Clint Eastwood (41 page)

At the time, the only people to discuss this point were a pair of college journalists. Deliciously innocent yet determined counterculturists, they unaccountably turned up poolside at the Las Vegas junket MGM staged to promote the picture, where their “interview” with Hutton was recorded by a wicked journalist named Bernard Drew. “
Why did you pick a glamorous war?” one of them inquired. “Why didn’t you do something on Vietnam? Would you have treated the Vietcong as you did the Nazis—all morons?” His female partner chimed in: “Even in the most frivolous of entertainment there has to be one moment of reality. Did
all
of the Nazis have to be such bad shots?” They weren’t entirely serious; they were goading the director, trying to get him to admit to selling out (he had earlier made some small, earnest, unprofitable pictures), while proposing that evil Hollywood might better have parceled out this film’s large budget to their contemporaries, struggling to make “personal statements.” Eventually they got the explosion they wanted (“For fifteen lousy goddamned stinking years I paid my dues …”), an outburst that plagued Hutton for years in Hollywood, where such complaints are supposed to be confined to the “community.”

Finally it all comes back to generic conventions, doesn’t it? We’re used to movie heroes doing slaughter within the well-established morality of standard-issue war movies, westerns and crime dramas. It’s only when a movie strays outside those lines, asks its audience to think actively about the assumptions that routine action dramas are built on, that its “violence” (or its gender implications) is deplored.

At this time—though it is doubtful that anyone around Clint articulated it in so many words—the effort was clearly to edge Clint away from that morally interesting fringe, position his developing screen character at the center of the movie mainstream, where it could function less controversially, and with this expensive and successful film—so obviously not a B picture—that goal was achieved. Whether a critic mildly liked or mildly disliked the film itself, none of them attacked his work or worried in grand cosmic terms over what his popularity might suggest about the state of the national psyche.

Where Eagles Dare
would become MGM’s biggest hit of 1969 (it grossed close to $7 million in North America alone) as well as Clint’s biggest box-office success to date. This pleased him, of course. But it also displeased him. He could see that films of this kind lacked the singularity and impact of the Leone films, and he hated their long, tedious schedules. He did not want to become just another well-paid Hollywood gun for hire, lacking autonomy and range of choice.

Circumstances would soon crystallize these still-somewhat-inchoate feelings. If he now knew how not to be a movie star, the film he now began would teach him more than he ever wanted to know about how not to make a movie. Insignificant in and of itself—a film with no historical resonance—it would nevertheless have an impact on Clint Eastwood’s personal history almost as significant as that of
A Fistful of Dollars
or
Dirty Harry
.

It was to be a musical—a lavish, no-expense-spared musical, a form that Hollywood, looking back on the midsixties grosses of
My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins
and
The Sound of Music
, had decided represented the high, if risky, road to vast profits.
Camelot, Star!
and
Doctor Dolittle
had thrown doubt on this supposition, but at this moment the game was still on, and Paramount was determined to get in on it.

The creators of
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
, Alan J. Lerner and Fritz Loewe, had one more property in their trunk, the least successful of their Broadway collaborations,
Paint Your Wagon
, a saga of the California Gold Rush. Lerner, who signed to produce the project, assured Paramount that playwright Paddy Chayefsky could rewrite and update it so that it appealed to the sensibility of the sixties, especially since he would be working under the guidance of director Joshua Logan, who had shared a Pulitzer Prize for his work in adapting
South Pacific
to the stage.

How could anything possibly go wrong? As it happened, almost
everything did. It began the first day Clint reported for work on the Paramount lot. Logan had decreed a week or two of rehearsals on a Hollywood soundstage before the company left for location on East Eagle Creek, in Oregon’s Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Clint drove up to the gate in his customary underwhelming vehicle, in this case a tan pickup truck, gave his name to the guard and was told that there was no pass for him. “Well, you know, I’m supposed to be here,” Clint replied mildly. “They’re kind of expecting me down there.”

The guard said he’d have to make a U-turn, find a phone somewhere and call a number he’d be glad to give him. Clint was now afume: “I’ll tell you what, buddy. I’m gonna go over to Universal—here’s my number there. If anybody calls here asking for Clint, just tell them I’m over there, because I can get on
that
lot.”

One imagines a screech of tires, the smell of burning rubber. When he arrived at his Universal office he told his secretary to inform callers that he was out, then withdrew into his office to read some scripts. The phones began jangling, and after a time his assistant appeared: “God, they’re going crazy down there.”

Clint accepted the next call, playing dumb. “You know, fellas, I couldn’t get on, and I thought maybe I’d been replaced.”

When he returned to Paramount he found Logan, the rest of the principal cast and key department heads, like William Fraker, the cinematographer, gathered in a corner of a cavernous soundstage, with the actors, scripts in hand, reading their lines as they moved about at Logan’s command. He was blocking action as if this were a theatrical production. It was essentially busywork, since the crucial element in movie staging, the camera, was missing.

Elsewhere, other lunacies were occurring. Tom Shaw, a veteran and expert assistant director, who specialized in complex, large-scale productions, had signed on as the film’s associate producer, and one day found himself at the center of a perplexed and angry group of horsemen and stuntpeople. They had been called in for auditions, because, even though they would not have speaking parts, they had to look like the citizens of a mining camp. But they found themselves grouped with chorus boys and, like them, being asked to take their pants off so that the casting people could study their legs. This was not something these rough-and-ready types were accustomed to. Worse, Shaw got the distinct impression that someone in the production hierarchy was perhaps thinking of saving a few dollars by having the dancers double as riders and as drivers of the film’s many horsedrawn vehicles. It was ridiculous—musical-comedy performers trying to master the arcane (and dangerous)
art of driving a six-up or an eight-up, every bit as ridiculous as asking one of the riders to attempt a jeté.

