Clint Eastwood (26 page)

They had unsuccessfully offered
The Magnificent Stranger
to a number of actors before turning to Clint. He believes one of them to have been Rory Calhoun, who was one of several minor, fading American stars then working steadily in Italy; it was logical, for he had starred in the only previous film credited to Leone,
The Colossus of Rhodes
. Two men who would work for Leone later, when they were all better known, Charles Bronson and James Coburn, also rejected it. “
It was just about the worst script I’d ever seen,” said the former, well after the fact. “
I didn’t know who Sergio Leone was, and I’d heard nothing but bad about Italian filmmakers,” said Coburn when subsequently he came to contemplate his error of judgment.

But money was as much an issue with them as quality. In those days the asking price for all these actors was around $25,000, more than the producers could pay them out of a budget somewhere between $200,000 and $250,000, and these actors were not inclined to cut their price in order to participate in so dubious an enterprise. Neither was Steve Reeves, who also wanted $25,000.

It was not until Leone and friends spoke to one of Reeves’s competitors in the muscle-men genre, Richard Harrison, that their luck began to change. He was one of a group of lesser-known American performers living permanently in Rome and making a decent, if sometimes chancy, living in this film industry, the while enjoying la dolce
vita. (Fellini’s famous film of that title, produced in 1960, is, of course, a mordant portrait of this show business demimonde.) Harrison already had a commitment for the spring of 1964, but he had seen
Rawhide
, liked Clint’s work in it and recommended him to Leone. The director had not heard of him, but got hold of episode ninety-one of the series, “Incident of the Black Sheep,” responded, he later said, to the catlike combination of indolence and menace he read in Clint’s movements and decided to approach him with the role.

It was, Clint recalls, Sandy Bressler, then a young agent in William Morris’s motion picture department (latterly the well-known head of its TV department, now an independent whose major client is Jack Nicholson), who placed the call reporting the offer to Clint and asking him if he wanted to consider it. “Hell, no, I’m not interested in it,” Clint later remembered saying, “especially not a European western. It would probably be a joke.” “Well,” came the reply, “I promised the Rome office that I’d get you to read the script.” Clint casually agreed to do so.

What arrived on his doorstep was a carbon copy, on onion-skin paper, of a document that looked more like the manuscript of a novel than a script, with the dialogue embedded in long descriptive passages. A subtitle, or possibly an alternative title, identified
The Magnificent Stranger
as “Texas Joe.” A few pages into this curious text Clint identifed it as a free adaptation—or should one say “knockoff”?—of Akira Kurosawa’s
Yojimbo
, which he had recently seen.

This did not much bother Clint. His taste in action runs toward straight-faced, self-satirizing exaggeration, and what he read was very much in that vein. Besides, the Japanese master openly admitted that these movies had been inspired in part by the American westerns he admired (among them almost certainly Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott’s
Buchanan Rides Alone
, which has a theme similar to
Yojimbo
’s), so Clint thought it entirely appropriate to complete the circle by rerooting the story in a western setting.

Indeed, the thought that it could easily be remade as a western had, he says, briefly crossed his mind when he first saw
Yojimbo
, but he had judged it “too rough” for American tastes. Now, suddenly, this unknown, working from a place about as remote from the western’s native ground as it is possible to get, was offering him a version of it “rougher” than anything he had imagined. It appealed to Clint’s sense of the absurd, and to his gambling impulse. He asked Maggie to read the script, and she confirmed his instinct.

So he decided to go for it. He felt he had nothing to lose.
Rawhide
would soon be on hiatus, and he had no work to fill the empty months.
Better still, the figure he was being asked to play—mature, mysterious, deadly dangerous—was about as far as he could get from Rowdy Yates, and the context in which he was to appear was also deliciously far from the maddening gentilities of his television work.

He recalls thinking: I’ve never been to Italy. I’ve never been to Spain. I’ve never been to Germany. I’ve never been to any of the countries [coproducing] this film. The worst I can come out of this with is a nice little trip. I’ll go over there and learn some stuff. I’ll see how other people make films in other countries. He knew that if the picture bombed, it would not be picked up for distribution outside its producers’ home territories and become an international embarrassment.

