American Rebel (28 page)

    
H
owever, a year and a half passed without a new Clint Eastwood film, while he waited for the perfect script to revive his career. During that time he dealt with several real-life issues he had previously relegated to the back burner, claiming his schedule left him little time to concentrate on them. Now he had to deal head-on with his relationship with Locke, or more accurately its downslide, and to face up to Maggie’s much-publicized new romance.

According to Locke, in her memoir, her relationship with Clint never fully recovered from the abortions. For all of Clint’s explanations about not wanting more children, she saw it as a clear signal that he had no intention of staying with her forever. Moreover, in 1980 he even told Locke about his daughter with Roxanne Tunis.

Not long afterward Locke was offered and accepted the lead role in a TV film, Jackie Cooper’s
Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story
, a project that had nothing to do with Clint. Shortly into the filming of
Rosie, Us
magazine whispered to its readers that “reports are circulating that Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke are no longer such good friends. Clint plans to make his next movie,
Honkytonk Man
, without her—and Sondra has already expressed a desire to establish her own solo career. So their [recent] Christmas release,
Any Which Way You Can
, seemingly ends a long and financially successful collaboration.”

The whispers, which were by no means confined to one magazine, contained a kernel of truth. Clint, never a big sharer of anything—money, credits, stardom—was, according to Locke, thrown by her
acceptance of the role in a movie he did not control, even if it was only for TV. In some ways, that made it worse, for it separated them even more, bringing her down to the level of the little screen, from which Clint had worked so hard to escape.

On top of all that, Maggie was now publicly flaunting her new “companion,” the millionaire playboy Henry Wynberg, who at the age of forty-six had gained the dubious reputation as the man who had become involved with Elizabeth Taylor between her two marriages to Richard Burton. After Taylor and before Maggie, Wynberg had been briefly involved with Olivia Hussey, the estranged actress wife of Dino Martin, Dean Martin’s son.

Despite the fact that Wynberg spent most of his time in Beverly Hills and Maggie lived in Carmel, they saw each other several times a month. According to Wynberg at the time, “We meet as often as we can … Maggie and I spend our time together skiing, swimming, playing tennis … and sometimes we just take long walks and do some talking. We also love to cook and have friends over for a dinner party. That’s one reason she likes me. I’m a great cook. I don’t know what the future holds. As for now, we have no plans to marry … Maggie never speaks of Clint.”

Apparently Clint’s answer to Wynberg’s public boasting was to get away. He took off with Locke for Helsinki and Copenhagen, to scout future locations, according to reports in both
Daily Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
. After their brief stay in Europe, Clint took Locke to London to see Frank Sinatra perform in concert.

Upon their return to America, Locke began filming her TV film, and Clint continued to search for a script worthy of being the next in the Dirty Harry franchise. In his spare time, which was increasingly plentiful, he began visiting the new Hollywood-friendly Washington, D.C., of President Ronald Reagan. Clint was warmly accepted into the cinematic circle that Reagan surrounded himself with at the White House. Because of it, Clint had access to several of the international mercenaries who were conducting “secret” government missions in the name of democracy, many of which were sanctioned by the president.

Fritz Manes, one of the few long-term survivors of Clint’s major clean-out of Malpaso’s staff, is credited with arranging for Bob Denard, a French self-described soldier of fortune who had seen
action in Africa during the 1970s, to be introduced to Clint. After that meeting Clint, impressed with Denard’s tales of intrigue, had Malpaso option his life story for a biopic.

At the same time, along with several other Hollywood conservatives, Clint privately funded a mercenary expedition into Laos to search for missing and possibly captive American soldiers taken during the Vietnam War. That project ended in failure, and at least one mercenary was killed during it. Clint said little to the press about either the excursion or his own financial participation in it, but after it became public and was subjected to much negative publicity, he quietly dropped the Denard project. Instead he turned to an adaptation of Craig Thomas’s 1977 bestselling novel,
Firefox
. That film would mark the fifty-two-year-old movie star’s return to the big screen.

