American Rebel (35 page)

The story of the impending lawsuit hit the national press with all the force of a Hollywood hurricane. In the tabloids it wiped everything else off their front pages for weeks, echoing the highly volatile (and endlessly entertaining) ten-year-old palimony case between Lee Marvin and Michelle Triola that had all but ended Marvin’s career.

Clint did not want to be part of anything like that, especially at a time when his career seemed in decline.
Pink Cadillac
had opened on Memorial Day weekend, the traditional start of the big-money,
big-production summertime run of movies. But it disappeared quickly in the wake of mostly negative reviews (Richard Freedman, writing for the Newhouse News Services syndicate, called it “a 122 minute dozer”) and the cinematic tsunami that was Steven Spielberg’s
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
. In its first ten days,
Pink Cadillac
did about $6 million against
Indiana’s
$38 million, making
Pink Cadillac
one of the biggest flops in Clint’s and Malpaso’s history. (And it all but ended Peters’s film career.) Whether or not the negative publicity surrounding the emerging legal slugfest between him and Locke had anything to do with it, the film simply did not draw the usual Clint crowd.

Even as
Pink Cadillac
was opening and closing, Clint was already planning his next film,
White Hunter Black Heart
, to be shot on location near Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe, an attractive place even more attractive to Clint because it was so far away. Fisher was not invited and, reportedly, did not even receive a good-bye phone call from Clint before he left.

But before he could leave, he received notice that Locke had gone ahead and filed a $70 million “palimony” lawsuit against him. Locke’s revelations of Clint’s philandering, and her two abortions—now a matter of public record—proved irresistible reading. The public consensus was surprisingly in Clint’s favor, however, as it appeared to most that Locke was putting a noose around his neck in order to save her own pretty face.

If Hollywood was biased in Clint’s favor as it hadn’t been in Marvin’s, the reason was not hard to understand. Despite his last few failures, Clint remained one of the most powerful, if not
the
most powerful, actor-producer-directors in post-studio-era Hollywood. He had built a human tower of strength on the back of Malpaso, and his thirty-five-year, forty-seven-film career had generated billions of dollars for the industry and untold jobs for actors, directors, screenwriters, and set designers, all the way down to the weekend popcorn vendors in the neighborhood movies.

Moreover, everyone in Hollywood who didn’t work with him loved him, which meant they hoped one day to work with him. He had a reputation for being fast and easy, liked to be hitting the links by early afternoon, and generally let the actors play their roles the way they wanted to. The studio suits may not have liked his way of doing business, but they lived in fear—Hollywood’s only known true emotion—that
if they somehow offended Clint, they might not be able to continue to pay the second mortgage on their beach houses. Marvin had been nothing more than a fading actor, and Locke had appeared in one noteworthy movie and six Clint films and had thus far directed one unsuccessful movie.
^*

    
L
ocke’s legal team pressed for immediate depositions to prevent Clint from being able to leave for Africa without giving them. According to Locke, “My [oral] deposition was nothing short of hell.” Clint’s litigator for the depositions, Howard King, led a fierce attack on Locke’s character and motivations. She loved fairy tales, as she had told Clint many times, and King tried to somehow establish that she was living in one in her own mind, casting Clint as her rescuer, her savior, her knight in shining armor. He pressed her on her longtime marriage to Gordon and why she had never divorced him. He wanted to know if she had had other sexual relations while living with Clint. He condemned her for “stealing” another woman’s husband.

The deposition drove her to see a psychiatrist.

Then it was Oberstein’s turn to put Clint on the grill. For six hours Oberstein focused on Clint’s “real” intentions with the house on Stradella, pointing out that Clint had originally intended, via his will (which he had since had rewritten several times), to leave it to Locke. In response to a question regarding the nature of their relationship, Clint suggested they had only gone steady but had not lived together on a formal basis, because Locke was married to Gordon. A “part-time roommate” was how Clint characterized Locke. Pressed to explain that definition, Clint said that “anytime a person spends one night it’s part-time.” Oberstein confronted Clint with the fact that he had wiretapped Stradella’s phone; he responded that he had been the victim of a stalker and had been simply trying to gather evidence to build a case against him—or her. On more than one occasion, he said, Locke had threatened to kill him. Later, in her autobiography, Locke described these accusations as “ridiculous, preposterous and a slanderous lie.”

A week later a closed-door preliminary hearing was held, to determine if Locke should be allowed back into Stradella. A variety of
players, pro and con, mostly friends and relatives, testified in support of their espective sides. Jane Brolin testified that whenever she stayed with Clint at Stradella, which she often had, she couldn’t help but notice how much of Locke’s clothing and personal items were there. And she was testifying for Clint. It was, to say the least, a strange strategy on Clint’s part; it made him look more like a playboy than he might have wanted; Brolin’s interest in Locke’s belongings may have seemed like snooping.

It came out, under cross, that Brolin had been the “unnamed source” for many of those
National Enquirer
“exclusive” stories about the deteriorating relationship between Locke and Clint and also the likely source of those poison-pen letters. Kyle testified that he was the primary tenant at Stradella Road. And Clint revealed here for the first time that he had had two children with Jacelyn Reeves, a girl, Kathryn, and a boy, Scott. Until then no one had known for sure who was the father of her children, as the birth certificate for both had read, “Father declined.” The existence of these children came as a complete shock to Locke, who had had no idea Clint had begun yet another family, with another woman, during their time together.

Locke was granted interim support but was denied palimony, the judge ruled, because she had been married to another man while she was involved with Clint. But because the case was in arbitration, the decision was not binding. Locke declined to accept the ruling and pressed for a full hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court. That June, while she continued her case, Locke rented a relatively modest apartment for the duration on Fountain Avenue, in West Hollywood, and resumed postproduction on her project, now called
Impulse
.

