Clint Eastwood (32 page)

But in the end we do not (and should not) attend
For a Few Dollars More
for comparison’s sake. It represents, after all, one-seventh of Leone’s total directorial output, and by no means its most negligible part. It is, in fact, part of a coherent continuum, demonstrating that the tone, style and point of view presented in
A Fistful of Dollars
were not accidental or opportunistic, and suggesting that the director was capable of sustaining and developing all of them still further.

What is true of Leone is also true of Clint. The first film sketched, in bold strokes, a screen character—basically a self-contained ironist, worldly-wise but not world-weary, determined to pursue his destiny and equally determined not to define it, or himself, verbally—that was also capable of enrichment. There is something of his Leone character in much of everything he has done since. And when there is not, he (and we) are conscious of him going against its grain, so that this early work is always in some way part of his self-definition on-screen. The “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” Clint, the “Make my day” Clint, have their beginnings in the brutally frank figure who comically tallies his profits at the end of
For a Few Dollars More
.

By the time he completed this second film with Leone, Clint was keenly aware that as an actor he had finally found a comfortable stride. That he was doing something that gave him pleasure and confidence carried the promise of freeing him from the sterilities in which he had been trapped for so many television seasons. He was at last being permitted to act his age. And now here comes a representative of
Rawhide
eager to extend that privilege.

Ben Brady, who had previously produced
Perry Mason
and
Have Gun, Will Travel
, had now been hired as
Rawhide
’s latest executive producer, and given what appears to have been virtually a free hand in revamping the show. His first, and largest, decision was to fire Eric Fleming and to promote Rowdy Yates to trail boss. He flew to Europe to discuss the change with Clint, whose immediate response was “You mean fire the wrong guy? Keep Fleming and get rid of me. You really don’t need me. I would prefer to be out of the show.” Working on
For a Few Dollars More
, which he could see was good, and to which there was no bar to wide and virtually immediate international release, had emboldened him.

But Brady, “a nice guy,” remained adamant. “It was just the old reverse
psychology,” Clint comments, “the more you ask to get out, the more they want you to be there.” Apparently, though, he exacted a good price for his continued presence, a salary guaranteeing him payment for a full season’s work, even if the show was canceled before all the episodes were shot (the trades later reported a settlement of Clint’s final
Rawhide
contract for $119,000).

There were other changes, too. The veteran John Ireland (who was the gunslinger Cherry Valance in
Red River
, and thus in a sense represented a return to basics) signed on as Rowdy’s deputy trail boss—and Fleming’s replacement as the wise older hand—Jed Colby. Rowdy’s old role as the perpetually impetuous youth was approximated by a young English actor, David Watson, whose pip-pip locutions as a radically displaced person offered some broad comic possibilities. Perhaps the most interesting new casting was that of Raymond St. Jacques as one of the drovers, Simon Blake. He was the first black man to have a regular role on a television western, and doubtless an element of sixties tokenism went into this casting. But he was also an imposing actor, less anonymous than most of the cowboys had been, and offered some potentially interesting dramatic possibilities that the show did not live long enough to exploit.

To make room for these characters, other actors besides Fleming were dispensed with and Paul Brinegar professed “
utter shock” at these changes. “They have decimated the cast,” he said. Fleming, naturally, took a contrary position. He saw his dismissal purely as a money-saving move. “They were paying me a million dollars a year,” he cheerfully lied. Clint expressed no pleasure at his “promotion.” He asked a reporter: “Why should I be pleased? I used to carry half the shows. Now I carry them all. For the same money.” To another journalist he complained: “
In the first show of the season they don’t even explain how Rowdy Yates is promoted from ramrod to trail boss.” Nor did he much care for his new role. It was fine to play a mature male, but not this one. He is, in his nature, a loner, and even in his fifties and sixties, when father figures are age appropriate, he has not yet chosen to play one.

In the end, though, it was probably not these changes, radical though they were, that undid
Rawhide
. It was primarily victimized in its final season by a catastrophic scheduling error. As Clint would tell a reporter early in 1966, “
It had been the network’s only show to get a rating on Friday night; so they switched us to Tuesday, opposite a show with the same type of male audience,
Combat.”
The redesigned series languished for thirteen episodes in its new slot, then was canceled permanently. No attempt was made to bring Rowdy’s or anybody else’s
story to a formal conclusion. The 217th episode, a rerun, simply aired in its regular spot on January 4, 1966, and then the program vanished as unceremoniously as it had begun.

Clint was glad to escape the grind at last, and his future looked more promising than ever. For as
Rawhide
was stumbling to its end,
For a Few Dollars More
opened in Italy as strongly as its predecessor had. By the turn of the year it was on its way to a gross there that would exceed the takings of
A Fistful of Dollars
by some $400,000—a pattern that would obtain throughout the world over the next few years. It proved the success of the first film was not accidental, and it made Clint someone to reckon with, someone on whom an American company could sensibly take a chance. That winter United Artists agreed with Grimaldi to supply substantial backing (somewhere between $1.2 to $1.6 million) for the next Leone-Eastwood collaboration,
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
, which would be epic in length (three hours long in its original Italian version, two hours and twenty-eight minutes in the version most of the world saw) as well as cost. (In addition to his $250,000 fee Clint was to receive a percentage of the western hemisphere net.) As negotiations for that film proceeded, UA’s head of production, David Picker, was also obtaining rights to
For a Few Dollars More
. Clint remembers running into him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, hearing this news and urging him to acquire the full set by pursuing
A Fistful of Dollars
as well. The conflict with
Yojimbo
’s proprietors was still unresolved, but as a neutral party, whose only interest was making money for all concerned, the American company might be able to settle it, Clint thought. This it eventually did by granting distribution rights to the film in many Asian territories to the Japanese, in return for which they ceased legal actions against it.

