Clint Eastwood (62 page)

Fate, however, has a different plan for him. Along his trail waifs and strays keep joining him—among them a sly and funny old Indian (memorably played by Chief Dan George), an Indian woman (Geraldine Keams) who has been cast out by her tribe and rescued by Josey from virtual slavery, an old lady (Paula Trueman) and her granddaughter, Laura Lee (Sondra Locke), whom he saves from the brutal predations of Comancheros, even a snarly but redeemable hound dog. The Locke and Trueman characters are heading for a ranch left to them by their son and brother, and Josey agrees to escort them there. It stands on Indian land and a deadly confrontation with Chief Ten Bears (Will Sampson) and his tribe seems inevitable. But Josey rides out alone to parlay with them. He tells the chief that they are both in their ways outcasts, betrayed by unfeeling government policy, and Ten Bears accepts his proposal of peaceful coexistence. Thereafter, Josey dispatches Terrill, accepts a truce from his former commanding officer and at last settles down to a new life, carving a civilized corner out of the wilderness for himself and his own makeshift tribe.

It was late by the time Daley finished reading the novel that outlined this tale, but he could not resist calling Clint in Carmel to share his discovery. Normally a rather phlegmatic man, Daley had never reacted to anything with such urgency before, and Clint, who would remember him saying, “God, this has so much soul to it,” was intrigued by his enthusiasm. The next day Sonia Chernus endorsed Daley’s opinion. Now Clint wanted to read it immediately, and it was hand-carried to him by air. The following morning he told Daley to secure the rights for Malpaso.

It took Daley two days to reach Carter at the Alabama phone number
he had given in his covering letter. “He was out in the woods somewhere,” the producer recalls. When they finally connected, Daley found himself wrapped in what seemed to be the toils of folksy innocence, though Forrest Carter was not at all what he appeared to be. That, however, would only be revealed much later. For the moment he was, as Daley informed him, a writer in need of an agent, which he offered to help him find. The writer said that wouldn’t be necessary, and called back a day or two later informing the producer that he had engaged someone in the William Morris Agency’s New York literary department to represent him. Since Clint was a Morris client Daley told him there might be a conflict of interest. Carter said he didn’t care, and, in fact, the agency cut a pretty good deal for him, considering his, and his book’s, lack of status—as Daley recalls, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar payment for the screen rights, with ten thousand dollars more due on commencement of principal photography and a final fifteen thousand dollars to be paid out of net profits if they should accrue. With a firm movie sale in hand, Carter’s agent was also able to secure republication of the book, under a new title
(Gone to Texas)
by a mainstream mass-market paperback house.

Chernus asked for, and was granted, a chance to adapt the novel. While she was working on it, Daley got his somewhat-disconcerting first glimpse of Forrest Carter. They had kept in touch as the script proceeded, and one day he told Daley that he was going to be in the neighborhood and would like to drop in and meet him and Clint. The latter was out of town, but Daley assured Carter of a warm welcome. Where are you going to be? he inquired. “Dallas,” came the reply. Geography apparently was not the writer’s strong suit.

He said he’d be arriving the next day, so Daley told Carter to be on the lookout for Art Ramus, who worked for the company as driver, occasional security man and general factotum. He was a large man, a former basketball player close to six feet, eight inches, in height, not to be missed. Carter, however, was not on the flight, and as Ramus was calling in to report this to Daley the writer rang on the second line saying he’d got drunk with some friends the night before, been thrown in jail and missed his plane. He’d be on the next one, he assured Daley. Carter appeared as announced—staggering drunk. Ramus hustled him into a bar, propped him up at a table and once again made for the phone. He told Daley that the man was in no condition to be brought to the office. The tone of their sotto voce conversation suddenly changed when Ramus burst out, “Oh, God, what’s he doing?” “What’s going on? What’s happening?” an alarmed Daley cried. “He’s taking a whiz in the
middle of the Satellite Lounge carpet,” the driver replied, “and here come the cops.”

