Clint Eastwood (86 page)

Nothing came of it. Nothing came of any of the thirty-odd projects she proposed to Warners. They were subsequently represented by studio spokesmen as gloomy and unsympathetic, without significant popular appeal. Locke said that her efforts to see material the studio owned that she might undertake were rebuffed. After her contract expired, she sued Warners, charging breach of contract and good faith as well as sexual discrimination and fraud.

This action was summarily dismissed in 1995, but Locke brought another suit against Clint, charging fraud, seeking some $2 million in damages and claiming she would not have agreed to their earlier settlement had she known he was standing behind her Warner Bros. contract. For, she contended, his underwriting virtually guaranteed that the studio would not move forward with any of her projects.

Her reasoning was that Clint was ultimately liable for all her development
costs if she made no pictures, but that if she made one, those costs would be shifted to its budget and borne by Warner Bros. Ergo, it was in the studio’s interest not to produce anything of hers and to let Clint cover the cost of her contract. At the very least, she came to believe that the production hurdle was higher for her, by however many feet or inches $1.5 million translated to, than it was for other producers.

Possibly so, possibly not. She reckoned without Clint’s clear-cut economic interest in her success and Warner’s close ties to him. Its executives would not have been eager to stick one of their most valuable assets with a $1.5 million tab. That’s chump change in studio terms—many films carry much higher development charges—thus nothing that would greatly influence its decisions. It can also be said that it is not uncommon for very little to develop from development deals, and that Clint paid a steep price for this failed compromise; most, if not all, of the studio’s expenses were ultimately deducted from his
Unforgiven
takings. Worse, he was forced to settle Locke’s civil suit for an undisclosed sum in September 1996, when it became clear that a jury was going to find for her. In interviews with the press, jurors made it clear that Clint’s angry appearance on the stand, where he made much of Locke’s earlier campaign against him in the gossip press, combined with her well-projected air of victimization, weighed heavily with them. In her testimony she had referred to Clint as “
the unfightable one” and in her comments to reporters later she called hers a victory for “the little person.” Assuredly it was a loss for a powerful and manifestly aggravated man to whom it was easy to impute devious motives.

All of that was far in the future in the spring of 1989, when contentiousness between Clint and Sondra was at its height. His other preoccupations included performing his hostly duties for the
Gary Cooper: American Life, American Legend
documentary (one of his rare television appearances), preparing
White Hunter, Black Heart
, which was scheduled to begin shooting in Africa in June, and readying
Pink Cadillac
for release.

Neither the critical reception nor the box-office performance of the latter would do anything to lighten his mood. Directed by Buddy Van Horn, it is the story of a skip tracer named Tommy Nowak, who falls into unlikely love with Lou Ann McQuinn (Bernadette Peters), a woman he is assigned to apprehend. John Eskow’s script was pressed on Clint by the studio, which thought, as he did when he read it, that it had something of the knockabout spirit of the orangutan films. Clint—as we know, a man not insusceptible to the joys of Groucho glasses—liked the fact that Tommy employed outlandish disguises in his work. At various points in the film he appears as a cowbell-wielding radio personality,
a rodeo clown, a casino sharpster wearing a gold lamé jacket and a pencil mustache and a brain-dead bumpkin. He also thought Peters’s character was an excellent foil for him. Fleeing with her baby from an abusive husband, who is also a right-wing crazy of the survivalist persuasion, not knowing that her eponymous vehicle contains $250,000 belonging to his organization’s treasury, she may look like trailer-park trash, but she has a ferocious spirit—especially when the survivalists kidnap her baby. Finally, perhaps most important to Clint, the film had the kind of range—farce, romance, crazy action—that he likes in comedies.

Dave Kehr, virtually the film’s only critical supporter, would eventually argue that Tommy constituted a statement no less personal than the ones Clint had made in weightier works, offering him a character through which he could pay tribute to the escapist and self-expressive pleasures he had found in performance. When Nowack dons false colors “he lights up with self-enjoyment; the straight bearing softens, the gestures expand, and he can’t stop smiling,” the critic observed.

