American Rebel Page 24

  *Gere wasn’t nominated. Winger was, for Best Actress, but lost to Meryl Streep in Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice.

  *Some thought that Clint’s noticeably lower and rougher voice in the film was his homage/impersonation of Ronald Reagan. Clint denied it, claiming it was actually his impression of an uncle who had damaged his vocal cords and had to talk that way.

  SEVENTEEN

  Clint, with Liam Neeson in the fifth and final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool (1988), hangs up his Magnum for good.

  I went to a jazz concert one time at the Oakland Philharmonic. This guy comes out in a pinstripe suit, standing off to one side, the joint is jumping, and then all of a sudden he steps up and starts playing and everything is doubled up. I’m thinking, “How the hell does he do that?” … It was a great acting lesson—the amount of confidence [Parker] exuded. I’ve never seen an artist, an actor, a painter, any artist have that kind of confidence.

  —Clint Eastwood

  That March, after the 1987 Academy Awards ceremonies, Clint reimmersed himself in the business of running Carmel. One of his first chores was to oversee an ongoing conflict over Carmel’s Mission Ranch, a large wetland just south of the city limit that had been purchased by a private consortium that wanted to develop it into a modern housing project, with expensive town houses and maybe even a self-contained modern mall with ample parking facilities. The town council was opposed to the development, preferring to keep the land preserved in the image of Carmel, a beautiful, natural seaside village. To prevent the development from advancing any further, the city offered $3.75 million for the land, about half of what the owners said they would take to settle. The situation remained deadlocked until Clint decided to put up $5.5 million of his own money to help Carmel acquire the land. Having completed the sale, he took it out of the hands of any and all developers and vowed to keep it as it was. The elders of the township hailed the move, and the national press as well looked upon it favorably.

  With that victory under his belt, Clint dove deeper into Carmel’s municipal activities. He actively pursued projects meant to improve pedestrian access to beaches, adding public toilets, walking trails, and also a new library for the town. He began writing a column in the local paper, the Pine Cone, his personal forum to discuss and respond to issues of the day, especially those that generated the most mail to his office. And he even put a bit of the old-style, back-door politics of vengeance into play when he made it difficult for former councilman David Maradei to get a variance to put a gable on his roof. Maradei had been one of the people who had made it difficult for Clint to build his Hog’s Breath Inn annex. Even though Clint officially abstained from voting on the issue, he made sure everyone knew he did not support it.

  And when Jimmy Stewart was scheduled to be feted by the local film festival, the town council turned down permits for temporary high-stacked lighting, citing the garish, Hollywood-like atmosphere that it was sure to create. Clint, miffed at what he felt, probably rightly, was a veiled reference to his being a movie star mayor, made sure those lights got hung. He also saw to it that Pope John Paul II was able to make a stop in Carmel in 1987, which boosted tourism and filled the city’s coffers. If Clint was the celebrity mayor, Carmel was becoming a place where tourists liked to come, hoping to catch a glimpse of him strolling around town, always ready, willing, and able to keep the peace.

  Sondra Locke, meanwhile, was trying to move her stalled career forward. Occasionally she still made the drive up the coast to visit Clint in his Carmel enclave. Locke knew that if she wanted to see him, she would have to go up there; otherwise (and Clint had done nothing to hide it from her) a steady stream of other female visitors would come to his home. He was continuing to see, among others, Jacelyn Reeves, who gave birth to their second child, a daughter, in February 1988.

  Locke’s place in L.A., on Stradella Road, was becoming less and less hers and more and more Kyle Eastwood’s. Clint’s son, at Clint’s directive, had moved in, according to Locke, even as he was struggling at the University of Southern California. Kyle brought home his pack, musicians and actors, most of whom Locke did not know. When she raised a red flag to Clint, he supported Kyle, seeing it, in his way, as taking Kyle in, even though Clint was rarely at that house. As much as Locke wanted to protest, Clint still owned the place, and she had no legal right to prevent the sudden influx of “family” and friends. “So this had become my life with him,” she wrote,

  Clint being distant, rarely at home and Kyle and his friends playing their instruments into the wee hours, sneaking girls in and out for overnight stays. It was humiliating to feel that I had nothing to say about circumstances in my own home. The final straw for me was the night I woke up and saw someone staring down at me. It was a friend of Kyle’s. I threw him out and locked my bedroom door from that day forward.

  Nonetheless at times Locke felt that she and Clint were making progress, getting closer, having fun when they saw each other. For a while she became his official escort, even at home, where he entertained the usual round of obligatory celebrities in Carmel, including Merv Griffin, whose advancing age and mania for “old” Hollywood held little social interest for Locke (or ultimately for Clint). Cary Grant and Lucille Ball were also regulars, although again, the age differences and levels of sophistication proved difficult for Locke to handle.

  Gradually, though, Clint’s social circle changed as the older members disappeared or died off, and it updated itself with the likes of TV producer Bud Yorkin and his wife, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, Al Ruddy (the producer of The Godfather), and Richard Zanuck and his wife, Lili. Most of these were friends from Clint’s vacation home in Sun Valley, a place Locke always enjoyed. This circle was closer in age, temperament, and love for physical sports like skiing, which made her feel more a part of Clint’s life. And of course, they were all active filmmakers.