In the meantime, Clint received an intriguing—even flattering—offer from Europe. Dino de Laurentiis was putting together a film entitled
Le Streghe (The Witches)
as a sort of vanity production for his wife, Silvana Mangano. She had become the first of the postwar Italian sex symbols with her appearance in
Bitter Rice
in 1948, but her international standing had been diminished by the rise of Gina Lollabrigida and Sophia Loren, who was married to Carlo Ponti, de Laurentiis’s erstwhile partner and now his rival as a high-rolling international producer. The latter’s plan was to make an anthology film—a form popular in Europe in this period—composed of five short stories, which would display several facets of his wife’s talent and, perhaps, revive her career. To this
end he recruited some of Italy’s leading filmmakers (Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, Franco Rossi and Vittorio De Sica) to direct the segments. He also planned to employ first-class players to support Mangano—among them, in the event, Annie Girardot, Francisco Rabal, Alberto Sordi, Toto and Pietro Rossi. Given the huge Italian success of Clint’s westerns—by now they were calling him “El Cigarello” there—De Laurentiis believed he belonged among them.

When a scenario (not a full script) of his segment arrived, Clint found it amusing even though it was “never a commercial item—you knew that.” Still, in its little way, it presented an interesting opportunity—a chance to get out of period costume and play a contemporary male. It also offered him an opportunity to subvert radically his newly created image by playing a middle-management banker who was in every respect the opposite of El Cigarello—passive, impotent, self-excusing, even a bit of a whiner.

This performance is the best early evidence of Clint’s confidence in his own identity, his feeling that even before it was fully established he could toy with his image without endangering his audience’s loyalty. The project had other attractions, too. One of them, certainly, was the chance to spend another month on his own in Rome as the era of la dolce vita wound down. More important to him were his costar and his director. Mangano’s wonderfully sensual performance in
Bitter Rice—
“in which I fell in love with her”—remained a vivid memory, and the idea that he was being sought after to play opposite a star he had long ago admired from afar pleased him deeply. So did the fact that De Sica would be directing his segment. One of the founders of neorealism (
Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D.
) he was unquestionably one of the great figures of the postwar renaissance in Italian filmmaking. And so it went, first-class all the way: Cesare Zavattini, De Sica’s collaborator on his most memorable films, cowrote Clint’s segment; the cinematographer of which was to be the gifted Giuseppe Rotunno. Clint was also flattered to hear that he had been competing for his role with no less a figure than Sean Connery, then at the height of his success in the 007 films.

De Laurentiis flew to New York and paid Clint’s expenses to meet him there in order to place an interesting choice before him: a flat fee of $25,000 for a month’s work or $20,000 and a Ferrari. Thinking to himself he would never buy a new Ferrari, he told his agents to accept the second alternative, realizing as well “that there’s no ten percent on that Ferrari.”

So it was back to Rome, sooner than he anticipated, for an experience
that was as good, if not better, than he had anticipated, in a movie that was, overall, much less good than it might have been. Clint’s segment appeared last in the release print of
The Witches
, a tribute to the fact that, slight as it was, scarcely more than an anecdote, it was more smoothly polished and narratively more comprehensible than the other pieces. It was entitled “A Night Like Any Other,” and in it, he and Mangano appear as a husband and wife, their marriage having settled into dull routine, enduring yet another excruciating evening at home. The night is enlivened for her (and the audience) by her distinctly Felliniesque reveries about more exciting times past, and her equally wild sexual fantasies. In the last of these she is seen sashaying down the Via Veneto, followed by a crowd of eager men. She leads them to a stadium where Clint appears in a black cowboy outfit, shooting at her admirers. Later, inside the arena, she does a very discrete striptease to the baying delight of the all-male crowd while her husband is observed perched on a light pole, dressed in mufti, carrying a gun, which he eventually turns on himself.

In the domestic scenes, where Mangano wears a pair of particularly awful glasses, she gets to do dowdiness and exasperation. In the fantasy passages she gets to be glamorous and parodically sexy. (What range! we are supposed to exclaim.) Clint gets to do a real character turn, wearing nerdy horn-rimmed glasses (no Rock Hudson to stop him now) and a three-piece suit, talking in an exhausted monotone, avoiding eye contact with her. An utter blank, totally without intellectual or emotional resources, he obsessively complains about the traffic in Rome and the “honk-honk-honk” of its horns, is obsequious to and resentful of his boss, but unable to do anything to improve his working life. He also vacuously attributes the violence of the world to the failure of its population to get enough sleep, and as if to prove the point he actually nods off as his wife hectors him. When they finally retire to bed and she tries to seduce him, he recommends that she calm herself with chamomile tea as he sinks into oblivious slumber.