American Rebel (25 page)

During the vacation Clint admitted to Maggie that he was in love with Sondra.

When they returned, Maggie filed for the separation.

Sondra too was upset. Certainly Clint’s marriage looked like it was going to end, but for her the notion of Clint being a single man was a bit too complicated.

Because she too was married and had no intention of getting a divorce.

    
L
ocke had married Gordon Anderson, her childhood sweetheart from Shelbyville, Tennessee, where they had spent their days imagining what the rest of the world must be like. Locke’s family disapproved of Anderson and what they claimed was his impure “hold” on her. The night following their high school graduation they eloped. Anderson moved to New York City to pursue a career in acting, while Locke stayed behind, picking up the occasional local job modeling and acting in commercials. Then Anderson read about a nationwide talent hunt for a teenage girl to play the lead in an upcoming movie of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
.

He immediately returned to Tennessee, picked up Locke, and took her to Nashville, where the preliminary interviews were taking place. Anderson worked on her to prepare her, spending a lot of time detailing her face and appearance. He scruffed her up, redid her hair, taped down her ample breasts to make them less prominent, and clothed her in the style of the novel. They agreed to lie about her age—she was twenty-one, but the part called for a teenager. After her successful interview, they drove to Birmingham, Alabama, for the first major eliminations. A thousand young girls auditioned, and about a hundred passed, including Locke. The next stop was New Orleans, where the finalists were to meet with the film’s director, Robert Ellis Miller.

A week after meeting Miller, the girls were called to Warner Bros.’ New York offices, all expenses paid, for the last round of auditions. Fine-tuned by Anderson, Locke was confident as she went before the producers and director and won the role. In 1968, the same year Clint appeared in his seventeenth feature,
Coogan’s Bluff
, in her first, Locke was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
^*

Even before the film was released, Locke and Anderson had moved to Hollywood—or rather to West Hollywood, the predominantly gay neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Hollywood proper, where Anderson set them up in a spacious town house. He wanted to live in West Hollywood for a reason—he was gay. He had been in the closet most of his life; Locke first found out before the marriage, but she said it didn’t bother her. He was who he was, and she loved him. They were friends first, and lovers without physical sex, which did not prove a problem because they were both able to get what they wanted elsewhere. West Hollywood gave Anderson the chance to come out, and he did so with a vengeance. By the time Locke met Clint and appeared with him in
The Outlaw Josey Wales
, Anderson was seriously involved in a relationship with another man.

The fact that Locke was married had not bothered Clint at all; in fact, it initially held great appeal.
Married
translated into
safe
, as in his own marriage. Now, the more he got to know Locke and found out about her unorthodox marriage to Anderson, the more he recognized in her a kindred soul, a talented loner with a marriage that was convenient and even advantageous, but unsatisfying.

    
A
month before Clint and Locke appeared on the cover
of People
, he had appeared with Burt Reynolds on the January 9 cover of
Time
magazine. Inside the eight-page spread covered a lot about Clint’s official (i.e., studio-sanctioned public) life but said relatively little, comparing him to his old friend Reynolds, who was still a bankable star after his impressive performance in John Boorman’s
Deliverance
(1972). That performance had had Oscar written all over it—until Reynolds self-destructed by posing as the seminude centerfold for
Cosmopolitan
magazine. The gesture relieved his career of any remaining pretense of seriousness. The movies he made after
Deliverance
failed to ignite the public, until he returned to southern-redneck form in Hal Needham’s
Smokey and the Bandit
(1977), which was a huge box-office success but which the Academy universally avoided. The
Time
piece, written by Richard Schickel, lauded Clint and Reynolds as the only two actors in sync with the popular tastes of moviegoing America, audaciously awarding them the mantle of Everyman once held by James Stewart and Henry Fonda and favorably comparing them to such tough-guy screen stalwarts as John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman (while all
but ignoring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro). He concluded, “In today’s climate it may actually take more courage and more imagination to become an Eastwood or a Reynolds than it does to be a Nicholson or a Redford.” Lurking just behind them, given the separate “box” treatment, was, according to Schickel, the “third great action star” of his generation, Charles Bronson.

The Eastwood-Bronson comparison was a common one; publications like the
Hollywood Studio
magazine said,

Both Reynolds and Bronson bought into the idea that they were iconic, but Clint ran from it. If Reynolds allowed himself to be stroked by Schickel’s overblown
Time
piece, Clint kept his distance from it.

Instead, he turned to Locke for his creative validation. Of all the women he had dated, she stood out in one crucial aspect. She was young, blond, largely inexperienced (he believed), and perhaps even a bit malleable, but she gave off an air of cool, of hip understanding that belied her rural southern roots. She dripped “artist” from every pore, and as critics were, for the most part, still trying to figure out Clint Eastwood and the meaning of his personal appeal, hitting 180 degrees wide of the mark, the only one who really “got” him was Locke.

If some wanted to anoint Clint as the reincarnation of the Great American Hero (the original having been lost in the country’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam), Clint was more than happy to let them, leaving the glorification of his screen heroics to self-appointed critical know-it-alls like Schickel. Clint was too busy trying to balance his private life between what he thought he needed (a home, a wife like Maggie, kids, a big house in Carmel) and what he thought he wanted: a woman like Locke who could run with him, who understood him, and who could take him where no other woman had. For the first time since he had gotten married, he didn’t hit hard and then run home to his wife.

