Authors: Richard Schickel
His slogan was simple, “Bringing the Community Together,” and in his talks he stressed his desire to build bridges between the business community and the residential community. He intended, he said, “
to be an officer of the whole community … to be for everybody,” his highest priority being “to alleviate the fear … about how the business community is going to gobble up the residential community. It’s just not true. It’s not going to happen.” He added: “I don’t think it’s a fair thing to do, to use [merchants] as villains in the drama. They’re there; you can’t just ignore them.”
In short, he presented himself for what he is, a principled pragmatist. One has to believe, though, that he heard Clinton Eastwood Sr. whispering in his ear—Show them what you can do, show them why they need you. As for the media shouting in his ear, the din was louder and more persistent than either he or Padberg had imagined it would be. Had not Norman Mailer seen in Clint “a presidential face”? Was not Garry Trudeau doing a series of “Doonesbury” strips about the election? Was there not an irresistible analogy to be drawn between him and that other movie star presently occupying the White House? Both were Californians and conservatives, both were unpretentious actors and agreeably self-deprecating men, both had worked successfully in pictures with an adorable ape.
The press converged on Carmel from all over the world. Reporters were reduced to covering Clint’s public appearances and to pursuing public opinion on the streets of Carmel. Not a photo op, not an exclusive interview, did he grant them, though in speeches he did what he could to still speculation about larger ambitions. “
My interests are in Carmel,” he said in a typical version of an often-repeated statement. “It’s the city I’ve lived in for some time, it’s the city I love. That’s where my political interests start and stop.” He always told Padberg that he was running for only one two-year term, unless he felt passionately at the end of that time that he had not accomplished what he set out to do.
He was far more realistic than the newspeople covering him. He knew, for example, that he could never quit making movies. His passion for his work, and his success with it, ensured that. He could also see already
that he would soon become impatient with the pieties, politesse and picayune details of politics.
In this campaign, for example, Clint was obliged to take a stand on second kitchens. Through the years many older residents had installed them, so they could rent out part of their houses while continuing to live in them. Now the administration was proposing to regulate them strictly, even perhaps eliminate them. “
If you’ve read that ordinance,” Clint said hyperbolically, “it’s like Adolf Hitler knocking on your door. A lot of people could be evicted from their homes.” Then there was the great ice cream war. The previous year the council refused to grant a business license to a store that proposed selling ice cream cones that might—gasp!—be eaten on the streets, an activity strongly discouraged in an official tourist brochure. The story made the wires—“Scrooge City” someone dubbed Carmel—and when he was asked about it at an electoral forum, Clint deplored the action: “
At first it was funny, then after a while you started thinking, Wait a second. Wasn’t this a waste of official time? Weren’t there more pressing matters to be dealt with?”
Of course, in the end, all these questions were subsumed by the only topic of real interest, which was, of course, Clint Eastwood himself. The media’s descent on Carmel was, his opponents argued, a harbinger of unwanted attention to come. Mayor Eastwood would himself become the town’s number one tourist attraction. The answer to this concern was, simply, good humor. He knew some people had come to town hoping to glimpse him, Clint told one gathering, but he guessed that a certain number of nonfans stayed away for the same reason. “Maybe it balances out,” he said. By this time, though, his seriousness was clear to everyone, and it was beginning to seem unfair to deny him a job he was qualified for just because he was a celebrity.
Ms. Townsend’s response was square and inept. Confronting one of the great ironists of the age, she came across as cranky and befuddled. Her slogan was negative—“If you want progress, don’t vote for me”—and she had to confess that she had never heard of Dirty Harry—“I had a friend explain it to me.” In the end, Clint was the overwhelming victor. Voter turnout was twice more than usual, and Clint received 2,166 votes, 72.5 percent of those cast. Maggie and their children joined him at campaign headquarters for the election-night celebration, as Townsend confessed herself “bewildered and astonished” by the margin of her rejection. She added bitterly, “
I understand the bus tour companies are already getting ready to advertise tours to Carmel-by-the-Sea council meetings.” Ronald Reagan called to congratulate Clint and make monkey jokes. At a brief, rain-spattered inaugural ceremony a week later, Clint presented Townsend and two of her council allies who were
also turned out with some potted redwood seedlings as reconciliatory gifts.
