American Rebel (22 page)

While he had loved the script, and Cimino’s cockiness, Clint hadn’t
counted on the director’s perfectionism. It closely resembled what Clint had experienced with Siegel, times ten (bordering on the obsessional, it would contribute to Cimino’s later self-destruction with
Heaven’s Gate)
.

Clint was well known on his sets for preferring to do one take in the morning and spending the afternoons on the golf course. During
Play Misty for Me
, in which he wore three caps—as director, de facto producer, and star—he said, “I must confess I can’t stand long locations or production schedules. Once you get moving, I don’t see any reason to drag your feet. During production, I can function much more fully and efficiently if I move full blast. Maybe it’s because I’m basically lazy.”

Clint found Jeff Bridges easy to work with and his performance revelatory. When the film was released in 1974, Bridges was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
^*
But according to several sources, including (but not limited to) Steven Bach’s
Final Cut
, Clint perceived himself as having been upstaged by Bridges. His disappointment and anger were palpable. And when the film proved a disappointment at the box office (settling in at about $9 million in its initial theatrical release, less than half of
Magnum Force)
, according to Bach, Clint excused his unofficial and overly indulged protégé Cimino. Instead he pointed the finger at UA, which, Clint felt, had failed to adequately position or promote the film. Despite all they had done for him, going all the way back to the Leone westerns, he swore he would never work for the studio again. He remained true to his word and never made the second film of the two-picture deal or any other for UA.

Instead, Clint went back to Universal to make a more comfortable type of movie, and a more reliably profitable one—straight action, with no women, no matter how tight their asses were, to interfere and slow things down. He wanted to return to the safety of the kind of film where he had to hang by his fingertips for dear life, while the audiences eagerly lined up to see him do so.

Only this time, he nearly fell making it.

Costarring in
The Outlaw Josey Wales
(1976) with Sondra Locke at the start of their tempestuous thirteen-year on-and off-screen relationship
.

T
he film was
The Eiger Sanction
, a James Bond–style movie in which Clint plays a government assassin on a mission to kill a renegade spy; in reality, the agency believes he is the renegade and wants
him
killed, or so he thinks. The politics of paranoia are insinuated in the backstory. It is the physical assault on Switzerland’s Eiger mountain that dominates the screen.

Clint leaped at the chance to do another film that would emphasize his physical prowess, in a surrounding where he would not have to share the stage with other, perhaps more talented or more famous actors, be harried by a self-indulgent director, and for a script that was more colorful than the resulting movie.
The Eiger Sanction
was just the kind of picture he knew best how to do—its content and form melded into one continuous flow of action, so that its content
became
its form, like a film with no plot starring a Man with No Name.

Apparently, at the relatively late-for-Hollywood age of forty-four, Clint felt he still had something left to prove. The financial dip that
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
had taken was enough for Clint to want to fall back on more familiar turf, preferably in an outdoor setting, playing a silent but deadly hero with death-defying physical skills. Jonathan Hemlock (Eastwood), the former assassin who has lately turned to the clergy (of all things), is once again summoned by a “secret (i.e., CIA)” U.S. intelligence agency to return for one final assignment that will, upon its completion, enable him to make some new art purchases. As preposterous as it sounds, this plot offers the perfect setup for pure action, the essential ingredient of
The Eiger Sanction
. As he always liked to do, Clint personally went through the script with a thick blue pencil and slashed the dialogue as much as possible.

The Eiger Sanction
property had been owned by the studio for quite some time. They had purchased the screen rights in 1972 to the first
of what became a series
of Sanction
novels by Trevanian
(sanction
means “assassination” in the lingo of his books), its twisty hook being its intellectual hero who is all-too-easily able to become a man of action who thrives on danger.
^*
The production team of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, sitting pretty with a strong development deal at Universal, had purchased
The Eiger Sanction
with Paul Newman in mind. (The next year they would score big with their filmed version of the novel
Jaws
, directed by Steven Spielberg.) Newman was red hot after George Roy Hill’s
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(1969) and
The Sting
(1973), but after expressing preliminary interest in the project, passed. Jennings Lang then suggested that Zanuck and Brown offer it to Clint (who had been Lang’s first choice). He read it, loved it, and with Malpaso worked into the deal, signed on.

