Clint Eastwood (16 page)

This is not meant to imply that she was terribly demanding. On the contrary, she seems to have quickly come to understand that her new husband required a long leash, and that the fewer questions she asked about his comings and goings, the smoother their relationship was likely to be.

Not long after he signed his studio contract, Clint and Maggie found a tiny apartment in a complex of three motel-like structures on Arch Drive, within easy walking distance of the Universal lot. Its appeal, however, was more than convenience. Their neighbors in Beverly Hills had mainly been older people, rather stodgy and patronizing of their young building manager and his bride. The Arch Drive crowd was young and lively, in and out of one another’s apartments, one another’s lives, for everyone was at roughly the same place professionally, either trying to figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up or trying to establish themselves in recently adopted occupations. Over the years Clint encouraged some of his friends to rent in the complex, among them Fritz Manes and Bill Tompkins, a pal he had met in a gym in Seattle, whom he encouraged to become a Stuntman and who worked with Clint later on
Rawhide
and accompanied him to Europe for his first Sergio Leone picture.

The longest-lasting friendship of this period—extending without interruption until her death in a car accident in 1995—was with Jane Agee, a striking woman with a voice like Eve Arden’s, with whom the Eastwoods formed a “maternal-paternal relationship.” She was a largehearted woman whose enthusiasms were always getting her into scrapes that required advice and sympathy from Clint and Maggie. Later, she married James Brolin, the actor (their son, Josh, is now a rising movie actor), with Clint giving away the bride (and blowing his lines) at their Carmel wedding. Still later, after their divorces, she became “like a guy buddy, just a real pal,” someone to whom he could apply for the woman’s slant on life’s issues—and vice versa. She was never a threat to Maggie or to any other woman in Clint’s life.

Indeed, despite Clint’s later comments about the early days of their
marriage, it was, so far as their friends could tell, serene. Bob Daley, who moved into the Arch Drive complex at about the same time the Eastwoods did, remembers Maggie as “very sweet, very nice, very outgoing, so much fun to be around.” Brett Halsey characterizes her as “Miss Apple Pie All-American Girl.” To add to their income and in addition to her regular job she did some part-time modeling for a swimming-suit company. Daley remembers her regaling the Arch Drive crowd with tales of her misadventures in that trade, especially with the experimental designs. One literally disintegrated on her when she plunged into the water. Another was made of a fabric that lost its elasticity on immersion, sagging in all the wrong places while she desperately tried to preserve her modesty. She was, in his recollection, a good sport about any and all misadventures. But she was also, in Daley’s characterization, strong-minded. Clint “used to rely on her for a lot of advice.”

The Arch Drive crowd was not particularly showbizzy. Aside from Clint, the only performer of even modest prominence that anyone can remember living there was a young actress name Kathryn Grant, who was at the time dating an older man. “Every once in a while this guy would come in with the hat and the pipe, you know, and everybody’d be glued to the windows,” Clint remembers. “Bing Crosby [whom Grant would marry in 1957] would go up and they’d go out somewhere.”

Clint also recalls a young Swedish woman named Lillie Kardell, who lived in the building next door. She had been discovered working in RKO’s Stockholm office and had been encouraged to try her luck in Hollywood. She was also at some point in the Universal talent program, but her chief claim to fame was as one of
James Dean’s lovers in the last year of his life, and Clint recalls meeting him and seeing him around quite a bit at this time. He also remembers meeting Jayne Mansfield at one of the Arch Drive parties. She was completely unknown at the time, and he tried to help her with her career. “I took her over to the Universal lot with me just to introduce her to a few people in talent, and nobody gave her a chance—though there were a couple of directors who would have loved to jump all over her.” That, as he says, not for the first time, was the way it was at Universal: They already had their Marilyn Monroe type in the person of Mamie Van Doren and didn’t need another one. (Perhaps, though, they did. Jack Kosslyn remembers Van Doren saying to him one day, “I don’t dig this Staniskovski,” which is something Monroe, who of course did come to dig the Method, perhaps to her sorrow, would never have said.)

Clint got his first role around the time the studio renewed his option, in the fall of 1954 (he got a raise to one hundred dollars a week). The part was given to him by William Alland, who, with another producer, Albert Zugsmith, had joined Lubin as Clint’s chief studio supporters. Alland was perhaps overqualified for his job (a longtime associate of Orson Welles, he had served as dialogue director in
Citizen Kane
while playing the inquiring reporter). Now casting the sequel of his very successful
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, he offered Clint a one-scene part in
Revenge of the Creature
, which was shot in 3-D. He was to play Jennings, a lab assistant to John Agar’s research scientist (even the B-picture leads at Universal were bland), who is studying the half-man, half-fish creature, which eventually escapes and terrorizes a town.

Basically, Clint had to play dumb. One of the lab’s white rats is missing, and Jennings not illogically blames a cat that has been placed in the cage with them: “Doc, there were four rats there in that cage when I changed my lights. Now there are only three. It’s my considered opinion that rat number four is sitting inside that cat.”

The scientist inquires if Jennings is certain he fed all the rodents earlier. “Here, I always feed them,” Clint begins, groping in his lab-coat pocket to show what he’s been giving them. But as he feels around, he encounters something soft and furry. “Uh-oh,” he says, pulling out the missing rodent. He gives a nonplussed look and delivers a line to cover his embarrassment. End of Clint Eastwood’s movie debut.

He almost didn’t get that far—not in this picture, anyway. The day before the scene was to be shot, Alland took him down to the set to meet the director, Jack Arnold, another former actor now in the early stages of a directing career that would include some of Universal’s better genre films,
The Mouse That Roared
and uncounted television episodes. Director and producer immediately fell to wrangling about the scene Clint was supposed to do. Arnold thought it irrelevant and was refusing to shoot it. Alland liked it for some reason—perhaps it was his own invention; he has story credit on the film—and insisted that it be made.