Clint does not disagree with this reading. The problem was context. These sweet, goofy moments are contained in a movie of mercurial mood shifts. As Clint says, there were moments when Lou Ann, dealing with the loss of her baby, comes close to tragic bereavement. At other times the picture skirts country traversed by hundreds of pickup trucks in dozens of redneck road comedies. At the end, Buddy Van Horn and Clint deliver an assault on the survivalists’ redoubt, full of high-impact car stunts and automatic weaponry; it belongs in a different movie.

In short, the film develops no firm point of view toward its varied elements. It is genial enough, but it has a definitely slapped-together quality. Tall tales need to be told confidently, and
Pink Cadillac
achieves that spirit only occasionally, generally when Clint is cutting up or Peters, belying the airhead voluptuousness of the first impression she creates, zings someone with a one-liner. (She has the movie’s best line, a response to a flasher inquiring of her what she sees: “Looks just like a penis, only smaller,” she says sweetly.)

Unaccountably, the studio decided to release
Pink Cadillac
on the Memorial Day weekend, the traditional opening of the summer movie season and, by more modern tradition, a period ceded to some high-decibel action movie—that year
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
. It may be that studio executives thought of Clint’s film as counterprogramming to this surefire blockbuster, something a slightly older crowd might get a kick out of. Then again, they may not have been thinking at all.

The show-business press immediately made a contest out of this situation—Clint Eastwood versus Indiana Jones. It was, of course a mismatch—this shaky little comedy going against Steven Spielberg’s handsomely
mounted behemoth. The latter grossed $37.7 million; Clint’s picture did $4.4 million, about half of what recent Eastwood movies had been doing on their first weekends. Much was made of this, all of it deleterious to Clint’s standing as a box-office favorite.

Clint was not quite willing to admit that he had reached an age and a stage where he could no longer afford such seemingly regressive filmmaking. But he did derive some consolation from the higher standards to which he was now being held. He remembers thinking, People wanted me to go another step and maybe that’s good—at least they’re rooting for you to go somewhere.

Pink Cadillac
opened on Friday, May 26. By the following Wednesday, all the bad news about its disastrous grosses was in as he confronted Locke in the unpleasant, unsuccessful attempt to reach a settlement. Almost immediately thereafter he left for the media-free zone of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, where he would shoot
White Hunter, Black Heart
.

We can judge the state of his spirit at this time by noting that Frances Fisher did not accompany him. He had, she says, previously hinted that he would like her to come along, but in the end he did not even call to say goodbye. Obviously he could not so soon undertake another serious relationship. He needed instead to immerse himself in the healing routines of a far-distant production.

On the way to Africa, Clint stopped off in Paris for its annual air show, where he completed arrangements to purchase the most expensive indulgence he has ever permitted himself, an Acurielle helicopter, known outside its country of origin as an A-Star. Fulfilling the promise he had made to himself when he first took the controls of one of those contraptions on the
Paint Your Wagon
location, he was now a fully qualified pilot, and though his machine was shipped home for him, he ferried himself and others from place to place in Africa, using choppers leased to the production.

Much as
White Hunter, Black Heart
meant to Clint, it meant even more to Peter Viertel, author of the book from which it derived, for this production represented the culmination of a dream deferred for well over three decades. The son of émigré movie people—his mother had been Greta Garbo’s favorite screenwriter; his father had been a promising director in Weimar Germany (and latterly the model for the leading character in another roman à clef about the movies, Christopher Isherwood’s
Prater Violet)
—he had been hired in 1951 by John Huston, who had once worked on a script for Viertel’s father, to polish James Agee’s
screenplay for
The African Queen
. He had accompanied the director (and, of course, Bogart, Hepburn and the rest of the company) to the film’s Congolese location, returning with material for a melodramatized account of a movie director clearly modeled on Huston, obsessed with shooting an elephant at the expense of shooting his picture. The novel became a best-seller in 1953, thanks in part to an ending suggested by Huston himself, in which his character is portrayed more monstrously than he was in real life. The book was sold to Columbia, and then entered upon what must be one of the longest preproduction Odysseys in the history of the movies.