  But really it was all over between them. It had always been Clint’s style to act passively when a relationship was ending. He had kept Roxanne Tunis and their child on a back burner (of sorts), while his marriage to Maggie slowly flickered out. If Locke was going to put up with all of Clint’s ways, Clint was not predisposed to do anything more than hope she would just go away.

  Toward the end of his term, papal visits notwithstanding, Clint’s restlessness with local politics finally led him to think about making a new movie, one that he had actually signed on to before he put his film career on voluntary hold.

  The project was a biography of alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker that had been around for years in what is disaffectionately known in Hollywood as “development hell.” He couldn’t possibly play the lead, because Parker was African-American, but he could produce and direct without starring in the film. That prospect excited him but sent automatic shivers up the spine of Warner Bros.

  While Clint was perhaps the most valuable single commodity Warner had in the post-studio era, much of his value came from his on-screen appearances. To date, he had directed only one other movie that he had not starred in, the problematic 1973 all-but-forgotten Breezy, which did not even register in the top thirty of the forty-three films that he had appeared in (some of which he had also directed).

  Probably no other actor-director at the time could have gotten Bird made the way he wanted to do it except Clint, who in 1988 accounted for a full 18 percent, nearly one fifth, of Warner’s domestic revenues from films, plus an additional $1.5 million per week his movies generated internationally. A biography of a jazz musician, Charlie “Bird” Parker, who drank and drugged himself to death in the 1950s, filled with failure, despair, and death, was unlikely to find an audience with any kind of box-office pulse, especially with the all-important 18-to-25 rock-and-roll set who bought the majority of all theater tickets.

  Like nearly every Clint Eastwood film, Bird was produced by Malpaso as a stand-alone project, which allowed Clint to rattle his saber and threaten to do business with another studio when the executives did something he
didn’t like. Because Clint’s passion for Bird was so high, Terry Semel, not wanting to incur his wrath or, worse, lose the East-wood/Malpaso franchise, put up no resistance, even though no one at Warner thought the film stood any chance at all of making a dime. Few films about jazz (excluding The Jazz Singer, Alan Crosland’s 1927 box-office-busting novelty—the first talkie—which had absolutely nothing to do with jazz) had ever gotten made, let alone shown a profit in America. The best the studio hoped for was that the losses wouldn’t be too big.

  Clint had been indirectly involved in a film about jazz once before, Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 ’Round Midnight, which lovingly followed the lives of several Paris-based American jazz expats. It won an Oscar for Original Score, awarded to Herbie Hancock, and gained a nomination for its star, Dexter Gordon. When that film’s producer, Irwin Winkler, had shopped it, he had met a stone wall at the studios except at Warner, where Mark Rosenberg, then head of production, teetered on the fence. Clint exerted his influence to get the film green-lighted. Not long afterward Fox offered $3 million for the foreign rights. Winkler made the film with that foreign money, and it became one of the sleeper hits of 1986.

  The script for Bird first came to Clint via a long and circuitous route, not unusual for projects the studios considered too fringe. Its writer, Joel Oliansky (also the originator of the project), had previously written a mildly entertaining movie about a classical music competition (classical music was another studio no-no) that he also directed, The Competition (1980). The film did well enough to get him a plum assignment: writing an eight-hour historical miniseries for ABC, Masada (1981), for which he was nominated for an Emmy and got a contract from Columbia. They soon green-lighted Bird, his proposed feature film bio of Charlie Parker. Although he had been promised he could direct it, the studio eventually gave the project to Bob Fosse, who had been nominated for Best Director for his autobiographical All That Jazz (1979), a Broadway-based biopic.* All That Jazz had nothing to do with jazz, but the title was enough for Columbia to conclude that he was the perfect director for the film. But Fosse passed, and it came back to Oliansky.

  Columbia’s initial interest in the project was based on its belief that Richard Pryor would play the title role. But after Pryor nearly burned himself to death in 1980 in his infamous drug-related “accident,” the studio put the project on the back burner. Five years later Warner revived interest in it as a possible vehicle for Prince, who had had an unexpected outsize hit with his semiautobiographical Purple Rain (1984, directed by Albert Magnoli). To get the Oliansky project, called at the time Yardbird Suite, from Columbia, Warner traded a script it had, called Revenge, to Ray Stark’s Rastar, the longtime producer’s company under exclusive contract to Columbia.†

  When Prince’s involvement ended, the script once more lay idle—until someone thought to send it to Clint. By now both Manes and Chernus were gone (Chernus had been Manes’s assistant, and when Manes went, so did she), so Clint took to searching for projects on his own. When he found out that Semel had Yardbird Suite and nowhere to go with it, he requested a copy, read it, and decided he wanted to make the movie. He called Oliansky, and they met, but despite their shared interest in Parker, they failed to hit it off. Reportedly they fell out over the development part of the deal: Clint wanted Oliansky to do a rewrite, and Oliansky asked for rewrite money. Clint, perhaps feeling the writer should have been a little more grateful and cooperative for a project that had been sitting around for years, fixed the script himself, mostly cutting own on the dialogue. Clint kept Oliansky at arm’s length for the rest of the movie.

