Authors: Richard Schickel
When his preparations were complete, the camera was trained on Crawford, and he did all his lines with the natural-seeming movements
he could not have accomplished if his eyes were fixed on a stationary cue card. Clint and the other actor cued him as he proceeded. When Crawford finished the director called “Cut” and “Print” and said, “OK, now we’re gonna come around on you two guys, and Brod, you’re through.” Whereupon Crawford headed off for another set, because they were shooting two episodes simultaneously. Clint and his colleague then did their dialogue to camera, with a script supervisor reading the star’s part.
Another role, on
TV Reader’s Digest
, in an episode entitled “Greatest of the Apaches,” materialized soon thereafter, and around this time he even got his first fleeting taste of media attention. One day a fan magazine reporter named Earl Leaf called. He told Clint he had an assignment to write and photograph an “at home” layout for his publication. Startled, Clint invited him over to Arch Drive, greeting him, beer in hand, with a question: “
Some of my friends put you up to this, didn’t they? We’re always playing jokes on each other.” The reporter assured him that his assignment was legitimate, that an editor in New York had glimpsed him in a Universal picture, found him adorable and wanted to feature him as a “star of tomorrow.” She also—ahem—thought it would be nice to meet him next time she was in L.A. “She didn’t know you were married, I guess,” said Leaf. The reporter, who later wrote a recollection of the encounter, got most of the facts wrong, but gave an accurate impression of a shy young man bemused by the reporter’s mission and thoroughly unimpressed with himself.
It was much more important that his little career roll seemed to be continuing. Early in 1956 the faithful Lubin offered him a part in a feature. The director had moved from Universal to RKO, which had recently been acquired from Howard Hughes by a subsidiary of the General Tire Company. The lunatic billionaire had brought the studio to the edge of extinction, but its new management was promising a renaissance, with Lubin’s movie
The First Traveling Saleslady
scheduled as its first release. Clint’s role offered him several scenes—more than he had had in a movie since the Francis picture. More important, he was to have an “and introducing” credit and a princely $750 salary. Lubin even talked of getting him a long-term contract with the studio.
Starring Ginger Rogers, Barry Nelson and Carol Channing, the film was one of those ghastly fifties comedies full of sniggery sexual innuendos, trying to take advantage of the slightly liberalized production code, which was now permitting somewhat more obvious, therefore somewhat more witless, double entendres. It is a period piece, set in 1897, with Rogers playing Rose Gilray, a free spirit presiding over a corset business. The irony of a supposedly liberated woman trying to
succeed by selling other women painfully constricting undergarments was, of course, entirely lost on the filmmakers. The plot has her working off a debt (for stays) to a steel magnate (David Brian) by using her charms to sell his barbed wire to western ranchers. Nelson is the inventor of a horseless carriage whom she keeps encountering and bickering with (a sure sign of true love in bad movies); Channing is Molly Wade, her model and companion on this expedition; with Clint cast as a soldier, Jack Rice, whom Channing encounters in a Kansas City hotel lobby, where he is recruiting for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Molly eyes him with supposedly comic lewdness, and he mimes unconsciousness of her libidinous intent. She assures him that she doesn’t want to join his outfit (“I can’t even ride smooth”) and this dialogue ensues:
“Do you like girls?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I’m a girl.”
“You sure are.”
Later on, when Molly introduces Jack to Rose, she says, “Pleased to meet you,” eyes him from toes to top and back again and adds, “all of you.”
This is a fair sample of the movie’s wit, and the scene where he meets the Channing character was Clint’s best. Once the action leaves Kansas City, he leaves the picture for several reels, reappearing again when it settles down for a conclusion in Texas, where he leads a ride to the rescue and ends up, of course, in Channing’s arms.
The whole enterprise puzzled Clint: “I read this script and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, yet they were going to make it.” He could not even understand the excitement buzzing around the set about James Arness, who had a role in the film, because he and Maggie didn’t have a television set and had not seen him in
Gunsmoke
, the “adult western” that had begun its endless CBS run the previous fall.