Once aboard, Clint assumed complete control of the project, becoming its nominal producer, although Zanuck, Brown, and (for Malpaso) Bob Daley got the on-screen credit. The first thing Clint did was toss the script and contact Warren Murphy, a novelist whose work he liked (Murphy’s action-oriented
Destroyer
series would be the basis for at least one movie—Guy Hamilton’s 1985
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins;
Murphy eventually provided the story for Richard Donner’s
Lethal Weapon 2
). Clint liked Murphy’s minimal style, and although he had as yet no background in scriptwriting, Clint convinced him to try one for
The Eiger Sanction
.

Working off what Murphy considered his first draft, Clint went into production with a cast that included costar George Kennedy as Big Ben Bowman, Hemlock’s pal and also his secret enemy. Clint and Kennedy had gotten friendly during the making of
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
, and as was Clint’s way, he rewarded that friendship by making Kennedy a member of the Malpaso “family.” Clint filled out the rest of the cast with Jack Cassidy and Vonetta McGee (playing the female spy Jemima Brown). McGee had made a couple of “blaxploitation” pictures and had the kind of “taut bottom” that Trevanian had given Brown in the book.

He wanted the film to look authentic, which not all his pictures did. This time, because he saw the film as essentially a great mountain
climb with a little story and even less dialogue, he recruited Mike Hoover to serve as the film’s technical adviser. The set was, in reality, the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, a mountain with a reputation of being nearly impossible to climb; the names of those who had died trying was a grim roster. Hoover had made a documentary called
Solo
that had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Subject—Clint had seen and admired it. For this film his assignment would be twofold—to teach Clint how to look professional while he climbed, and to serve as a cameraman on the more dangerous shoots. After several days rehearsing the action sequences at Yosemite Mountaineering School, Hoover and his handpicked team (which included at least one veteran of the north face), and the cast and crew all left for Switzerland, where they were booked into the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel, located at the base of the mountain.

One of Hoover’s crew was David Knowles, a twenty-seven-year-old British climber who had been awarded the Royal Humane Society’s highest honor for his part in the 1970 rescue of several stranded climbers in Glencoe, Scotland. His good looks made him a perfect double for Clint in some of the more difficult mountain shots. (Clint and the rest of the cast did very little actual climbing—helicopters transported them to and from the mountain.) The last shot of the first week of filming was a pickup of a mountain slide, re-created by using rubber rocks. Hoover and Knowles decided to shoot it themselves. They positioned on a lower ledge to get the angle they wanted, when suddenly the rubber rocks triggered real rocks, and they all started falling at the same time. Possibly the vibrations from the helicopters created the landslide. Hoover suffered a broken pelvis and clung to the side of the mountain until rescuers could get to him. Knowles wasn’t so lucky. He was found dead, hanging upside down, dangling from one foot, his head crushed by a boulder that had killed him instantly.

Everyone was, naturally, upset, and for a while Clint considered canceling the production, but Clint’s unofficial statement was this: let it continue.

T
he unfortunate incident was used, rather coldly, to promote the film. In an interview entitled “Clint’s Cliff Hanger,” James Bacon described some of the footage (he’d had an advance look) as “white knuckle” material. He also said that “the only time [Clint] ever used a double was a dummy. One professional mountain climber hit on the head with a falling rock was killed in Switzerland. Clint had dropped from the same site only moments before.” Bacon quoted Clint about it this way: “I just got myself involved deeper and deeper. There was no turning back. At first, I was going to use a double but a double can only think of the stunt. He can’t think of the characterization. It just wouldn’t have worked with a double.” Bacon wound up his piece noting Clint’s youthful looks: “Clint, at 44, is the world’s greatest advertisement for health food … Even Clint’s restaurant in Carmel—’Hog’s Breath Inn’—features health food. He even serves organic booze—no preservatives added. The menu includes such goodies as ‘The Dirty Harry’ dinner, ‘Fistful of T-Bone,’ and a ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ New York–cut steak. It seems that everything Clint touches makes money. His wife Maggie told me that the restaurant took off like Clint’s box-office record.”

The restaurant was in a former antiques shop and had become the prime social hangout for Clint and his local non-show-business friends, including Paul Lippman and Walter Becker, whom he knew from one of Carmel’s more upscale restaurants, Le Marquis. According to Bacon, “The Hog’s Breath’s courtyard has an old-fashioned fireplace, and the entire place is surrounded by white picket fence and climbing ivy. The menu offers such basic food as Swiss cheese on rye with avocado and alfalfa sprouts, a char-broiled hamburger on organic bun with cheese or sliced tomatoes, a vegetarian salad bowl, fresh mushroom omelets and an assortment of Monterey Bay fish, including crisply sautéed filet of sole, squid sautéed in white wine and minced shallots, and a wide selection of teas.”