  Forest Whitaker was cast in the title role. Whitaker had made a name for himself in a trifecta of Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), and Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). Production on Bird went smoothly, and Whitaker’s performance was so strong that in the spring of 1988, when Clint took the film to Cannes, Whitaker walked off with the Best Actor vote. Unfortunately for Clint, it lost the Golden Palm to Argentinean Fernando Solanas for Sur. That loss put a drag on the film’s momentum and slowed Warner’s plan of release.

  Disappointed at Cannes, Clint returned to the States and his mayoral duties. He quickly made two public announcements.

  The first was that he was not going to run for a second two-year term as mayor of Carmel, putting an end to the collective fantasy that he would one day follow in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps and make a successful run for the presidency. In truth, Clint had become disillusioned with local politics, finding most of it boring and mundane, and he had failed to bring a successful, definitive resolution to his Hog’s Breath Inn battle with the city council that had made him run for the office in the first place. Eating ice cream in public somehow wasn’t enough of a victory to motivate him to continue. Nor did the obligatory scrutiny that accompanied anything higher than small-town politics appeal to him. Exposure of the facts of his private life—rife with lovers and out-of-wedlock children before, during, and after his only marriage—would not only eliminate him from any serious run for larger office, but could conceivably damage his public image and, even possibly, his acting career. As he told the Los Angeles Times seven years later, “I would never have been able to pass the Bill Clinton–Gary Hart test … no one short of Mother Teresa could pass.”

  The second was that he was going to return to the well one more time to make another Dirty Harry film, the fifth, this one to be called The Dead Pool.

  The screenplay came from the unlikeliest of sources, a pair of nutritionists whom Clint had known since at least the late 1970s. Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw had a program they called Life Extension that promised, among other things, improved personal appearance, reduced anxiety, and of course long life. Pearson was a graduate of MIT who had majored in physics; afterward he had devoted his life to searching for a way for a human being to live to 150 years without any appreciable loss of physical prowess or mental awareness—in effect, to double the human life expectancy. Pearson’s method was built around large doses of vitamins and minerals and other assorted nutrients. Along the way he met and teamed with Sandy Shaw, a UCLA graduate with a degree in biochemistry who had studied the aging process extensively.

  Clint first met Pearson and Shaw at a dinner arranged by Merv Griffin, who was already a devotee of the pair and wanted to turn Clint on to them. In 1981 Pearson and Shaw wrote a bestselling book called Life Extension, based on their theories and their applications. There they recounted a meeting with Griffin and “Mr. Smith,” who was in fact Clint Eastwood; he had tried the megadosing and extreme exercise system and found it to be an extraordinary help to his overall health and his allergies. It even improved his ability to talk to interviewers, which in the past had always caused a bit of anxiety, reflected in uneasy word flow. In 1984, after years of evasions and denials, Clint finally admitted that he was “Mr. Smith.”* His daily regimen included three-mile jogs, two hours in the gym, and two sessions of meditation; a low-fat, high-vegetable, meatless diet (save an occasional cheeseburger); and doses of choline, selenium, deanol, L-arginine, and L-dopa. He later claimed not to have needed reading glasses until he turned fifty-eight.

  To many who knew the story, his purchase of the screenplay seemed something of a payback to Pearson and Shaw for having helped keep him fit enough to be able to make another Dirty Harry film. In fact, Pearson and Shaw had worked on a previous film of Clint’s, serving as “consultants” on Foxfire, but they had been left uncredited to keep Clint’s deeper involvement with them confidential.

  Now Clint was willing to give them a full story credit. This new Dirty Harry project had the familiar story trope of the tracking of a serial killer. The Dead Pool (not to be confused with Stuart Rosenberg’s 1975 Paul Newman vehicle, The Drowning Pool) involves a game of betting on how long a celebrity will live. (He or she has to die a natural death for the winner to collect.) Unfortunately the film had few of the psychological overtones or dramatic elements of Tightrope, and onscreen Clint app
eared weary and uninvolved. He seems to be simply going through the motions.

  With a script heavily rewritten by Steve Sharon, and with Buddy Van Horn directing (Horn was the stuntman who had directed Clint’s comic turn in Any Which Way You Can), the film did not have much going for it. It did take a clever jab at a female film critic, unmistakably Pauline Kael (who, reviewing Bird, had wondered if Clint had paid the electric bill, meaning the film looked too dark to her). In a very early screen appearance Jim Carrey (billed as James Carrey) acted a deadly unfunny parody of a doomed rock star. The Dead Pool grossed about $59 million in its initial domestic release, which would have been good for most films but was disappointing for a Dirty Harry movie. It did nothing so much as signal that the franchise was finally and forever dead.*

  By the end of 1988, the arc of Clint’s career appeared finally to have curved downward. The drop was neither fast nor sharp enough to cause alarm, but the glory days seemed to have faded into the sunset. To be fair, only a few actors from the 1960s were still box-office draws—among them Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman—but even their movies were nothing like the ones that had brought them to prominence earlier in their careers.