American Rebel Page 10

  I had signed with Universal Pictures to do a film called Coogan’s Bluff. That was to be my second American film after coming in off the plains of Spain. The studio had recommended a director by the name of Alex Segal, who had come from back east and had several plays, television shows, and movies to his credit. Segal had some personal problem which precluded him from doing this film and he withdrew. Then the studio came up with the suggestion, “How about Don Siegel?” Now, in a business in which nepotism runs rampant, I began to think, “Hold on just a minute, what relationship do these two have and how many more Siegels are we going to go through before we get this picture on the road?”

  More than a little skeptical, Clint agreed to screen a couple of Siegel’s films before setting about to find a real director. But Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) made him sit up and take notice. It was, as he later recalled, “one of the two or three finest B movies ever made and I realized that this was a man who could do an awful lot with very little. Coogan’s Bluff was a [relatively] modest-budget picture, but perhaps we could get a lot more on the screen for the dollar and push the film on to a higher echelon of ‘look.’ So I said, ‘Yes, let’s go with Don Siegel.’”*

  Siegel was something of an oddity in Hollywood. He had worked at Warner Bros. in the 1930s making shorts, and on dozens of hit movies in various subdirectorial roles. After bouncing around from studio to studio, he landed at Universal, where he directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one of the most spectacular and disturbing films of the 1950s, a classic sci-fi horror crossed with political paranoia that did to falling asleep what Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) did to taking showers. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, it had perfectly captured the fear and loathing of an America that believed communism was to individuality what the pods were to human beings—irretrievably stealing one’s individuality. (Its stylistic use of stairs and heights, and the climactic relentless pursuit through the streets and into the hills, would be echoed in Dirty Harry.) Siegel’s next assignment at Universal was to direct Baby Face Nelson, which received terrific reviews but went nowhere. A series of ho-hum jobs followed, including Spanish Affair (1957), The Line-Up (1958; adapted from the hit TV series, its stark semidocumentary view of San Francisco police work and the pursuit of maniacal killer Eli Wallach foreshadow the action, mood, and pace of Dirty Harry), The Gun Runners (1958), Hound-Dog Man (1959), Edge of Eternity (1959), Flaming Star (1960), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), Stranger on the Run (1967—TV), and Madigan (1968). The thirty-eighth film (out of the fifty he would eventually make) was Coogan’s Bluff, the smash he had been looking for to return him to the spotlight. It was the first of a series of films that Clint and Siegel would make together.

  Clint, the temperamental don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-unless-you-know-what-you’re-doing star, and Don Siegel, the just-do-what-I-tell-you authoritarian, each marked his turf, and neither would let the other upset the power balance necessary to get this movie made.

  Many on the set were surprised by how well they did get along, after a couple of early and minor bumps in the road. The key was mutual respect; Clint had been looking for someone (who spoke English) to show him how a movie was put together, and Siegel was more than happy to show Clint how the tricks were done.

  Early on in the shoot, according to Clint,

  I learned a lot from [Siegel] in the sense that he’s a man who does a lot with a little—so therefore our philosophies are pretty much akin … he’s a very lean kind of director … Coogan’s Bluff was the first picture we did together. It was a fun film to do in the sense that it started out with another director, and Don and I didn’t know each other. We started out butting heads together a little, and as it turned out, we ended up with a great working relationship.

  Siegel agreed: “I thought we did very well.”

  One aspect of the film that seems unmistakably Siegel is its heavy, at times obvious, metaphorical overlay. In the turbulent 1960s, when the country was divided by the unpopular and ultimately unwinnable war in Vietnam, uncomplicated heroes in popular movies were hard to find. Coogan’s Bluff works precisely because it depicts New York City as an urban, lawless “jungle,” commandeered by a tough yet ineffective cop. Detective Lieutenant McElroy was played by the always powerful Lee J. Cobb, an actor who couldn’t be more different onscreen from Clint. Cobb, heavyset, rough, sneering, and street-smart, was the polar opposite of the tall, lean country boy Clint. If the American psyche was desperate for someone to come in and end the Vietnam nightmare, it found its savior in the movies. Cobb is reminiscent of General Westmoreland, while Clint is the heroic rebel who comes in, cleans up the situation, and removes the bad guy. As Coogan, he was a Central Casting American hero who single-handedly captures the villain by waging a guerrilla-type war on “foreign” turf.

