Clint Eastwood (44 page)

Nor was that the end of the film’s “homages” to Clint’s movie past. Ennio Morricone supplied its score, and the visual connection between Hogan and the Man with No Name is stressed. He appears in his first sequence unshaven, wearing a serape-like vest and smoking a cigar. The three men assaulting Sister Sara are also out of the Leone school; third-world second heavies, if you will—dark, dirty, visibly Hispanic and intent
on defiling a figure they take to be a holy woman. (Siegel would later write that he intended to cast Americans in these roles, but that Rackin, trying to save a few pesos, insisted on hiring locals for the parts.)

Most significantly, Hogan confronts them with No-Nameish cool. After a minimal exchange of verbiage he shoots two of them, whereupon the survivor grabs the almost-naked Sara to use as a shield. Hogan, however, pulls out a stick of dynamite, lights its fuse with his cigar and tosses it at their feet, confronting the bad man with a cruel choice: If he lets go of Sara and runs, he will be shot; if he holds on to her he will be blown up. He runs, Hogan shoots and then ambles casually down from his position on a rise to cut off the fuse with his knife, his pace being especially irritating to Boetticher, who found it—who would dispute him?—unrealistic.

So is the dialogue that follows: “They said they were going to kill me.” “Well, they’re not saying much now.” It is the harbinger of many similarly brusque exchanges, with Hogan, in general, getting most of the toppers. She’s always either blithering idealism or quavering alarm, thus ever in need of a sharp slap with a smart line. These are well enough written, however, and since incident follows incident—they range from a confrontation with a rattlesnake to an Indian attack to the demolition of a railroad trestle to the final, suspensefully managed attack on the fort—at a very satisfactory clip, the movie is, in its entirely unambitious and predictable way, entertaining. A director like Siegel can always provide canny professional crispness in lieu of conviction.

Stanley Kauffmann, when he reviewed the movie, was obviously aware of Boetticher’s complaints, but argued that newfangled stylistic tics or no, the film was basically “
an attempt to keep the old Hollywood alive—a place where nuns
can
turn out to be disguised whores, where heroes
can
always have a stick of dynamite under their vests, where every story has not one but two cute finishes.” Clint too was aware that the movie had a certain lineage. “
It’s kind of
The African Queen
gone West,” he told a journalist at the time. It also owed something to another John Huston film,
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
, his desert-island fantasy, set in World War II, in which Robert Mitchum (whom Boetticher said was one of the actors he had in mind as he wrote) played marine roughneck to Deborah Kerr’s nun. Clint’s attitude toward Boetticher’s script and its revisions was—and remains—quite neutral. “I read his script,” he says, “and it really wasn’t any better. It was a little different interpretation.”

That reinterpretation was not easily arrived at. This was a rugged shoot, not made any more comfortable by MacLaine’s temperament. She is an actress who tends to question a director rather closely about every shot: Why do you want me to move now instead of then? Do we
really need this line? Wouldn’t it be better if …? And she drove Siegel crazy. In her defense, it must be said that the location in and around Cocoyoc, thirty miles from Cuernevaca, was particularly difficult for her. She did most of her own stunts, some of which were quite taxing, and she proved to be especially sensitive to sunburn, so it was necessary for someone to trail her around with a parasol whenever they were shooting outside, which was, of course, most of the time. Moreover, she was by nature a nightbird, not entirely happy to arise early in order to catch the morning light—particularly, as Clint recalls, when her lover of the time, Sander Vanocur, the television newsman, visited her. Eventually she became ill and caused the picture to shut down for a few days.

But Clint related to her affably enough. “Shirley was great fun,” he recalls. And though she scarcely discusses this film in her memoir of her acting life, she did write, in a picture caption, “I loved Clint even though he was a Republican.” All of her troubles were with Siegel, and they came to a head one day when, in order to hold everything he wanted in shot, he asked her to dismount from a mule on its off-side. This offended her sense of realism, a fight ensued, and she stormed off the set, with even Clint losing his customary cool and yelling imprecations after her. Siegel ordered him to stay out of it and then quit the set himself, intending, he said later, to quit the picture as well.