In some ways
Firefox
fits neatly into the Eastwood canon and was in some ways a fictionalized version of the film he had wanted to make about Denard. It is an action flick whose lead character, pilot Mitchell Gant, is also an international spy. Gant has a potentially fatal flaw that sends him squarely into the dark side—he suffers from mental disabilities that leave him unable to function well—but finds himself on a mission to save the world from the cold war Russians. He is assigned to steal their newest and potentially most dangerous plane, the Firefox, and deliver it to the NATO alliance.

Despite the film’s timely subject matter, its James Bond gadgetry deprived it of any sense of realism. Perhaps to further distance himself from current headlines, Clint—who directed and produced as well as starred in the film—saw to it that Malpaso had no producing credit.

Shot on location in Austria, England, Greenland, and the United States, it had a hefty budget of $21 million (another reason he may not have wanted to make Malpaso a partner) and took nearly a year to complete. When it was finally released, the reviews were at best mixed. Sheila Benson, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
, called it “a sagging, overlong disappointment, talky and slow to ignite. It is the first time that Eastwood the director has served Eastwood the actor-icon so badly, and it is unnerving.”

“Firefox
is fun,” Andrew Sarris wrote in the
Village Voice
, “little more and not appreciably less.” For Sarris and other auteurists, where
Play Misty for Me
failed as faux Hitchcock,
Firefox
succeeded as neo-Bond.

And the film resonated with audiences longing to see Clint return to his steely-eyed-if-flawed-action-hero stance. It became one of his highest grossers and returned him to the top of the Hollywood heap.
^*

    
W
ith his career back on the main track, Clint allowed Locke to talk him into moving into the new Bel-Air house that she had decorated—despite (as Locke later described it) Clint’s domestic temperament of wild outbursts. Brief but extreme fits of anger punctured his otherwise cool facade, usually precipitated by the lighting of some short emotional fuse. Locke also described Clint’s growing narcissism: “Rarely did Clint acknowledge any flaws of his own. I was really surprised when, sometime in the mid-eighties, he had hair transplants. He actually finally admitted that he was losing his hair, but like everything else he was unbelievably secretive about it … actually the whole situation was so ridiculous that it was all I could do to keep from laughing. I interpreted these quirks of Clint as either humorous eccentricity or simple human failing.”

Maggie’s ongoing relationship with Wynberg didn’t help Clint’s intense and lightning-quick mood swings. She was now talking about finalizing her divorce from Clint and marrying Wynberg, which would mean for Clint a payout in the neighborhood of $25 million and an asset split that he had tried to avoid for several years. As if in response, Clint, according to Locke, rather than moving closer to her, pulled away and talked less and less of their future together.

Perhaps even more telling, she had not appeared in
Firefox
, which might have been understandable in the light of its typically Clintonian lack of any substantial female role. But when he publicly announced his next movie, a somewhat inexplicable return to Red-neckville and country music,
Honkytonk Man
, the female lead, into which Locke would have fit like fingers into gloves, went to a young and beautiful unknown, Alexa Kenin.

Honkytonk Man
, based on a 1980 Clancy Carlile novel of the same name, is a fictional biography of a failed country singer, Red Stovall, whose only apparent goal is to make it to the Grand Ole Opry before
he dies. Loosely based on the lives of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, the book ends with tovall’s death before he achieves his dream.

Carlile, as it happened, was a William Morris client, and the agency, as always, wanted to keep the project in-house. That was how the book came to Clint, who was looking for a project to introduce his son, Kyle, now fourteen, to feature films. Clint offered to buy it, star in it, direct it, and produce it through Malpaso, believing it had a good part for Kyle that would bring them together both professionally and personally.

Carlile, however, was reluctant to sell Clint the rights, thinking that at fifty-two he was too old to play the role of a country singer who dies at thirty-one. And while Clint had done some singing, his voice in no way matched the soaring beauty of either Williams or Rodgers, the models Carlile had used for Stovall.