Ramus hastened to Carter, wrapped his burly arms around him and told the policeman, “Officer, I’ll take care of him—he’s my father.” With that he hustled his charge to his station wagon, made him lie down in the backseat and drove him to a motel, where he administered hot coffee and cold showers until the man sobered up.

The next day Carter appeared in Daley’s office, dressed in cowboy regalia and acting as if nothing had happened. His opening words, however, were: “Well, I don’t wanna take up any more of your time. I guess I’d better go home now.” Daley says he had to physically restrain him so they could discuss
Josey Wales
. This went well enough, and Daley proposed that Carter stay over another night. Though he could not join the party he asked Ramus and two of Malpaso’s secretaries to have dinner with the author. Once again he turned up drunk, and in the course of the meal he drew a knife, held it to one of the women’s throats and told her he loved her and that he would kill them both if she didn’t agree to marry him.

By now it was clear to everyone that they were dealing with sociopathy of some sort, though its full depths would not become known until after the film was released. On the other hand, this strange creature had somehow managed to write this story that they loved, and it fell to Daley to keep him placated. It was not easy. At a certain point Carter was convinced by friends that he was being exploited by a rich and powerful movie star and began demanding more money. Finally, Clint bought a measure of peace by advancing him, out of his own salary, the fifteen thousand dollars due Carter when the picture went into profit.

Prior to its publication in 1976, Carter showed Daley the manuscript of another book,
The Education of Little Tree
, a memoir of what Carter claimed was his orphaned childhood, when he was raised by Native American grandparents. This, too, interested Malpaso, but when he pursued the rights Daley discovered that Carter had optioned them to three other producers. This was fortunate, for they discovered a couple of months after the release of their film that Forrest Carter was, in fact, Asa (Ace) Carter, a virulent segregationist who had organized a particularly vicious subgroup of the Ku Klux Klan and had been an anti-Semitic and red-baiting radio broadcaster as well. Before that he had also been a speechwriter for George Wallace (author, apparently, of his infamous “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” phrase) though he later broke with the Alabama governor because he became, in Carter’s warped view, too liberal on the race issue.

His past history on the further fringes of American lunacy was
exposed by an Alabama newspaperman, Wayne Greenhaw, just as
The Outlaw Josey Wales
was released, and though his widely reprinted story did not harm the movie, it tainted
The Education of Little Tree
, which made no great impression on its initial publication. With its failure, one might have imagined this strange tale would conclude, especially since Carter died of a heart attack three years later.

But this is America, where memories are short and reinvention a national pastime. Somehow,
The Education of Little Tree
made its way to the University of New Mexico Press, which reprinted it in paperback in 1986. Its sentimental representation of Native American culture, with particular emphasis on its ecological soundness, struck a chord in the eighties, and it became a word-of-mouth bestseller. Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg, among others, expressed interest in making a movie of it.

Remarkably, nobody recalled the earlier stories about Carter’s rancid past until 1991, five years after
Little Tree
’s republication. Then Dan T. Carter, who said he might be a distant relative of Asa and is a scholar specializing in the history of modern racial politics in the South,
wrote a piece for the op-ed page of
The New York Times
, reexposing the author. Other commentators expanded on his work, pointing out that though young Asa did have a grandfather of Cherokee descent he never lived with him and that his grandmother had died before he was born. Dan Carter erred factually in his description of Asa Carter as a “friend” of Clint Eastwood, and critically in misreading Clint’s work in general, the adaptation of Carter’s novel specifically. He suggested that the violence of Clint’s movies, among others, besides demeaning popular culture, matched quite naturally with Carter’s racism, though the latter was not manifest—rather the opposite—in the movie version of
Josey Wales
.

Clint was on location, making
Unforgiven
, when this article appeared, and he sent a polite letter to the
Times
, pointing out that he had met the man he knew as Forrest Carter only once. He also observed, “
If Forrest Carter was a racist and a hatemonger who later converted to being a sensitive, understanding human being, that would be most admirable.”

