American Rebel (31 page)

Respectability was the heart of the matter, and it no longer seemed out of reach. Most of the critics, who had been far behind audiences in recognizing Clint’s movies as terrific entertainments, were beginning to “get” that he was more than just a genre moviemaker, and that his films were about something, even if it wasn’t the usual boy-meets-girl love story.

As one critic wrote during this period in the
New York Times
, where its mere inclusion was a benediction: “The Eastwood persona caught a blue-collar discontent with a country portrayed as being run by bleeding hearts.” In other words, Harry Callahan the immoral fascist had now turned into Harry Callahan the law-and-order hero.

Even the
über-liberal
Norman Mailer had changed his opinion. “Clint Eastwood is an artist,” he said, and “he has a presidential face.” In fact, he said, “maybe there is no one more American than Clint.”

    
A
fter his triumphal visit to Paris, Clint returned home and went directly into pre-general-release work on
Pale Rider
, his first western since
The Outlaw Josey Wales
, nine years earlier. Meanwhile a new script came his way via Megan Rose,
The William Munny Killings;
she had read it and thought it perfect for Clint. Francis Ford Coppola had
an option on it; when Rose showed it to ucy Fisher, a head of production and development at Warner, she agreed that it was a good choice for Clint. But he would never consent to being directed by Coppola, Fisher said. Their styles—Coppola’s painstakingly slow brand of perfectionism, Clint’s fast, instinctive method—were incompatible. Eventually Coppola let his option lapse, and as a 1984 Christmas gift to Clint, Rose put a copy of the script into his Christmas stocking. He liked it, bought it, and then put it away until he felt the time was right to make it. That time would come in 1992, when it was retitled
Unforgiven
.

This time out, with his confidence bubbling like chilled champagne, he assured himself he would have no more problems with temperamental or inexperienced directors (or girlfriends with excessive proprietary claims). As his affair with Rose was ending, Clint made sure to keep sufficient distance from her. With
Pale Rider
he was going to produce, star in, and direct the whole picture; Manes would have the nominal role of Malpaso’s executive producer.

To some, Clint’s choice to return to westerns (especially one tinged with a mysterious and elegant unearthliness) seemed odd, as the genre had been pronounced dead in the mud since
Heaven’s Gate
. Moreover,
Pale Rider
was in many ways yet another version of the true events that that film, and
Shane
, had been based on, the Johnson County War. Following his success with
Tightrope
(and forgetting his failure with
City Heat), Pale Rider
seemed, at best, an offbeat choice.

Clint shifted the locale to Gold Rush California, where would-be instant millionaires are being terrorized by a ship-mining corporation led by Coy LaHood (Richard Dysart). His conglomerate needs the land in order to survive. (In previous versions, including
Shane
and
Heaven’s Gate
, the battle pitted land-settlers against cattle-breeders.)

On the miners’ side is Hull Barret (Michael Moriarty), a homesteader, who has a new girlfriend (Carrie Snodgress) and a daughter from his first marriage, Megan (Sydney Penny). Out of the mist comes a man known only as the Preacher (Eastwood), who succeeds in uniting the miners in a successful showdown with LaHood and his men, including on LaHood’s side an evil marshal (John Russell), all of whom the Preacher battled sometime in the past. In a series of strange and violent confrontations, the Preacher helps the homesteaders achieve peace. Despite Megan’s adoration of him, he rides off by himself
into the sunset, a ghostly eminence who uses the violent ways of the lawless Old West.

Like Shane, the Preacher seems to come out of the past to confront the evil cattlemen before he heads out, presumably to Boot Hill, the inevitable destiny of all gunfighters, even the Old West itself. In
Pale Rider
(as in
High Plains Drifter)
, the Preacher is less a former gun-fighter than the ghost of a former gunfighter—perhaps, in the film’s pseudo-religious overlay, a descendant of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (The Preacher is seen riding past a window as Megan reads that passage aloud from the Bible.)

A sense of the dramatic if ethereal power of the unexplainable, mystical, and supernatural pervades this film as it did
The Beguiled
, although here much more affectingly. Obvious earlier Eastwood-film allusions abound, from the vague history of the Man with No Name, to the brutal tactics of Harry Callahan and the aforementioned ambience of
The Beguiled
. The difference in
Pale Rider is
that the character is not merely out of the mainstream, he seems out of the stream of life itself.

In addition, a sense of political and social resurrection floats like a mist throughout the film, suggesting a post-Vietnam metaphor: the ghosts of the American war dead seem to live on, performing heroic deeds for the landowners, the South Vietnamese people, caught in a battle with the North not just over land rights but over the definition of what the law of the land will be. On that zeitgeist level, in its belief in the spiritual power of the defenders of the land, the film is pure Reagan-era fantasy.

Heady stuff, to be sure, but also the makings of a terrifically entertaining movie, which
Pale Rider
turned out to be. While they were making it in Sun Valley, the cast and crew felt that Clint was in a great groove, undergoing a resurrection of his own with this return to his most familiar genre and role, the western tough guy.

When he was invited to go to Cannes that spring to show
Pale Rider
, prior to its official commercial release, he took up the offer. “I enjoyed going there because I was taking a western. No one ever takes an American western. It was kind of fun and the film was received rather well. They gave me a thing called The Chevalier of Arts and Letters, and later on The Commander of the Arts and Letters.”
^*

Pale Rider
opened in June 1985 to raves. Vincent Canby went all out in his praise:

And Andrew Sarris in the
Village Voice:

But as always with Clint’s movies, it was the audience that spoke the loudest.
Pale Rider
, which cost less than $4 million to make, was the top-grossing release its first week, raking in an amazing (for 1985) $9 million, and it brought in $21.5 million in its first ten days. It would go on to gross more than $60 million in its initial domestic release, a figure that would more than triple by the time it played on screens worldwide, everywhere to wildly enthusiastic reviews.

