Clint Eastwood (92 page)

There is one final cross-reference, perhaps the most significant of all, to consider. As the critic Howard Hampton noted, “
The operative mode … is playback: Leary pushing Horrigan’s buttons the same way
Dirty Harry
’s Scorpio Killer pushed Harry’s (and the audience’s)—only with far more élan and psychological sophistication (Malkovich has much better buttons at his disposal, in terms of both script and acting technique, than poor drooling Andy Robinson did).”

This striking resemblance, however, contains a striking reversal. It is
In the Line of Fire
’s heavy, not its hero, who feels himself victimized by a bureaucracy. As Leary points out, it was the CIA that made him what he is today, a perfectly poised, perfectly heartless killer, then turned him out when the Cold War thawed and it had no further use for the talents it conspired to create. There are, he says, no causes worth fighting for anymore. “All that’s left is the game,” he tells Frank. “I’m on offense. You’re on defense.” And why does he initiate play? Well, as revenge of course. But also “to punctuate the dreariness.”

Their connection, to be sure, is accidental. Working a counterfeiting case, Frank and his partner stumble on the assassin’s lair, but Leary (who at first calls himself Booth, as in John Wilkes, because the man had “flair, panache”) is delighted. He knows Frank by reputation and knows he will prove a worthy foe. “Fate has brought us together,” he says. “I can’t get over the irony.”

He loves such high-flying palaver, our Mitch, and he has a nice line in weary intellectuality. He satirically quotes the famous “I have a rendezvous with death” line to Frank in one of their creepy phone conversations. When the latter identifies Alan Seeger as its author, Mitch sneers, “It’s a bad poem, Frank.” Which, as it happens, is true—like a lot of his cynicism. It is that, finally, which sets him apart from the ever-growing filmography of sniper-psychos; he’s a sinuous stylist of evil.

Frank, too, is a much more worked-out figure than Harry is. He is cooler, wryer, much less clenched. His psychic wound—his failure in Dealey Plaza—is widely known, openly worn, unlike Harry’s never-explained damage. He is, as he says to Lilly, “a living legend, the only active agent who ever lost a president.” The line contains another slant rhyme to Clint’s own status, but more important it signals healthy self-awareness beyond, say, Harry Callahan’s reach. Mitch, however, is betting that, deep down, Frank is truly his double, a man whose loyalty to the system has also been ill rewarded, a man who may, therefore, have
reason to throw its game. Or, conversely, overplay it and make mistakes out of an anxious need to redeem himself.

One does not want to press these notions of gaming and doubling too far. The movie doesn’t. But they are there, just as they were in
Dirty Harry
. The older picture, though, played them out in a hotter, harsher climate, whereas there is a certain breezy slickness about
In the Line of Fire
. Whether or not this is an improvement is debatable.
Dirty Harry
ran on its rawness. That is what made it controversial; that is what has kept it lodged in people’s minds all this time.
In the Line of Fire
does not make that kind of impact.

But then, how many movies do? For that matter, how many action films, these days, achieve its pleasurable lightness of being? How many of them play so knowingly and cleverly with a star persona? How many of them offer supporting performances as wily as Malkovich’s? How many of them blend menace, romance, action, humor and impeccably gathering suspense so deftly?

It is not nothing, this kind of Hollywood professionalism, and it is derived, in part, from determined commitment to the project by its producer, Jeff Apple, and the writer of its final screenplay, Jeff Maguire. The former had nursed the idea since Lyndon Johnson’s day, when he first witnessed a presidential motorcade and found himself fascinated by the men protecting Johnson. He commissioned his first script for the film something like a decade before it was produced. Maguire came aboard as a replacement writer and took the script through many drafts without much reward. On the day he heard that it was finally going to be produced, he also heard from the electric company—with a shut-off notice. At that time he told reporters he and his wife were packing for a retreat to New England and some less frustrating profession.

The problem Apple and Maguire kept encountering was, frankly, ageism. Studio readers wanted this to be a story about a younger man, so that they could cast a hot young stud in the lead (never mind that this would have eliminated the Kennedy back story that lends the film its poignancy).