Did Carter’s writing, all of which was apparently completed during a silent withdrawal from political life that began in 1971, represent a genuine conversion and atonement? Or was it an elaborate hoax? One thinks of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum about the test of first-rate intelligence being its ability to hold opposed thoughts simultaneously and still function; here was a third-rate mind—and a very disturbed one at that—managing the same trick. Bob Daley observed some of this schizophrenia
firsthand. He saw a decent side to the man, reflected in warm, supportive letters he received from Carter on the death of his father. He also saw vicious anti-Semitism, directed at William Morris agents, when the arguments about money started up. He finally came to the conclusion that Carter was basically an opportunist, willfully burying—but not necessarily abandoning—his racism so that he could rejoin decent society.

One inescapably imagines the adventures of Josey Wales, this Southern sympathizer, this “hard-put and desperate man” (as one character describes him in the screenplay), this outcast redeeming himself, as a wish-fulfilling fantasy on Carter’s part. One of his novel’s subtexts, a distrust of government, which first brutally betrays and then obsessively harries his hero, would seem to reflect the author’s profound suspicion of federal authority. One could speculate as well that the idea, implicit in the book, that ordinary people, left to their own devices, can work out their conflicts peaceably—a metaphoric expression of what had been a typical Southern response to federal enforcement of civil rights laws—reflects, in housebroken form, one of the author’s core beliefs.

Knowing nothing of the author’s racist past, these notions, in the benign form the book presented them, spoke clearly to Clint—particularly to his wariness about government—though needless to say, they were not for him, as they were for Carter, a coded argument against racial integration. When he discusses this film, Clint rarely fails to mention that it was developed in the aftermath of those two great betrayals of trust by American authority, the Vietnam War and Watergate.

For whatever reason, he was unusually angry—and open—in his contempt for statism at this time. Shortly after
The Outlaw Josey Wales
was released, when he was in England promoting the film, he was quoted as saying: “
Today we live in a welfare-oriented society, and people expect more, more from Big Daddy government, more from Big Daddy charity. That philosophy never got you anywhere. I worked for every crust of bread I ever ate.” He was also feeling isolated, lacking, as he said “the gift it takes to enjoy fame.” When a trade-paper reporter asked him why blacks tended to be such enthusiastic supporters of his work, Clint said: “
I suppose they see me as an outcast. I play a lot of outcasts.”

Some of those feelings, more ambiguously stated, are certainly to be found in the film. But hard-put and desperate though he may be, Josey Wales retains a dry, wary, saving sense of humor. It is only in his climactic parlay with Ten Bears that his disgust with government is articulated. But the fact that officialdom speaks in “double-tongues” is a conventional, even stylized, trope in such movie encounters. We expect and accept it quite equably.

Looking back on the film now, Clint insists that it was the other aspects of Carter’s story that provided its largest attractions. The most obvious of these was “
the saga of it”—its movement across vast landscapes, the rich variety of characters and situations it encompassed. None of his other westerns had, or would have, these qualities. Nor had they heretofore offered a “total chronology”—a motivating back story with significant emotional development proceeding from it: “I’d always played the guy who appeared out of nowhere.” He also liked the way it portrayed Native Americans neither sentimentally nor as savages. It treated them with “a certain humanness that we hadn’t seen in the movies in a long time.” In particular in Chief Dan George’s marvelous performance as Lone Watie, who often functions as a kind of chorus commenting on the action, the movie grants to at least one Native American a quality almost never attributed to his race by popular culture, a wise and ironic sense of humor.

Finally, however, it was the reconciliatory note struck by the film that constituted its most significant virtue in Clint’s eyes. Entirely aware of the parallels the film draws between the Reconstruction era and the post-Vietnam era, Clint insists that he intended, as well, a more generally pacifistic message—“It was just any war, any war you can name in history.” In this connection, he raises a familiar irony: Man, the planet’s most intelligent creature, is also the one that “can raise the most mayhem.” He adds: “At the time I felt that it was a statement that mankind has to find a better solution than just battling themselves into the ground.” If not, “there’ll be no one left, eventually; we will have gone the way of
T. rex
and the rest of the dinosaurs.”