Clint Eastwood (63 page)

The film presents this theme with considerable indirection. Josey Wales must inflict considerable “mayhem” in pursuit of peace. But in the negotiated settlement with Ten Bears, and in his final exchange with the last of his soldierly pursuers, in which they pretend not to know one another and go their separate ways as if nothing had happened, a “better solution”—a sort of forgiving amnesia—is definitely endorsed.

The theme of reconciliation is presented in similarly indirect fashion. Josey is, on the face of it, one of Clint’s classic, wounded loners—“A reticent-type person, he doesn’t want relationships.” But as Clint also puts it, “The more he doesn’t want them, the more they keep imposing themselves upon him.” Working on, manipulating, that shred of good nature that is still present in him, until at last, without his ever overtly acknowledging it, “this little commune” heals and restores him to the human family. It was the first time his radically isolated screen character had come to such a comfortable end, the first time a film did not leave him as it found him—alone with his self-sufficiency.

All of these ideas, together with a great deal of its dialogue, were transferred more or less intact from book to first-draft adaptation by Sonia Chernus. Dean Riesner then did some work on it, but Clint still felt the screenplay needed more suspense and hired Philip Kaufman for the final polish, thinking he might also be a good choice to direct the film.

Quiet and somewhat intellectual in manner, Kaufman was a graduate of the University of Chicago with a degree in history who had briefly studied law, drifted around Europe and tried writing fiction before becoming enamored of film, particularly postwar European film. After some low-budget apprentice work he had written and directed
The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
, an antiromantic variant on the Jesse James legend, which Jennings Lang had produced at Universal and Bruce Surtees had photographed. He followed that with
The White Dawn
, a rather glum and claustrophobic tale of nineteenth-century whalers shipwrecked in the Arctic and falling into brutal conflict with their Eskimo rescuers. Clint particularly responded to the film’s unblinking realism.

Kaufman discovered what Clint thought was the key to unlocking the full dramatic power of
The Outlaw Josey Wales
. In the book and in the first draft the protagonist’s old enemies, the Redlegs, had simply faded out in the last half of the story; in Kaufman’s revision they were kept alive, hunting him, haunting him, for the length of the movie, keeping tension alive. Clint thought this invention important enough to earn Kaufman the right to direct the film.

Jim Fargo, however, quickly began to have doubts. Scouting locations with Kaufman, the AD thought he was somewhat indecisive and began to fear trouble with the always impatient Clint. They did, however, finally settle on a variety of sites in Arizona, Nevada and northern California, with the first major sequence on the production schedule the rapacious assault on Laura Lee’s wagon by the Comancheros, set for the desolate country outside Page, Arizona. It was there, during the first few days of principal photography, that things began to fall apart for Kaufman. He began the sequence before Clint arrived on location, and he was disappointed in the dailies that were forwarded to him. So was Bob Daley; “milquetoast,” he called them; “there was just no power whatever in the thing.”

Matters did not improve when Clint began working with Kaufman. As Fargo put it, “Phil was the kind of director who comes out there prepared, but likes to sit there and look and say, ‘Now what if we did this? And what if we did that?’ And Clint’s just going up a tree.” This, to him, was self-indulgence.

Kaufman’s story is otherwise. Years later, he told a reporter that “
the original novel … was kind of grim and right-wingish, and I thought it would be a good idea to take a slightly different approach, maybe inject some humor into it. Eastwood didn’t think so.”

The description of the book is not entirely inaccurate, but it is obvious that Clint raised no objection to the lightening of the movie. The finished film is full of humor; it is one of its salient qualities. Kaufman also put it about that Clint resisted his efforts to probe more profoundly into the material. David Thomson has written: “
Philip Kaufman asked for more takes. ‘Why?’ asked Clint. ‘What do you want me to do different?’ And Kaufman said he wasn’t sure, but he felt repetition would take them deeper. For Clint, repetition sounded like indecision, wasted time and going over budget.”

The crisis came with what Clint now refers to as “a Captain Queeg incident.” The conclusion of the Comanchero sequence begins with the near-magical appearance of Josey Wales, backlit, riding over the crest of a sand dune, with the sun behind him, partially blinding the superior force he was about to attack. The shot was planned for magic hour, late in the afternoon when the sun is low and glowing, the shadows particularly long and photogenic. One day a small party, consisting of Clint, Kaufman, Fargo, Surtees and Fritz Manes, Clint’s high-school buddy who had just joined Malpaso, set out to grab it.

As it happened, Fargo and Kaufman had scouted these dunes, and the director had placed a discarded container of some sort along the road to mark the place where he planned to place his camera. Over the intervening weeks the ever-shifting sands covered his marker, but he was determined to find it, and he ridiculously kept halting the little expedition to search it out.

It was absurd. There were dozens of heights suitable for the shot, and time pressure was mounting; magic hour does not last forever. Finally, at one stop, which appeared entirely appropriate for their purposes, Clint proposed setting up. The director demurred. So Clint told him to take one of the vehicles and a driver to continue his search while the rest of the party waited. As Kaufman prepared to depart, Clint turned to Fargo and asked where he’d put the camera.