But that evening MacLaine knocked at his door to tender an apology, he invited her in for a session in which they both vented their grievances, and peace of a sort was restored, though even a few years later Siegel was still rankled by her. In 1974 he told his biographer, Stuart Kaminsky, “
It’s hard to feel any great warmth for her. She’s too … unfeminine. She has too much balls. She’s very hard.” A couple of decades later, when he came to write his autobiography, Siegel’s opinion of her had softened somewhat. After their peace parley, he reports, “
she was a doll. When working, she was most cooperative. My major regret was that I never really sat down and found out what made her tick.”

Rackin, however, he never did forgive. Their problems had begun in Hollywood when he had inserted a page in the shooting script bearing this ominous legend: “
There are to be no changes in the script, without exception, unless you obtain the oral or written approval of the Producer, Martin Rackin.” He and Siegel were discussing this directive in the latter’s office one day when Clint happened by. The director handed the script to him, pointing out the offending sentence. Clint eyed him blankly and said, “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

He got the reaction he expected from Siegel—barely suppressed apoplexy—then wandered toward a window, turned slowly back to face the two men and said, “There’s one way, Don, to handle situations like
this.” At which point he ripped the page bearing the producer’s order out of the script, crumpled it up and tossed it across the room.

This effectively backed Rackin out of the film’s creative process. But it did not prevent him from interfering in the production process. Trying to cut corners, he refused to pay for movie-trained horses, which do not shy around equipment. Riding one of them, Clint was thrown when a camera boom, swinging alongside him, spooked the animal. Later, when it came time to shoot the raid on the fort, Siegel found the set, on which Rackin had supervised construction, flimsy and inadequate. About the only argument he won was for his choice as cinematographer, the great Gabriel Figueroa, who had shot Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films and who, on Clint’s recommendation, would be employed on his next movie, too.

Clint was loyal to his director in all of his disputes with Rackin, and they worked together companionably, with Clint full of suggestions, usually proposing the more complicated, time-consuming shot, feeling that if his friend had a flaw as a director it was his low-budget habit of opting for the simplest, cheapest setup. “
He can dream up absolutely impossible shots,” Siegel told a visiting journalist, “but the trouble is that they sound good.” Of course, he slyly added, when they didn’t work, they were not discussed subsequently.

Overall, the filmmaking process was very similar to the one they had endured on
Coogan’s Bluff
—messy, contentious, improvisational. And the results were about the same, too—modest profitability and mixed reviews when the film was released a year later. Clint, in the critics’ view, had settled down nicely after his boyish Italian escapades. If some agreed with Kauffmann about the regressiveness of
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, others found in it a certain classic grace. “
A movie lover’s dream,” Roger Greenspun called it in
The New York Time
’s. “I’m not sure it is a great movie, but it is
very
good, and it stays in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do.”

Many of the more serious reviewers tended to see
Sister Sara
as they had
Coogan’s Bluff
, more as a Siegel film than as an Eastwood movie, but in their eyes that at least placed Clint in good company. This was useful to him, because on the
Sister Sara
location, for the first time in Clint’s experience, the press flocked around, more interested in him than in any other aspect of the production, making their first crude sketches of his off-screen persona. Indeed, it could be argued that over the long run the movie is most interesting as the avatar of his primary celebrity image.

Clint was not very helpful either to the reporters or to himself. He was obviously ill at ease in their presence, and innocent about their needs. Every star eventually has to supply the press with a basic personal narrative to work from, something that can support a simple, attractive image, and Clint did not yet have his story straight. In order to present him to their readers in an easily comprehended form, the journalists were obliged to adapt one of their standard formats to his case.