The Morris office, having put him in touch with this possibility, did not share his developing enthusiasm for it. An agency is obliged to submit all offers to its clients, but it is also obliged to a certain caution, particularly in cases of this kind. The money was short—a flat fee of fifteen thousand dollars—and the agency was well aware of the Italian industry’s reputation when it came to fulfilling even such modest obligations.

It also may be that some in the agency felt the project was more suitable for another of its clients. Lennie Hirshan, who would soon begin his long run as Clint’s agent, recalls that the part was discussed with Henry Silva, the character actor whose moon-faced menace would have been interesting in the role.
But he also remembers Silva holding out for $16,000, a minuscule increment the producers nevertheless refused to meet. Careers do sometimes turn—or fail to turn—on such small, sticky points.

Clint was not inclined to haggle over money. He did insist on the right to make changes in the long and awkward dialogue passages he had read. And eventually he would get the producers to hire his pal Bill Tomkins to do stunt work, partly because he was unsure about the Italians’ skills in this area, partly because he wanted a friend along to help him cope with the mysteries of fringe filmmaking on locations where he did not know the language, with a director who did not speak English.

Clint has never claimed, or been credited for, the large imaginative leap this project represented for him. But it obviously required a certain critical acuity to recognize the solid source of the material, a certain wit to perceive that it might be turned into something more than yet another cheap remake of a better film and a certain self-confidence in his ability to make something dark, ironic and memorable—the anti-Rowdy he had been looking for—out of the near-blank character sketched in the script. Certainly it required a long leap of faith to commit himself to Sergio Leone. There was no way he could have predicted,
from the pages submitted to him, the remarkable, indeed, transforming visual style with which Leone would realize the story they outlined.

It also required a certain professional courage to accept this role. He was an established presence on an established television show, still young, not in need of money, with some kind of conventional future—perhaps a lead in another series, possibly some kind of a career in less marginal features—open to him. He was risking status, perhaps even projecting what could be interpreted as desperation, by engaging in this far-fetched venture.

But careers also turn on daring instinct. And instinct, as Clint insists, is his strength. He signed the contract to make the film without meeting Leone or anyone else involved in the production and boarded a plane for Rome in April 1964.

C
lint arrived in Rome conscientiously prepared for
Il Magnifico Stragnero
. He had a few days’ growth of beard, which the script called for, and he brought with him the guns, gun belt, boots and spurs he wore on
Rawhide
. He also carried in his luggage several pairs of black Levi’s that he had bleached and roughed up, a flat-crowned western hat he had found in a costume shop on Santa Monica Boulevard and a sleeveless sheepskin jacket that he would wear more often in the film than his more famous poncho, which was Leone’s inspiration and was purchased in Spain. The script also called for him to smoke cigars—he is not a smoker—and he had bought several boxes of them, long, thin, foul tasting, with their tobacco wrapped around a central strip of bamboo. These he would cut into thirds and park, both lit and unlit, in the corner of his mouth in many of the film’s sequences. They had their uses: “They put you in the right mood—cantankerous.” In short, he was ready, willing and eager to play an antiheroic—not to say nihilistic—protagonist, scruffy and enigmatic, who never once explained himself and generally spoke only to make an ironic comment on the action.

Besides carrying wardrobe and props, Clint brought with him his undiminished conviction that his character’s “atrocious” dialogue must be cut. In this belief, according to him, he at first encountered directional resistance. In this belief, according to Leone, he found encouragement. In the mild dispute that developed on this point over the years, one is inclined to believe Clint; his case is more logical, and it is Leone—intent on staking an auteur’s claim—who had a need to insist later that he had been in complete control of every aspect of the production.

Their first meeting, at Clint’s hotel, a few hours after he landed, was not altogether cordial. Leone seemed to him “gruff,” making an attempt to assert his authority on their first encounter. Clint guessed this display to be something of a sham, and he was right. Leone could not maintain
a stern pose for very long; it was alien to his nature, which was intense and excitable, chaotic and childlike. In any case, Clint was not greatly put off by him.