  The sub-rosa Vietnam symbolism, overlaid with a good-guy-gets-bad-guy formula that is as old as film itself, was right in Siegel’s wheel-house. The alien fighting the bad guy was a kind of inversion of the plot structure of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and became the cinematic glue that held the film’s spine in place.

  Coogan’s Bluff, which stretched Clint beyond his Man with No Name, was highly anticipated by audiences and critics alike. But reviews for the film were mixed at best; critics either loved or hated it. Judith Crist called the film, in New York magazine, “the worst happening of the year.” But Vincent Canby, the New York Times’s newest and most astute film critic (and its best overall writer yet about film), in a combination review and think piece, enthusiastically compared Clint to screen icon James Dean. Archer Winston, writing in the New York Post, noted Don Siegel’s directorial contribution but more or less ignored Clint, as did the weekly edition of Variety.

  Kitty Jones, an agent during the late 1960s, was someone Clint had befriended in his early TV days and had remained a member of his inner circle of friends. She regularly held social salons in her apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard, which Clint often attended with a couple of his friends from the old studio days. A young starlet by the name of Jill Banner remembered those afternoons and, in particular, Clint’s presence at them:

  He and his buddies were like a pack of wild college comedians, always horsing around, cracking jokes, telling risqué jokes, rough-housing and teasing the girls … his chums were guys he’d known a long time, one was Bill, another George, and he got them regular work on the Rawhide series. Another was Chill Wills, who was Francis the Talking Mule’s speaking voice in Clint’s first two films.

  Clint didn’t give a shit about the la-de-da Hollywood crowd, or the traditional stylish symbols. He drove an old pickup truck [despite having two Ferraris], and I never saw him wear anything but Levi’s, T-shirt, wind-breaker jacket, and tennis shoes. He was a health nut. He didn’t smoke but he could stow away plenty of beer, which he said was a health tonic.

  Kitty’s girlfriends were crazy about him, not because he was so young and good-looking or a star but because he was kind, intelligent, and such a fun guy.

  Maggie, firmly planted up in Carmel, never attended any of these salons.

  Two days after the completion of Coogan’s Bluff, he left for Europe; Brian G. Hutton’s Where Eagles Dare was to be shot on location in England and Austria for MGM. In this World War II action drama a British officer is given a top-secret assignment to parachute behind enemy lines, somewhere in the Bavarian Alps, to rescue a captured American general before the latter can be tortured into revealing the details of the impending D-Day invasion at Normandy. He is accompanied by five commandos, one of whom is an American lieutenant, played by Clint Eastwood.

  Where Eagles Dare was a big-budget action film starring one of the world’s most famous actors, Richard Burton, at the peak of his fame but also on the brink of financial collapse. Burton was forced to accept movie work like Where Eagles Dare that didn’t necessarily fit his needs or desires as an actor but earned him millions. Burton agreed to star in Where Eagles Dare, he told the insatiable coterie of press that followed him eve
rywhere, because he wanted to make a movie that he could watch with his two daughters; his most recent films, he said, were not especially well suited for that. Behind the scenes, though, it was widely believed that he took it solely for the money.*

  Costarring with Burton would bring Clint international attention for something other than a spaghetti western. And European audiences would get to see him again in a noncowboy role. Where Eagles Dare was sure to push his steadily growing salary toward his goal of a million dollars a movie.

  To write the script, Burton approached his friend and colleague Elliott Kastner, who in turn recruited the well-known adventure novelist Alistair MacLean. MacLean had achieved a fair measure of film credibility from the adaptation of his novel (done by Carl Foreman) for J. Lee Thompson’s World War II adventure The Guns of Navarone (1961). Burton particularly liked that film and wanted a script for Where Eagles Dare that would match it. MacLean had never written an original screenplay, but as all of his novels had already been made into movies or remained under option, he tried his hand with Where Eagles Dare, which he banged out in six weeks.

