Clint Eastwood (74 page)

This word was evidently passed to Clint (though Gritz would later claim that he received back-channel intelligence support from the Pentagon). By this time, Clint was beginning to have his own doubts. He visited Gritz’s training camp in northern California and was distinctly unimpressed by what he saw. When the local sheriff busted them for trespassing on somebody’s back forty, he began to think, as he understates it, “These guys were maybe not all they were written up to be.”

He did not feel, however, that he could back out honorably. So off Gritz and his little band flew to Thailand, which by this time was beginning to resemble a convention site for right-wing crazies, with about twenty groups poised there for expeditions into Laos. Gritz, accompanied by four Americans and fourteen Laotian guerrillas, pushed off on what he called Operation Lazarus in late November—“Like Laurel and Hardy or the Marx brothers go to Cambodia,” as Clint ruefully puts it. They were ambushed three days later. One Laotian was killed, and one American was taken prisoner (he was later ransomed) in this fiasco, and much of their matériel was lost. Gritz retreated and regrouped and in February 1983 launched another, smaller foray. While he was gone Thai police arrested the radio operators he had left behind, and then Gritz himself was apprehended when he strolled out of the jungle empty-handed a couple of weeks later. He spent five days in jail, teaching the local police chief karate and making himself available to
Good Morning, America
for an interview. By this time, one of his compatriots had sold his story to
Soldier of Fortune
for five thousand dollars, generating much press attention and much paranoid irritation from the colonel.

Gritz has since spun completely out of control. He is the founder of a survivalist real estate development in Idaho, which he calls Almost Heaven, where he awaits the Apocalypse and rants against the New World Order, that conspiracy of the Rothschilds, the queen of England and the world bankers that he and his ilk imagine is planning to stamp every American citizen with a bar code, the better to control their lives.

Clint, who was making contributions to groups supporting the Equal Rights Amendment around the same time he was giving money to Gritz, obviously learned a lesson in caution from this incident. Aside from his two years as the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel, he has generally avoided public identification with causes and candidates, though he did admit casting a quixotic vote for Ross Perot (incidentally, another of Gritz’s suckers) in the 1992 election. His response to rumors of larger political involvements—as late as 1995 there was hopeful talk in California Republican circles of a run for governor—is to cite his unwillingness
to embrace the tedium of politics or to submit his private life to the kind of scrutiny the press now devotes to candidates for major office.

In the long line of this career, both
Firefox
and Colonel Gritz are aberrant; nothing like them had occurred before, and nothing has since. Indeed, even as Gritz was rounding up his troops, Clint was working on a movie that was in scale and tone as far from its immediate predecessor, in spirit as far from the lunatic Southeast Asian adventure, as it is possible to get.

Honkytonk Man
is based on a novel by Clancy Carlile, who also adapted it for the screen. He was represented by William Morris, and Lenny Hirshan brought the book to Clint. It recounts the last weeks in the life of a country-and-western singer named Red Stovall, a drifter and alcoholic who is terminally ill with tuberculosis. The time is the 1930s, and he appears at his married sister’s farm in Oklahoma as a dust storm wipes out her family’s crop—their last hope for survival on this land. Reprobate though he is, Red is not without hope. After a lifetime singing his songs and passing the hat in road- and cathouses, he has an invitation to audition for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. His problem is getting there intact. He has a fine Lincoln convertible, but his energy and his driving skills are, at best, erratic. His relatives are about to abandon their farm and join the Okie migration to California, so it is decided that Red’s young nephew, Whit, will be his driver and chaperone, and that they will give a lift to the boy’s grandfather (John McIntire), who is going to join other kinfolk.

Clint took to the story because it offered him the opportunity to recreate the back roads of his boyhood, and, indeed, he doubled for Oklahoma one of the areas he knew from those days, the flat farmlands around Sacramento. It also gave him another opportunity to sing, which he did in a way that was right for the role, but, as it turned out, wrong for the reviewers. Finally, the part of Whit, Red’s nephew, called for a fourteen-year-old boy, and he just happened to have one of those handy—his son, Kyle, who would bring something more than a persuasive genetic match to the role.

The project had some hidden attractions as well. One of these, curiously, had its roots in the weekend rodeoing of Clint’s
Rawhide
days. He and his cohorts had often shared the bill with country-and-western groups, and these musicians, going nowhere in what was in those days a closed world, offering no hope of the crossovers some of its performers made later, fascinated him. So did the self-destructive ends of the legendary
figures of this world, the likes of Hank Williams and Red Foley. “You wondered,” he says, “why so many of them died on the highway.”

Honkytonk Man
did not propose a firm answer to that question, only a chance to explore it. In the self-made men of show business one often notices this intense interest in willed failure, perhaps because it is a trade in which the means of self-destruction come so readily to hand, perhaps because the luck that raised them up from lazy, hazy boyhood is so inexplicable, so easy to imagine never happening. In any case Clint’s interest in this topic extends far beyond country pickers
(Bird
, for instance). Indeed, discussing this movie, Clint has more than once invoked the curious fate of Richard Nixon, painfully achieving his life’s goal and then painfully trashing it.

