Authors: Richard Schickel
Clint shot back: “How tall is the guy?” Wellman looked at him, puzzled, and started laughing.
Clint said: “I’ve got to qualify this. I’ve lost so damn many parts because somebody said I was too tall or too this or too that.” At which point, setting caution aside, he drew himself up to his full height and said, “I’m this high.”
To which Wellman replied that Sinclaire was the tallest man in the outfit, and that for once his size was to Clint’s advantage. A little later he called Clint’s agent and told him Clint should stand by—and start growing a mustache like the one Sinclaire had affected.
But now Paul Newman, who had signaled interest in playing the film’s lead, suddenly developed doubts about the screenplay. While these were being addressed, Clint was placed in a quandary, for he was offered a part on the TV series
Death Valley Days
. His new mustache was wrong for the role, but he was loath to lose it so long as there was any chance of getting
Lafayette Escadrille
. He kept the facial hair, did the TV job and was glad that he did. For when Newman backed out, his part went to Warner’s tall, blond contract star, Tab Hunter. Now, suddenly, Clint’s height and coloring weighed against him. His part went to David Janssen, who was shorter and darker.
Wellman, upset at betraying an implicit promise, compensated by giving Clint a smaller, more anonymous role—George Moseley, a man who had played baseball against another flyer, Princeton (Tom Laughlin), in civilian life, and continued their rivalry in a game on a French airfield. This deteriorates into a brawl, with Clint chasing McLaughlan and even throwing a bat at him, while French onlookers look on in comic amusement. The sequence was all too typical of a movie in which humorous camaraderie and not very persuasive romance were stressed at the expense of aerial action, which was one of Wellman’s strengths. The uncompromising filmmaker had, for once, compromised in order to get a beloved project before the cameras. The picture was poorly received by
both critics and the public, not least because Hunter’s central role is very square and old-fashioned and because Hunter, a quintessential fifties leading man, is without energy or dangerousness.
It would be Wellman’s last film; he always said its failure caused him to retire. As for Clint, he had some location fun, put a few dollars in the bank and developed a lasting relationship with the director and his large, warm family—the last being no small reward. “He had a big influence in encouraging me to be a director,” he would later say.
For the moment, though,
Lafayette Escadrille
was yet another big disappointment. But not, as it would happen, as grave as the one he suffered on his next assignment. Shortly after Clint finished the Wellman film his agents sent him on a call to Twentieth Century-Fox, where a director named Jodie Copeland was casting
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
. It was not an entirely promising venture. Copeland was a film editor being given his first chance to direct. The budget was minimal. The shooting schedule was eight days, the running time was just barely feature length—seventy-three minutes. The salary offered Clint was $750, but the producers insisted—somewhat debatably—that he was the picture’s second lead.
Clint chose to look at it optimistically. How bad could it be? A few days in the deeper, drier reaches of the San Fernando Valley, working in a marginal, but certainly not disreputable, little western—it would certainly be more fun than digging swimming pools.
Little did he know. Everyone’s troubles began when Scott Brady was cast as the lead. He was a crude, distinctly uninviting actor, useful only as a blunt, subsidiary villain in B pictures. He should never have been employed as a leading man. Worse, his price was $25,000, which bit deeply into the film’s minuscule budget. According to a story that circulated on the set, Copeland had been saying one day that, thanks to his skill as an editor, he would make the forty Indians he was planning to use in the film as menaces to a mixed band of travelers look like four hundred Indians. At which point someone rushed in with the news that Brady had accepted the role. “Without missing a beat,” Clint recalls, “Copeland says, ‘I’ll make those four Indians look like forty.’ ”
The director was “a nice guy,” Eastwood remembers, “but he didn’t know what he was doing.” And he certainly wasn’t strong enough or experienced enough to deal with the fractiousness that quickly developed on the shoot. Brady was another heavy drinker and reported to work extremely hungover. He was surly in general, but took a particular dislike to the leading lady, Margia Dean, who he believed had got the part because she was the girlfriend of a Fox executive. When she objected one day to his habitually foul language, he simply snarled, “Go call your
fucking agent.” Clint remembers the director saying to him, shortly thereafter, “ ‘Could you please treat Margia nice, because somebody needs to help her out,’ and I’m going, ‘How can I help her out, I’m just trying to fend for myself here.’ ”
So it went on the most disorganized and unpleasant shoot Clint had ever experienced. Under budgetary pressure, the producers couldn’t afford to keep livestock and their wranglers on for the whole shoot, so the script called for the “marauding savages” to run the horses off after a day or two’s work. A western without horses is, obviously, at something of a disadvantage pictorially and in terms of pace; in the most literal sense of the word,
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
is stumbling.
