Clint Eastwood (87 page)

If Clint’s directorial choices were admirable in this austerity, his most basic choice as an actor was more debatable. Early on, he had to decide whether or not to imitate Huston’s well-known mannerisms—the rich drawl of his voice, the kingly elegance of his gestures. There were arguments on both sides. Knowledgeable people had for decades understood that
White Hunter, Black Heart
was a roman à clef. They had, indeed, made it part of the vast Huston legend, part of what they knew, or thought they knew, about him. Even if one was unfamiliar with this historic gossip, the film within Clint’s film was rather obviously a version of
The African Queen
, the most widely beloved of all Huston’s films, and also central to his legend. It was hard in this context to pretend that John Wilson was John Doe, and self-defeating as well. It would surely help the commercial prospects of the project if one legend could be
clearly discerned portraying another. On the other hand, thanks to Huston’s second career as an actor, his mannerisms were very well known. A close imitation of them would inevitably invite narrow comparisons between art and reality at the expense of the film’s larger issues and pleasures.

Clint did not hesitate over this matter. Before leaving for Africa he gathered footage of Huston, studied it closely and, despite the disparity in the timbre of their voices, created a very passable impression of him. But since he directed the actors who played such easily recognizable figures as Hepburn, Bogart and Lauren Bacall away from detailed imitation, his decision in the last analysis is difficult to understand. His propensity for realism certainly went into it. So did his love of character acting. It is possible, however, that at this particular moment in his personal history Clint did not want to appear before the public in a persona closely resembling his own.

When he completed work on the Zimbabwe location, he had two weeks of work to do on
White Hunter, Black Heart
in and around London. There the tabloids observed him keeping company with Maggie, herself hurting from the ending of her second marriage. The papers incorrectly rumored reconciliation, especially when they took a short vacation together in the south of France. But as Clint has often said, his relationship with Maggie has turned out to be better in divorce than it was in marriage, and they turned to one another now for reliable, well-tested warmth and trust.

Once back in the United States, Clint was in no hurry to finish his picture, which would mean making himself available to the press, and in no mood to disport himself in public, for to him it seemed the stories about his breakup with Sondra would not die: “
Everywhere I went, I couldn’t get away from it. When a story was written by one person, everyone else picked it up. It was so parasitic. It made me so uncomfortable.”

Other discomfiting matters surfaced as well. It was now that the press revealed Kimber’s existence, and in the fall of 1989, Alison, then seventeen, and in a rebellious phase, was arrested for drunk driving in Beverly Hills. She was jailed overnight, fined and had her license suspended. She had suffered more from the Eastwoods’ divorce than her brother had. And also, perhaps, from her father’s stardom, having herself become the target of a celebrity stalker. Clint acknowledges now that at that time his communication with his daughter was strained. He says that one of the factors drawing him to
Absolute Power
, the film he shot in the summer of 1996, was that William Goldman’s adaptation of the best-selling novel stressed a troubled father-daughter relationship. “I’d been there,” he said. “I could relate to that.”

At the time, he remained silent about these matters. If he was obliged to attend a public function he would take as his date Jane Brolin or Dani Crane, David Janssen’s widow and his old friend from the Universal talent program. This remained true for some months, even though Frances Fisher had returned to his life.

No one outside his closest circle knew this. He was more than ever determined to keep his private life private. This reconciliation began in the late summer of 1989, when Frances had a late-afternoon audition on the Warners lot. Burying her pride, and convinced that she knew what was best for both of them, she dropped in at the Malpaso offices sometime after six, where she found Clint at work with Joel Cox in their editing room. She was, she says, greeted by a sheepish grin, but she encouraged him to call her, and over the next few months they drifted into what would soon become an exclusive relationship. She was living then in Manhattan Beach, a long drive from his house and from her working rounds. It made sense for her to stay over in Bel-Air, to begin leaving a few clothes there, and that seemed perfectly agreeable to him. Pretty soon, without their ever formally discussing it, they were living together, although Frances took an apartment in town—she says she spent a total of six nights there—so he would not feel she was trying to entrap him. Finally, early in 1990, he began introducing her to his friends, the first such occasion being an evening they spent with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. A little later, he invited her to spend time with him at his Shasta County ranch, the retreat he shares only with true intimates. She remained, by her own account, more in love with him than he was with her. But if this was never a grand passion, he was grateful to her for restoring a sense of calm and normalcy to his life.

By the spring of 1990 he was ready to return to work, and to public life. It must be said that the latter was more gracefully managed than the former.

The
Rookie
, the picture he began working on in April, was another script Warner Bros. controlled and urged on him. It was a cop-buddy picture, with Clint cast as an old, low-life pro working grand theft auto (not exactly the most riveting of crimes), and Charlie Sheen as a rich kid assigned to be his partner but in serious need of maturing. The thinking was obvious: About to turn sixty, Clint was getting too old to carry an action picture single-handed; maybe by being paired with a young hotshot he could refresh his grip on this traditional franchise. His was virtually a supporting role, and he went along with it because he
thought directorially he might be able to make something of it. “Also, I didn’t have something else to do at that time.”

Except carefully tend to the launch of
White Hunter, Black Heart
. He knew, of course, that it was not going to be a hugely popular film, and that, like
Bird
, it would require sober journalistic attention if it was going to make any impact on the public. He knew that was obtainable at Cannes, and so he entered the new picture in competition there, abandoning work on
The Rookie
to attend the festival.

