Clint Eastwood (79 page)

There was more than the usual interest in
Pale Rider
during the runup to its release, more than the customary concern in tracking its box-office returns in the period after it opened. So many westerns of the sixties and seventies had taken the closing of the frontier as their theme that people wondered if a movie could again live comfortably in an earlier western era. To many it seemed that Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate
, offering more empty grandiosity than epic grandeur, had, perhaps, put a period to the genre; no significant westerns had been made since its release in 1980. But now Lawrence Kasdan was set to bring out his star-encrusted
Silverado
almost simultaneously with
Pale Rider
, and the press, ever eager to make a trend out of coincidence, wondered volubly if this represented a renaissance or a last gasp for the form. The decision was that it still had viability if Clint was the star. For
Pale Rider
was the nation’s top-grossing film—about $9 million—during its first week of release and eventually took in close to $50 million at the domestic box office alone.

Still,
Pale Rider
remains the most problematic of the westerns Clint directed. It is an altogether smoother picture than
High Plains Drifter
, the work of a mature artisan in full and tasteful command of an inherently improbable tale. But one misses the rough outrageousness of the previous film. Nor can one quite make the kind of emotional connections with this visible shade that one made with Josey Wales, struggling with his less visible demons. Finally, the film lacks the realistic intensity—and the moral urgency—of
Unforgiven
, which turns on a kind of rebirth, too, but a much more riveting one.

As
Pale Rider
went into the theaters, Clint was completing the first (and only) film he ever directed for television and the last in which he would direct Sondra Locke. This was “Vanessa in the Garden,” an episode for the
Amazing Stories
series Steven Spielberg was producing for NBC. A prestigious, heavily publicized effort to revive the spooky spirit of the old
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and
Twilight Zone
anthologies, the network
was financing these half-hour programs generously, and Spielberg was recruiting feature-film actors and directors to work on them (Martin Scorsese, Peter Weir and Brian De Palma were among the latter). According to Clint, Spielberg hailed him on the main street of the Warners lot one day, and told him he had a script that he had himself written for the series that he thought would be ideal for Clint to direct.

At first glance it is difficult to see why. It is a variant on the
Portrait of Jennie
theme and a period piece, set more or less in Edith Wharton—or maybe one should say Merchant Ivory—country. In it, Vanessa, the wife and principal model of a painter named Byron Sullivan (a miscast Harvey Keitel), is killed in a riding accident on the eve of his first important show. In his bereavement he destroys most of his work and turns to drink. When he tries to burn a picture called
Vanessa in the Garden
, however, a wind blows out his match, and when he awakes the next morning he hears Vanessa’s voice, singing sweetly. Returning to the painting he finds her image vanished from it and then glimpses her wandering in the setting he had used for its background. Later he finds her sitting in a large wicker chair, posed as she was for another painting. He imagines that if he creates more such scenes she will return and inhabit them. He’s right, and he becomes a man obsessed. Sullivan’s gallery manager and best friend (Beau Bridges), in turn, makes him a rich and famous one—which means nothing to him in comparison to the happiness he has found in (quite literally) immortalizing his beloved.

Spielberg had the right man for this job. “Vanessa in the Garden” was yet another “exploration” of the possibilities of life after death, with Clint making a sunny, formal, gently romantic chamber piece out of it. With Locke more playful than ethereal in her work, there is an unexpectedly cheerful air about this little anecdote.

Off-screen, however, Clint’s relationship with Sondra was drifting toward more uncomfortable territory. If their arrangement was in its more visible aspects unconventional, considering her continuing legal—and emotional—commitment to Gordon Anderson, it was in some respects quite traditional. She urged Clint to sell (to Fritz Manes, as it happens) the little house on the wrong side of Mulholland Drive that he and Maggie had shared so long ago, and that had remained his Los Angeles pied-à-terre. She helped him find something more suitable in Bel-Air, a dark but airy Spanish-style structure, the decorating of which, also Spanish accented, she supervised.

Locke has described herself as “
very much the obliging girl-woman” in these years, “just head over heels in love with this incredibly dominant man. I thought he hung the moon.” According to a lengthy article on their breakup by Rachel Abromowitz, he “took to calling himself
Daddy, as in ‘Daddy is going to take care of this.’ ” He does not deny his paternalism. He always felt “protective” toward her.

“Indulgent” might be an equally good word. His constant use of her in his films is the most obvious evidence of that. Locke was, at best, a character lead, not a star, yet he employed her as such when few others had or would. More to the point, he bought her the house that she shared with Gordon when she was not with Clint.

This was, to say the least, a remarkably tolerant arrangement. When, in 1989, she brought her palimony action against Clint, lawyers commenting on the case observed that it is not uncommon for people to settle into new relationships, and maintain them for years, without finalizing their divorces. This is clearly true; it is what Clint had done earlier. But very few of them continue to live part-time with their legal mates.

Clint had, he says, understood the intricately woven nature of Sondra’s relationship with Gordon at the outset and had not imagined that it would be quickly or easily untangled. He expected, however, that eventually that would happen. As the years wore on, though, Sondra and Gordon continued as before, and Clint’s resentment of their arrangement grew. He says he kept waiting for something to happen—a “conversation,” as he puts it, “that would go like this: ‘Clint, I’m going to divorce Gordon Anderson and make myself available if you would like this to become a permanent kind of relationship.’ ”

This issue became more pressing for him in 1984, when his own divorce from Maggie was completed. (In April of the following year she married—not for long and not very happily, as it would turn out—Henry Wynberg, the onetime used-car salesman who had gained momentary fame as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s boyfriends.) “Well, I’m divorced,” he remembers saying to Sondra at the time. “Why don’t you show your hand?” Her reply, he says, was “I have to stay married to him for tax purposes.”