The story is this: A cavalry patrol under the command of Sergeant Matt Blake (Brady) is bringing in for trial a man who has been running guns to hostile Indians. On the trail they encounter a rancher and some of his riders, among them Clint’s character, Keith Williams. Their herd has been driven off by Apache. The cowboys are unreconstructed Southern sympathizers, especially Williams, whose mother and sister, it is explained, were victimized during Sherman’s march through Georgia. Indeed, Clint’s first line in the film has him begging his boss to “let me have just one Yankee.” When Blake tells the cattlemen they are surrounded by Indians, Williams refuses to believe him (“He’s a liar; all Yankees are liars”). Once the Apache have claimed their horses, they turn over a captive Hispanic woman, Dean’s role, to the soldiers so that she can offer them a deal: The Indians, she says, are willing to return their horses if they will surrender the trader’s stock of rifles.
Clint’s character is all for accepting the offer. “We were doing OK until you came here,” he says to Blake. “Seems wherever you bluebellies go, you cause trouble.” But the stalwart sergeant naturally refuses the trade, and the little party meanders on, losing someone here, someone there, to the stalking Indians, the while squabbling among themselves. Eventually, virtually in sight of a frontier fort, it becomes necessary—heavy irony here—to burn the rifles they have carried so far in order to make a final run for safety. “We’ve lugged these rifles a hundred miles—a hundred miles for nothing,” someone cries. “No, not for nothing,” the sergeant intones. “Sometimes you’ve gotta lose before you can win.”
The thought does not quite parse. Not much in the picture does. Clint has more than once called it the worst movie ever made, though that’s not strictly true. It is simply indistinguishable from a hundred, a thousand, “products” made for a price to fill out the bottom half of double bills (a style of exhibition that was disappearing even as the picture was made). Indeed, the trade reviews, taking into account the film’s
limited budget and intent, were quite indulgent, with
Variety
listing Clint among a group of players giving “fine” performances.
If working conditions had been reasonably professional, and the atmosphere on the set agreeable, it would have been just a minor incident in what was turning out to be a reasonably promising year for Clint professionally. For while the movie was in postproduction, he was cast in episodes of
Wagon Train, Navy Log
(in an episode narrated by his idol, James Cagney) and
Men of Annapolis
. Then, however,
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
was released—ineptly. There was no cast and crew screening, no advance word of its opening. One morning Clint simply opened his newspaper and discovered that it was playing all over town as a second feature. That afternoon he and Maggie headed for a neighborhood theater, sat through a main feature and prepared themselves for the worst, which turned out to be more dismaying than anything he had imagined.
As the picture unreeled, Clint “slumped down so low in [his] seat it probably looked like Maggie was sitting alone,” outraged and shamed “to sit there in a movie theater and watch this pile of crap run by.” Maggie tried to be supportive, but he was inconsolable: “No, this is just … dog shit. I started thinking, I’m going to go back to school. I’m going to learn something. I’m going to get some other kind of job. I’m going to jump out of this.”
None of his previous setbacks seem to have shaken his obstinacy and determination as this one did. However modest this film was, it at least had offered him his first role with, as they say, an “arc” to it—his character eventually loses his bitterness and makes peace with himself, the past, his former enemies personified by the sergeant—his first to have some impact on a film’s narrative. At the very least he imagined he could get “a piece of film” out of it, something his agents could show around town. But there was nothing even that useful to him here. If anything, the film seemed likely to harm his cause.