Curiously, the last studio to consider it was Warner Bros., and that’s when Lenny Hirshan first heard about it. He got a call from one of its executives saying he wasn’t sure, but it might be for Clint, and asking if the agent would like to read it. From a brief description it sounded good to Hirshan, but this was a Friday, he was heading for Palm Springs, and he said he’d have a copy of the script picked up on Monday. That morning he learned from
Variety
that Warners had let the piece go to Castle Rock. Now he begged a copy from the script’s agent, read it that
evening and on Tuesday called two Castle Rock executives asking them not to make any casting decisions until Clint had read it.

They were less welcoming than they might have been. They said they were thinking about Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and some others. This was the spring of 1992,
Unforgiven
had not yet been released, and Clint was still in his cold spell. Finally, however, they agreed to let Hirshan submit the script to Clint. “But this is not an offer,” they kept saying.

Clint read and took to
In the Line of Fire
immediately. “It’s funny,” he said to Hirshan. “It’s almost as if it’s written for me.” It was odd that others missed that simple point, though not, seemingly, to Clint. Ever the realist, he had long imagined the day when he would not, as he says, “deliver” at the box office, and a dialogue something like this would ensue:

“Hey, Clint, how ya doing?”

“Fine.”

“Yeah. How about stepping out of the way.”

That was the way of things. He would, however, console himself in these gloomy moments with a thought he expresses this way: “There’s always somebody who’s going to want to take a flyer with you, figuring that lightning will strike like it did in the old days. We’ve seen that with Marlon Brando. They’re always hoping.”

He didn’t think he had reached that point; he knew, if no one else did, what he had in
Unforgiven
. And, soon enough, Castle Rock came to its senses and struck a deal. Then there was even some talk of Clint directing, but he passed. There was not enough time for him to prepare the picture and attend to the opening of
Unforgiven
. He did have director approval, though, and suggested Wolfgang Petersen, whom he had never met. Clint knew his great international success,
Das Boot
, but it was a relative failure,
Shattered
, that interested him; he was talking about it on the
Unforgiven
set. It was a routine blend of overplotting, amnesia and bad behavior among the rich, at heart not much more than an upscale TV movie. But Clint thought Petersen brought something spirited and enlarging to it, and he filed his name away for future use.

The two men took to one another immediately. Petersen is energetic and confident, unpretentious in manner, well versed in his craft and, since his film-school days in Germany, an admirer of the Eastwood-Leone collaborations (he eventually engaged Ennio Morricone to write the score for
In the Line of Fire)
. Moreover, they immediately agreed on what was needed to make the picture work. “
Give it scope, a spectacular look,” as Petersen later put it, “but at the same time focus totally on
the intimate side of the story.” In short, balance spectacle with the kind of believable human interest that has all but disappeared from the modern action film.

On the set Clint sometimes grew a little testy about extra takes (“Was I in focus? Then let’s move on,” he has been reported saying). And there were times, he told a visiting journalist, when he had to restrain himself from interfering; “I think to myself, ‘
Why is Wolfgang doing this?’ And then I catch myself and say, ‘This may not be the way I’d do it, but his way may be a better way.’ ” But warmed by Petersen’s regard, trusting his manifest professionalism and observing that this was a director who did not feel his manhood threatened when the star posed a question or made a suggestion, he was an essentially happy collaborator. “I always felt good when the door opened in the morning and Clint came to the set,” Petersen said. “Very often that is not the case with a director and a star.”

There was real sparkle on the screen in Clint’s relationship with Rene Russo, who became an after-hours pal of his and Frances’s. As one critic put it, “When he smiles at her, twenty years fall away.” What was to become the film’s most discussed moment—when the camera detects tears in Clint’s eyes as he summons up for Lilly that shattering, long-ago day in Dallas—happened in part because he had an acting partner to whom he could entrust his feelings. “
I’ve never been against that,” he commented dryly, when an interviewer mentioned his suddenly visible vulnerability. To another he recalled tearing up in
The Outlaw Josey Wales
. To yet a third he observed, “
I’ve been knocking at the door of that kind of thing for a long time. But if anyone wants to think this is the time I’m breaking out, that’s fine.”