  Even as MacLean was putting the finishing touches on it, Clint held firm for $800,000 up front, a percentage of the profits, and equal-size name-above-the-title billing with Burton to compensate for his de facto second billing. He got almost everything he asked for: the $800,000 up front, the percentage, and the equal size, but without Burton’s name-above-the-title credit.

  After a few days in London he flew to Salzburg to begin the shoot, still wearing faded jeans and carrying a single torn canvas bag. His style was markedly different from that of the Burtons (Elizabeth Taylor accompanied her husband on the flight to Salzburg), who flew in formal attire via private jet amid the rush and glare of European-style paparazzi. No sooner had Clint settled into his hotel, the same one where the Burtons were staying, than he received a call from the actor to join him in the lounge for drinks.

  For the rest of that day and into the night the two drank—or rather Burton drank and Clint observed, and what he saw was not pleasant. Here was Burton, conceivably the biggest movie star in the world, a hopeless drunk, self-justifying and self-pitying, with one eye on his whiskey and the other on the waitress who kept bringing it. He had made a fortune in film but was still strapped for cash—something incomprehensible to Clint. And while Burton could still pass as a leading man, he looked at least a dozen years older than he had five years earlier, when he shot to international stardom and scandal in Cleopatra. What’s more, he was puffy and out of shape and smoking up to sixty cigarettes a day despite his needing to be fit for a film that would tax all his physical abilities.

  According to Ingrid Pitt, who played a minor role in the film (Heidi), Burton’s fragile condition was apparent to everyone on set: “Clint and Richard Burton were so different. Clint was looking forward to the rest of his career. He was watching everything … Richard Burton was just drinking and spouting Shakespeare. He was unhappy. He drank … he was just tired of living.” It was a powerful cautionary tale for the always-careful Clint.

  Elizabeth Taylor—Liz, as everyone who knew her called her—was another story. She stayed only briefly in Salzburg, leaving shortly before the filming of the most difficult physical scenes—she could not stand to watch them because the untimely death of her third husband, producer Mike Todd, in a plane crash still haunted her dreams. While in Salzburg, she formed an easy, informal friendship with Clint.* Often while Burton was off doing a scene, Liz and Clint would sit and talk—about their careers, their lives, their loves, their dreams. Early on Taylor knew she wanted to work with Clint. She received dozens of scripts every day from producers and studios hoping to work with her and had recently come across one she liked. It was about a nun caught in the crossfire of a Mexican insurgency and an American mercenary who rescues her from being raped and murdered and helps to bring her to safety. The plot had a few clever twists—the mercenary at first doesn’t know the woman is a nun, and she winds up at one point rescuing him. Whatever her motives—friendship, mutual attraction, rivalry (on both their parts) with Burton—Taylor thought the script was perfect for herself and Clint, he in the role that would naturally have gone to Burton if he had been in better shape and if he had had any interest in that type of film, which he didn’t. Not even opposite her. Or especially not opposite her.

  By now Burton had—inevitably, perhaps—begun to feel negatively about sharing the stage with his wife’s all-encompassing persona. The problem was, she was a far more limited actor (as far as he was concerned), and their films together were the least worthy—if, ironically, most successful—of his career. Clint, who lacked any classical training or pretenses to greatness, had no such concerns.

  But their talks of working together went nowhere. As Clint later explained, “The script was given to me by Elizabeth Taylor when I was doing When Eagles Dare with her husband. We wanted to do it together, and the studio approved of the combination [of stars], but [as it turned out] she was going through some deal where she didn’t want to work [alone] unless it coincided with Richard’s working, so we had it set up to do in Mexico while Richard was working there on something else,† but then there were other problems.” Whatever those problems may have been, the imagined Taylor-Eastwood collaboration never happened.