Clint invited Carlile to his home and promised him that, if he sold Clint the rights to the book, he could write the screenplay adaptation of his novel without any interference. That was enough to get Carlile to agree to the deal.

Once Carlile finished the screenplay, Clint went to work adapting the story to his liking. He never wanted to die in his movies, so he had Carlile change the ending so that Stovall is inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame for his hit song, “Honkytonk Man,” as he lies dying, thereby letting the character “live on.” Clint also enlisted the services of his favorite music producer, Snuff Garrett, and charged him with juicing up Carlile’s screenplay with “classic” country hits, including songs by John Anderson, Porter Wagoner, and Ray Price, all of which would appear on the original sound-track album.

If Carlile objected to any of these changes, he had no real opportunity to express them. Once production began, he made repeated requests to become more involved, but Clint paid little attention. To be fair, this often happens to writers, because producers, stars, and directors—of which Clint was all three on this film—do not want them watching the script to make sure every word they’ve written gets onto the screen. In this case, however, the situation was more delicate, as Clint and Carlile were both William Morris clients, which made it impossible for the agency to take sides. Carlile was left out, and there was nothing he could do about it. In struggles like these, the writer always loses.

As Carlile had feared, the obviously middle-aged Clint was not remotely believable in the part (although he did bear some resemblance to Hank Williams, whose dissipated look shortly before his death made him seem far older than he was). The film opened poorly, quickly disappeared, and is rarely seen to this day.

Locke’s final big-screen appearance with Clint was in his next film, a one-more-time, perhaps desperate resuscitation of Harry Callahan in
Sudden Impact
. After seven years away from the Dirty Harry franchise, this would be his fourth visitation to his most successful screen persona. And to everyone’s surprise, including no doubt Clint’s, it turned out to be by far the best. “It was like an homage to Don Siegel. I was the only one who hadn’t directed one so I thought, well, why not?”

The project began, oddly enough, with a script sent to Locke. It was by Earl Smith, with whom she had worked on a small independent film in the early, pre-Oscar-nomination days of her career. She agreed to help develop it. But by now she knew the dangers of doing anything without Clint’s approval, so she talked with him about the possibility of her being involved as a producer. “Naturally, I talked about it with Clint, hoping that he would have no objections. But before I knew it, Clint had bought the treatment outright from Earl, had hired a writer of his own choice, and begun to turn my story into a Dirty Harry film, without even so much as a courteous ‘Do you mind, Sondra?’”

To make it easier for her to give up control of the film, Clint promised Locke the female lead and $350,000 (at the behest of Fritz Manes, who knew that the project had originated with her and that she fairly deserved that kind of money). Having settled that part of the deal, Clint brought in screenwriter Joseph Stinson to convert the script into
Sudden Impact
. (As always, Clint preferred young and inexperienced personnel to veterans, who not only came with a hefty price tag but were better able to challenge Clint’s authority.)

In the spring of 1983, with Manes in place as the film’s executive producer, Bruce Surtees behind the camera, and Clint ready to perform a triple-play as producer, director, and star, production began on
Sudden Impact
. The film would, with Dean Riesner’s help, give Clint his career’s signature line of dialogue: “Go ahead, make my day!” It was so succinct and powerful that later Ronald Reagan would borrow
it to take on Congress.
^*
“When you point a gun at someone’s head and say ‘Go ahead, make my day,’ well, I knew the audiences were going to go for it in a big way.” “It was just a whimsical thing,” Clint later recalled. “I hadn’t directed one, and I thought, why not do one before I hang that series up. It was based on an idea that wasn’t intended to be a Dirty Harry picture, just a little synopsis. I put together a screenplay on it and said, okay, I’ll do it.”

In the story Callahan has been suspended from the police force for abusively threatening a Mafia don, who then dies of a heart attack. Clint, ever careful not to make Harry an out-and-out loser, treats his suspension as one more abuse—of Callahan—by an overly authoritarian police force that just doesn’t get his righteous sense of mission and mercy (or lack of it) that passes for personal justice in 1980s San Francisco.