Nor was he disheartened by the warnings he soon started receiving about
Il Magnifico Stragnero
. The day he arrived he ran into Brett Halsey outside his hotel. His old friend was living in Rome, gaining some modest success in Italian movies. So were some other actors Clint had known in Hollywood. At a party Halsey and his wife invited him to a couple of days later, someone told him he should be wary of the project because it had been around a long time. To which he recalls replying, “It may have been around a long time, but I like it. I think it will be fun to do.”

And so it turned out to be. Leone “was a guy who loved to eat and loved to make movies.” They had to communicate through a Stuntman named Benito Stefanelli, whose English was excellent and who was a Leone favorite (he worked all the westerns Clint did in Europe), and through Constantin’s Rome representative, Elena Dressler, a Polish Jew who had learned German in a concentration camp, English after American troops liberated it and Italian when she moved to Rome after the war. Her intelligence, courage and worldliness impressed Clint—he had never known a woman like her—and partly because of her good offices he and Leone were soon getting along famously.

For despite their vast and obvious differences in background, they shared certain attitudes and professional experiences. Leone gave Clint—and many interviewers—the impression that they were about the same age, claiming to have been born in 1929 and leading his star to think that perhaps generational bonding accounted for their good relationship. In fact, though, Leone was born January 23, 1921, nine years earlier than Clint. The child of a movie family, his mother was an actress, his father a pioneering director whose career ultimately ran afoul of the Fascist regime. But like Clint, Leone had once imagined himself working in a more conventional field (he studied law briefly), and he, too, had learned filmmaking in a hard, humble school. He did a little acting (he can be seen in a small role in De Sica’s
The Bicycle Thief
) and a lot of gofering before beginning his lengthy career as an assistant and second unit director after World War II, working in these capacities, he claimed, on something like fifty-eight productions of every imaginable kind—some of them directed by such visiting American filmmakers as Mervyn Leroy, William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann and Robert Aldrich.

He might well have exaggerated the length of his filmography somewhat, for he was always a man who liked to improve on reality. Later on, Clint would read and hear things about their experiences together that were “totally not true,” but also amusing to him. In any case,
Leone’s apprenticeship was certainly long and varied, and it fully qualified him to direct when he finally got his chance. This was when Mario Bonnard, the director of record of
The Last Days of Pompeii
, fell ill just as production began, and Leone took over. He received no credit for that assignment, but he did on
The Colossus of Rhodes
in 1961. At forty-three, as he set out to make
Il Magnifico Stragnero
, he was exactly the kind of seasoned professional Clint loved to work with.

He was something else as well—a cineast who had seen and studied thousands of movies in every genre, from every culture, and a man with a vast romantic affection for America, derived both from movies and from literature. Perhaps because of his father’s profession he had as a child seen more American films than many of his European contemporaries, and he also recalled reading James Fenimore Cooper and Louisa May Alcott in his early years, gathering from them an idealized vision of the United States. But it was not until the postwar period that, as he put it, “
I became decisively enchanted by … Hollywood.… I must have seen three hundred films a month for two or three years straight. Westerns, comedies, gangster films, war stories—everything there was.” He was exaggerating again, of course—no matter how movie mad you are, it’s impossible to see ten movies a day—but perhaps by not too much. The war had dammed Europe off from American movies, and when they flooded forth in peacetime, they seemed a revelation. One need only consult the critical writing of the young men who would eventually constitute the French New Wave to grasp the importance of this experience in shaping their cinematic tastes and theories, and so it was with Leone. “He would always talk about John Ford,” Clint remembers, “and ask what films you liked, what westerns—he was a big western fan.” As it was with moviegoing, so it was with his reading in those years. After the war, Leone recalled, “
Publishing houses came out with translations of Hemingway, Faulkner, Hammett and James Cain. It was a wonderful cultural slap in the face.”