“They were arguing like crazy,” Clint remembers. “It was nothing against me, but meanwhile I’m just standing there, this big, gawky kid getting more kind of anxious about the whole thing. Finally, Arnold says, ‘OK, I’ll shoot it, but we’re not gonna use it in the goddamn picture.’ So I just said, ‘Well, nice to meet you, Mr. Arnold.’ ”

But as they were leaving the stage Alland told him, “Don’t worry about it, you should be there tomorrow morning.” But, of course, he did worry: “My first scene in my first picture, and here I got a director who hates the scene and doesn’t want to shoot it. You can imagine how
adverse those circumstances were.” They did not improve when he set to work: Clint blew his lines on the first two takes. From his position by the camera the crusty Arnold could be heard muttering, “That’s great, that’s just great.” Oh, shit, Clint said to himself, I’m really in this over my head. But John Agar—“bless his heart”—reassured him: Don’t worry about it, don’t listen to him, just relax.

“So I sucked my gut in and jumped in there and did it. And afterward nobody said goodbye or anything. I left there with my confidence knocked back about three notches, because I felt if in every picture we had to go through that, that’s kind of an exhausting process.”

In time he would make his peace with Arnold. “I joked with Jack about it years later when he came on and did some
Rawhide
s. “It wasn’t a bad deal like Abner Biberman or something.” A sometime actor and coach in the Universal talent program, now turning to directing, Clint approached Biberman for a part in
Running Wild
, an exploitation picture about delinquent adolescents that he was casting. He was curtly dismissed. Jesus Christ, that was a short career, Clint remembers thinking. He also remembers thinking that a former actor, who must have known his share of rejections, might have put this turndown more kindly, instead of making Clint feel like “a punk kid, hanging around.” Years later, when Biberman was working in episodic television, his name appeared on a list of potential
Rawhide
directors that Clint happened to spy in a producer’s office. He took out a pencil and drew a line through it. “I’m not a vindictive person, but I just didn’t want to see that face on the set.”

Clint also remembers a certain nameless Universal executive: “This guy saw me coming and he’d start throwing rocks.” A few years later, when Clint was starring on
Rawhide
and his old nemesis had become an agent, they encountered one another on the M-G-M lot, where Clint’s program headquartered for a while, “and you’d have thought I was his long-lost son he had never seen.” Where was this guy when I needed him? Clint wondered. He understands that most of the time an actor cannot fit the image a director or a producer has in his mind for a particular role. But that is scarcely the actor’s fault, and he doesn’t understand why people need to get nasty about it.

He has, however, an equally long memory for kindnesses past. Arthur Lubin, for example, recalled getting a phone call from Clint a couple of nights before he won his Academy Awards for
Unforgiven
. Clint had been remembering the director’s lonely staunchness in these early days and wanted him to know that he was still grateful. And, indeed, it was Lubin who cast Clint in his longest role of this period, that of Jonesy in
Francis in the Navy
, sixth in the seven-picture series. Lubin directed all
but the last of them, developing his curious specialty in verbalizing fauna; a little later he produced and directed
Mr. Ed
, the long-running television series about a talking horse, as well as
The Incredible Mr. Limpet
, a Don Knotts feature for Disney, in which the star was transformed into a talking fish.

Francis had been the subject of a novel by a writer named David Stern, the rights to which Lubin purchased, hoping to interest Universal in putting the talking mule on film. The studio resisted, largely because of the problem of making the animal’s lips move so that dialogue could be persuasively synchronized with them. But the director persisted and prevailed—though he always refused to divulge the secret of the illusion.

The basic joke of the series is that Francis is the grown-up, making variously wry and wise observations (drawling Chill Wills supplies his voice) on the childlike behavior of the humans around him. His straight man (except for the last film in the series) is Donald O’Connor, who plays army lieutenant Peter Sterling, always getting into unlikely scrapes and always frantic to cover up the fact that his best pal (and sometime conscience) is this unlikely creature.

In this eighty-minute film designed for the bottom of double-feature bills, Francis finds himself, for reasons the picture does not make entirely clear, in the navy’s charge. Apparently he can read and write, too, for he summons his friend Sterling to rescue him. He, however, looks exactly like Slicker Donevan (also played by O’Connor), a rather mean-spirited bosun’s mate, who is a womanizer, slacker and general con artist. Much merriment is supposed to ensue from this confusion of identities.

Jonesy, Clint’s character, is one of Slicker’s navy buddies, none of whom ever quite grasps the situation. Along with two or three other actors, his function is largely to supply reaction shots when things go amiss. He never has more than two sentences of connected dialogue, though his part does run through most of the picture, and because of his size, the eager alertness he brings to his role—no one’s going to accuse him of inattention—and with Lubin favoring him in some group shots, he is noticeable. More so than his two army friends, Martin Milner, who plays one of Slicker’s other pals, and David Janssen, who plays a junior officer. Toward the end of the film, Clint climbs from a landing craft to a truck ahead of it in a traffic jam and is last seen handsomely semaphoring farewells from that vehicle when it turns onto a side road.

It was a brief but pleasant experience. As he already knew, Lubin was a “very straight-ahead, professional guy, and very encouraging. All the cast and crew thought he was great.” Best of all, Clint had billing in
the main titles—fifth position—the only time that happened at Universal. That was not bad for a beginner, even in this distinctly minor context. (“Lubin, who has megged all ‘Francis’ offerings, fails to insert his usual punch,”
Variety
opined, fair-mindedly enough.)