborator, Lou Derman (the show’s head writer), served Clint rather well. He looks swell in modern mufti (golf sweater and slacks for most of the show, a suit in its last sequence), gets to play outrage, comic befuddlement and, in the end, clever authoritativeness. He even gets to be something more than a straight man for two or three brief moments.

As the title suggests, Clint plays a bachelor version of himself, newly moved into the neighborhood where Wilbur and Carol Post (Alan Young and Connie Hines) live in suburban sterility. They have the standard TV neighbors, Roger and Kay Addison (Larry Keating and Edna Skinner), who drop in to comment dryly on their confusions. This episode opens with Carol angry at Wilbur, thinking perhaps he’s been out with another woman, when in fact he’s been chasing the errant Ed. The horse has wandered off angry because Clint’s horse, Midnight, a larger and more glamorous creature (“next to him I look like a poodle”), has been making out with the neighborhood fillies. (Besides accepting the absurdity of a talking horse, viewers had to accept the idea of a suburb full of horses casually dropping in on one another.) In revenge, Carol has proposed Wilbur as writer and star of an amateur show. Mr. Ed, too, has a dark plan in mind—to drive Clint and his horse out of his territory.

He arranges with the phone company to get on Clint’s party line. When a movie producer calls to offer Clint a part in a feature—Chernus providing her pal a little wish fulfillment—Ed sabotages the conversation by speaking for Clint: “But you couldn’t afford me, you cheap old windbag,” he tells the producer. Needless to say, Clint doesn’t get the job. A little later his girlfriend (seen stretched out, femme fatale style, on a chaise longue cuddling a lapdog) gets the same treatment. Ed pretends to be the father of a rival and says, “Listen, little girl, if you’re smart
you’ll cut this con artist off right now. He’s been promising to marry my daughter for over a year.”

Clint traces the calls to Wilbur’s house and threatens to punch him out, but, of course, peace is quickly made. The central conceit of the series is that only Wilbur knows Ed can talk, so he can never fully explain the mischief he causes. But, in the horse’s hearing, Clint mentions that Midnight is going to work in a film abroad and that he is replacing him with “a pretty little filly.” This causes Ed to relent and nuzzle him affectionately. That relation squared away, Clint supplies Wilbur with a script for the charity show, and in the course of directing it patches up the quarrel between the Posts.

No, it definitely isn’t
Seinfeld
. Indeed, looking at something like
Mr. Ed
today, one can’t help but reflect on how quick the turnover is in pop culture. Connie Hines’s bras turn her breasts into unyielding missiles, the art direction turns her house into an unlived-in, shop-window vision of middle-class life, and the scripts turn her into a child, alternately sulky and hysterical. This is perhaps because her only real function is to make sandwiches for a husband who is a wimp and an incompetent (when Clint at one point slaps him on the shoulder, he nearly falls over; at another moment when he playfully punches the guest star in the stomach, his hand is stung by its hardness). Indeed, the show runs on the irony that its only fully human character—libidinous, cynical, imaginatively unfettered—is, in fact, a horse. In the fifties and early sixties, television dared not give those qualities to any creature who might believably, threateningly, act on them.