They settled on a variation on what might be called the starlet-phenomenon yarn. In this tale, an attractive, but not obviously talented, individual—usually a woman—suddenly, mysteriously, seizes the public’s imagination, and the press, looking to find shrewd manipulation, either by the new star or by that creature’s handlers, seeks explanations. When the press’s subject is not forthcoming, or appears to be as puzzled as everyone else by his or her good fortune, much is made of this inarticulateness, and a sort of “lucky stiff” text emerges.

Clint’s natural wariness with strangers was deepened by the fact that most of what had been written about him had been contemptuous reviews. He had no reason to think interviewers would be more kindly disposed. “
You’ll find the conversation pours like glue,” one frustrated reporter told another as the latter approached her task in Mexico. To Wayne Warga of the Los Angeles
Times
, who wrote two pieces about him that summer, Clint said, “
Actors have their bag, and journalists have theirs. I’m not that talkative, and their job is to get me talking. It may just become chic to blast hell out of me.” Then he waited a beat and added, “So permit me to introduce myself”—in a dead-on imitation of Bela Lugosi.

But that moment aside, he didn’t really know how to let his playful, self-satirizing side out, and his interrogators, unaware of its existence, didn’t know how to bring it out. Some of them talked about his fitness regimen, some about his fondness for cars, and one of them, Aljean Harmetz of
The New York Times
, dug an observant quote out of Irving Leonard, who paired “
his fussiness about his cars and his body.”

The biggest news out of Cocoyoc was the revelation of his humane relationship with the lower phyla. It had once or twice been hinted at previously, but an English journalist who had not succeeded in getting more than a couple of connected sentences on him was on the set one night when a moth “
as big as a bat” suddenly dived into a shot. Many hands grabbed at the creature, which was held captive in a pool of light. One grip, “stamping, swearing, swatting,” was particularly eager to kill it, until Clint shouted, “Leave it, leave it, they need killers like you in Vietnam.” He moved forward, elbowed the man aside and “then cupping his hands gently he guided the moth into the safety of the dark.”
The reporter quoted him thus: “I think violence of that kind is so unnecessary, don’t you? It wasn’t doing any harm.”

Other stories like it emerged from this shoot: Clint insisting that the resident armadillo be released when it refused to eat in captivity; Clint seeing a bunch of iguanas brought to the set “strung on a string like a bunch of bananas” and buying them for five pesos and releasing them in the wild. They presaged a string of such anecdotes that have appeared through the years: Clint rescuing a drowning bee from his swimming pool, Clint feeding rose petals to a pet turtle named Fred in his backyard, Clint warning his daughter, Alison, not to step on a cockroach on the set of
Tightrope
because it, too, has its place on the planet. In 1969 Harmetz got him to trace his attitude back to his grandmother’s farm, where he said he learned to identify with animals “
Dr. Doolittle style.”

It played well. It was the human-interest touch journalists are always looking for. But it did not vitiate their basic lucky-hunk line. His famous self-appraisal as a bum and a drifter, quoted by Warga, stems from this shoot, and its follow-up—“
As it turns out, I’m lucky, because I’m going to end up financially well-off for a drifter”—supported the idea that, purely fortuitously, he was forging a potent link with young working-class males like himself. Playing the kind of autonomous figures they admired, he was himself achieving the kind of autonomy they dreamed of achieving.

Clint did not discourage this take—it seemed to satisfy most inquiries while leaving his privacy intact—and neither did Maggie. She told Harmetz, “
Clint gives the feeling of a man who controls his own destiny,” an idea he expanded on slightly: “My appeal is the characters I play. A superhuman character who has all the answers is double cool, exists on his own without society or the help of society’s police forces. A guy sits in the audience, he’s twenty-five years old, and he’s scared stiff about what he’s going to do with his life. He wants to have that self-sufficient thing he sees up there on the screen.” To this thought he appended somewhat surprisingly, somewhat gratuitously, another, darker one: “But it will never happen that way. Man is always dreaming of being an individual, but man is really a flock animal.”