It was she, according to Locke, who convinced Clint to follow
The Gauntlet
with a complete turnaround, the off-the-wall
Every Which Way but Loose
. To her (and then to Clint), it was the perfect response to all those who insisted he was the primal American cinematic hero. One thing that she pointed out to him was that he had thus far (excepting the occasional paychecks like
Where Eagles Dare, Kelly’s Heroes
, and
The Eiger Sanction)
created essentially two iconic characters that reappeared again and again in his movies. The Man with No Name had appeared in the three Leone spaghetti westerns and was echoed in one way or another in most of the later westerns including
Hang Em High, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Joe Kidd, High Plains Drifter
, and
The Outlaw Josey Wales
. All these characters, including the original Man with No Name, were Vietnam-era antiheroes, men who went against the establishment mostly because the establishment was itself controlled by outlaws, thereby making the outsiders heroes. Clint’s other great screen persona was Dirty Harry, in some ways a modern-dress version of the Man with No Name. These characters (and their other variations) are not knights in tarnished armor, they are just tarnished, and that’s what made them unique. Doing
Every Which Way but Loose
, Locke suggested, would expand Clint’s realm and suit the shift in the postwar cultural zeitgeist.

She was right on the money, and he knew it. Pushing ever closer to fifty, he was more than ready to trade in his John Wayne mantle for a little bit of what Burt Reynolds had going for him. (Since 1972 Reynolds had ranked higher in the popularity polls than even the Duke and was now threatening to pass even Clint.)
^*

The outsize success of Reynolds’s
Smokey and the Bandit
the year before told him two things: first, he didn’t have to knock himself out with big, brawling action films; and second, the public might be shifting toward (or back to) working-class, southern-based humor, something he felt he could play in a walk. In an interview he gave around
this time, the influence of Locke on his thinking comes through: the sudden eferences to Capra and Sturges, the rejection of his established image, and his abilities as a filmmaker, particularly in terms of story, even if the allusions here are a bit of a stretch:

Instead he played off an orangutan.
^*

    
J
eremy Joe Kronsberg’s screenplay concerns a two-fisted truck driver who travels from town to town making money in bare-handed pickup prizefights; he is accompanied by, of all things, an orangutan he has won in a previous fight. He falls in love with a country-western singer, loses her, wins her, and loses her again. Clint may have first come across the script from a secretary who was a friend of Kronsberg’s wife. Everyone at Malpaso was against the project except Clint, and Locke had liked it as well. He took it to Warner to find the funding for it.

Warner, eager to get another Eastwood film in theaters, was nonetheless split on this one. The new head of production, John Calley, wanted to pass, but Frank Wells, Clint’s steadfast ally at the studio, thought it might be a good commercial departure for him. After a lot of back-and-forth, Warner finally said yes and put up the production money. Shooting began shortly thereafter, in April 1978, in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and Denver—the stops along the trucker route in the film. The film’s production caravan eventually
wound up in Los Angeles, both for additional locations and the sound-stages of Warner.

To direct, Clint brought back James Fargo, who had last worked with him on
The Enforcer—
someone who, essentially, wouldn’t get in the way. Wanting country music to be played throughout, he hired Snuff Garrett from the old
Rawhide
days to write some tunes, and chose the title of one, “Every Which Way but Loose,” as the title of the film (originally called
The Coming of Philo Beddoe)
. He then cut a publishing deal with Warner and used all of their artists on the soundtrack album. The title track, by Eddie Rabbitt, was released as a single a month before the film came out, became an unlikely cross-over hit, and provided free promotion every time it was played on the radio. In the film Locke’s character, Lynn Halsey-Taylor, sings two songs, something she didn’t particularly want to do nor was especially good at, but Clint hired a singing coach, in this case Phil Everly of the famed Everly Brothers, to work with her until Clint thought the songs, and the scenes, were good enough.

Although Sondra Locke was cast as the female country-singer-love-interest, as usual in an Eastwood film, the woman was part of the back-story rather than the major plot line, dominated here by the orangutan. Working with animals is always iffy, and Clint knew it. He had worked with animals before, as far back as his all-but-invisible part in the
Francis the Talking Mule
series, but felt he could pull it off. His costar was an orangutan called Clyde in the movie (three orangutans were used in the production, but one, whose real name was Manis, was on-screen most of the time), a Las Vegas–trained performer with whom audiences immediately fell in love.

Clint, with perfectly understated comic timing, played to the film’s lowbrow mentality, up to and including the simplified moral—what life lessons man learns from an orangutan. The set piece that everyone remembers most happens when Clint points his fingers like a gun at Clyde and yells
bang
, to which Clyde responds by pretending to fall down dead. That bit of comedy, plus tough-guy motorcycle gangs, bare-chested fistfights, insincere women, and a buddy-buddy “’tan more faithful than even Tonto was to the Lone Ranger,” added up to an improbable hit but a box-office sensation. Women, who ordinarily stayed away from the harder Clint movies (unless dragged to them
by their husbands or boyfriends) loved this one and helped drive the movie’s take into the stratosphere.

But the reviews were almost universally awful: “The film is way off the mark”
(Variety)
. “This is a redneck comedy with no stops pulled. If I could persuade my friends to see it, they would probably detest me” (Stuart Byron,
Village Voice)
. “A Clint Eastwood comedy that could not possibly have been created by human hands … One can forgive the orangutan’s participation but what is Eastwood’s excuse” (David Ansen,
Newsweek)
. “The latest Clint Eastwood disgrace” (Rex Reed,
New York Daily News)
. Nonetheless,
Every Which Way but Loose
grossed an astonishing $124 million in its initial domestic release, about eight times what
The Gauntlet
had done, making it the second-biggest Warner film of the year, behind Richard Donner’s
Superman
, whose title character Clint had seriously considered playing.
^*