As with Russo, so with Malkovich, an actor who, like Clint, liked to “jump right into” a scene without much preparation and who from his perspective in deep left field caught the heart of Clint’s nature and appeal as well as anyone ever has. “
There are quite a lot of Americans who are capable of treating you justly and fairly,” he said one time, “but if you don’t respond in kind, they are capable of shooting you.” There was a compliment implicit in this remark—one visibly volatile actor acknowledging the more restrained dangerousness of another. There was also some personal history in it. Clint, Malkovich said, reminded him of his father, an Eastwood fan, whom he described as a mass of contradictions—“
very elegant, very handsome, very strange and self-contained; he was quite funny and had a bad temper.” We are talking actor heaven here—the chance to project powerful, unresolved feelings onto a fellow player smart enough to encourage him.

Their crucial moment occurs in their first face-to-face confrontation.
At the end of a rooftop chase they achieve a version of the famous fable of the scorpion and the frog crossing the river. All Frank has to do is shoot Mitch to bring their duel to an end. Unfortunately, if he does so, Mitch will loose his grip on him, and he will plunge to his death. It brings up the movie’s central question: Is the Secret Service man who was unable to take a bullet for his president willing to take a fatal fall for him?

This time the question is posed not to unpredictable instinct, but to rational calculation. As things work out, Frank is permitted to elude the question for the moment. But not before the devilish Malkovich, without warning or rehearsal, took Clint’s gun into his mouth. It’s not the done thing—surprising a star that way. In his whole daring career, John Malkovich has probably never done anything more dangerous.

But the star laughed. He had encouraged Petersen and the producers to make adjustments in their schedule in order to accommodate Malkovich’s needs, and here was patience’s payoff—the challenges the actor posed to Clint.

Clint kept rising to these tests more enthusiastically than Petersen had dreamed possible. He, too, was lucky in the order. “
Unforgiven
got so much play right when we were shooting,” says Petersen, “and I think he was then, psychologically, willing to take risks—be more accessible and give more layers to his performance.” It was, he adds, “just wonderful to watch him grow in this great way,” grow it seemed to Petersen without conscious effort—“I don’t know what he did”—and without any specific goading or instruction on his own part.

Their harmony extended through postproduction. Clint had offered to supply a fresh eye, as Don Siegel sometimes had for him, should Petersen get lost in his own imagery in the cutting room, and the director showed his rough to Clint before letting anyone else see it. Clint’s response was, “I just can’t stop watching this.” “That’s a nice thing,” adds Petersen. “A star normally just sees himself and how many close-ups he has.”

All in all, it was a happy, effective collaboration, and an islet of tranquillity in a period that was about to turn confusing and harried for Clint.

“I ain’t like that no more,” Clint would say, quoting William Munny, when Frances Fisher taxed him about his capacity for faithfulness. This was for her, as it had not been for Sondra Locke, a pressing issue. She says she had always told Clint that if he proved incapable of a fully committed
relationship she would leave, and now, four years into their relationship, she began to harbor suspicions.

These were confirmed, she says, on a Sunday morning in December 1992. Clint had gone to Carmel for a few days while she stayed behind in Bel-Air because she was working in a movie. Around nine a.m. she received a call from Courtney Ross, informing her that Steve Ross had died a few hours earlier, after a long struggle with prostate cancer. Frances tried to call Clint with the news, but there was no answer, and she assumed he had turned off the phone. A few minutes later, however, he walked in, wearing a business suit and looking surprised to see her—she had been scheduled to work that morning, and he did not know that her call had been put back. He told a not-entirely-persuasive story about an early meeting in Carmel and a quick flight to Los Angeles. Neither timing nor wardrobe supported his claim, and she would later learn that he had been at a party the night before in Los Angeles at Dani Janssen’s, with his subsequent whereabouts unmentioned.