Clint Eastwood (21 page)

Worse, he began to feel he had his “whole career sitting in the basement down there in a bunch of cans at CBS.” He could mention
Rawhide
when he was being interviewed for a part, but the network refused to let him show any of its footage to other producers. And he was
forbidden to pursue or accept a lengthy role in a feature film because the network kept insisting he might be called back to resume work on the series at any moment. Approached about playing the lead in
Tall Story
, a Broadway comedy about a college basketball player dealing with a bribe offer, which Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse had adapted from a novel by the poet Howard Nemerov, Clint asked his agents to see if CBS would release him. They were rebuffed, adding to his stress.

The strain eventually told on him physically. One day, for example, he and Maggie were having a drink in a bar with Fritz Manes and his wife, Audrey, when, suddenly, Clint slammed his fist down on the table, yelling a stream of expletives, as dishes and glasses bounced every which way. He had looked down at his hand and seen hives suddenly developing there—“one hundred percent nerves” as Manes puts it. On other occasions Maggie told Audrey Manes he had waked in the night hyperventilating.

While he waited, he did appear on an episode of
Maverick
entitled “Duel at Sundown,” and it is probably his best early work. He plays a young gunfighter picking a quarrel with James Garner’s ever-charming, eponymous character, and for the first time there is some dangerousness in Clint’s portrayal—a touch of generational contempt for Bret Maverick, a bit of youthful insolence and unpredictability in his manner—and Maverick responds to him with a trademark trick, smooth talk not quite hiding cowardice. Even when he was “one of the young guys boppin’ around town on television series,” Clint likes to insist, “I always thought of myself as a character actor. I never thought of myself as a leading man.” This performance offers concrete evidence of that attitude.

But it came and went in a hurry, and Clint sank back into his anxious idleness. “I didn’t want to see anybody; I just was feeling kind of sorry for myself,” he recalls. With Christmas approaching, Clint and Maggie decided to get out of town and spend the holidays with his parents, who had by this time moved back to Piedmont.

They took a train north, and at one of the stops a telegram was delivered to him. It informed him that
Rawhide
was being slipped into the CBS schedule in a good spot, on Friday night between
Hit Parade
and
The Phil Silvers Show
. Production on new episodes was scheduled to resume in early January. It took Clint a few minutes to digest the news. Then as the train pulled out of the station and began gathering speed, he found himself leaning out the window, yelling crazily, obscenely, at the countryside flowing past. From that point on, he says, “it was a very nice Christmas.”

Rawhide
premiered on January 9, 1959, without anticipatory excitement and without generating any large critical enthusiasm. It was just another western, just another midseason replacement show in the eyes of the press. The first episode, “Incident of the Tumbleweed Wagon” (until the 1964–65 season all titles employed this “Incident of” device) was the last of nine programs shot before the hiatus had been imposed on production, and, in a way, it was a curious introduction to the series precisely because it contained so little introductory material—just a shot of Gil Favor and a brief voice-over monologue by him explaining the function of a cattle drive. Its plot also quickly separated Fleming and Clint from the rest of their outfit, leaving Paul Brinegar and other supporting players in dusty anonymity, their characters unestablished.

The famous tag in which Favor commanded his drovers to “Head ’em up, move ’em out” was also missing. But the still more famous theme song (“Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’, / Keep movin’, movin’, movin’, / Though they’re disapprovin’ / Keep those dogies movin’ ”), which was written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington, who had also composed the compulsive “High Noon” theme, was very much present, and very helpful in establishing the show, for the catchy, silly tune quickly became a hit, while its linkage to a musical convention then reigning in feature films suggested that
Rawhide
aspired to something like their status.

This may well have been true. Warren was a striver, never modest about stating his belief that good, serious work could be done in a form more often patronized than appreciated. Indeed, Warren liked to tell interviewers that if the network would let him he would expand the show to ninety minutes, approaching feature length. He also liked to insist that in creating his show he had not ripped off old movies. No, he said, its source was a recently discovered diary kept by a Texas cattleman named George Duffield on a nineteenth-century trail drive to Abilene.

He acknowledged, of course, that he was operating within severe limits. Television’s small black-and-white screen (which made it an antiepic medium), its low budgets (the typical
Rawhide
episode cost less than forty thousand dollars in the show’s early days and was made in six days), its implacable schedules (thirty new programs a year) and the restraints of a censorship more niggling even than that of the movies all worked against the achievement of consistent quality and the creation of a spacious mise-en-scène. But if the format of his show suggested, and Warren was trying to fight, these limits, it also, ironically, doomed him to frustration.

For
Rawhide
was intrinsically more at odds with its medium than the other westerns. Its natural subject matter was obviously to be found in
the normal perils of trail herding—bad weather, rough country, the spookiness and recalcitrance of livestock on the move. And from time to time the program took up these topics. But you needed to go on location to do so, and the show traveled to places like Nogales, Sonora and Pasa Robles only once a year, and then the cast and crew were obliged to gather stock footage that could be scattered through many episodes, leaving them time to do portions of only two or three of these more epic stories. The rest of the year the crew was confined to back-lot western streets, sound-stage green sets and the ranches most studios then maintained on the outskirts of Los Angeles for outdoor shooting (there was a small
Rawhide
herd on one of them). These tight spots, more than any other factor, imposed a modest scale on the shows. Something Rita Parks, a scholar of the western, wrote applies with particular aptness to
Rawhide:
“
The scaling-down process that takes place in the television western … turns the bold colors and vibrance of the epic form into the leisurely pastels of the pastoral mode.”

