Clint Eastwood (20 page)

Warren apparently heard of that sale while he was in the hospital recuperating from wounds suffered filming amphibious landings in the South Pacific during World War II, in which he attained the rank of commander. It emboldened him to try Hollywood, where he was soon working steadily as a writer and a director, first in features, then in television. In 1955 he developed, produced and directed many episodes of
Gunsmoke
, but after one season he left with bad feelings all around. He then coproduced and directed a feature,
Cattle Empire
, which was currently in release. A cattle-drive western starring Joel McCrea, it owed something to Howard Hawks’s
Red River
, which had, a decade earlier, set the standard for this subgenre. These two films obviously inspired the new series he was developing for CBS.

A thick-browed, fit-looking man in his midforties, Warren appeared in Sparks’s office wearing a battered, writerly sports jacket, his manner not at all prepossessing to Clint, who was leaning back into a sofa, his
legs stretched out comfortably before him. “Bill, pleasure,” was Clint’s casual response to their introduction. He did not know then that Charles Marquis Warren was “Bill” only to friends and close colleagues. At work with strangers it was supposed to be “Mr. Warren,” in the same way that John Ford, also a former naval person and a maker of westerns, therefore a figure with whom Warren identified, was always “Mr. Ford” on his sets.

Sparks and Warren started describing
Rawhide
to Clint. Each season a group of cowboys would take a herd of cattle from Texas to a railhead up north. Each week they would encounter and overcome some dramatically arresting threat to their progress. There would be some location work with a rented herd of cattle, and the show would be, by television standards, quite realistic.

This was, indeed, the program Clint had heard about from his agents, and he said that he understood the lead was to be played by a man in his forties, which left him out. That’s true, he was told, but there were to be several other running parts in the series, most notably the costarring role of a young ramrod, the older trail boss’s second-in-command.

The tenor of the meeting now changed. “All of a sudden, I’m sitting up,” says Clint. Warren continued to regard him suspiciously, but Sparks “seemed really wired, really enthusiastic.” He vowed that he would pull in
Ambush
to study Clint’s work, an idea that filled him with dread. But he left the meeting with Sparks promising that he would hear from them in three or four days. Events moved faster than that. By late afternoon Clint’s agent was on the phone telling him that Sparks and Warren were not going to look at the film, but instead wanted to test him. “Great, where are the sides—you got anything for me to look at?” No, came the reply, it’s going to be an interview test.

“Well, those aren’t so hot,” said Clint, understating the matter. They had been the bane of his existence over these years. Never comfortable making small talk with strangers, particularly when he was in the role of supplicant, he felt he had lost several jobs when he was prevented from getting into character. “But I’ll do anything,” he says, dropping into the present tense as he recalls past tension, “and maybe even at this point in my life I feel a little better than I did a couple of years earlier.”

He was back at CBS the next day, slightly dismayed to discover that his champion, Sparks, was not present, and that Bill Warren would be conducting the test. Worse, the rules of play had been changed again. Clint was told to head down to Western Costume and get outfitted in some cowboy clothes—this was going to be a full-scale reading, after all.

“By the way,” Warren asked, “how are you at dialogue?”

“Well, I’m OK,” Clint replied.

“I’ve got a monologue.”

“A monologue?” said Clint, his heart sinking.

The writer handed him “a full page of solid talk. It’s a speech where you had to come in and run up to the camera, and you’re supposed to be really pissed off, and deliver this monologue to the camera as if it’s a group of people. It’s about the hardest thing you could ask a person to do.”

As it happened, it was also a portent of things to come. For Bill Warren, though he had, as a writer, a rather good feel for the western form, and especially for measuring the moral weight it could comfortably carry on television, had, as a director, no feel at all for his actors’ needs. He was peremptory and insensitive, as this surprise demand for a reading indicated.