Shaw quickly straightened out this confusion of realms, but not without a sense of foreboding, which elsewhere, for different reasons, Clint was also entertaining. For a man who did not like to overthink a performance, Logan’s rehearsals were intolerable, and Clint found himself wondering if he had made a terrible mistake when he signed for this picture.

He had been drawn to the project for two reasons: because it offered him a chance to sing and because he liked the first script he was shown. Musically, he would not encounter serious problems. Lerner had at first thought Clint might have to talk his songs, as Rex Harrison had in My
Fair Lady
, but then he listened to some of his old records and had a session at the piano with him, where Clint handled the
Paint Your Wagon
melodies well enough. He knew, of course, that he didn’t have a big musical-comedy tone, but thought, I’ll try to sing what the character is, not try to come out with a booming voice, which he feels works better anyway on-screen. It had always worked for Fred Astaire, hadn’t it?

The screenplay, on the other hand, turned into a growing issue. Chayefsky, who was struggling with a writer’s block at the time, had signed on largely for the money (his fee was $150,000 plus a percentage of net profits that never emerged) and for the opportunity to practice his craft on something that did not involve him emotionally. This strategy worked for the writer; when he finished the job he found that his block had dissolved. Moreover, he produced something that attracted not only Clint, but Lee Marvin, then regarded as an even more bankable star.

Chayefsky’s work bore no resemblance to the book Lerner had written for the 1951 Broadway production, which recounted the adventures of a widower and his daughter searching for new lives, new wealth (and in her case a new love) in a California mining camp during the Gold Rush era. The playwright retained the setting of the original show, and found a place for most of its songs (plus some new ones that Lerner wrote with André Previn) but threw out everything else. His was a story about the creation of a frontier menage à trois involving an old miner, Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin); his friend, known only as Pardner (Clint); and a young woman named Elizabeth (in which role, after much dithering, Jean Seberg was cast). No-Name City, the site where this nonaction takes place, eventually, literally, collapses as a result of rampant greed (Ben and some friends secretly tunnel under the town searching for gold, weakening its foundations).

“Not an up story at all, kind of a moody piece, very dark,” is the
way Clint characterized it. Indeed, in the first draft he read, Marvin’s character actually died at the end. “I’d never seen a musical with this kind of a story line before,” he says, and he remembers thinking, This is very bold—maybe these guys are on to something.

Possibly so, although even in Clint’s fond description this early draft sounds, at best, like a Tin Pan Alley version of the Weill-Brecht
Mahagonny
. At worst, it seems to be about what one might expect from some older Broadway types trying desperately to refurbish a decrepit property and use it to bridge the then-notorious generation gap. What he seems to have seen here was something like the
Fistful of Dollars
scenario. If the western had then seemed tired, the movie musical, despite its recent commercial success, now seemed positively moribund, the glory days of the first postwar decade, when Hollywood was making originals like
Singin’ in the Rain
, long gone. It was therefore reasonable for him to think, based on what he had read initially, that this project might revitalize this form as the Leone pictures had the western.

This was perhaps naive of him, but not totally so. The deal memo he signed before going off to make
Where Eagles Dare
prudently provided an escape clause; if he did not approve of
Paint Your Wagon
’s final shooting script he could leave the project. As his work in Europe dragged along, Clint spared an occasional thought for this revision, and finally he called Hirshan to inquire after it. In a matter of days it was in his hands—the work of Lerner, who would eventually receive writing credit on the finished film, with Chayefsky, whose services had now been dispensed with, getting an adaptation credit.

“I get this thing, and I start reading it, and it’s now totally different. It has no relation to the original, except the names of the characters. They had the threesome deal, but it wasn’t a dark story at all. It was all fluffy. Fluffy, and running around talking, and they’re having Lee do
Cat Ballou II
.” This accords with Chayefsky’s recollection that no more than six pages of his work remained in Lerner’s version. So Clint called Hirshan immediately and said, “This has really gone haywire. Just get me out of this. Get me totally, completely out this.”

That was not easy to do. People had committed to
Paint Your Wagon
because Clint had. “The next thing you know, here come Lerner and Logan,” flying into London to argue that musicals have to be upbeat, cheery. That’s what audiences expected. “Yeah, but it was so interesting,” said Clint, making a hopeless plea for a return to the first draft.

They, of course, misunderstood him. They thought he was signaling disappointment at the size of his role in the new script. They assured him that they were willing to do still more rewriting in order to “make
your character more important,” which, apparently, they did in the next draft.

But that was not at all the message Clint was trying to send: “I’m trying to explain to everybody that I don’t need a big part. Bigness isn’t bestness; sometimes lessness is bestness.”

The next revision was, he thought, “somewhat better.” But it was “still 180 degrees from where we started.” His impulse to pass was still large. But his agency and the studio were pressuring him to sign the contract. A green light had been flashed; the vehicle was now moving; people were counting on him. Implicit in this argument was another one: You don’t want to become known around town as difficult, and you especially don’t want to discommode a major studio. And because there was a romance in his part, it remained a good career move, something that might ingratiate him with an audience that had not yet seen him. So he gave in: “I’m taking it on as sort of a
Rawhide
deal: How can I make this interesting, if at all?”