The typical
Rawhide
story involved the cowboys coming upon people along the trail and getting drawn into solving whatever issues they presented or were confronting. As a variant, someone from the trail drive (usually Rowdy) would venture into a town or to a ranch on some errand and encounter some trouble he needed to be extricated from before the herd could move on. The idea, obviously, was to come in from the great outdoors as soon and as often as possible into more easily managed environments.

The episode chosen for the premiere was shot at a studio ranch and differs from the series norm because trouble comes to the drovers without their having to look for it. The tumbleweed wagon referred to in the title is a sort of jail on wheels, used to gather lawbreakers from far-flung prairie locales and transport them (in this case) to a territorial capital for a trial. It pulls up to a streamside campsite where Favor’s cowboys are settling down for the night, carrying human cargo mixed in the usual way: a man accused of selling illegal liquor to Indians, an army deserter, a silent Indian who has murdered his wife when he caught her with another brave and, more significantly, an English remittance man also accused of murdering his wife, a member of the Luke Storm bandit gang and a hellcatish woman named Dallas (Terry Moore, the program’s top-billed guest star), who is Luke’s wife, and a classically bitter good-bad woman (she has turned outlaw because her father was lynched by a vigilante mob for a crime he did not commit).

An escape is attempted, in the course of which the marshal in charge of the wagon is grievously wounded, his deputy killed. Gil and Rowdy are obliged to leave their herd and escort the wagon to the nearest
fort. Two more escapes are tried, and eventually Storm and his gang catch up with the wagon as the cowmen are trying to get it across a stream. The outlaw leader, who is a standard-issue psychopath, decides to murder Gil and Rowdy, but Dallas intervenes and is killed by her husband, who, in the subsequent confusion, is shot dead by Favor. The episode ends with a low-angle shot of Gil and Rowdy riding off past the crude cross that marks Dallas’s grave.

The failure of this episode to do much with Rowdy Yates was not entirely atypical, particularly in the early seasons. He is seen to be attracted to the captive woman, seen to be quietly rebellious toward Favor (instructed not to try chatting up Dallas, Rowdy tells the trail boss, “After dark, when I’m not on night herd, my time is my own”), and he gets the chance to wrestle with Dallas during the first escape attempt—sexless sexiness of the old-movie, old-TV kind. But for the most part Rowdy takes orders and seems to like them. “Rowdy Yates, trail flunky,” is how Clint says he used to describe his character, when he wasn’t calling him “Rowdy Yates, idiot of the plains.”

You can tell from Clint’s modified ducktail haircut and from the fact that he alone among the drovers was allowed the occasional passing romance that Rowdy was intended to have a certain demographic appeal; he was supposed to attract young women to a program that had small intrinsic interest for them. That meant that he should have had a sort of mild, outlaw appeal. But Rowdy was never allowed his rowdiness, sexual or otherwise. One runs into women, now in their late forties and early fifties, for whom the young Clint Eastwood was a teen dream, but that was because he was—obviously—a really cute guy, not because of any overt sexiness on his part. Clint was aware at the time of what he was supposed to be doing (“Rowdy was sort of the bopper, but older gals liked Mr. Favor”), yet he was equally aware that for the producers this was dangerous country, occasionally approached but in the end always skirted.

There were times when Rowdy initiated an episode’s central action, and other times when he played a key role in bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. But often as not, his contributions to an “incident” were about what they were in his first appearance—a couple of decent scenes and then a few more appearances in which Clint’s acting consisted largely of reacting.

All in all it was the guest stars who got to do the most interesting work. The regulars, to the show’s writers and directors, were the givens in the weekly equation they had to solve—no reason to fuss unduly over them—and they were, as Clint recalls, often left to their own devices, making up their own bits of business, their own modest subtexts, doing
what they could to stay interested and grab a little screen time they might call their own.

But if the regulars were more or less taken for granted creatively, they were vital to the success of the show, which debuted fairly low in the ratings (forty-second in its first week), but made it to the top twenty within three weeks and remained there for four seasons. They, not the guests, had to win the loyal regular weekly audience that all long-lived television programs must recruit. Here the convention of regarding the regular cast as family aided the writers. The ups and downs of their long-term relationships constituted a sort of tacit running story easily sketched in: Gil Favor, the stern but forgiving father figure; Wishbone, the fussy mom feeding them, dressing their wounds, occasionally interceding for them with the trail boss when he became too authoritarian; Rowdy, the number-one son, a good kid, troublesome (or anyway inconveniencing) because he was idealistic and quick to take up the cause of troubled or ill-used people, especially females; and so on down the cast list.

The TV plains were alive with such patriarchies in those days.
Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian
and
The High Chaparral
featured all-wise elders rallying a real or surrogate family against the anarchic threat posed by the outsider, the other. It says something about the popular culture’s raging need for a particular kind of order that this pattern was imposed on the television western, thereby creating a spurious historical example to reassure the suburban middle-class family that it had made the right choice, should be wary of intruders, adventurings, passionate emotions. Indeed, this imposition was essentially new to the fictive West—a weak coinage that would eventually drive out the stronger species offered by theatrical westerns.

We had, for instance, occasionally witnessed in movies the creation and defense of cattle empires (besides
Red River
there had been
Duel in the Sun
and
The Furies
among others), but in these films the emperor-patriarch was seen as a dark and driven creature, making life miserable for his children. Even in films that did not focus primarily on such characters, the cruelly patriarchal rancher (often attended by his moronic and sadistic get) driving out homesteaders (representing more benign family values) infringing on his domain was a familiar figure.