Clint Eastwood (29 page)

Leone was receptive to him on this point. “He believed, as Fellini did, as a lot of Italian directors do, that the face means everything. You’d rather have a great face than a great actor in a lot of cases.” Of course, once Leone realized that he was going to be tight on his leading actor so often, he had to accord the same privilege to his other players if he was to achieve some kind of visual balance. Thus did a directorial signature, the alternation of extreme wide shots with extreme close-ups, begin its evolution.

Clint concedes that the director might have come to it anyway, given his Italianate love of gargoylish human expression, the fact that he was, by nature, a man of extremes and perhaps above all because of the luck of this particular shoot. The extras and small-part players Leone recruited on location in Spain were mostly drawn from the Gypsy population of Andalucia, and they lacked the practiced anonymity of professional extras. They offered instead the fierce watchfulness, at once stoic and angry, of disenfranchised people who had been ill used for generations.

With his brutally tight close-ups of them Leone created what might be termed a “landscape of masks” that outlined the unforgiving psychological
terrain of San Miguel as no amount of verbiage could have. And from his placement of these figures in his frames he derived much of the famous “operatic” quality of his work. For they are like the chorus and supernumeraries of opera (or a passion play, since there is something so ritualistic about this drama), functioning as living scenic elements, primarily present to lend grandeur to the occasion.

This is particularly true at its conclusion, when San Miguel becomes the unlikely site of nothing less than a resurrection. Joe and the Rojos having fallen out, they torture him almost to death before he makes a painful escape, aided by his only ally, the town’s saloon keeper. The sadistic gang, believing he has crawled away to die, greet his reappearance, obviously intent on vengeance, as a return from the dead. And when they fire on him, they cannot kill this unholy ghost. They can knock him down with their pistol fire, but he keeps getting up. And he keeps coming toward them. Joe has fashioned a metal breastplate while recovering from his wounds, making himself literally bulletproof. Only Ramon discovers it—the last thing he learns on this earth. Again, this is not an entirely novel invention. But it is an effective one, and its overtones would, as the film scholar Edward Gallafent observes, echo through Clint’s career. The power of Clint’s Stranger does not entirely depend on his skill with weaponry; it derives as well from “
his unbridgeable distance from the world of San Miguel. A figure with no past or future related to the town, he is envisioned for a moment as a gothic avenger from some other plane of being.” Clint would establish a similar distance (and offer reincarnations or pseudoreincarnations) in
Hang ’em High, High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider
and
Unforgiven
.

Clint has always shied away from such interpretations of this seminal work (as well as of the films he went on to make himself). He makes no authorial claims regarding
A Fistful of Dollars
. He believes he was always supportive of his sometimes-hard-pressed director, his suggestions specifically practical, aimed at keeping the film within his most effective range. If he was aware of the many subtexts viewers of the movie have since discovered, he said nothing about them. If Leone was consciously aware of them, he apparently said nothing to Clint about them.

Since Clint’s recollections of this and their other collaborations have always been generous to Leone and modest about his own contributions, the director’s latter-day attempts to diminish those contributions (and Clint’s talent) are puzzling and rather dismaying. But they are spread across the record. He told Iain Johnstone, author of a short biography of Clint, that “
I take the real life actor and mold the character from him,” implying that Joe might have been a more articulate and principled figure if
only he had had an actor who was up to those qualities. In Frayling he is quoted thus: “
In real life, Clint is slow, calm, rather like a cat. During shooting he does what he has to do, then sits down in a corner and goes to sleep immediately, until he is needed again. It was seeing him behave like this on the first day that helped me model the character.” The language barrier, rendering it impossible for Clint to join in the camaraderie of the set, may have caused him to withdraw somewhat, but he has another catlike quality, curiosity, and one cannot quite imagine him snoozing the days away. It seems likely that he kept a quiet, watchful eye on a filmmaking process unlike any he had ever previously known.

Later, Leone’s sly digs would give way to outright contempt. After he had directed Robert De Niro in
Once upon a Time in America
, the journalist Pete Hamill asked Leone for a comparison between his first star and (as it turned out) his last one, and he unloaded at length—unguardedly and rather unpleasantly—on Clint. “
In reality, if you think about it, they don’t even belong in the same profession. Robert De Niro throws himself into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with elegance, while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang. It’s exactly that lowered visor which composes his character. And that creaky clang it makes as it snaps down, dry as a martini in Harry’s Bar in Venice. Look at him carefully. Eastwood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same—a block of marble. Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers. Clint yawns.”

Speculating a little sadly on Leone’s comments, Clint recalls: “When we were working together he had great things to say. Then later on, after the picture was a success, he tried to say how he developed the performances. And no director really does. They can give you ideas that might make something work. But they’re not acting for you.” As for the invidious comparison between himself and De Niro, he says, simply, “It was a crack out of envy. People asked me what I thought, and I said I didn’t think anything of it. I couldn’t tell them that it was just a guy who hadn’t been prolific as I had been.” Clint adds: “He [Leone] was having a rough time getting things going,” because, he thinks, he had difficulty making decisions and “was more afraid to go to the post.” Leone also developed a taste for epic filmmaking. These large-scale productions were time-consuming to set up, and both
Once upon a Time in the West
and
Once upon a Time in America
, each in its way a masterpiece, were brutally reedited by their American distributors with the result—almost inevitable when movies are tainted by this kind of tampering—that they
fared badly with reviewers and audiences, which, in turn, further embittered the director.

