American Rebel Read online

  Though it owes much to Yojimbo and Shane, however, A Fistful of Dollars* also owes a great deal to the great pulp and genre writers of the first half of the twentieth century. The British critic and film historian Christopher Frayling has traced all these films’ common plot line and characters to Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest (the Continental Op is, significantly, a man without a name) and even further back to Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century play Servant of Two Masters. Leone himself often said that Red Harvest was a primary source of his script.†

  What impressed Clint, and first clued him in to the fact that something might be going on other than just another European ripoff of American genres, was the stylistic flourish Leone used to shoot the film. Clint had become interested in directing well before he showed up in Italy, especially in the stylistics of directors that made their films personal. As he told it, during one episode of Rawhide:

  We were shooting some vast cattle scenes—about two thousand head of cattle. We were doing some really exciting stampede stuff. I was riding along in the herd, there was dust rising up, and it was pretty wild really. But the shots were being taken from outside the herd, looking in, and you didn’t see too much. I thought, we should get right in the middle of this damn stampede. I said to the director and producer, “I’d like to take an Arriflex [camera], run it on my horse and go right in the middle of this damn thing, even dismount, whatever—but get in there and really get some great shots, because there are some beautiful shots in there that we are missing.” Well, they double-talked me. They said, “You can’t get in there because of union rules.” I could see they didn’t want to upset a nice standard way of moviemaking.

  Even before he worked on A Fistful of Dollars, Clint had been thinking a lot about how familiar setups, camera angles, and methodology—establish the scene in a master shot, cut to over-the-shoulder one-shots for the dialogue, finish the scene with the master shot, dissolve into the next master—bred a uniformity in TV directors and made them all (directors and their shows) stylistically look the same. The day Clint wanted to shoot the cattle drive a little differently was the day the seeds of his future role as a director were planted.

  Finally, I asked Eric Fleming, “Would you be averse to my directing?” He said, “Not at all, I’d be for it.” So I went to the producer and he said great. Evidently he didn’t say great behind my back; but he said great at the time. He said, “I’ll tell you what, why don’t you direct some trailers for us—coming attractions for next season’s shows?” I said, “Terrific. I’ll do it for nothing and then I’ll do an episode.” And I did the trailers. But they reneged on the episode because, at that time, several of their name actors on other television shows were directing episodes, not too successfully.

  So about the time I was getting set to do it, CBS said no more series actors could direct their own shows … then I went to work with Sergio Leone.

  Acting in the film proved difficult for Clint, primarily because Leone insisted on shooting in three languages simultaneously. Clint had to speak his lines in English while the other actors spoke in either Italian or Spanish. The result was a limited amount of dialogue that Leone used to help create the strong silent mystique of the Man with No Name. Rather than having the character talk a lot, at Leone’s insistence (Clint enthusiastically supported this decision and, with Leone’s permission, cut much of his own dialogue out), he smoked cigarillos and used his big gun to do a lot of the talking for him. All of it allowed Clint to act with his face and his eyes rather than to talk as Rowdy Yates and almost every other character on Rawhide did, because on TV describing action is always a lot cheaper than actually showing it. (“You know those rustlers we rounded up yesterday?” “Yeah, I remember.” “Well, two of them had a fight in their jail cell last night and we had to break it up.” “Too bad I missed it.” “One of them hit the other over the head with a bottle … and now the doc is with him. Let’s go see how he’s doing and maybe we can get some more information out of the varmint …”)

  Gradually, the slim backstory of the Man with No Name began to take shape. He was some kind of wandering knight in shining armor, which is revealed in a single sentence, after he helps a young couple escape the clutches of the evil Rojo, by explaining, “I knew someone like you once and there was no one there to help.” That was all, and that was enough.