This was, to him, palpable nonsense. Who would not rather file joint returns with Clint Eastwood instead of with a not-very-successful sculptor, at the moment, according to Fritz Manes, preoccupied with manufacturing miniature guillotines? But, of course, Sondra’s significant joint returns were of quite a different—emotional—kind.

Clint says that even when she was with him, Sondra continued to spend hours on the phone with Gordon, talking him through this or that crisis. One time, Clint recalls, a lover deserted him, and Gordon recruited her to accompany him as he drove around town, late at night, seeking this absent friend. “I, to tell you the truth, was extremely concerned about it,” says Clint, “because she was out there in the middle of the night in an unpredictable situation.” Gordon, she kept telling him,
“was like a child to her, and that may be true.” But he was also a man approaching forty, and there does come a time.…

It is reasonable to ask why Clint Eastwood, a man completely capable of asserting his needs in every other area of life, was so reluctant to press them in this matter. It is also fair to say that he has no coherent answer to that question, except to say that he enjoyed the freedom that lack of a full commitment from Sondra granted him. We may also note in his nature a profound reluctance to engage in emotional confrontations.

This he did, probably without quite acknowledging it to himself or to Sondra. She might as easily have been cast in
Pale Rider
(or in
Tightrope)
as she was in his other films, but she was not. She might have been included on some of his longer and more glamorous junkets, which she was not. In the summer of 1985
Newsweek
published a cover-length story entitled “Clint: An American Icon,” another acknowledgment of his new cultural status as well as
Pale Rider
’s hit status, and it quoted him thus about Sondra: “
We’re very close friends. She’s very smart and good for me. She’s somebody I feel has my best interests at heart.”

It was spoken like a gentleman, but also rather dispassionately. And the story went on: “It’s clearly a serious relationship, but his friends say it’s an open one.… ‘She gives him his space,’ one says.”

Perhaps more than she knew. For it was around this time that he entered into a relationship with Jacelyn Reeves, a former flight attendant, who was then living in the Carmel area. A warm and seemingly uncomplicated woman, with no desire to share his public life, she wanted children, and eventually bore him two—a boy and a girl. Clint supports them unstintingly, is attached to them emotionally while maintaining with their mother the same sort of agreeable connection that he did with Roxanne Tunis. He is, obviously, a man entirely unshirking about the consequences of
all
his acts.

All of this was, of course, handled discreetly—it was a long time before the tabloid press reported anything about this liaison—but, on the other hand, it was never a deep secret either: Many of Clint and Jacelyn’s friends in Carmel knew of their relationship. If there is such a thing as a masterpiece of compartmentalization, this is surely one. More important, though, it signals, in a very obvious way, Clint’s impatience with Locke and her failure to make a definitive choice between him and Gordon.

But still, he was as yet unwilling to break with her. Instead, he offered her extremely generous support in an attempt at professional renewal. Her acting career had stalled. In the time she spent with Clint her filmography reveals only two feature-film roles for other producers and an impersonation of Rosemary Clooney in a television biopic about the
singer. She was now thirty-eight and beginning to worry—justifiably—about her future. Actresses of that age, far more popular than she was, have had for the last two decades trouble continuing to get work in the movies. It is one of the most discussed issues in modern Hollywood.

She thought directing might be an alternative for her, and Clint agreed. “You don’t have to worry about the twenty-eight-year-old that’s running up behind you,” he said. He also felt she had good qualifications for the job. She had a strong historical background in movies and good critical sense about them. She had always taken a keen interest in the filmmaking process when they worked together. And as an actress she was naturally sympathetic to the needs of other performers.

So she began looking around for scripts and found a curious little fantasy called
Ratboy
by a writer named Rob Thompson, whose credits included
Hearts of the West
, an engaging portrait of Gower Gulch Hollywood in its early days. This newer script had been making the rounds for some time—Warner Bros. had once had it under option—and Clint thought it “kind of interesting,” if a little “far out.” But Sondra had a taste for fables, and this one, about a half-human, half-animal creature, discovered and exploited by a media-savvy woman who eventually learns something worthwhile about herself and the world from this innocent, seemed to suit her sensibilities.

He would make it, he said, as a Malpaso production, securing studio approval of an $8 million budget, and providing his entire A-Team, all people she had worked with before, to make her feel secure: Fritz Manes would be the line producer; Ed Carfagno would design it; Bruce Surtees would shoot it; Joel Cox would edit; Lennie Niehaus would score. David Valdes, who had been working his way up with Clint and was soon to be his executive producer, would be first AD. Buddy Van Horn would be the stunt gaffer. Rick Baker, legendary creator of features for imaginary creatures, was engaged to design the title character’s makeup. It was further agreed that Clint would stay away, so Locke would not feel he was looking anxiously over her shoulder. It is safe to say that no first-time director ever started a film more safely cradled by strong, experienced, sympathetic arms.

No one, however, reckoned with Gordon Anderson. The onetime director of amateur theatricals began consulting with his wife on script rewrites. Mostly this was done without Clint’s knowledge, although at one point Sondra came to him and asked if she might cast Gordon in the film. “Yeah,” he remembers saying vaguely, “if there’s some small part.” But when, at last, he was permitted to see the revised script, it had become, he says, “a tribute to Gordon Anderson. All of a sudden he was like the major lead—besides the Ratboy. And I’m going, ‘Wait a second
here.’ And besides that, forgetting all of that, the material sucked. It was just awful … very, very bizarre.” Manes offers one example: Gordon’s character sprawled shirtless on a bed, ladling mayonnaise into his navel, dipping carrot sticks into it and happily proclaiming that his new diet seemed to be working.