Typical of the international adulation was a piece in a French magazine that declared,
“Clint Eastwood, depuis 15 ans, la star de cinéma le plus populaire du monde! ”
^*

    
C
lint had made a spectacular return to form, and in more ways than one. On location in Sun Valley it was an open secret on set that there was a new “main squeeze” in Clint’s life, a pretty young woman
he had met at the Hog’s Breath by the name of Jacelyn Reeves, an airline stewardess hose home base was Carmel.

And he kept at least one other woman (as he had kept Tunis, Rose, Reeves, and even Locke for a while) in a “regular rotation.” Jane Brolin, an actress who had married James Brolin in 1966, had known Clint since his Universal contract-player days, when they had first met on the grounds of the studio. After the breakup with Brolin, Jane had run into Clint, and before long they had become romantically involved.

Around this same time Clint began receiving anonymous “hate mail” regarding Sondra Locke. Some close to the situation suspected the letters were coming from Jane, despite the fact that Locke was on shaky terms with a fast-cooling Clint. He refused to believe it, and the matter was never satisfactorily resolved.
^*

On March 21, 1986, Jacelyn Reeves, who had become pregnant by Clint, gave birth to a son she named Scott. The registered birth certificate shows the baby was delivered at Monterey Community Hospital. The name of the father is omitted.

    
I
n the midst of all this, Clint decided to do something about both the ice cream ordinance and the one that was preventing him from expanding the Hog’s Breath: he threw his hat into the ring for mayor. Almost immediately campaign posters with his picture that looked like a cross between Ronald Reagan and Dirty Harry began to appear on the sides of buildings and streetlamps. Bumper stickers bore the slogan “Go ahead, make me mayor!” With Ronald Reagan’s improbable leap from movies to the White House still fresh in everyone’s minds, the news that Clint had “entered politics” filled the front pages of newspapers around the world. (He ran as a nonpartisan, as the office of mayor does not require a political affiliation.)

On the morning of January 30, 1986, after completing his round at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament and just hours before the deadline, Clint dropped off his petition of thirty signatures (ten more than the minimum required), and his name was put into official nomination. In his first interview after declaring himself a candidate, Clint told the local Carmel newspaper why he had decided to run:

It was a startling statement. That he would put the brakes on his more-successful-than-ever film career in favor of small-town politics sounded like a reverse
It’s a Wonderful Life
. The lines between his roles and his real life were blurring. In his films Clint was, in one way or another, always the defender of the people. Now he wanted to defend them in real life. At nearly fifty-six, when most men started to at least think about retirement, Clint was proudly and publicly opening up a new avenue and going so far as to suggest it meant a major career change.

Change was indeed in the air for Clint that year, although not entirely the change he had in mind.

    
O
n April 8, 1986, he won the $200-a-week mayoral post handily, spending more than $40,000 on his campaign; his opponent, incumbent Charlotte Townsend, spent $300. Clint got 2,166 votes, or 72 percent of the total cast. Townsend got 799. Clint voted before breakfast, after driving in a beat-up yellow Volkswagen convertible through a massive press gauntlet.

The next day he received a call from President Reagan, who congratulated him by asking, tongue firmly planted in cheek, “What’s an actor who once appeared with a monkey in a movie doing in politics?” The not-so-inside joke was, of course, that Reagan had made
Bedtime for Bonzo
. Jimmy Stewart, the star
of It’s a Wonderful Life
, who wasn’t in politics but, true to his image, was the best friend of the president, also called to congratulate Clint.

At his swearing-in for his two-year term, his mother, his sister Jeanne, more than a thousand townsfolk, and at least that many paparazzi showed up to watch Charlotte Townsend hand over the symbolic gavel of power.

Even before he dealt with the ice cream crisis, one of the first things the 1985 box-office champion did as mayor was to fire the heads of the four planning commissions that had turned down his proposal to build the office addition next to the Hog’s Breath.
^*
The reversal of the anti-ice-cream ordinance followed, sparking a noticeable rise in sidewalk cone sales.

    
S
oon after the election, Clint turned his day-to-day mayoral responsibilities over to Sue Hutchinson, a sixty-something consultant he had hired to organize his campaign. Her strong organizational skills were ideal for the job. She wasn’t someone with whom he could possibly become involved, but she knew how to run a screw-tight ship. With Hutchinson firmly in place, he increasingly boarded the Warner corporate jet that was always available to him and flew to his Malpaso offices in Burbank, to turn his full-time attention back to filmmaking.

The first
post–Pale Rider
project he liked (one of the two feature films he would make while ostensibly serving as the mayor of Carmel) was a military-themed script called
Heartbreak Ridge
. Warner had sent him the script, written by James Carabatsos, a Vietnam veteran who had drawn upon his own experiences once before in a 1977 movie called
Heroes
, directed by Jeremy Kagan.
^†
Distributed by Universal,
Heroes
had caught the eyes of the Warner executives who were interested in producing Kagan’s next film, especially after the success of
Apocalypse Now
and
The Deer Hunter
made Vietnam a hot-button topic for mainstream films.