  Clint found a wide hat he liked and wore it low to shade his eyes, giving him an even more menacing look while preserving a certain coolness—not an easy balance to maintain. And he wore a poncho, donned in the second half of the film, to hide his mangled hand from his opponents.* It became akin to Batman’s cape. Finally, the metal shield he wore during the climactic shoot-out made him appear unearthly, as if he were an invincible alien from another world. Clint combined all these character accoutrements perfectly, throwing the cape back with a flourish in the film’s final shoot-out, which Leone cut perfectly in sync to the extraordinary score by Ennio Morricone, the best film music for any western since Tiomkin’s Academy Award-winning theme for High Noon.

  Besides the stylized music-to-action and the low angles that Leone used to shoot the Man with No Name, he also cut close-ups of the characters’ eyes in strong, rhythmic motions. As the action of the film intensified, the close-ups got closer. And for the final, climactic shootout, Leone came up with one of the film’s most unforgettable sequences; after a series of close-ups of eyes, a double-barreled shotgun appears through a window, and the shot turns them into the perfect cold, unfeeling, unblinking steely eyes of evil incarnate. The moment never fails to evoke cheers and chills in audiences, and rightly so. It is the kind of effect no other form can achieve, not theater, not television, not the novel—a moment that is purely kinetic, a triumph of directing and editing that does not take away from the story but adds a dramatic flourish to it.

  Leone’s cinematic feel was not lost on Clint:

  An American would be afraid of approaching a western such as Fistful of Dollars with that kind of style. For instance, there were shots of a person being shot. In other words, you never shot a tie-up shot of a man shooting a gun and another person getting hit. It’s a Hays Office rule from years ago, a censorship deal. You’d cut to the guy shooting, and then cut to a guy falling. That was all right—the same thing—the public isn’t counting the cut. But you could never do a tie-up. We did because Sergio didn’t know all that. He wasn’t bothered by that. Neither was I. I knew about it but I couldn’t care less. The whole object of doing a film with a European director was to put a new shade of light on it.*

  With filming completed, Clint packed his things and boarded a plane for America. It would make a brief stopover in London, then continue to Los Angeles, just as filming on the seventh season of Rawhide was about to begin. Maggie met Clint in person at the airport. Roxanne Tunis called the next day and happily informed him that he was now the proud father of a baby daughter, Kimber Tunis, born June 17, 1964, at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Hollywood. Although the father is listed on the birth certificate as Clinton Eastwood Jr., Tunis publicly gave the baby her last name, protecting Clint. He promised to support the child and did, emotionally and financially, asking from Tunis only that, if possible, the baby’s identity be kept secret.

  Clint now had to negotiate a fine line to make sure his worlds (and women) didn’t collide. Thompkins, his longtime friend, agreed with Tunis that Clint should at least tell Maggie about the baby. Clint immediately and permanently cut him off. Thompkins was summarily fired from Rawhide and permanently disappeared from Clint’s life.*

  As for Maggie, it is difficult to say for sure that she actually knew about the baby, although it would have been nearly impossible for her not to. Everyone on the set knew, many of Maggie and Clint’s friends knew, and it is simply too difficult to keep a secret like that when the mother and the illegitimate child live in the same small town, especially when that small town is Hollywood.

  Perhaps that was one reason Clint suddenly decided he and Maggie
should move north, to the Monterey Peninsula. He found a small home for them in Pebble Beach, and a second getaway place in Carmel, and assigned Maggie the familiar job of making the two houses into homes, even if he was going to be away from them, and her, most of the time, working on the show.

  Meanwhile Rawhide was continuing to have problems not just with ratings but with salaries. The standard seven-year contracts that both Fleming and Clint had signed, the maximum allowed under AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), were set to expire at the end of the season, and neither the network nor the stars were particularly eager to extend them. New contracts for Fleming and Clint, the network knew, would be expensive propositions, more now for Clint than for Fleming, whose fan mail had markedly decreased while Clint’s had steadily grown.

  Moreover, CBS had decided to job out the entire production. Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski, two aggressive young independent producers, had formed a company called Unit Productions and won the assignment from the network to take over Rawhide. They hired Del Reisman as executive producer, or “show runner,” and made themselves highly profitable middlemen. One of the first things Reisman did was to screen episodes from all six previous seasons. He immediately saw that thirty-four-year-old Clint Eastwood was no longer suited to play Rowdy Yates; nor was Fleming, about to turn forty, to play Favor.