Still, Clint looked fine in his soldier suit, and his gulpy shyness was inoffensive, if not exactly riveting: “very attractive” was the mild comment of the
Hollywood Reporter
’s critic, in what appears to be the first trade review that did more than simply acknowledge his presence in a movie.
The studio contract (which Lubin remembered actually being drawn up) did not materialize. Perhaps RKO’s executives were unimpressed with his work. Perhaps its casting people failed to respond to a scene he did for them—he thinks it was from William Inge’s recent Broadway success,
Picnic
, about a hobo stud’s sexually galvanizing effect on a group of small-town Kansas women. Perhaps the faltering studio was simply uninterested in making long-term commitments to anyone.
Whatever the case, it was the beginning of a bad time, the worst Clint had known since his winter in the paper mill. He did not get an acting job for almost a year. He thinks, perhaps, that younger actors were victimized when older movie players, their own opportunities limited by dwindling feature-film production, started taking roles in episodic television. He continued to feel, as well, that his looks were against him. The only work he got was in a couple of commercials. One of them was for the American Dairy Association (“Milk is the lift without a letdown”), in which he silently gulps milk and chews a sandwich in a spot that featured more prominently one of the Miss Universe contest winners who had been with him in the studio talent program. The other was for Greyhound, and it was not without irony. He played a parking attendant, surveying a crowded lot and saying, “We’re all filled up”—the implication being that bus travel permitted one to avoid such inconvenience. It was shot the same day as another commercial in which a bus driver, gray-haired, exuding trustworthiness and looking as much like an airline pilot as possible, leaned out of his bus window to advise viewers to “leave the driving to us.” His one line became something of a national tag line. Clint’s definitely did not. “Mine ran once. The other one ran fifty times a day,” the residuals from it and various sequels greatly enriching the actor who played the driver.
The Eastwoods, by contrast, were living on Maggie’s salary and on what Clint could bring in from day labor. He and another Arch Drive resident, Bob Morris (who later changed his name to Bob Donner and, at Clint’s urging, became an actor), had a regular weekend job sweeping up at the Mode Furniture factory in South Los Angeles. On weekdays, Clint mainly worked for the United Pool Service, digging swimming pools. He remembers leaving his jobs two or three times a day, a coin damp with sweat in his hand, and running down to the nearest pay phone to call his agent. “But there’d be nothing. And I’d do this month in and month out; after a while you get kind of discouraged.”
He was also angry.
He had tried to get in to see Raoul Walsh when he was casting
The Naked and the Dead
, tried to get an interview with Sam Fuller when he was doing
Run of the Arrow
—men’s men that they were, they might have responded to him—but he didn’t have the credits, and his agency didn’t have the clout, so meetings could not be arranged. There were dozens of other such failures. And even when Clint got an audition it was equally discouraging. Putting aside paying work for a day in order to go out on a call, he would often enter a casting office and confront twenty other young men of roughly the same age, height and coloring and realize they had not sent for him specifically, but were just looking at types. He also knew that before this group of twenty there
had been another group of twenty, and that a similar crowd would be coming in after they left. One time a search for an unknown to play Charles Lindbergh in
The Spirit of St. Louis
was launched with much fanfare, and Clint dutifully attended one of the cattle calls for a role that ultimately went to that great unknown James Stewart. He snorts derisively at the hype and at the innocence of his hopes.
He summed up his general feelings very articulately for Norman Mailer: “
Oh, I hated it … having to deal with some of the most no-talent people in the world passing judgment on you. They’re going to pick out the worst aspects of you or anybody else they cast.… I wanted to pull people out of their seats and say, ‘Don’t talk to me that way.’ ”
But his frustrations spilled out in other directions. One brutally hot day, for example, he and a friend named George Fargo were working on a pool when the foreman started giving Fargo a hard time. Fargo—“kind of a crazy guy”—answered back and was fired. “So he started heading for the door and I started going with him. And the guy said, ‘Wait a minute. Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘Well, I gotta drive him home, so I guess I’ll have to be fired too.’ ” Clint does not make much of this act of loyalty: “I was kind of fed up with doing this particular work, too.”