  Before any of his Eagles scenes were shot, Clint had taken to altering his dialogue. For the most part he disregarded Hutton, the director, whom Kastner had hired despite a notable lack of credentials. Hutton had directed only three films before Where Eagles Dare: Wild Seed (1965, aka Fargo), The Pad and How to Use It (1966), and Sol Madrid (1968), a detective story also known as The Heroin Gang. Before that he had worked occasionally as an actor, mostly in TV episodics. Kastner, with his partner Jerry Gershwin, had produced Sol Madrid and was impressed by Hutton’s abilities. The film’s financial success also helped Kastner to decide to go with Hutton on Eagles, even though it would be considerably more difficult and expensive to make. Because Burton’s fee took a lion’s share of the film’s budget, with Clint’s right behind, Kastner needed to keep the rest of his production costs down while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. Hutton may have been talented, but his best asset for this film was that he came cheap.

  Burton did not waste much time studying his part in MacLean’s screenplay. To him, these films were all the same; he had a job to do, and he wanted to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible. Clint, on the other hand, went through the script page by page. He was confused by the inconsistencies in his character’s dialogue, which made little sense. As he had for A Fistful of Dollars, and as he would do with every script henceforth, he went through it and slashed every unnecessary line of his own dialogue, leaving himself relatively little to say while he performs his character’s impressive physical feats, for which he was doubled most of the time. After the film was released, he joked to friends that it should have been called When Doubles Dare.*

  The production encountered innumerable problems, including blizzards, four-foot snowdrifts, and avalanches; outbreaks of altitude sickness and frostbite; fistfights on a moving cable car (Burton); and a high-speed motorcycle ride through a fierce snowstorm on a winding mountain road (Clint). But when the film was finally finished and rushed into production, it received surprisingly good reviews. Variety said it was “so good for its genre that one must go back to [John Sturges’s 1963] The Great Escape for a worthy comparison.” Rex Reed, then writing film reviews for Women’s Wear Daily, told his readers, “If you stop being so serious and sophisticated … you can have a wonderful time at Where Eagles Dare.” Andrew Sarris also liked it. “Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood,” he wrote, “balance out the savage and sardonic elements of the movie into an inconsistent but generally engrossing entertainment.”

  Whether its audiences came to see Burton or Clint or both, the film grossed more than $15 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, enough to make it MGM’s top earner of 1969. A million more was tacked
on when the film was released worldwide.

  At home things were changing as well. In May 1968, after fifteen years of marriage, Maggie gave birth to a baby boy whom she and Clint named Kyle Clinton Eastwood. The baby’s arrival was a mixed blessing. For Maggie, Kyle was an undeniable reaffirmation of her unusual marriage. In a rare interview the two gave shortly afterward, Maggie explained that the secret to their long and successful marriage (as she described it) was “We don’t believe in togetherness!” Clint echoed that emotion, although he put a slightly different slant on it: “By [the time we had our child], I knew we could get along well enough to last … that we’d stay together.”

  Amid all the change and accolades, Clint went straight off to make yet another movie; but this one would come to be universally regarded as one of his worst. Paint Your Wagon was a big-screen version of a relatively obscure 1951 Broadway musical that had yielded only one semi-hit song, “They Call the Wind Maria.” It was a collaboration of Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had also done several other musicals, most notably Brigadoon (1947), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot (1960). All of these Broadway shows had been made into hit movies, leading the way to the film version of Paint Your Wagon.

  Movie musicals were a huge gamble in the late 1960s as the song-and-dance era of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly was long over; still, My Fair Lady (1964), directed by George Cukor, won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and was nominated for four more; its star, Rex Harrison, won Best Actor. But only three years later Harrison nearly single-handedly destroyed the genre and his own career (and along the way 20th Century–Fox, still reeling from the debacle of Cleopatra, in which he costarred) in Richard Fleischer’s ill-conceived, poorly executed, and publicly ignored Doctor Dolittle, which inexplicably received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The film’s poor showing appeared to have once and for all put an end to big-budget musicals—until Paramount decided to try to turn Paint Your Wagon into a $14 million cinematic musical extravaganza.