Clint fulfilled to his own satisfaction all his major campaign promises. The first council meeting he presided over was, predictably, inundated by the press, which was given just six of the sixty seats available in the chambers, but was provided with closed-circuit TV coverage of it in a nearby tent. Thereafter, though, things settled down to the customary civic drone. A couple of months after taking office Clint and his council allies fired most of the do-nothing planning commission. He made the streets safe for ice cream. He made it somewhat easier to build or to renovate property. He got a tourist parking lot constructed—it was surfaced with granite chips he donated from a quarry that stood on land he owned—along with beach walks and public restrooms (Clint contributed stones for those, too). A library annex, talked about for years, was finally opened in a disused bank building, dedicated to use by children, and it is the accomplishment of which he is most proud.
His administration was exactly what one might have expected of him; he governed as he made movies—as a populist with an eye on the bottom line, as a realist without formal ideological biases but with a strong sense of what was right, wrong and, above all, practical. It may be that his most lasting and valuable contribution to his adopted community will turn out to be one that was quite unofficial—his purchase of Mission Ranch late in 1986. It was a sometime dairy farm that had long ago been converted into a tourist facility, the bar of which Clint fondly remembered from his days at Fort Ord. It had, however, fallen into disrepair and disrepute and in recent years had become a controversial issue in town. A real estate corporation had acquired the property, proposing to tear down its standing structures and replace them with eighty condominiums. Townsend’s administration sued to block construction, and this had been a point of contention between her and Clint in the campaign. In office, he caused the lawsuit to be dropped, but the more he thought about them the less happy he became with the developer’s plans. The ranch’s buildings had historic value, the property offered a fine view of the bay that he didn’t want privatized, and, most important, it bordered on extensive wetlands that would be threatened by commercial development.
He began to look around for someone to take over the property and refurbish it as it stood. “
I thought I could come up with a dream philanthropist,” he told a reporter. “The guy I talked into it was me.” The cost was around $5 million, but that was only the beginning. He had thought a coat of paint and some new wiring and plumbing were all that was needed to bring the place back, but in the end a full overhaul
was required, with the ranch being shut down while every room was redecorated and a new bar and restaurant added. The result is an upscale mini-resort of the kind that attracts the sort of prosperous visitors even Carmel finds desirable.
About a year into his term Clint was sure he was not going to run for reelection. He began to reach this conclusion one day when he was standing in a chilly garage, surrounded by staff and council members trying to decide if a prominent citizen, a doctor, would be permitted to change the slope of his garage roof. Life was too short for this sort of pettiness. Since council members were elected for four-year terms, he knew that his people would retain a majority in its deliberations after he left. Late in 1987 he announced that he would not stand for a second term.
In all, this experience had a larger effect on him than it did on Carmel. A decade later, the village remains physically attractive. Its much-argued-over business district is still shady and sedate, with rather more galleries selling indifferent scenic art than one might think the traffic would bear. The other shops sell the kind of mall merchandise available the world over. We are all now united under Benetton’s colors, and Carmel, no more than the rest of us, has not been able to resist that trend—Ms. Townsend would not have prevailed against it any more than Clint or his successors did.
As for Clint himself, his longtime editor Joel Cox thinks he became a little looser, a little more open with strangers, as a result of having to deal with so many of them in his campaign and in his council chamber. Indeed, it could be argued that it transformed him—not in his own eyes, but in ours. For decades movie stars and politicians have been flattering one another by their attentions. We are used to reports of glamorous Beverly Hills fund-raisers on behalf of chic presidential candidates. We are used to reports of starry sleepovers in the Lincoln bedroom. We are by this time perhaps fed up with the passionate advocacy of exotic causes in inappropriate forums by inappropriate spokespeople. What we are not used to is celebrities engaging themselves in meaningful discussions about the issuance of sewer bonds.
