American Rebel (34 page)

With a script heavily rewritten by Steve Sharon, and with Buddy Van Horn directing (Horn was the stuntman who had directed Clint’s comic turn in
Any Which Way You Can)
, the film did not have much going for it. It did take a clever jab at a female film critic, unmistakably Pauline Kael (who, reviewing
Bird
, had wondered if Clint had paid the electric bill, meaning the film looked too dark to her). In a very early screen appearance Jim Carrey (billed as James Carrey) acted a deadly unfunny parody of a doomed rock star.
The Dead Pool
grossed about $59 million in its initial domestic release, which would have been good for most films but was disappointing for a Dirty Harry movie. It did nothing so much as signal that the franchise was finally and forever dead.
^*

    
B
y the end of 1988, the arc of Clint’s career appeared finally to have curved downward. The drop was neither fast nor sharp enough to cause alarm, but the glory days seemed to have faded into the sunset. To be fair, only a few actors from the 1960s were still box-office draws—among them Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman—but even their movies were nothing like the ones that had brought them to prominence earlier in their careers.

Clint decided the time had come to take a good, long, hard, and realistic look at his career and his life. And to once and for all get rid of Sondra Locke.

He had continually tried to widen the growing distance between them, accelerating it after the box-office failure of
Ratboy
. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but it made no difference; the time had come to remove himself from her life, and she from his.

What he didn’t anticipate was how difficult, ugly, embarrassing, and costly that was going to be.

In redneck mode with Bernadette Peters in
Pink Cadillac,
1989

A
pproaching his sixtieth birthday, Clint Eastwood wanted to clean house, literally and figuratively. The only property he actually owned in Los Angeles was the house he was leasing to Locke. She had to go, and there was no point in putting it off any longer, but California law had an especially sticky issue called palimony. The word had come into the popular lexicon in the late 1970s, after Lee Marvin’s live-in girlfriend successfully sued for support when they broke up. That court decision sent a chill down the spines of the Hollywood social set, where it had once been business as usual for a star or an upper executive, married or single, to keep a girlfriend, maybe a pretty starlet, stashed in an apartment, with a car and a credit card, until the heat cooled, at which point the gal-pal had to give up everything and leave.

Clint, like most stars, enjoyed a lot of different women, and his privileged life allowed him to live by his own social (or antisocial) rules. By now his pattern had long been set. He had liked being married, or at least the appearance of it. Unquestionably it had been good for his image in his
Rawhide
days, when moral clauses hung on actors’ backs wherever they went, and their personal indiscretions, real or suspected, were discussed in the powerful and feared
Confidential Magazine
, the forerunner of today’s celebrity gossip megaindustry. Marriage to Maggie, even with all its restrictions and compromises, had given his life some structure and his image some sanitation. And to ensure that his real-life image did not clash too much with the righteous character of Rowdy Yates, he made sure that Roxanne Tunis was content to live separately, raised their child as a single mother, and stayed far away from Clint’s public persona. Locke, however, had not been as cooperative or as willingly conforming; in fact, she had committed a couple of unforgivable sins, for which he was now going to make her pay.

The first was that she had never divorced her husband, Gordon Anderson. Now Clint was, more or less, supporting him by allowing him to stay in the house he had bought in Hollywood; as for the house on Stradella Road that he had bought for Locke, Clint had kept it in his name and set up a lease arrangement that gave him all the control and all the power. He had moved Kyle in, but Locke had dug in her heels and apparently was as ready as Clint for the coming slugfest.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the fading blossom finally fell from the tree, but sometime in the middle of 1988 the tensions between Clint and Locke visibly escalated over, of all things, a relatively minor pickup accident Locke may (or may not) have had while driving one of Clint’s trucks outside Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, at the time the most popular music megastore in L.A. A motorcyclist claimed he had been hit by the pickup in Tower’s parking lot.

The incident made Clint furious when the motorcyclist sued his auto insurance company. When Clint confronted Locke about it, she claimed she couldn’t remember having had an accident in his pickup at Tower or anywhere else. Clint did not believe her. He took away her driving privileges and told her that from now on she was to drive her own car—not his pickup, not his blue Mercedes, just her own vehicle. And, he added, with emphasis, that went for Gordon as well.

When Locke took the bait and defended Gordon, Clint’s response was “Well, I’ve divorced Maggie, but you haven’t divorced Gordon.” To Locke, he seemed to be invoking their not being married as one more reason why he was angry. Understandably, this made no sense to Locke, who called him on it. “Do you want us to get married now, Clint?”

“That’s not the point,” he barked. “You should do it without my asking you; you should make yourself available. I can’t ask if you’re not available.”

It sounded right, but Locke wasn’t buying any of it. She believed that it was just one of Clint’s ploys to get Gordon out of his life as well as hers. Then two seemingly unrelated incidents cut Clint’s slow-burning fuse down to ignition.

The first was a new film and a directing deal that Locke had managed to secure from Warner, green-lighted by Terry Semel and producer Lucy Fisher. The project was originally called
Sudden Impulse
, a psychological thriller with a female lead that Semel thought, based on the original
Ratboy
, Locke would be perfect for. She wanted to find
a new name for it, though, lest Clint think it too close to
Sudden Impact
, in which she had starred with him a few years back.

