American Rebel (10 page)

Moreover, CBS had decided to job out the entire production. Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski, two aggressive young independent producers, had formed a company called Unit Productions and won the
assignment from the network to take over
Rawhide
. They hired Del Reisman as executive producer, or “show runner,” and made themselves highly profitable middlemen. One of the first things Reisman did was to screen episodes from all six previous seasons. He immediately saw that thirty-four-year-old Clint Eastwood was no longer suited to play Rowdy Yates; nor was Fleming, about to turn forty, to play Favor.

Reisman’s solution was to fire Fleming and focus on Clint, hoping that Clint’s maturing character Yates would work better solo. But before he could actually do it, Fleming, sensing trouble coming his way, went directly to William Paley and complained that the new production team was going to ruin the show. Paley, a big fan, listened to Fleming and decided that CBS should not be jobbing out its shows. He fired Unit Productions, which meant that Reisman was gone as well, and he convinced Endre Bohem, one of the show’s longtime line producers who had been let go when Unit was brought in, to come back.

But it did no good. By the end of the season, the show had slipped to number forty-four in the ratings.
Rawhide
had clearly turned into a tired replay of a good thing—the cattle could have reached the shores of China by now. “Every time they wanted a format change,” Clint later recalled, “they’d drag in some other [producer] … they tried a lot of different approaches but Paley would tune in every now and then and get on the horn with ‘What have you done with the show,’ and they’d get back to basics.”

    
I
n the spring of 1965, after one more season playing Rowdy, Clint jumped at the chance to return to Italy to star in Leone’s planned sequel to
A Fistful of Dollars
, to be called
Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More)
.

By now, a mystique had grown around
A Fistful of Dollars in
America, where (in the days before video, cable, and the Internet) no one could actually see the film without traveling to Europe. Even so, it was talked about in magazines, on the radio, on television, and on college campuses all across the country. Tales of the film’s “unbelievable” action sequences traveled in whispers, while
Variety
, the showbiz bible, printed story after story about the movie’s phenomenal overseas box-office success.

Indeed, in Europe it had been a hit from the day of its release; in the November 18, 1964, issue
of Daily Variety
, the newspaper’s Rome reporter kicked off the type of noncritical enthusiasm that would follow the film wherever it played: “Crackerjack western made in Italy and Spain by a group of Italians and an international cast with James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons. Early Italo figures indicate it’s a major candidate to be sleeper of the year. Also that word-of-mouth, rather than cast strength or ad campaign, is a true selling point. As such it should make okay program fare abroad as well.” Clint, who now was widely known throughout Europe as “Il Cigarillo,” rightly figured that sooner or later the film would have to play in America, Hays Code or no Hays Code. When the offer came for him to make the sequel, he quickly accepted it.

But before Leone could actually start production, he had to settle the still-unresolved dispute between Jolly Films and Kurosawa over the division of profits from the first film. When the case went to formal litigation, Leone simply declared himself free from all future obligations to Jolly and signed a new deal with Produzioni Europee Associates, headed by Alberto Grimaldi, one of the better-known Italian producers, who had worked with many of Italy’s greatest directors. Leone secured a $350,000 fee for himself, plus 60 percent of the profits for his proposed sequel to
A Fistful of Dollars
, if—and it was a big if—he could get Clint Eastwood to return as the star. Leone told Grimaldi not to worry and quickly found himself a new screenwriter, Luciano Vincenzoni, who, working together with the director, came up with a completed shooting script in nine days.

The character of Ramón Rojo, played by Italian actor Gian Maria Volontè, had been killed off in the first film, but this one would bring the actor back in a different (but essentially the same) character. Lee Marvin would play a rival bounty hunter to the Man with No Name, who is also hunting down Volontè. Marvin was all set to go until he asked for more money. Leone fired him and replaced him with Lee Van Cleef, a Hollywood character actor with a once-bright future who had fallen on hard times. He had made his debut in
High Noon
as one of Frank Miller’s gang out to kill Will Kane. Van Cleef was originally cast in the far better role of Kane’s deputy, but when he refused to get his big and hooked nose “fixed,” the part went instead to Lloyd
Bridges, and it made him a star. Van Cleef, relegated to playing one of the Miller gang, was not given a single line of dialogue. Still, his debut was so powerful, he managed to get steady work as a bad guy throughout the 1950s, until his career finally petered out and he turned to painting. Starving in Europe and living on his oils, he leaped when Leone offered him Marvin’s part for the $50,000 that Marvin had turned down.

Clint was also offered $50,000, plus a first-class round-trip plane ticket and top-of-the-line accommodations. Having accepted the terms, Il Cigarillo boarded a plane as soon as
Rawhide
went on hiatus, bound for Rome and Cinecittà studios, to begin filming.