That a man famous for the inarticulate impatience of his screen character was willing to do so struck people as remarkable. It suggested something interesting, unexpected, about his character. And when it became clear that Clint had no ulterior motives or larger ambitions, it rendered him admirable even to people who rarely see movies unequipped with subtitles.
C
lint permitted himself only two films while he was mayor—
Heartbreak Ridge
early in his term,
Bird
very late in it—with
The Dead Pool
, last and least of the
Dirty Harry
pictures, pushed out quickly in the months immediately afterward. If his production schedule was slightly diminished by his political preoccupations, its basic pattern was unaffected: a genre film with some amusingly disguised aspirations, an essay in biography that was the most self-consciously aspiring film Clint ever undertook and a sequel with no aspirations beyond predictable entertainment.
These movies, which showed a career Marine Corps noncom coming confusedly to the end of his final hitch, a jazz genius’s final burnout and a famously outraged cop’s anger cooling into curmudgeonliness, had in common a somewhat autumnal air. Each of these protagonists is, in his way, looking for a concluding unscientific postscript—and not finding it.
Particularly after he finished
Bird, a
long-cherished expression of a deep and formative passion, Clint now fifty-six, admitted to feeling “fringed out” by his passage at politics. Instincts require some tutoring, and for two years he was out of touch with industry trends, audience moods, his own best impulses. He had time, amid his political preoccupations, to devote to the work immediately at hand, but he did not have time to think ahead coherently. As a result, his career would lose momentum and direction in the period between 1988 and 1991, during which time an ugly personal crisis would further distract and depress him.
This turn of events would prove to be all the more shocking because he was so entirely unprepared for it. His political venture, managed with such discretion and dignity, had brought him to new heights of public esteem, and the films he made in the period prior to his slump all turned
out to be, each in its way, successful. Nothing in his life predicted the unhappy passage soon to come.
Heartbreak Ridge
, though not very well reviewed, was commercially successful and represented an off-line venture not entirely dissimilar from
Bronco Billy
or
Honkytonk Man
in that it took up, in genially entertaining—not to say comically outrageous—form issues that had long bemused him. “You ought to be sealed in a case,” his new CO tells Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway, USMC (Clint), when he reports for his last posting as a marine. The case, he adds, ought to be labeled “Break Open Only in Case of War.” There’s much to be said for this point of view. The sergeant has a Medal of Honor and a set of attitudes that even the Corps, officially striking the softer, gentler poses of a new age, regards as antediluvian. Clint saw this as material for satire.
“Heartbreak Ridge
is my ultimate statement about macho,” he says. “He’s supermacho, and he’s full of shit—just completely ignorant.”
But, of course, delicious to play. We hear Highway before we see him, a familiar voice essaying a soaring aria of obscenities, a parody of foulmouthed masculine assertion, far beyond the call of any movie’s duty to realism. Eventually the camera conducts us to its source, and we find the sergeant—drunk and disorderly—in a holding pen; challenged by a yet more brutish type he reduces him to a quivering mass of protoplasm with some precisely executed violence. Clint had, of course, known men like Highway when he was in the service, and he flashed back, too, on Colonel Gritz and his soldiers of misfortune. There is something pathetic about war lovers when they are denied the object of their affections. “What does a warrior do when there is no war?” he muses.
Highway has nostalgically requested that his last tour of duty be on the base, where he served his first enlistment, knowing as well that his estranged wife, Aggie (Marsha Mason), still lives nearby and that they have unfinished emotional business to attend. His professional task is to whip a reconnaissance platoon, composed entirely of flakes and fuckups, into fighting form. But that cannot occupy him (or us) fully—topkicks have been doing that for decades in the movies. There’s plenty of time left over for an unusual activity—brooding. Does it really make any difference, in the age of high-tech warfare, if these guys are battle ready or not? Has he made any difference—medals or not—with
his
dutiful and screwed-up life?