Clint Eastwood (94 page)

There was, as well, near unanimity on the quality of Clint’s work as director. Critics liked his sense of period—
A Perfect World
is set in Texas in the autumn of 1963, on the eve of John F. Kennedy’s fatal visit to Dallas—and they liked the way the pace of the narrative seemed to match the gently rolling quality of the countryside through which it moves. They enjoyed the contrast he struck between the rollicking spirit of Butch and the boy on their (petty) crime spree and the claustrophobia of Red, a criminologist who is a premature feminist (Laura Dern) and an FBI man exuding bureaucratic evil trapped in a jouncing, windowless trailer the governor has pressed on them as a mobile command center. Everyone thought, too, that the film’s climax was brilliantly managed: Butch, gutshot and bleeding, sheltering under a lone tree in a field, the boy riotous with emotions too large for him to handle, helicopters whirring overhead, serried ranks of lawmen training their rifles on them from a distance, Red hopelessly trying to prevent a needless, pointless tragedy.

“
The high point of Mr. Eastwood’s directing career thus far,” Janet Maslin wrote. She named several other recent films (including
Mrs. Doubtfire)
that had taken up the subject of “men’s legacies to their children, and of their failures and frustrations in bringing up those children,” but this film, she said, “gives that subject real meaning.” David Denby saw in Clint “a newly born classical master” no less.

If the qualities of this movie, featuring two extraordinarily popular stars at the peak of their careers, were completely visible to a wide range of observers, why did it fail? One extremely curious answer was offered by Michael Medved and Richard Grenier, right-wing ideologues masquerading as movie reviewers, who accused Clint of selling out to political correctness. Talk about circles closing! The man formerly accused of fascist tendencies was now criticized for liberal excess. The film, Medved observed, “
offers passing condemnations of shameful sexism in the workplace, joyless religion, authoritarian parents, sexual harassment, murderous FBI men, mistreatment of juvenile offenders, dehumanizing preoccupation with money, sexual abuse of children, and, above all, the devastating impact of corporal punishment on kids.” Are we to assume that the reviewer favors all these things, since he makes no effort to disown them?

Grenier, who attacked
A Perfect World
in two articles, insisted it was Clint’s stance on these matters that doomed his enterprise. He spoke as a disappointed lover, for writing in
Commentary
ten years earlier he had attributed Clint’s popularity to his crystallization of gun-’em-down conservatism for a popular audience starving for such raw meat as they bent under the tyranny of liberalism’s moral vegetarianism. The film’s commercial failure, he explained, was because Clint had become “
a startling example … of a public figure suddenly abandoning the moral values of the populace for those of the liberal elite.” He guessed the public would forgive Clint his feminism and his attacks on the CIA, FBI and fundamentalist religion—as if there were, indeed, an unexamined reverence for these institutions everywhere in American life—“but going soft on the punishment of evildoers robs him of his very identity.”

We are in a realm here every bit as loopy as the one Pauline Kael so long ago staked out. Indeed, they were making the same mistake she had, trying to comprehend Clint Eastwood in narrowly ideological terms. There was, however, a grain of (nonideological) truth in Greniers last remark. Red Garnett is the first lawman Clint ever played who is unable to take command of a dangerous situation. Swigging Geritol and confessing to an antediluvian partiality to Tater Tots, he conveys a drawling, slightly out-of-it air, and, at the end, unable to prevent the bloodthirsty FBI man from slaughtering Butch, he is reduced to impotent
rage. “I don’t know nothing. I don’t know a damn thing,” he snarls, unable to explain to anyone, including himself, how these events got so tragically out of hand. This was not—let us make the point one last time—the way audiences wanted to see Clint.

Beyond that, some of the qualities that most pleased the critics may have disturbed the popular audience, perhaps most notably the movie’s lifelike—as opposed to movielike—lurches from the comic to the menacing, its refusal of conventional sentiments. For all its pleasures and honesties, it does not finally provide us a fully satisfying emotional release. That “us,” however, is not all-encompassing.
A Perfect World
was accepted much more widely and enthusiastically by audiences abroad, where rootlessness is often perceived as one of the more romantic aspects of the American experience, quirky outlawry as one of the more appealing aspects of the American character. Overseas, the film grossed well over $100 million, turning it—belatedly—into one of Clint Eastwood’s more successful ventures.

One day on one of the
Perfect World
locations, Clint casually inquired of a visitor if he had read
The Bridges of Madison County
, then in its tenth month of its near-endless stay on the best-seller lists. Yes, the man said, and it had made him think of Clint. “It’s one of the great American fantasies,” he said. “The husband and kids are away, you’re bored, you’re lonesome, and one morning you look up and there’s Clint Eastwood standing in your driveway.” Clint lifted a quizzical eyebrow, not entirely appreciating the cynicism. He was inclined to take this thing seriously.

And why not? The part of Robert Kincaid, the rootless photographer who finds a few days of happiness and a lifetime of regrets in a three-day liaison with an Iowa farmwife, Francesca Johnson, was right for him. He had himself been a man in a pickup truck looking for something he could not quite explain, settling for such romance as chance put in his way; he was, indeed, still such a man at heart.

But all of that aside,
Bridges
offered him a chance at something he had never tried before as an actor—classic, flat-out, leading-man romanticism. That it was controlled by his friend Steven Spielberg, who was at that time thinking of directing it himself, added to its appeal, as did the fact that Spielberg could not get at it for a while. Clint was determined to take some time off, beginning in December 1993, when the release of
A Perfect World
was behind him.