According to Locke, however, even before she could make that change, Clint began doing everything he could to make the project difficult for her. “Suddenly, he’d want me to travel with him only when he
knew
I had an important meeting. When we were at the ranch, each time [producer] Al Ruddy would phone me, Clint would sit down at the piano and immediately start banging out Scott Joplin tunes as loudly as he could.”

The second incident was the annual Christmas vacation that Locke and Clint had taken ever since they had known each other; Christmas Eve had been reserved for just the two of them, no matter how many other people were in their lives. But in 1988, just weeks before the holidays, Clint casually informed her that he was going to be spending them by himself, in Carmel, playing golf. Locke then spent Christmas with Gordon. Then, as she prepared for her annual New Year’s Eve ski trip with Clint, she received a call from Jane Brolin. Brolin invited her to come to Sun Valley—where Locke was planning to go anyway—and told her that Kyle and Alison were coming too. Locke, fearing the worst, flew to Sun Valley on a private Warner plane with Brolin and Clint’s two children.

The next morning, in Sun Valley, Brolin confronted Locke, telling her that she was really not wanted in the group. It was a bizarre confrontation, and the first thing Locke thought was that Clint was making Jane do his dirty work for him. Words were exchanged between the two women that quickly escalated into a screaming match. Just as it reached the neck-vein-popping state, Clint walked in, listened to the two of them, and told both of them to take the Warner jet and go home.

Locke tearfully packed and left. Brolin stayed with Clint.

As soon as the holidays were over, Locke went to see a lawyer, Norman Oberstein, who suggested that this was perhaps not the right time to start a legal proceeding.

    
C
lint, meanwhile, was spending much of his free time with actress Frances Fisher, with whom he was quite taken. On the morning of April 4, 1990, he dropped by the house on Stradella Road and waited in the living room until Locke came down the stairs. His presence
startled her. He was there, he said, to tell her he wanted her to leave the house. Locke, who was preparing to direct her film, was shocked into silence. With nothing left to say, Clint simply turned and walked out the door.

On April 10, while Locke was at Warner, Clint personally came by the house again and this time changed the locks. That same day he had Locke served with a hand-delivered written notice, on set, that she was no longer welcome at Stradella and no longer had any legal access to it. All her belongings had been taken to Gordon’s house on Crescent Heights, the one Clint had bought for him. When Locke read the notice, she fainted.

    
M
eanwhile, Clint had been busy working on a new movie,
Pink Cadillac
. Three years had passed since his last legitimate box-office success,
Heartbreak Ridge
, and he hoped this new film would finally turn things around for him. It was a working-class country cowboy film with a slightly harder edge, even a few echoes of Dirty Harry; a noticeable absence of singing and simians; the addition of the lovely Bernadette Peters; and an appearance by still relatively unknown Jim Carrey (billed as “James”), his second Clint movie.

In it, Clint plays Tommy Nowak, a tough skip-tracer assigned to find Lou Ann McGuinn (Peters, in a nonsinging, against-type role), an equally tough young mama who has taken off with her baby after being indicted for possession of counterfeit money. McGuinn’s oppressive husband Roy (Timothy Carhart) has of late been hanging out with the toughest guys of all, a gang of white supremacists, the Birthright, who are the real counterfeiters. Lou Ann’s method of escape turns out to be her husband’s pink Cadillac. Somewhere along the way she finds some funny money in the car, drops off the baby with her sister, and heads for the nearest casino, where Nowak catches up with her. In a reversal (the script had more twists than a corkscrew), the money in the car turns out to be real. Even as Nowak and McGuinn are discovering this fact, the Birthright had sent a team of killers to kill McGuinn to recapture the money. Eventually, there is a confrontation, a shoot-out, and guess what, Nowak and McGuinn beat the bad guys, realize they are in love, and live happily ever after, or something approximating that within the confines of their colorless and uninspired lives. The
film is meant to be a comedy with dramatic overtones, or a drama with comic overtones—it’s difficult to tell which.

To direct, Clint called in his former stuntman Buddy Van Horn, who had helmed two previous Clint movies
(Any Which Way You Can
and
The Dead Pool)
, while he, Clint, pulled his performance out of his back pocket.

Peters was more familiar to Broadway audiences than to filmgoers; Clint had hired her, it appeared to several witnesses on the set, simply because he was attracted to her. Clint’s interior logic may have been that if he were attracted to his costar, his audiences would be too. Peters and Clint had good chemistry on-screen, but she showed no real-life romantic interest in Clint. At that point Clint turned his attention back to Frances Fisher, who was playing the small part of Dinah, Peters’s sister.

Locke, still busy making her movie, kept hearing that Clint was running around town with Fisher, and in a fit of pique she went back to see Oberstein. This time he agreed the time had come to take action. The first thing he wanted was for Locke and Gordon to sign a severance agreement. In effect, this meant that while they were still married, Gordon voluntarily surrendered his access to any and all of Locke’s property. The purpose was to remove Clint’s possible defense that Locke’s relationship with Gordon had a financial motive or that she was still beholden to him in any way.

Once they signed it, Oberstein (at Locke’s insistence) met with Clint’s attorney, Bruce Ramer, to see if any kind of informal resolution between the two was possible. Ramer said the only thing Clint would agree to was that Gordon could keep his house, but Locke had to remain out of Stradella. When Oberstein relayed Clint’s conditions, Locke knew she had no choice but to go ahead and sue.