Fargo was standing in a declivity with a nice up-angle on a nearby ridge. “Right here,” he said, pointing at his feet. “Get the camera.” “God, I can’t. That’s the director over there.” “Get the camera,” Clint repeated. “Let’s shoot it.” The minute Kaufman decamped they did, then packed up, leaving Manes with a car to await Kaufman’s return. The director, according to Manes, saw that his authority was now fatally
compromised, and proposed a confrontation with the star, from which Manes says he dissuaded him.

It would have been too late in any case. That night Clint placed a call to his lawyer to discuss the ramifications of firing the director and taking over himself. “If I kept him,” Clint says, “I knew I couldn’t keep my promise to the studio as far as schedule and budget went. And since I’d put my own money up to buy the story, I thought I had that right.”

There is more to the decision than that, of course. Even if Kaufman suddenly became a model of efficiency, Clint could see that the temperamental differences between them would make a good working relationship impossible. Kaufman continued to shoot for the remainder of the week. But when Daley arrived on location at the end of work on Saturday Clint drew him aside and told him he was going to let Kaufman go. He was, Daley reports, anguished about it, but rejected the producer’s offer to accompany him to the final confrontation. What passed between them no one but Clint and Kaufman know. All the former says is, “It’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life.” For a man whose own memories of the cruelties and insecurities of the movie business are always lively it surely was, and there were consequences for both of them. It was three years before Kaufman directed another movie, and Clint’s action caused the Directors Guild to promulgate a rule forbidding one of its members from being replaced by anyone working in any capacity on the picture from which he or she has been removed.

Genuine as the issues between him and Clint were, Kaufman was to a degree the victim of Clint’s growing confidence in his own abilities. The polite young actor, eager to learn, the aspiring director, acquiring the rudiments of that craft by observation and by relatively modest doing, were—perhaps somewhat to his own surprise—creatures of the past. His power was unquestionable now, and he had all the skills required to handle any kind of picture. There was no longer any need for him to tolerate styles and methods antithetical to his own. From this point onward he would either direct himself or he would employ people he knew would defer to him.

As for
Josey Wales
, Jim Fargo says “it became a labor of love,” with even the weather contributing to the sense of well-being that now settled over the production. Clint has spoken most volubly on the pleasures of working with Chief Dan George. “
He just had a great charisma. In fact, the first time I saw him he came in in an all-white suit—white tie,
white shirt, white coat—and he looked like some Indian god, and he had this great big Swedish gal who was a little bit taller than he was, and she was his ‘nurse’—at least that’s the way it was presented to me.” Once or twice he appeared on set a trifle worn by evenings spent dancing or otherwise partying with his companion, but he was always ready to work. And Clint kept giving him more to do, so effective was his presence in the film. At his age (an estimated seventy-seven) the chief, who had given a similar, and similarly touching, performance in Arthur Penn’s
Little Big Man
—a much angrier use of the western form as a Vietnam metaphor—five years earlier, did have some trouble remembering his lines. “When the camera was rolling,” Clint remembers, “I’d say to him, ‘Chief, just forget about all those lines, just forget all that dialogue and everything you’ve been rehearsing, and just sit here for a minute.’ So we’d sit there and the cameras would roll, and then I’d say, ‘Now tell me that story, you know, about the Indian that came over the hill.’ ” Quickly the chief would find himself taken up by whatever tale he was telling, recounting it in his own words, but coming close enough to the script and, in his immediacy, vastly improving on it. “I’d find myself mesmerized,” Clint would later recall. So much so that on one occasion, when Josey and Lone Watie are saying what they both imagine is a final farewell, he brought Clint to tears, and Clint thought for a moment he was going to lose it completely. “I thought, God, how am I going to keep my composure if he’s going to tug me like this?”

But tug at him the old man was supposed to do, and Clint’s delicate—and generous—relationship with the chief particularly impressed Sondra Locke. She spoke of it several times in subsequent interviews. She also spoke of Clint’s insistence on realism, with a special emphasis on deglamorization, in his work with her. In her account, he kept shooing the makeup man away from her and registered dismay when she went to her trailer to make repairs on her own. One time, when her eyebrows were singed by fire and she asked him what to do about it, he replied, “
Oh, the stumps look fine.”

He had cast her for her vulnerability and because, as he put it, “She didn’t look like she came out of some Hollywood casting session.” What he discovered working with her was an eccentric intelligence that intrigued him.

Locke is a fragile-looking woman, five feet, four inches, in height, weighing scarcely more than one hundred pounds, with luminous blue eyes. Born and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee, she was, as she frequently told interviewers, a shy and dreamy child, somewhat disaffected from her parents and drawn early and deeply into the fantasy world of the movies. When she was eleven a young man named Gordon Anderson,
four years her elder, and equally detached from mundane reality, moved to Shelbyville. They quickly became inseparable (“
the weird two, the town dreamers,” as she put it later), memorizing movie scenes and playing them with one another. Sometimes he would hold a mirror up to her face so she could get an idea of what she would look like in a close-up. Eventually, because their school did not have a drama teacher, he directed her in a production of the hoary thriller
The Monkey’s Paw
, which they took to a statewide competition and against the odds won—he as best director, she as best actress.

Thereafter, she attended junior college in Nashville, where she also did some acting and continued to think about performing professionally. Anderson, meanwhile, moved to New York to pursue an acting career. There he heard about a talent search concentrated in the Southern states in which an unknown was to be sought for the role of Mick Kelly, a fourteen-year-old tomboy, in the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’s
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
.