Clint Eastwood (68 page)

The notice that summarized this turnabout was Tom Allen’s in the
Village Voice
. Clint’s movies, he said, were beginning to contain a certain “
sophisticated character interplay within spectacles pitched low to the mass audience.” Noting Locke’s “full partnership” in the action, and terming her work “the most naturally unaffected” of the year, he also observed the emergence, “slow and crude,” of a new Eastwood character, “a vulnerable male who needs a woman to lean on.” He called “the plodding weakness” of Shockley “a much more audacious concept than the preening invincibility of Harry Callahan.”

Why he and some of his colleagues chose this, the most relentlessly violent of all Clint’s movies, instead of the more thoughtful and complex
Josey Wales
, as the occasion for surrender is impossible to say. But this much is certain: A rude beast had been perceived slouching toward the Bethlehem of the New Masculinity, waiting to be reborn in more cuddlesome form. From now on his progress would be watched with slow but steadily increasing sympathy.

In the months immediately following
The Gauntlet
’s release Clint did his best to maintain the fiction that all was still right with his marriage, that his relationship with Sondra Locke—about which increasingly serious rumors were beginning to circulate—was simply that of two mutually respectful professionals who enjoyed one another’s company at work. He spent a lot of time in Carmel that winter, and he invited journalists from significant publications into his new home, where Maggie submitted to brief interviews with them. There may have been a certain lack of warmth in such comments as they offered about their marriage, but at least it was being placed on display.

Locke, too, did what she could to allay the gossip. In
People
, for example, she said: “
Everybody would love for us to say, ‘It’s all true, we’re madly in love.’ … Even if it were true—which it isn’t—I certainly wouldn’t talk about it.” Asked about her husband’s reaction to the rumors,
she said, “We don’t sit down and talk it out. He figures if there’s any truth to it, I’ll be the first to tell him; if there’s anything to know, he’ll know it.” The most she would concede was that “when the actor you’re developing a rapport with is directing, you feel much more camaraderie about scenes, and you can relate in a much tighter way.”

But the very fact that the magazine dared report rumors about them irritated Clint, and he fired off a letter to the editor that read, in full: “
I have just finished reading your untalented article on a very talented subject—Sondra Locke. It’s sad that you found it necessary to indulge in adolescent titillation.”

But he was living a lie, which he now admits. For he knew that his relationship with Sondra was different in character from his previous affairs and that his marriage was, in all but name, over. Indeed, it’s likely that it had been, in his mind anyway, for a couple of years.

It was, he says, the splendid Carmel house, the construction of which had consumed seven years of their lives, that created irreconcilable differences between him and Maggie. It was a showcase home, the only hugely impressive one (as opposed to the purely comfortable) he has ever occupied. A redwood-and-Douglas-fir crescent set on twelve acres overlooking the bay, it had four bedrooms, a split-level living room with two fireplaces and all the other accoutrements of success—Jacuzzi, gym, projection room. His mother’s old upright piano was built into a specially created niche.

Given Clint’s long and frequent absences, the house became very much Maggie’s project. That troubled him. He started to feel cut out of her consultations with designers and builders. As he began to see it, he was the one working hard to pay for a lifestyle growing ever more expansive, and he felt his wishes and opinions were being ignored. He says they came to crisis, ludicrously enough, over a detail—the placement of a showerhead. The one in the master bathroom was, he thought, too low for a man of his height.

Needless to say, they patched up this silly quarrel, but the issues it symbolized were not so easily ameliorated. Sondra or no Sondra, they were drifting toward an event not uncommon in the prospering classes—the dream-house divorce. In this scenario, the new home is supposed to compensate for years of hard work, sacrifice and disappointment and at the same time signal arrival at unshakable stability. When it does not, the inevitable question arises: “All that for this?”

Indeed, what matter decor and amenities when the things that were wrong before you moved in remain wrong? By this time, according to Don Kincade, Clint’s old friend, who would remain affectionately loyal to both parties in the future, Maggie could no longer deny his infidelities
—and, denials or no, this latest one was far more obvious than the others. Fritz Manes was staying in the Eastwoods’ Los Angeles home in this period, his own marriage in temporary disarray. When Maggie called there looking for Clint when he was out with Sondra, Manes tried to cover for him—not very plausibly.

Clint, however, maintained his silence about Sondra, merging it into his larger silences, which surely played their part, too, in the sundering of this marriage. In recent years he has become a little more emotionally open, but this has always been hard for him. “Women,” Clint says, a sort of sad befuddlement in his tone, “always want to know what you’re thinking.” It is a mystery to him, this desire to penetrate the deepest reserves of his privacy. It is equally a mystery to him why anyone would think that bringing things up out of this murk and discussing them would profit either party. At our cores, he believes, for whatever reasons, we are what we are, and there is nothing much to be done about that—beyond simply accepting the hard facts of personality. For this realist, that may be the ultimate reality. For a marriage, of course, it is the ultimate peril.