Verna Bloom, who played Red’s sister, puts it simply: “If Clint were a failure, he’d be Red.” It’s an interesting thought. If life had dealt differently with him, one can imagine Red’s weary hardness and charm, a desperate effort not to explode—or more likely implode—in Clint.

Not that the movie openly adverts to such thoughts. We are pretty sure from the start that Red is a foredoomed figure, but the structure of the film is almost childishly linear, its tone, until the end, loose, light and unforced. The road Red, Whit and Grandpa share might be described as the road untaken—untaken by Red, that is, at any previous time precisely because it is a shared road.

If it is too late for Red to change his ways or his route, it is not too late for him to enjoy a few sunny days before the shadows close in around him. The ferociously inward man of the film’s first passages, drunken and cynical, becomes almost boyish and unguarded in this company. Indeed, there is something prankish about the film’s incidents. An angry bull is encountered and evaded; some chickens are stolen. Young Whit is introduced to sex in a bordello, and old Red is introduced to jail, from which his nephew cleverly springs him. Red does a little singing to help ends meet and, with some help from Whit, composes a new and rather good song (“Throw your arms around this honkytonk man / And we’ll get through the night the best way we can”). Grandpa, who participated in the Oklahoma land rush, offers a lovely reminiscence about it, a reminder of the freshness of the American morning. In time, the old fellow departs and is replaced by Marlene (Alexa Kenin), who can’t carry a tune, but can’t abandon her dream of singing stardom. She sleeps once with Red, but without loss of her essential innocence.

The picture does not darken until Nashville is attained. Then with his audition going wonderfully—he’s singing the song he and Whit composed—Red succumbs to a terrible coughing fit. The TB is now hard upon him, and the implication is that though he will probably die
soon enough anyway, he will certainly die sooner if he goes on singing. But he has, at last, a recording offer—twenty dollars a song—and a last chance at a sliver of immortality. He comes to his final crisis in the studio (where, in tribute to Clint’s youth, the backup band is supposed to be Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys). At the end of the film Whit and Marlene are seen walking away from Red’s grave, and we hear a disc jockey introduce a new hit, “Honkytonk Man.”

It is obviously a very simple film. And it was accomplished simply, too—on a five-week schedule for a budget of little more than $3 million, with the redemptive ending the studio urged on Clint carefully avoided. Clint treasures his memories of working with John McIntire, an actor much beloved in the business. He had offered this role first to James Stewart, but though he was only a year younger than the seventy-five-year-old McIntire, he told Clint he didn’t want to play a grandfather just yet.

Verna Bloom, whose infant son was in the film, thought the work was hardest on Kyle: “It was a burden, that part—he had a lot to carry in the picture.” Clint worried about that, too. But he “
looks like a kid of the thirties,” as he told a reporter at the time, and he was showing a real interest in his dad’s line of work. Most important to Clint, he was not a professional. “I’m not crazy about kid actors,” he said. “You can almost see their parents off camera, encouraging them to be cute.” He asked Sondra Locke to handle the coaching, and working with his boy on camera he was, Bloom recalls, sterner than usual. He wanted a very straight performance, and he got it—that cautious alertness, that slight air of tension, that anyone might show if he was trying to please his dad was exactly right for a boy trying to take care of an explosive character like Red Stovall.

Critically, the film was radically undervalued. A number of reviewers made rather stupid
Camille
jokes at Clint’s expense. “Well intentioned” and variants on the phrase were also much employed. There was, too, considerable criticism of Clint’s singing, though simple resort to say “Barroom Buddies” would have demonstrated that he deliberately clouded his usually clear, light baritone in order to suggest the strangling effects of TB on Red’s voice. The film’s tone, its blend of muted humor and tragedy, its unmelodramatic way of insisting that life just kind of happens—which is its greatest success—seemed like a failure, a carelessness, to most observers. It got only one positive notice in a major publication. In
Time
this writer called it “a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people … but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.”

In France, however, some critics compared
Honkytonk Man
to
The
Grapes of Wrath
. “My God,” said Clint when a newspaperman reported this reaction to him. He must have had a similar reaction when he read Norman Mailer’s profile the next year. The novelist saw in it “
the steely compassion that is back of all the best country singing … and the harsh, yearning belly of rural America … making out with next to nothing but hard concerns and the spark of a dream that will never give up.” In Red he saw “a subtle man … brought to life with minimal strokes, a complex protagonist full of memories of old cunning deeds and weary sham. It was one of the saddest movies seen in a long time, yet, on reflection, terrific. One felt a tenderness for America while looking at it.”

And, perhaps, a certain tenderness for Clint Eastwood, who returned for his next two films to his most basic genre, the detective story. As someone once said, “A man’s gotta know his limitations”—or anyway his audience’s limitations. These
policiers
are, in different ways, among his most successful films. The first of them,
Sudden Impact
, was another
Dirty Harry
picture. But it grossed something over $70 million in the United States alone—his most substantial hit between
Any Which Way You Can
and
Unforgiven
—and got reviews that were more interested and engaged than
Honkytonk Man
’s had been. In an unexpected way, it even did Clint’s image some good.