At that point he simply did not yet have the skill and the force—the experienced actor’s powerful sense of himself, or, anyway, his self-interest—to impose himself on a film, to override its incompetencies while he was on camera. He was still a little too well mannered for his own good, exhibiting none of the natural unpredictability, the delinquent dangerousness, the role calls for. A sort of stunned sweetness keeps shining through his fits of anger, vitiating their force.
But if there is nothing to be particularly proud of in this work, there is nothing to be deeply ashamed of either. An actor far more experienced than he might have been defeated by these circumstances. Moreover,
in his youthful disappointment, Clint couldn’t appreciate his own good-looking presence, could not see that he was the film’s most attractive figure.
He did not want to get by on looks, of course. He wanted to be an actor in the fullest sense of the term. But what he did not realize, as he endured his little crisis of belief on that spring afternoon in 1958, was that appearances, up to now, in his opinion, a defect, were about to become an asset. For
Gunsmoke
and other shows like it were opening television to a new kind of western, westerns that revolved around what we would now call extended families. These programs had a need for lean, strapping, good-natured lads like Clint Eastwood to assume their man-boy roles. His professional luck was about to turn—definitively.
I
t was the kind of call out-of-work actors often make: A friend in the business suggests dropping by the office sometime in order to meet another friend who might, possibly, introduce him to someone else who might, conceivably, do him some good. Nobody expects much of such encounters, but, still, actors live on hope, and the myth of accidental discovery—the starlet, the talent scout, the soda fountain stool—is undying, precisely because it contains a minuscule element of truth.
Being a practical and realistic young actor, Clint Eastwood would not have been dreaming about one of those casting epiphanies. What he knew was that it was always better to be seen than not seen—especially around the offices of a television network. And, besides, his agent had mentioned that CBS was casting a new western series, though he had also been told that they were looking for a slightly older actor for the lead.
So, having nothing better to do on this afternoon in the early summer of 1958, he decided to take up his friend, Sonia Chernus, on her long-standing invitation to visit her at CBS Television City. She was employed there as a reader; the woman she wanted Clint to meet was an assistant to one of the executives, someone with more influence on her boss than her job title suggested. The introduction was duly made, no special spark was struck, and Clint and Sonia repaired to an indoor-outdoor patio area for talk and refreshments.
They had met through Arthur Lubin, around the time Clint was making
Francis in the Navy
, and she had become one of Clint and Maggie’s best friends. After Clint founded Malpaso she would join him as his story editor (and would write the first draft of, and receive cowriting credit for,
The Outlaw Josey Wales
). She would also become something of a surrogate aunt to the Eastwood children when they came along. At this moment she had recently found the short stories (by Walter Brooks) on
which Lubin’s
Mr. Ed
television series would be based, the pilot of which he was preparing to make. When they finished their coffee Clint decided to walk Sonia back to her office. They were strolling along one of the building’s long corridors when a man in a blue suit stepped out of an office, glanced at Clint and said, “Excuse me, are you an actor?”
“Yeah, I am.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Well, I’ve done some television, and I just finished this picture,
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
.”
“Fortunately, he hadn’t seen it,” Clint recalls. He also recalls doing his best, as they chatted, to exaggerate the importance of his other credits. Sonia, meanwhile, stepped out of the man’s eye line and made silent signals to Clint, indicating that his questioner, Robert Sparks, was an important figure at the network. A sometime movie producer, now in charge of filmed programming for CBS, he called Clint into his office and asked his secretary to summon Bill Warren to join him.
Clint, at this point, had never heard of Sparks or Warren, though he might have if Sparks had called the latter by his full name, which was Charles Marquis Warren. Born and educated in Baltimore, he became the protégé of F. Scott Fitzgerald when the writer was living there and Warren was a college student. Fitzgerald even recommended him to M-G-M to adapt
Tender Is the Night
, saying “
I haven’t believed in anybody so strongly since Ernest Hemingway.” Nothing came of that, and Warren instead turned to pulp fiction, later graduating to slicks like
The Saturday Evening Post
. Several of his western serials were published as novels, and one of them,
Only the Valiant
, served as the basis for the Gregory Peck movie, released in 1951.