Viertel was engaged to make his own adaptation, which proved unacceptable to the studio. Over the course of the years, two writer-directors, James Bridges and Burt Kennedy, wrote new versions of the screenplay, with the property finally passing into the hands of Ray Stark. As it happened, Stanley Rubin, whom Clint had known since he produced
Francis in the Navy
, back in his Universal days, was working for Stark at the time, and he brought
White Hunter, Black Heart
to Clint’s attention. He read one draft of the script, then another and another, then Viertel’s novel, and found himself utterly absorbed.

The Huston character, called John Wilson in book and screenplay, is a figure any actor would relish playing. His macho swagger not untouched by self-destructive impulses, his romanticism darkened by selfishness, cynicism and a talent for manipulation, his rebellious posturings undermined by his taste for the good life; there is an inescapable grandeur about him—and, to modern eyes, an air of humbug as well. Here was a chance for Clint to meditate on the most “daunting” of all American ideas about manhood, that of Hemingway and his school (Viertel was also a friend of the novelist’s and introduced Huston to him). For Wilson, his strutting (and rather literary) masculinity was no less “full of shit” than Tom Highway’s, and with fewer excuses, since he is an intelligent man who, in full, mocking consciousness of both his intentions and their absurdity, sacrifices friendship, work and the good opinion of others to the glamour of grandiose folly. “You’re about to blow this picture out of your nose,” the Viertel character rages at him, as he expensively delays its start “to commit a crime, to kill one of the rarest, most noble creatures that walks this crummy earth.” But that’s just the point. “It’s the only sin you can buy a license for and then go out and commit,” Wilson replies, relishing his existential rebelliousness.

Clint would admit Wilson’s redeeming aspects. He has, for example, a speech to the Viertel character (played in the film by Jeff Fahey) in which he tells him he will never be a great screenwriter “because you let eighty-five million popcorn eaters pull you this way and that.” In the
years since, Clint has often quoted that dialogue to interviewers seeking his own filmmaking credo. In a later passage Wilson deliberately picks a fight with a white racist in an African hotel, knowing he will lose. Sometimes, he says, as he staggers away from this encounter with his younger, stronger opponent, you have to volunteer for lost causes or “your guts will turn to pus.” Clint could respond to that, too. Nevertheless, it was the man’s monstrousness that compelled him. Here, truly, was a character to test the limits of an audience’s sympathy.

In the novel, Wilson finally bags his elephant, in the process setting off a stampede in which his native guide is killed. In the movie, he does not make his kill. At the moment of truth, confronting his prey, he funks, but with the same deadly consequences to the guide. He returns to the first day of work on his film visibly chastened, possibly even broken, slumping into his director’s chair and almost inaudibly rasping out “Action.”

It is a much more clear-cut and devastating comment on the hollowness of macho posturing. Indeed, the picture in general improves on its source. For Viertel was very much a bedazzled hanger-on in the Hemingway-Huston world, where people distracted themselves in far-flung pursuits of dangerous and expensive pleasures. He could moralize about them, but he could not entirely evade his enchantment by them. Some of his novel’s seductiveness when it first appeared derived from the glimpse it offered to goggling provincial eyes of the enviably posh path to self-loathing the privileged permitted themselves. Clint would take his tone from Viertel’s admirable title, so straightforward in the ironies and moralities it hints at, not from the more ambiguous atmosphere that suffuses the work itself, refusing even to present Africa in a handsome light. There are very few grand, glamorizing vistas captured at sunrise or sunset here.