But as their first picture together wrapped in Spain, the possibility of a future conflict between them was unimaginable to Clint, and doubtless to Leone as well. Indeed, it seemed unlikely to Clint that they would ever work together again, for he was confused about the film at that time: “I’d go through various feelings—this thing could be something, this could be nothing.” His confidence was not enhanced by the response of Columbo and the rest of the producers. “Jesus, this is a piece of shit,” he recalls them saying as they looked at unedited dailies drifting back from the lab. Flying home after a brief stopover in London Clint concluded that what he had imagined as the worst-case scenario for his project was probably about to be enacted—limited release in a few countries, and limited response from audiences, reviewers and the rest of the industry. It would probably not harm his career, but it certainly would not enhance it.

Back home, when people asked him about his summer job, he remained noncommittal: “I had a good time,” he would say, or “The picture was a little discombobulated, but it seemed to work all right.” The questions soon died down, but Clint then began wondering why there was no word from Rome—no calls, no cables, no letters, nothing.

“‘Come over here, I want to show you something.’ One of those jobs. ‘C’mere, I’ve got something to show you.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘C’mon over.’ ‘Oh, OK.’ ” Thus does Clint Eastwood recall the first teasing announcement of the last thing he expected to be—a father.

When Roxanne Tunis presented Kimber to him, he was stunned. Groping for a way to express his feelings he refers to an accident he had sustained on the Leone shoot: “I was lying on the ground with the wind knocked out of me.” He laughs, ruefully. “It’s happened frequently in my life—sometimes some physical impact, sometimes mental.”

Arrangements were made. There was never any question of his supporting the child. But as things worked out over the years, there was not much chance of his seeing her very frequently, either. Roxanne for a time reunited with her estranged husband, whom Clint says he never met, and then moved about a good deal. His own career kept him away from Los Angeles for long periods of time, and he and Maggie were spending more and more time in Carmel, too. In any case, Clint says, Roxanne did not press him to spend more time with them. He saw their child when they all happened to coincide in Los Angeles. Basically,
however, the situation remained what it was from the beginning—“awkward” and “confusing emotionally,” in his words.

Secrets always are, and the fact remains that only a few intimates knew this one, even though, over the years, Roxanne remained, as Clint says, “a friend,” occasionally visiting him on his sets, calling on him in his office. (
Fritz Manes remembers her bringing picnic lunches to share with Clint.) It was not until the period immediately after Clint’s bitter and very public breakup with Sondra Locke in 1989, when the gossip press was for the first time baying at his heels, that someone—probably a sometime friend of Roxanne’s—broke the silence.

This, in turn, encouraged Kimber to grant some interviews, in which her highly ambiguous feelings about her father surfaced. She insisted to one reporter that Clint “
was always there” for her emotionally and financially when she was growing up, asserting that she saw him every three or four months, remembering the cuddly animals he brought her, and her mother preparing his favorite pasta dishes when he stayed for dinner. At some point in her adolescence he invited Kimber and her mother to join him on a ski weekend in Vail. And when she was approaching her sixteenth birthday he called to ask her what her favorite color was; she told him yellow, and a couple of months later a Camaro of that hue was delivered to her. In 1984 he gave her a job in the production office of
Tightrope
when it was shot on location in New Orleans.

But Kimber told less happy tales to the press as well: “
I guess we never had the greatest relationship,” she once admitted. She has also said that after the press revealed her parentage she and Clint had a dinner at which she begged him to spend more time with her, that he agreed to do so, and she felt certain he meant it. She added, however, that “
I have tried to make an appointment to see him and he always has other commitments.” At various other times Kimber has criticized Clint for lack of generosity, for disapproving when she married and had a child while still in her teens, for failure to support her ambitions as an actress. What she has said about her father has rather obviously depended upon when she was asked and what the state of their relationship was at that particular moment.

Clint has preferred not to say anything beyond briefly acknowledging the facts of the matter. It is simply impossible to state what his deepest feelings about Roxanne and Kimber may have been or are now. Aware of his daughter’s fluctuating emotions toward him, and that she has yet to settle into a coherent career, he enters no plea—guilty, innocent or extenuating circumstances—about the way he has conducted his relationship with her.

After learning of her birth he returned to the routines of
Rawhide
gratefully, for it appears that he took more than his usually conscientious interest in it as filming for the new season began in the summer of 1964. This was not entirely a matter of escaping from the complications of his private life. Since Charles Marquis Warren had left the show there had been a new producer every season, and this year was no exception. Only this time it was a team of them—Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski, who had a company called Unit Productions, which subcontracted to CBS to handle the program. They, in turn, hired Del Reisman, who had been a story editor on
Playhouse 90
and on
The Twilight Zone
, to perform the same function for them.

Reisman says the new producers felt Clint had been underused and, to some degree, misused. “
We looked at film and we all had the same opinion: that he was too mature and in his mind too sophisticated to be Rowdy Yates at twenty-two, the pebble-kicking kid [Clint was now thirty-four].” Reisman adds, “We spotted his essential discomfort, and also a real western star, the star we had looked for in Eric but saw in the younger man.”

The new producers saw something else in him, too. There was, says Reisman, “a kind of dry line-reading quality that we seized on and went for,” giving him as much irony “as he felt comfortable with.” None of this was talked out with the network’s supervisors, certainly not with the other members of the cast, but it was discussed with Clint. “Don’t get shocked,” Reisman remembers telling him, “we’re trying to mature the character.”