Clint Eastwood (80 page)

Clint felt betrayed. “You showed me a script,” he told Sondra. “You said you liked it. I talked the studio into going on the line with it.” And now, arbitrarily, without consultation, the agreement he had undertaken and guaranteed was being undermined. “Look,” he said firmly, “I am not making this script.”

She retreated. This draft, she insisted, was still a work in progress. It could be returned to something like its original form. All right, he said, “just don’t try to back-door this whole deal.” Her story is, of course, different: “I was acting in a take-charge capacity instead of being a little obedient girl. I didn’t know what impact it would have.”

But she might have guessed. Anyone who had ever worked with him might have. The issue here was not obedience or disobedience, but trust—and professionalism, minimally defined as self-discipline and honorable dealings with one’s backers. She had not met those standards, and that is an issue he is always willing to confront.

In the end she shot a movie that, by all accounts, reasonably matched Thompson’s original blueprint, though, according to Clint, the writer remained no more than a puzzled and distant onlooker. Gordon Anderson’s sole contribution to it was the voice of the Ratboy, who was played on camera by a woman, Sharon Baird. Manes claims there were troubles on the set about which Clint knew nothing, displays of temper from the director, and days when she froze in panic.

Clint was true to his word, staying away from the shoot and largely absenting himself from the lengthy postproduction period, though it seems there were some disagreements then, too. Locke, however, turned an untroubled face to the world. In interviews, she very much wanted to be understood as an independent woman, admittedly advantaged by her relationship with Clint, but determined to succeed or fail on her own merits. With the press she played down Clint’s involvement, pointing out that her relationship with Warner Bros. (which had produced
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)
antedated her relationship with him (neglecting to observe that its ownership had since changed), saying that though the contacts she had made through Clint had got her in the door, she had thereafter proceeded independently. She admitted she had heretofore been perceived as his “
appendage”; now people would see what she could do on her own.

Not many of them, though. The studio clearly saw no commercial
possibilities in
Ratboy
. It opened in one small New York theater in October 1986, and on a single multiplex screen in Los Angeles the following spring. In the interim it was shown at the Deauville Film Festival and played Paris, where it fared rather well with the critics. In the United States, however, it was largely ignored. For the newspaper of record, Janet Maslin called the film not “really funny, or fanciful or even very far out of the ordinary.” She noted a certain physical resemblance between the Ratboy and Roman Polanski. Michael Wilmington, in Los Angeles, thought it “gentle, likeable, made with few pretensions.”

They were being kind. Aside from an enlivening performance by Robert Townsend as a street hipster hired as a companion for the Ratboy, the film is almost unwatchable. This is largely because it has no firm point of view. Locke never determined whether she was doing social satire or a
Beauty and the Beast
variant, opting instead for a listless, charmless and distancing realism. She never addressed, let alone overcame, the film’s obvious, central problem, which is that, however sympathetically he is treated, a rodent clone is unlikely ever to become anyone’s favorite cuddle. Locke’s own performance as Nikki Morrison, the window dresser who discovers the title creature, is as unfocused as the rest of the movie, skidding heedlessly from the cynical to the maternal.

Aesthetics aside, the picture did not accomplish what it was supposed to do. It did not free Locke from being seen as Clint’s “appendage.” Rather the opposite;
Ratboy
was perceived as his most embarrassing largesse. Thoughts of D. W. Griffith and Carol Dempster, Herbert Yates and Vera Hruba Ralston, flitted through the back of one’s mind. After this disaster Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke would never fully repair their relationship.

“
It’s all my fault he ran for mayor,” Sondra “chuckled” to an interviewer in the spring of 1986, shortly after Clint was installed as Carmel-by-the-Sea’s chief executive, meaning that with his staff preoccupied by her picture he had time on his hands. There may have been a grain of truth in the remark. He had always spent as much time as possible in this pretty place, and at the moment was certainly not averse to undertaking a job that would give him a convenient excuse for spending ever more time there.

But the key to Clint’s decision to enter local politics was that he believed himself to have been disrespectfully treated by the little city’s administration, and he was angry about it. The trouble started with the building behind which, down a walkway, his Hog’s Breath restaurant
was located. He had bought this structure, which was in disrepair, intending to tear it down and replace it with something more handsome and profitable. He delayed work on the project while work proceeded on another building down the block to minimize disruption on the street they shared. In the meantime, plans were drawn and approved by Carmel’s planning commission, whose decision was then overturned by the city council.

Clint was outraged and went to the city administrator to find out what he needed to do to win approval. “Give me a pointer,” he remembers saying, “tell me what you want. Do you want it white or brown. I’ll do it whatever way you want.” No, he was told, it doesn’t work that way. He would have to start all over again, and he would have to keep guessing what might please the council.

Now he was nonplussed. He had proceeded as he did with all his enterprises, offering a sensible, low-key, entirely reasonable idea, one that he imagined would redound to everyone’s benefit. Naturally he hoped eventually to make a profit on his investment, but in the meantime he would be replacing an eyesore with a handsomer structure that would be a useful addition to the tax rolls, too. What could be wrong with that?

Nothing, except that it challenged local custom and culture. Carmel had been settled by Spanish missionaries, but it had been discovered at the turn of the century by San Francisco bohemians looking for a secluded retreat in an area of stunning natural beauty. Over the years, the village and the area surrounding it grew steadily as wealthy people, many of them retirees, settled there and happily embraced the exclusionary values of its founders. But as the legend of Carmel’s quaintness spread, a substantial tourist trade also developed. Inevitably, conflict occurred between preservationists, who felt that any attempt to accommodate the visitors would radically alter the character of their little community, and another bloc, most of them businesspeople, who thought it impossible to stem the tide, but quite feasible to channel it so that both reasonable civility and decent cash flows were maintained.