  Reisman’s solution was to fire Fleming and focus on Clint, hoping that Clint’s maturing character Yates would work better solo. But before he could actually do it, Fleming, sensing trouble coming his way, went directly to William Paley and complained that the new production team was going to ruin the show. Paley, a big fan, listened to Fleming and decided that CBS should not be jobbing out its shows. He fired Unit Productions, which meant that Reisman was gone as well, and he convinced Endre Bohem, one of the show’s longtime line producers who had been let go when Unit was brought in, to come back.

  But it did no good. By the end of the season, the show had slipped to number forty-four in the ratings. Rawhide had clearly turned into a tired replay of a good thing—the cattle could have reached the shores of China by now. “Every time they wanted a format change,” Clint later recalled, “they’d drag in some other [producer] … they tried a lot of different approaches but Paley would tune in every now and then and get on the horn with ‘What have you done with the show,’ and they’d get back to basics.”

  In the spring of 1965, after one more season playing Rowdy, Clint jumped at the chance to return to Italy to star in Leone’s planned sequel to A Fistful of Dollars, to be called Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More).

  By now, a mystique had grown around A Fistful of Dollars in America, where (in the days before video, cable, and the Internet) no one could actually see the film without traveling to Europe. Even so, it was talked about in magazines, on the radio, on television, and on college campuses all across the country. Tales of the film’s “unbelievable” action sequences traveled in whispers, while Variety, the showbiz bible, printed story after story about the movie’s phenomenal overseas box-office success.

  Indeed, in Europe it had been a hit from the day of its release; in the November 18, 1964, issue of Daily Variety, the newspaper’s Rome reporter kicked off the type of noncritical enthusiasm that would follow the film wherever it played: “Crackerjack western made in Italy and Spain by a group of Italians and an international cast with James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons. Early Italo figures indicate it’s a major candidate to be sleeper of the year. Also that word-of-mouth, rather than cast strength or ad campaign, is a true selling point. As such it should make okay program fare abroad as well.” Clint, who now was widely known throughout Europe as “Il Cigarillo,” rightly figured that sooner or later the film would have to play in America, Hays Code or no Hays Code. When the offer came for him to make the sequel, he quickly accepted it.

  But before Leone could actually start production, he had to settle the still-unresolved dispute between Jolly Films and Kurosawa over the division of profits from the first film. When the case went to formal litigation, Leone simply declared himself free from all future obligations to Jolly and signed a new deal with Produzioni Europee Associates, headed by Alberto Grimaldi, one of the better-known Italian producers, who had worked with many of Italy’s greatest directors. Leone secured a $350,000 fee for himself, plus 60 percent of the profits for his proposed sequel to A Fistful of Dollars, if—and it was a big if—he could get Clint Eastwood to return as the star. Leone told Grimaldi not to worry and quickly found himself a new screenwriter, Luciano Vincenzoni, who, working together with the director, came up with a completed shooting script in nine days.

  The character of Ramón Rojo, played by Italian actor Gian Maria Volontè, had been killed off in the first film, but this one would bring the actor back in a different (but essentially the same) character. Lee Marvin would play a rival bounty hunter to the Man with No Name, who is also hunting down Volontè. Marvin was all set to go until he asked for more money. Leone fired him and replaced him with Lee Van Cleef, a Hollywood character actor with a once-bright future who had fallen on hard times. He had made his debut in High Noon as one of Frank Miller’s gang out to kill Will Kane. Van Cleef was originally cast in the far better role of Kane’s deputy, but when he refused to get his big and hooked nose “fixed,” the part went instead to Lloyd Bridges, and it made him a star. Van Cleef, relegated to playing one of the Miller gang, was not given a single line of dialogue. Still, his debut was so powerful, he managed to get steady work as a bad guy throughout the 1950s, until his career finally petered out and he turned to painting. Starving in Europe and living on his oils, he leaped when Leone offered him Marvin’s part for the $50,000 that Marvin had turned down.