This time Maggie accompanied him for the first ten days, then returned home and flew back again for the last ten days of filming in Spain. Clint’s press agent played up the husband-and-wife angle for all it was worth, but as soon as Maggie left Italy, Clint was seen with some of the most beautiful actresses in Rome, and his villa was filled day and night with them, even as dozens of friends and co-workers came and went. Clint partied like a teenage boy with the keys to the liquor cabinet while his parents were away on a trip. He had become such a movie star in Europe that he could no longer walk down the street without hordes of people, mostly women, running after him, like something out of Richard Lester’s satire on Beatlemania,
A Hard Day’s Night
.

The film’s three-way competition among gunfighters gave the film an added level of dramatic tension that the first film did not have, and Van Cleef especially, as he had been in
High Noon
, was superb in his role. When the completed film was released, it proved an even greater sensation than the original. This time, without Kurosawa to contend with, and with film censorship crumbling in America along with the entire studio system, Leone and Grimaldi were intent upon getting a distribution deal for this film for North America, where, they knew, the real money was. They approached Arthur Krim and Arnold Picker, the new heads of the reinvigorated United Artists looking to restore the studio’s original vision as a distributor for the best works of other producers and directors. While in Europe looking for product, they were approached by Vincenzoni.

Grimaldi took Krim and Picker to a movie theater in Rome, rather than a private screening, so they could witness firsthand the attention
and excitement the film created in audiences. Afterward in a hotel room, Grimaldi asked for a million dollars. Krim and Picker countered with $900,000—a phenomenal amount of money for a foreign-made American-style western. Grimaldi took the deal.

Papers were drawn up, and at the actual signing Picker asked Leone what his next film would be, adding that UA might be interested in bankrolling it in return for exclusive distribution rights. On the spot Leone improvised a story of three post–American Civil War losers scrounging for money. That was it, that was all he had, and a title he made up then and there
—Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
^*
—that drew a laugh from Vincenzoni and broad grins when translated for Krim and Picker. Based on only that much, they agreed to put up between $1.2 million and $1.6 million to fund the making and to retain the North American rights.
^†

    
B
ack in the States, meanwhile, Clint reverted once more to playing Rowdy Yates on
Rawhide
, a show that by this time seemed like a cultural artifact from the past, a leftover from the days
of I Love Lucy
. Another nail in its coffin was the network’s stubborn refusal to allow it to switch to color. James Aubrey, then the head of programming, turned thumbs down on the idea because of the expense; shooting in color would mean that more episodes would have to be shot to justify the cost, and there was very little stock footage of cattle drives. (The show had long ago switched to buying old footage from movies rather than staging its own, wildly expensive runs.)

The show was saved from cancellation only because Paley still loved it, and when Aubrey began talking about removing it from the schedule, Paley instructed CBS’s executive vice-president Mike Dann to keep it on the air, no matter what Aubrey said. A new producer was
brought in to try to spruce things up. Ben Brady, whose past hit show credits included
Perry Mason
and
Have Gun—Will Travel
, announced that for the new season the characters of James Murdock (Mushy) and Sheb Wooley (Pete) were to be eliminated from the cast, replaced by David Watson as an English drover; Raymond St. Jacques, an African-American actor with Shakespearean credits, as Simon Blake; and John Ireland, one of the stars
of Red River
and other gritty movie westerns, as Jed Colby. And there was one more change: Eric Fleming was out, and Rowdy Yates was promoted to trail boss (something Clint read about while in Rome, from a
Variety
clipping that Maggie sent him while he was finishing up
For a Few Dollars More)
.

Clint’s initial reaction was that they should have kept Favor and lost Rowdy. Shortly after the changes were announced, the
Los Angeles Times
dispatched Hal Humphrey to get Clint’s reaction. He began by asking him if he was happy about becoming the top star of his show. “Why should I be pleased,” Clint answered, not yet used to the fact that every word he said could and would be reprinted. “I used to carry half the shows. Now I carry them all. For the same money.”

Clint was angry and had a right to be. Fleming’s salary had been much higher than his ($220,000 per season, against Clint’s $100,000 a season), and now he was expected to fill those big boots without a raise—a detail that CBS had significantly left out of its revamping of the show.

If the season began in turmoil, it descended rapidly from there. After only two episodes, the network announced that it was bringing back Sheb Wooley. Then it announced it wasn’t. Both decisions had been made by Paley, without consulting Brady, who abruptly resigned. CBS then brought Bohem back, who said he wanted to relocate the show to Hawaii. He quickly retreated from that idea and resigned. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to save the show, CBS inexplicably moved
Rawhide
out of its regular Friday-night slot to Tuesday, opposite ABC’s hotshot
Combat
, a hit World War II action series starring Vic Morrow, just as Vietnam was beginning to burn itself into the hearts and minds of the American public. After thirteen more episodes,
Rawhide
was canceled by CBS. The 217th and last first-run episode, “Crossing at White Feather,” aired December 7, 1965, after which the series entered the ether of syndicated reruns.

Clint could not have been happier. Within days of shooting his
final scene, he flew back to New York to meet with producer Dino De Laurentiis, who said he had a proposition for Clint, the starring role in a new, big-budget movie to be shot in Europe and intended mainly for European audiences. Disappointed but resigned, Clint took the job, believing that big-screen Hollywood stardom was out of his reach.