The protectionists held as their sacred scroll the 1929 city zoning ordinance, the preamble of which declared it to be “predominantly a residential city wherein business and commerce have in the past, are now and are proposed to be in the future subordinated to its residential character.” There were no numbered addresses in the village, few streetlights, and a city forester watched over its many pines and cypresses, some of which grew unhampered in the middle of some streets. Their opponents had no desire to tamper with these traditions, but they did cite figures that showed something over two-thirds of the $6 million municipal
budget deriving from taxes on businesses, most of which were dependent on tourism. These businessmen wanted at least some responsiveness to their needs.

Clint’s building plans had been caught in this ongoing conflict. In a city where you could be busted for changing the landscaping in front of your house without permission—all shrubbery was registered with city hall—the preservationist-dominated town council automatically rejected most construction permits, even if the proposed building would actually improve the urban prospect. It is also possible that he was victimized by celebrity prejudice. The new edifice would, after all, be called the Eastwood Building. Maybe that alone would make it an attraction for the despised tourists. Maybe the council simply felt compelled to demonstrate that it could not be intimidated by the famous movie star.

And maybe it had not seen enough
Dirty Harry
movies. Clint promptly sued the city, eventually winning an out-of-court settlement that permitted him to proceed with his building. But the matter did not end there. Even now words like “punitive,” “dictatorial,” even “fascist,” creep into his conversation when he thinks back on this issue. In any case, his fight with city hall brought Clint into closer contact with the business community and led to discussions about challenging the incumbent mayor, a woman named Charlotte Townsend, now approaching the end of her second term. Clint heard himself saying, “I’ll help out. I’ll campaign—anything anyone wants me to do.” He then felt avid eyes turning to him. Bud Allen, a local innkeeper, finally said: “You run, Clint. We’ll bust this town wide open.”

He demurred, of course, but the dissident group kept working on him. Finally, Clint said, “OK, I’ll run. But if I run I want to win. I don’t want to do this halfway.” So he attached a caveat to his acceptance. He would get an independent opinion on his candidacy before announcing it. A mutual friend put him in touch with Eileen Padberg, partner in a political consulting firm in Costa Mesa, California, that worked with Republicans and had enjoyed considerable success with local campaigns. At their first meeting in his Malpaso office, she suggested an exploratory telephone poll of the electorate. Clint thought that a good idea and proposed this agreement to Padberg in case he finally did run: “
If you don’t tell me how to make movies, I won’t tell you how to run a campaign.”

The poll results were ambiguous. Obviously, his name recognition was high, but there were problems. For one thing, most of the voters expressed satisfaction with Charlotte Townsend’s administration. And many were, as Padberg puts it, “taken aback” at the thought of a movie star holding the mayoralty. Many felt his presence in office would create “a circus atmosphere” in town, while others wondered how seriously he
would take the job; they thought he might be off making movies instead of attending to their political business.

Padberg phoned Clint at home one night to report these findings and to tell him that his campaign entailed a high risk of embarrassment for both of them. It would clearly attract national attention, and the media would install him as the automatic favorite. If he should then lose, which her poll showed was a real possibility, it would scarcely do his image any good. And it would harm hers as well; she would be the political consultant who couldn’t get a movie star elected mayor of his hometown. He asked her for a little time to think this over. An hour later he rang back to say, “I’m in if you’re in.”

So on January 30, 1986, just hours before the deadline, he filed nominating papers and launched his campaign. Padberg’s strategy was very basic: He must never attack Townsend directly, lest he look like “the gunslinger from Mexico”; he must give no interviews to the national press, thus allaying suspicions that this was some kind of publicity ploy; he must stay in town as much as possible, especially on the weekends, until the April 8 election; he must watch his sometimes-salty language and, oh, yes, it would be a good idea if he was not seen around town accompanied by a woman.

She selected a sixty-year-old woman named Sue Hutchinson, gray haired and low-key in manner, to be his on-site campaign manager and, aside from a single brochure, they did almost no paid advertising—just some buttons and bumper stickers; local ordinances naturally limited placarding and other unseemly political displays. With the help of volunteers they divided the city into five sections and went over the voter lists, trying to identify pros, cons and undecided. Then they chose sympathetic residents in each area to host social events Clint would attend. The ground rule was simple: The hosts were obliged to invite forty registered voters from their district, but could invite five friends from outside it to rub up against the star. There were, of course, some more formal forums, including a debate with Townsend and two other candidates who were never factors in the race.

“I never wrote a speech the whole time,” Clint says. “I would just get up and start philosophizing.” Informal as he was, he proved to be, Padberg says, an ideal candidate. Unlike most of the professional pols she had worked with, he took direction amiably; she was impressed by his self-possession, too. “Either you control your ego, or your ego controls you,” Padberg says, and in her eyes he outshone more experienced candidates in this respect. He was, she says, awkward as he confronted rooms full of voter-gawkers, but that worked to his advantage. They took to his good-humored shyness, and liked his earnest answers to their questions.

It was, all in all, one of the most tasteful campaigns in the history of modern American politics. He politely refused to sign autographs when he was out on walking tours (though he occasionally obliged bedazzled matrons at a genteel tea or luncheon). All campaign contributions that were volunteered to him were turned over to the local boys’ club. Though he occasionally criticized Mrs. Townsend and her supporting slate of city council candidates for their “negative attitude” and “killjoy mentality,” he never personalized his remarks.