This strategy contained a significant fringe benefit. After his long season in the tabloid sun, and a year of avoiding personal encounters with the press, he would be presenting himself to reporters as the director of a very serious film. They would not, in this context, dare to ask him the kind of gossipy questions they were dying to pose. Moreover, his careful reflections on this film would remind readers that he was in possession of a career and character that could not, should not, be reduced to a sheaf of scandalous innuendoes.

He was indeed treated respectfully by the interviewers. His film, however, did not create the kind of buzz that pictures in serious contention for the jury’s favor must stir. Some wondered if Anjelica Huston’s presence on the panel harmed its chances (Clint thinks not). Many saw it as an exercise in idle historicism, without much relevance to a contemporary audience. This was the unintended, if not entirely unpredictable, consequence of Clint’s Huston imitation. It caused people to reflect on the director, who had died just two years earlier, not on John Wilson, and on the interesting questions about fame, power and masculine self-delusion that he embodied.

Clint finished principal photography on
The Rookie
in June and, as postproduction proceeded, returned to the high road on behalf of
White Hunter, Black Heart
. He took it to the Telluride festival in August, and it was the centerpiece of a retrospective of his directorial work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. A couple of days later, he screened it at the Toronto Film Festival.

It opened in limited release—twenty-five screens—in mid-September, and at first it seemed that Clint’s work for the film would be rewarded. Grosses were good initially, and the major reviewers, on the whole, were not less enthusiastic than they had been for
Bird
. Several of them unequivocally called it his best work yet as a director. Doubts predictably centered on his performance. Michael Wilmington in the Los Angeles
Times
spoke for many when he wrote, “
Huston’s persona becomes Eastwood’s own big tusker; the prey he can’t quite shoot.” He thought it might have been better to “soft-pedal” Huston’s mannerisms, but the real issue was that Clint could not soft-pedal his disdain for this
character, or forgive him his trespasses. Perhaps, to him, this man’s art was insufficient compensation for his flaws. Perhaps his articulateness, implying a capacity for self-awareness that Tom Highway and Charlie Parker did not share, put him off. Perhaps the outworn theatricality of Huston’s manner, so curiously mixed with the posturings of perpetual adolescence, so completely unlike his own, interfered with his empathy.

A sense of these ambiguities, this antiheroism, leaked through the critical enthusiasm for
White Hunter, Black Heart
. And the word of mouth didn’t help; this was not the Clint his public loved. Grosses quickly dwindled, and the studio never appreciably widened the film’s release. Its domestic takings were even less than
Bird
’s $2 million, and there was no consolation to be found in the overseas market either.

This is too bad. For one has to know John Wilson if one is to know Clint Eastwood, since this is the farthest he ever went in trying to imagine an alternative identity for himself, quite obviously as an actor, less obviously, but perhaps more significandy, as a filmmaker. For this anti-romantic director to make a movie about this darkly romantic figure was in itself a daring, even quixotic, gesture, the furthest he had ever ventured, both geographically and emotionally, from his main line.

Given Clint’s sensibility, this effort was perhaps foredoomed. He lacked the joyousness with which Huston—not to mention the heroes of his pictures—pursued slightly dishonorable success; therefore, he had to settle for honorable failure. Yet no movie of Clint’s—not even
Bird—
more forcefully foreshadowed the expansion of ambition that would preoccupy him in his sixties, our 1990s.

Similarly, no movie more clearly betokened the need to make that transition than
The Rookie
did. Not since
The Eiger Sanction
had Clint made a film so completely lacking in personal resonance, so nakedly, if ineptly, calculating of the marketplace. Given his aspiring recent work, given the honest weight he had always imparted to his action films, it puzzled and offended everyone. And since critics and public alike understood him to be the auteur of his own fate, he could not take the usual star’s way out and place the blame for this disaster elsewhere.

It is not merely that the macho jiving between Clint and Charlie Sheen is so desperately lacking humorous élan. It is not just that the look of the film is so glum and flat, or that Raul Julia and Sonia Braga, Hispanic actors, are so weirdly miscast as Germanic villains; it is that the entire film is so actively, even assaultingly, distasteful. Never more so than in a scene where Braga, having captured Clint and trussed him to a chair, forces him to have sex with her at razor point. In the abstract it is an interesting turnaround—the hero obliged to endure a heroine’s jeopardy—but it is protracted in an ugly way, and obviously uncomfortable
to both performers. It is, like almost everything else in this thoroughly depressing movie, very clearly at odds with the cheeky spirit and the nonstop accumulation of stunts and special effects that films like
Lethal Weapon
and
Die Hard
had taught audiences to expect and
The Rookie
was supposed to imitate.

There are, to be sure, a couple of spectacular sequences in the film—a car containing Clint and Sheen escaping an explosion by hurtling out of a fifth-story window that was well managed by John Frazier, the mechanical-effects master
(Twister
owes much to him), a highspeed car chase, involving Clint with an auto transporter dumping its cargo in his way, which Buddy Van Horn thinks may be the most complicated gag he ever supervised—but compared to its models,
The Rookie
seemed impoverished even in this respect.

The reviewers were uniformly appalled. As with
Pink Cadillac
the studio threw the picture into a holiday rush—this time at the Christmas season—and again the grosses were dreadful, and widely noted by the press. Indeed, a new note crept into some of the commentary on this picture. In the last four years, as the press was well aware, Clint’s hits had been smaller than they had previously been, and his failures had been embarrassingly large. One article referred to him as Warner’s “fading house star.” Here and there critics wondered aloud if he was about to follow Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson to the commercial fringe. There was in some of these remarks an almost gleeful animus, as if the writers couldn’t wait to see this Ur-celebrity drama, a version of Norman Maine’s story in
A Star Is Born
, reenacted.