One will never know from them precisely why or when Clint and Maggie finally agreed to abandon their marriage. But in early 1979 the Eastwoods would announce their legal separation. Clint was now routinely referred to in the press as one of the world’s richest actors, and the property settlement that followed a year later reflected the truth of those reports. Maggie, it was said, received at least $25 million under this agreement. In the years thereafter, they restored their friendship. Clint has recently said that their relationship after marriage was much better than it was during it, and their son, Kyle, has said: “It wasn’t bad as divorces go. There was no weird custody thing. We lived with my mom and saw my dad whenever we wanted to.” It seems to have been a little harder on Alison, then only seven years old, her bond with her father not as fully formed as her brother’s was (they began sharing a passion for jazz when Kyle was very young). But no one who knows Clint has ever doubted the strength of his affection for his children or his eagerness for them to share in his life, which meant sharing his work. As a little girl Alison was often on his sets, frequently wielding the slate that marks the beginning of a take. Each child would eventually be given a major role in one of his pictures.

If early in 1978 Clint was still being circumspect about the state of his marriage, there was nothing cautious about his choice of projects, for
this was the year he costarred with an orangutan.
Every Which Way but Loose
had come to him through one of his secretaries, whose husband hoped to produce the Jeremy Joe Kronsberg script. According to Manes no one at first thought of it as a likely prospect for Clint. Its proprietors hoped he might pass the script on to Burt Reynolds. Riding the seventies crossover of country music and cultural style into the mainstream, Reynolds had just had a $100 million grosser with
Smokey and the Bandit
. But Clint, as it turned out, was not uninterested in doing something basic and blue collar.

Feelings about
Every Which Way but Loose
were, however, decidedly mixed among Clint’s advisers. Daley read it and loathed it; Manes read it and liked it—“this is us growing up in Oakland,” he remembers saying, not entirely inaccurately. Lenny Hirshan thought it was awful, as did Bruce Ramer, Clint’s attorney, and most of the studio brass. Sondra, however, confirmed Clint’s impression that there was “something hip about it in a strange way.” It was “the entertainment piece” he had been looking for, full of action, but all of it comic and more overtly subversive of his macho image than anything he had yet tried.

Clint’s character, Philo Beddoe, lives in a tumbledown house with his pal Orville (Geoffrey Lewis), Orville’s harridan mom (played with wonderful relish by Ruth Gordon) and his pet ape, Clyde (who was played mostly by an immature male named Manis, though two other orangs were used for special tricks). Philo makes his living as a trucker and as a bare-knuckle boxer, under Orville’s dim management. He falls in love with aristocratic-seeming country-western singer Lynn Halsey-Taylor (Locke), who sleeps with hunks who happen to catch her fancy, but is also mysteriously committed to a sexually enigmatic male friend, to whom she returns after her fling with Philo (art imitating life, Clint thought). He decides to pursue her, accompanied by Clyde, Orville and the latter’s girlfriend, Echo (Beverly D’Angelo). In the course of this odyssey he fights a few bouts, incurs the enmity of a pair of dim-witted cops and a gang of over-the-hill bikers who call themselves the Black Widows, but doesn’t get the girl.

This sounds more coherent than it plays: The construction of
Every Which Way but Loose
was every which way but tight, except in one particular—Philo’s hugely comic, strangely touching relationship with Clyde. The orang is gentle, cuddly, somewhat mysterious, occasionally mischievous, completely faithful and, above all, a good listener whose needs are uncomplicated and easily satisfied. Putting sex aside, he offered everything guys dream of finding in gals and rarely do; everything guys hope to find in other guys and sometimes do.

The terms of their endearment are established early on, when Clyde
gets in trouble by stealing Oreos from Orville’s mother. After placating her, Philo encounters his pal and points a menacing finger at him. The ape throws up his arms in surrender. Philo goes “bang,” and Clyde flops down, pretending to be shot. Oh—somebody’s sending up his image and, as the movie proceeds, masculine ways in general. When Orville lets Clyde have a few brews in a bar, Philo is outraged: “How many times have I told you—I don’t want him drinking beer except on Saturday night.” When Philo takes Clyde to meet Lynn he lectures him: “Clyde, Clyde, you’re going to meet a lady now. I want you to handle it. No spittin’, pissin’, fartin’ or pickin’ your ass.”

All that goofiness aside the picture actually has a point to make. At the end, Philo throws a big fight he’s in the process of winning, for the best of reasons. He doesn’t want to be a marked man, somebody everyone feels obliged to challenge. Maybe, one thinks, he’s smarter than he looks. And maybe this movie is smarter than it looks. Its charm lies precisely in its obliviousness to its own “hipness,” its refusal to nudge and wink at the audience. It lets them recognize that quality—or not—in their way, in their own good time.

For Clint, the charm was working with Manis. The creature was part of an animal act owned and trained by Bob Berosini, who mostly worked Las Vegas and had been recommended to Clint by the director of a primate lab he consulted, and he turned out to be, for Clint, something of a soulmate.

“The orang is an introvert, and the chimp is an extrovert. Chimps love to perform, roll their lips back and do all that kind of stuff. But orangs are kind of cool. They love to study things, and they’re kind of shy. You have to coax them into it. I didn’t get overly friendly. I’d always pretend I didn’t notice him, then he’d start studying me, because I wasn’t looking at him and staring him down. I’d feel him start picking at my ear and looking in my ear, you know, doing little things like they do to you. And always grabbing my Adam’s apple. Eventually he got to really like me. In fact, it used to make Berosini jealous, because sometimes he’d be calling him and I’d call him and he’d come running to me.” This relationship worked so well, as Clint admits, because Manis was young and innocent. You can’t, he says, work this way with a fully mature orangutan, because “they start exercising dominance. They’re liable to take your head off when you least expect it.”