He and Fargo occasionally passed an empty afternoon in a bar with the latter’s friend, Robert Mitchum, with Clint fascinated by that yarnspinner’s sardonic tales. They called him “the Goose” because of a strutting stride. Always, however, Clint kept himself fit for work, establishing the near-vegetarian eating habits he maintains to this day, imbibing curious, but obviously effective, health-food concoctions and gobbling vitamins. He also constantly pumped iron at Vince’s Gym, on Ventura Boulevard. “
You want to get rid of anger,” Donner says, “that’s one of the ways you do it.” You want to stay a movie star, that’s one of the ways you do it, too. Clint’s obsession with fitness—he runs or works out (often both) daily—has generally been treated offhandedly by observers of his career as either hobby or eccentricity. But it is, in fact, utterly essential to his well-being, his sense of self—and the longevity of his career.
He studied acting as assiduously as he worked out, eventually becoming a regular at Jack Kosslyn’s studio, where he would continue to work through most of his
Rawhide
years. Eventually, he even made a believer of his dubious coach, who remembers the exact moment it happened. It was a couple of years after Clint left Universal, when he was doing the scene in Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons
in which a young man confronts his father about his wartime crimes of supplying shoddy
matériel to the air force. For the first time Kosslyn saw the power Clint could mobilize.
One of Clint’s salient characteristics is his ability to compartmentalize, and it is very evident in this period. However anxious he was about his career his friends of this passage rarely saw it. The anger and frustration he so often talks about in retrospect was not manifested to Bob Daley or Bob Donner. The former remembers Clint in these very early days talking optimistically about someday setting up his own production company, with Daley as the business brains, and producing features without the waste of money and motion that he was seeing around the industry.
A little good fortune finally began to flow in Clint’s direction in January 1957, when he was cast in an episode of the TV series
The West Point Story
entitled—appropriately, as it turned out—“White Fury.” The series was shot on location at the military academy, and Clint and another actor, Jerome Courtland, were flown in to work on it. The grandeur of the setting impressed Clint. So did the midwinter cold along the banks of the Hudson. There was a scene on a nearby ski slope, and “it was so cold that the AD, everybody, were sitting in the car.” Only the actors, the cameraman and the director braved the elements. A little later he was back at RKO, working for Lubin again, though in greatly reduced circumstances, as a day player picking up a $175 paycheck playing a pilot (code-named “Dumbo”) searching for survivors of a midocean plane crash in
Escapade in Japan
. It is quite a nice little movie, one of Lubin’s better efforts, but Clint’s contribution to it was peripheral. So was his part in his next film, William A. Wellman’s
Lafayette Escadrille
, though it might have been otherwise, for—frustratingly—he came very close to getting a leading role in the picture.
Wellman, whose
Wings
had won the first Academy Award for best picture, had made Cagney’s breakthrough movie,
Public Enemy
, and he had also made
The Ox-Bow Incident
, which remains one of Clint’s favorite movies (in 1994, asked to present and comment on a movie at the Cinémathèque in Paris, he chose this film, which is a western about a lynch mob); and Wellman was passionately committed to this new project. He had served in the Lafayette Flying Corps, successor to the Escadrille (which had been composed of American volunteers flying under French colors earlier in the war), and the script, which he had been developing for years, drew on many of the director’s experiences.
Clint liked Wellman immediately, for “Wild Bill” was one of Hollywood’s legendary straight shooters, a tough-sentimental man’s man, intemperate and lovable, and the feeling was returned; Wellman had a
particular dislike of vain and egocentric actors, which he could immediately see this young man was not. “It was really fascinating,” Clint recalls. “He was going on about all these guys [the members of the Lafayette Flying Corps], and he says, ‘This guy’s a terrific part, and you would be perfect for it.’ ” The role was that of Duke Sinclaire, one of the two men with whom Wellman enlisted (the other was Tommy Hitchcock, later to become a legendary polo player).
It was a revelation to Clint, this unguarded enthusiasm. Nonetheless, having lost many a role because of his height, he was slumping against the wall, trying to look smaller than he was. Finally, Wellman eyed him quizzically and asked the big question: “How tall are you?”