Very much the naval officer snapping commands, Warren brooked no discussion from people who were not, after all, enlisted personnel, but creative collaborators with whom, all going well, he would be working year in, year out. It was, indeed, an actors’ revolt over his dictatorial ways, led by Milburn Stone, that had driven him off
Gunsmoke
(“The whole unit, everybody, thought he was crazy,” Clint remembers hearing). No less a figure than William F. Paley, CBS’s founder and chairman, had been obliged to intervene, ordering Warren back to writing and producing, and replacing him on the set with less autocratic directors.

It was now becoming clear to Clint that he was a finalist for the role of Rowdy Yates and that this was a do-or-die audition, for only two other actors of his age, together with the three performers (among them the eventual winner, Eric Fleming) who were up for the role of Gil Favor, the trail boss, joined him rummaging for wardrobe at Western Costume. It was also clear to him that there was no time to memorize perfectly the speech that he had been handed. He observed, however, that there were three transitions in it, and he thought if he got those right and improvised a fiery approximation of the other lines, he might get by. It was the sort of thing he had been doing in some of his acting classes, where, as an exercise, the students were encouraged to get the emotions right and forget about being word perfect with the script.

When they returned to CBS and the small studio where the tests were being filmed, Clint discovered he was going to be up first, took a deep breath and went for it: “I just built up a lot of energy, came running in there [and] blew off steam, tearing those words a whole new rear end.”

“That’s fine. That’ll do it. Thank you,” said Warren, but Clint caught a dubious look on his face. “I mean, those words—I’ve just violated
everything.” He left the studio in that state of ambivalence so familiar to auditioning actors, pleased with some of his work—in this case the dynamism he had brought to the scene—and anxious about what he had left out, in this case, the boss’s writerly nuances.

While Clint was changing back into his street clothes, Fleming did his reading (also a long monologue), and as Clint stepped out of the dressing room he overheard one of his own rivals’ test. It was not encouraging: “This guy had it word for word—every single word.” And his efforts were appreciated: “That’s wonderful, Tom, that is wonderful,” he heard Warren say. “I go home and I’m saying, Gee, I blew that one, didn’t I? I came so close and I blew it.”

Cut now to a screening room at CBS a few days later. Gathered there are Sparks, Warren and a delegation headed by Hubbell Robinson, the network’s programming chief, out from New York to make decisions about the fall season. The projectionist in the booth, running footage and listening in on their conversations, was, as it happened, an army acquaintance of Clint’s (he can no longer recall his name). The man was somewhat startled to see Clint up on the screen. He was not surprised at the silence that followed the test’s running. On these occasions everyone waits for power to speak. After a moment, it did. Said Robinson: “That’s the guy. I don’t need to see anyone else. I like him.” The customary chorus of approval immediately arose.

All of this, of course, was reported to Clint some time later, when he encountered his friend somewhere along the long
Rawhide
trail. According to him, Bill Warren never volunteered any opinion about the tests and was never asked for it, either. Clint speculates, doubtless correctly, that Robinson was completely uninterested in Warren’s text and whether or not it was correctly spoken. He was concerned only with the first impressions made by the actors. By showing himself, instead of Warren’s words, in the best available light, Clint had made the right choice.

Word that the part was his came from Clint’s agent, and it was better than he dared hope. The network, which owned the show outright, was hinting that if the pilot looked good it would immediately commit to thirteen episodes, even if no sponsor was signed on. This, of course, was something Clint desperately needed at this stage of his career—steady work (at a starting salary of $700 an episode) and steady exposure in a part that would establish him in the industry, if not necessarily in the world at large.

The
Rawhide
crew was soon off to Arizona to shoot the first episode as well as stock footage of the cattle herd moving cross-country toward the railhead it never seemed to reach. Joining Clint and Fleming as a
costar was Paul Brinegar, in the role of Wishbone, the cook (he had played a similar part for Warren in
Cattle Empire
). Others in the regular cast for much of the show’s run included Sheb Wooley (also a song writer, most famously of “Purple People Eaters”), who played Pete Nolan, the scout; James Murdock as Mushy, Wishbone’s slow-witted helper; Robert Cabal as Jesus (always pronounced “hey-zoos”), the wrangler, and Steve Raines and Rocky Shahan (also out of the
Cattle Empire
cast) as the most prominent of the trail hands.