His primary goal was to spend as much time as possible with his new daughter, and this he did. One of the more delightful cognitive dissonances
available to his friends that winter was being greeted at his front door by Dirty Harry with a burbling baby cradled in his arms. He was not entirely idle, of course. There was his usual round of celebrity golf tournaments to play in, he was trying to develop a film script based on
Golf and the Kingdom
, a fable beloved by the game’s devotees (he has yet to lick it), he was looking forward to Cannes again, this time returning as chairman of the festival’s jury, and, as the spring came on, there were unsatisfying drafts of the
Bridges
script to study. The press was reporting interest in the project by Robert Redford, but given its auspices one had the impression that the role was Clint’s to turn down.

This calm, however, was soon shattered by tragedy. On the first weekend in April Clint joined Frank Wells, who was now the chief operating officer of the Walt Disney Company, and some other friends for a weekend of high-altitude skiing in Nevada. It is a sport for true aficionados, involving helicopter flights into virgin snowfields high in the mountains, beyond the reach of ordinary ski lifts. They had “a great day” on Saturday, under cloudless skies. Sunday, however, the weather was more threatening, and after a few runs Clint decided to leave. He had flown his own helicopter to the resort where they were staying, was due in Sun Valley later in the day and feared he might not be able to take off if the weather continued to worsen.

It was a decision that almost certainly saved his life. When he reached Sun Valley he put in a call to Wells to see how the rest of the day had gone. He was answered by a hysterical receptionist telling him that his friend and the rest of his party—all except one man—were dead. The chopper that had been sent in to retrieve them at the end of the afternoon had crashed in a canyon. Heavily laden, it apparently lacked the power to overcome whatever winds it encountered as it tried to lift off.

This was a devastating loss to Clint. Wells, who had taken time off between his Warners and Disney jobs to try to climb the tallest peak on every continent (only Everest defeated him), was in his rhythms and sensibility probably as close to a soulmate as Clint had ever known. In his tribute to him at his memorial service Clint sang a few lines from “Hey, Jude,” a song he had heard Wells singing as he schussed down his last mountain.

By now his relationship with Frances was reverting to its former troubled state. Clint’s mother, Fisher says, “told me on a number of occasions that she thought I loved him too much.” She is also, in her own words, “very demanding” and now, as the mother of their child, saw no reason to be shy about making her needs known. He, in his turn, was beginning to find some of her “new age” ideas—which included strong reformist impulses about traditional masculine modes as well as theories
of feminism—puzzling, irritating and, as they applied to his own ways of thinking and being, impossible to adopt. He also says he found himself once again under pressure to find roles for an actress who had a large personal claim on him.

It does not appear that their bad feelings were often or very openly discussed at this time. They went off to Cannes
en famille
, took a villa in the hills above town and lost themselves happily in the pleasures of the occasion. Clint enjoyed his official duties enormously. He says he found his experiences as mayor useful in conducting the jury’s business and stoutly denies the rumor that he had unduly influenced its choice of a controversial American film,
Pulp Fiction
, as winner of the Palme d’Or. With its bold mixture of violence and comedy it was undeniably his kind of movie. But his tastes are wildly eclectic—he voted for
Beauty and the Beast
in the Academy balloting of 1992, and the actress he is most frustrated about not working with is Maggie Smith—so he would have been open to almost anything. He says Quentin Tarantino’s film won on the first ballot, with only one juror holding out against it.

After the festival they spent a night in Paris before flying on to Scotland and a week of golf before returning home. It was during that brief stopover that another of those seemingly minor incidents that seem to crystallize emotional issues for Clint occurred. They had carried several trunks with them, but it seemed foolish to tote them all on to Scotland, since their flight back to the United States was to leave from Paris. They decided to buy a couple of suitcases and leave the rest of their belongings behind. Frances said she would take care of that, but it was late, and their driver said the only nearby shop likely to be open was Louis Vuitton. She splurged, returning with something like ten thousand dollars’ worth of luggage. Clint, who is not much of a comparison shopper—or for that matter any kind of shopper—said nothing.

Long dissolve. Frances goes off to Texas to appear in
The Stars Fell on Henrietta
, a little film about an oil boom that Clint executive-produced. Her costars were Robert Duvall, Aidan Quinn and Brian Dennehy. The director was James Keach, who is married to Jane Seymour, on whose television program,
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
, Frances had appeared. She had flown in on a private plane, and Frances asked if she could borrow it for a night to fly to Los Angeles for the premiere of
Babyfever
, a Henry Jaglom film in which she had had an important role. She told the charter service to bill her directly for the cost, but it required a credit card as collateral, and she gave them one Clint had provided her.

Another dissolve. Somehow the bill for the plane—less than the Vuitton charges, by the way, but still substantial—does not go directly to Frances. It appears on the credit card statement along with the luggage
bill. Since Clint lives as he produces movies—without ostentation—he flew into a rage, which abided.

Perhaps it persisted in part because he was also simmering over
The Bridges of Madison County
. It had to start shooting in Iowa by Labor Day or else wait until the next year. But the scripts he had seen were full of superfluous flashbacks and fantasies; one draft, he says, even proposed reuniting modern subliterature’s most famously sundered lovers in Katmandu or some such exotic locale. Richard LaGravenese’s excellent adaptation was, at least, in work, but had not yet reached its final form. And Spielberg, exhausted by
Jurassic Park
and
Schindler’s List
, had begged off directing. Bruce Beresford, the Australian whose Academy Award-winning
Driving Miss Daisy
seemed to qualify him for handling small, tender stories, had been engaged to replace him.

Clint claimed to find him personally agreeable, but, unfortunately, Beresford fell into a casting dither. Certain substantial names were mentioned for Francesca—Angelica Huston and Meryl Streep (always Clint’s leading candidate) among them—but he decided to fly off to Europe to test other, younger actresses for the role. The material he returned with was, at best, inconclusive.