While the hearing moved to the next court, Clint left it to his lawyers to fight it out and finally took off for Africa, accompanied by Jane Brolin.

    
W
hite Hunter Black Heart
was another of Clint’s personal anti-genre films on the order of
Bird
. It was a thinly disguised biographical portrait of John Huston, one of the most respected directors in Hollywood. Novelist Peter Viertel had written a stunning roman à clef about Huston’s experiences on location in the Congo while filming his award-winning
The African Queen
(1951). The novel revealed
Huston’s on-location obsession with drinking and bagging an elephant on safari.

It seemed an odd choice for Clint. Why did he make it? He said, in his own words:

In
White Hunter Black Heart
John Wilson (Clint) is about to kill an elephant when he has a sudden change of heart that instead causes the death of his native guide, Kivu (Boy Mathias Chuma), a Gunga Din type, the only person in the film Wilson cares about. Branded by the villagers as a white hunter with a black heart, Wilson returns to his only real love, making movies, in this case to finish the film he has ostensibly come to make. Art endures over life, as in the last shot of the film, Wilson shouts, “Action!”

It was as near a statement of self-definition as the tight-lipped Clint would ever give. Huston was someone he could identify with both as a filmmaker and as a contradictory personality; his flamboyance was both extravagant and selective, generous and thrifty, kind-hearted and mean-spirited. And as both actor and director, often for the same project, Huston had made mostly genre films (like
The Maltese Falcon
and
The African Queen
, both of which he had only directed) that were also personal statements, and offbeat, quirky films that were still meant to be “big” (like
Freud
, for which he was both director and narrator) but never attained the kind of attention or box office he felt they deserved.

With
Bird
and now
White Hunter Black Heart
, Clint was steadily moving toward films that were, in many ways, thinly veiled autobiographies: Charlie Parker, the musical genius who went against the
prevalent tide, only to leave a tidal wave in his wake; Huston, the physically daunting director-actor whose films did not always fit into a commercial category but nevertheless left an afterburn in the mind. Most interestingly, Huston was given to excess and lacked self-discipline. In other words, he was the exact opposite of Clint, whose self-discipline—both in filmmaking and in personal health regimens—was well known to anyone who had ever worked with him. As an all-warts homage, the film was Clint’s way of humanizing and idolizing Huston (and himself) at the same time.

    
W
hen filming was completed late in August, Clint returned to the States via London, where he met up with Maggie. Her marriage to Wynberg was on the rocks, and she wanted to see how Clint was handling the devolution of his own relationship with Locke into legal and emotional acrimony. It mattered to her if Clint was over Locke. Of all his indiscretions, she was the one whom Maggie had always blamed for the breakup of her marriage to Clint. Moreover, she and Clint were still business partners in a number of enterprises, the result of their complex divorce settlement, and the parents of two children. Maggie also told Clint that he had to try to play a stronger, more influential role in Kyle’s and Alison’s life.

And there was something else, Maggie told him. In the wake of his sensational palimony trial, she had learned along with everyone else that Clint was the father of a daughter, Kimber, who had been born to Roxanne Tunis, while Maggie and Clint were still married. Presumably Maggie had a few things to tell Clint about that. He listened to all she wanted or needed to say and did not argue or disagree.

Upon his return to L.A., Clint quietly resumed his relationship with Frances Fisher, and while the palimony case dragged on, he began postproduction work on
White Hunter Black Heart
. In May 1990 he took the finished version to Cannes where, inexplicably, he denied to the press that he had based his performance on John Huston. The cineast-heavy audiences and highly literate critics, well aware of the history of
The African Queen
, were puzzled as to what the film could otherwise possibly be about.

That September Clint showed it at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, where it was given a less-than-spectacular reception.

White Hunter Black Heart
opened in the fall of 1990, and earned less than $8 million in its initial domestic release, one of the worst-grossing films of his career.

    
E
ntering his fifth decade of moviemaking, with three film failures in a row, and mired in a very public palimony trial, he went directly into production on a straight genre
policier
, albeit with a slight twist. Rather than playing his trademark loner, he would try to lure more youthful audiences by sharing the screen with a much younger and extremely popular male costar, Charlie Sheen. A rookie (Sheen) comes under Officer Nick Pulovski’s (Clint’s) wing, after Pulovski’s last partner was killed by a stolen-car gang run by ruthless Latin murderers. The film, called
The Rookie
, had a script by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel that seemed a pale imitation—some critics thought it an out-and-out spoof—of the Dirty Harry films, minus the dirt and minus Harry. Not that the film lacked appeal. Sonia Braga, playing a sadomasochistic murderess named Liesl, handcuffs and ties Clint to a chair, rapes him rather graphically, then comes this close to killing him until he miraculously escapes. It was an explosive sequence, and the only one in the film that people talked about. As obviously provocative and exploitative as it was,
ars gratia artis
, the scene may also be read as conveying Clint’s feeling victimized at the hands of a beautiful but bad woman. In the scene, Liesl has him handcuffed, sexually tortured, and imprisoned and wants to kill him even as she is making love to him. And she is, in the end, killed by Clint’s big gun.

The film received mixed-to-negative reviews but did better at the box office than any of his recent films, prompting Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
to wonder how Clint could reach so high and fail with
White Hunter Black Heart
and reach so low and succeed with
The Rookie
. Rushed into Christmas 1990 release, it grossed $43 million in its initial domestic release. It was good enough to stop the slide, but by no means a great film or even a very good one.