  Clint was also offered $50,000, plus a first-class round-trip plane ticket and top-of-the-line accommodations. Having accepted the terms, Il Cigarillo boarded a plane as soon as Rawhide went on hiatus, bound for Rome and Cinecittà studios, to begin filming.

  This time Maggie accompanied him for the first ten days, then returned home and flew back again for the last ten days of filming in Spain. Clint’s press agent played up the husband-and-wife angle for all it was worth, but as soon as Maggie left Italy, Clint was seen with some of the most beautiful actresses in Rome, and his villa was filled day and night with them, even as dozens of friends and co-workers came and went. Clint partied like a teenage boy with the keys to the liquor cabinet while his parents were away on a trip. He had become such a movie star in Europe that he could no longer walk down the street without hordes of people, mostly women, running after him, like something out of Richard Lester’s satire on Beatlemania, A Hard Day’s Night.

  The film’s three-way competition among gunfighters gave the film an added level of dramatic tension that the first film did not have, and Van Cleef especially, as he had been in High Noon, was superb in his role. When the completed film was released, it proved an even greater sensation than the original. This time, without Kurosawa to contend with, and with film censorship crumbling in America along with the entire studio system, Leone and Grimaldi were intent upon getting a distribution deal for this film for North America, where, they knew, the real money was. They approached Arthur Krim and Arnold Picker, the new heads of the reinvigorated United Artists looking to restore the studio’s original vision as a distributor for the best works of other producers and directors. While in Europe looking for product, they were approached by Vincenzoni.

  Grimaldi took Krim and Picker to a movie theater in Rome, rather than a private screening, so they could witness firsthand the attention and excitement the film created in audiences. Afterward in a hotel room, Grimaldi asked for a million dollars. Krim and Picker countered with $900,000—a phenomenal amount of money for a foreign-made American-style western. Grimaldi took the deal.

  Papers were drawn up, and at the actual signing Picker asked Leone what his next film would be, adding t
hat UA might be interested in bankrolling it in return for exclusive distribution rights. On the spot Leone improvised a story of three post–American Civil War losers scrounging for money. That was it, that was all he had, and a title he made up then and there—Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)*—that drew a laugh from Vincenzoni and broad grins when translated for Krim and Picker. Based on only that much, they agreed to put up between $1.2 million and $1.6 million to fund the making and to retain the North American rights.†

  Back in the States, meanwhile, Clint reverted once more to playing Rowdy Yates on Rawhide, a show that by this time seemed like a cultural artifact from the past, a leftover from the days of I Love Lucy. Another nail in its coffin was the network’s stubborn refusal to allow it to switch to color. James Aubrey, then the head of programming, turned thumbs down on the idea because of the expense; shooting in color would mean that more episodes would have to be shot to justify the cost, and there was very little stock footage of cattle drives. (The show had long ago switched to buying old footage from movies rather than staging its own, wildly expensive runs.)

  The show was saved from cancellation only because Paley still loved it, and when Aubrey began talking about removing it from the schedule, Paley instructed CBS’s executive vice-president Mike Dann to keep it on the air, no matter what Aubrey said. A new producer was brought in to try to spruce things up. Ben Brady, whose past hit show credits included Perry Mason and Have Gun—Will Travel, announced that for the new season the characters of James Murdock (Mushy) and Sheb Wooley (Pete) were to be eliminated from the cast, replaced by David Watson as an English drover; Raymond St. Jacques, an African-American actor with Shakespearean credits, as Simon Blake; and John Ireland, one of the stars of Red River and other gritty movie westerns, as Jed Colby. And there was one more change: Eric Fleming was out, and Rowdy Yates was promoted to trail boss (something Clint read about while in Rome, from a Variety clipping that Maggie sent him while he was finishing up For a Few Dollars More).