The pilot was well received at the network, which ordered up twelve more episodes immediately. Ironically,
Rawhide
headquartered at Universal in these early days, and driving on this lot as a series lead just three years after he had been casually dismissed from it pleased Clint inordinately.

CBS was generous with the show in its early days, spending somewhat more than usual on its first episodes. Although Warren directed the pilot and several more in this first batch of shows, others were handled by well-regarded television directors, among them Richard Whorf (who had also done some major features), Andrew V. McLaglen (the actor Victor McLaglen’s son, who was beginning to make features) and Ted Post (who had been Warren’s principal directorial replacement on
Gunsmoke
and would work regularly on
Rawhide
during much of its run). The well-known guest stars included in these first episodes Dan Duryea, Troy Donahue, Brian Donlevy and Margaret O’Brien—people with solid motion-picture credits and recognition value with the television audience.

Then with only nine episodes shot, it all stopped. Clint and the rest of the company were told that CBS had been unable to interest sponsors in the show and that production was being suspended until some advertising time was sold. They were told to hold themselves available, in anxious limbo.

The advertising community was proving ambiguous about the show. In the medium’s earliest years westerns had been strictly kid stuff, and pretty occasional, featuring such childhood favorites as the Lone Ranger, Gene Autry and, of course, that early TV sensation, William Boyd’s Hopalong Cassidy, which began by recycling his old B-movie westerns, then continued with a series of fifty-two half hours made specifically for television.
Gunsmoke
and
Cheyenne
, both of which began airing in 1955, changed all that. These were “adult” westerns, and they touched a fifties nerve.

While public discourse of all kinds was at this time straitlaced, not to say prim, the consumer culture was, in contrast, quite self-indulgent. You could see it in the clothes of the New Look, swathing women in
extraneous yard goods, in the sculptured voluptuousness of automobile design, in kidney-shaped coffee tables and swimming pools, in the emphasis on ease and convenience in products ranging from frozen foods to power mowers. The TV westerns satisfied both sides of this conflict. Shot in austere black and white, portraying a harsher landscape in which actions could have unambiguous (and often mortal) consequences, they reminded people that they were not that far removed historically from harder times, harder choices. Yet these shows did not render the past in an unbearably realistic light; they tamed the West to suit the mild taste of the time.

In any event, the 1956 and 1957 seasons saw the western cycle gathering power, with such new programs as
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Broken Arrow, Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Californians
and
Wagon Train
reaching the air. In 1958, as the first
Rawhide
episodes were being shot,
The Rifleman, Bat Masterson
and
Wanted Dead or Alive
(the vehicle that made Steve McQueen a star) were added to the networks’ schedules. And this represented just the top of the line. By 1959, the peak year for the genre, the networks were programming no fewer than twenty-three westerns every week, consuming close to a quarter of the available prime-time hours. In the late fifties and early sixties, westerns, on average, commanded audience shares of about 33 percent. Later in the decade these figures dropped somewhat, but until the early seventies there were typically four westerns listed among the top twenty-five shows in the Nielsen ratings. As Richard Slotkin, the best critic-historian of our western mythology, has commented, “
No other type of action/adventure show in this period … commanded so consistently high a share of prime time over so many years.”

Herein lay the problem for
Rawhide
. There was obviously no pressing need for yet another western, yet given the genre’s popularity, it made equally good sense to go ahead with the show. Who knew what this market might bear? As this matter was debated, Clint Eastwood despaired. He remembers this period as psychologically devastating, more difficult to endure than his firing by Universal or his jobless year. He had been able to maintain the illusion that he was doing something about these circumstances simply by going out on auditions. In this case he had no alternative but to stay home and fret, listening to rumors about the show’s fate.