American Rebel (14 page)

Maggie, firmly planted up in Carmel, never attended any of these salons.

T
wo days after the completion of
Coogan’s Bluff
, he left for Europe; Brian G. Hutton’s
Where Eagles Dare
was to be shot on location in England and Austria for MGM. In this World War II action drama a British officer is given a top-secret assignment to parachute behind enemy lines, somewhere in the Bavarian Alps, to rescue a captured American general before the latter can be tortured into revealing the details of the impending D-Day invasion at Normandy. He is accompanied by five commandos, one of whom is an American lieutenant, played by Clint Eastwood.

Where Eagles Dare
was a big-budget action film starring one of the world’s most famous actors, Richard Burton, at the peak of his fame but also on the brink of financial collapse. Burton was forced to accept movie work like
Where Eagles Dare
that didn’t necessarily fit his needs or desires as an actor but earned him millions. Burton agreed to star in
Where Eagles Dare
, he told the insatiable coterie of press that followed him everywhere, because he wanted to make a movie that he could watch with his two daughters; his most recent films, he said, were not especially well suited for that. Behind the scenes, though, it was widely believed that he took it solely for the money.
^*

Costarring with Burton would bring Clint international attention for something other than a spaghetti western. And European audiences would get to see him again in a noncowboy role.
Where Eagles Dare
was sure to push his steadily growing salary toward his goal of a million dollars a movie.

To write the script, Burton approached his friend and colleague Elliott Kastner, who in turn recruited the well-known adventure novelist Alistair MacLean. MacLean had achieved a fair measure of film credibility from the adaptation of his novel (done by Carl Foreman) for J. Lee Thompson’s World War II adventure
The Guns of Navarone
(1961). Burton particularly liked that film and wanted a script for
Where Eagles Dare
that would match it. MacLean had never written an original screenplay, but as all of his novels had already been made into movies or remained under option, he tried his hand with
Where Eagles Dare
, which he banged out in six weeks.

Even as MacLean was putting the finishing touches on it, Clint held firm for $800,000 up front, a percentage of the profits, and equal-size name-above-the-title billing with Burton to compensate for his de facto second billing. He got almost everything he asked for: the $800,000 up front, the percentage, and the equal size, but without Burton’s name-above-the-title credit.

After a few days in London he flew to Salzburg to begin the shoot, still wearing faded jeans and carrying a single torn canvas bag. His style was markedly different from that of the Burtons (Elizabeth Taylor accompanied her husband on the flight to Salzburg), who flew in formal attire via private jet amid the rush and glare of European-style paparazzi. No sooner had Clint settled into his hotel, the same one where the Burtons were staying, than he received a call from the actor to join him in the lounge for drinks.

For the rest of that day and into the night the two drank—or rather Burton drank and Clint observed, and what he saw was not pleasant. Here was Burton, conceivably the biggest movie star in the world, a hopeless drunk, self-justifying and self-pitying, with one eye on his whiskey and the other on the waitress who kept bringing it. He had made a fortune in film but was still strapped for cash—something incomprehensible to Clint. And while Burton could still pass as a leading man, he looked at least a dozen years older than he had five years earlier, when he shot to international stardom and scandal in
Cleopatra
. What’s more, he was puffy and out of shape and smoking up to sixty cigarettes a day despite his needing to be fit for a film that would tax all his physical abilities.

According to Ingrid Pitt, who played a minor role in the film (Heidi), Burton’s fragile condition was apparent to everyone on set: “Clint and Richard Burton were so different. Clint was looking forward to the rest of his career. He was watching everything … Richard Burton was just drinking and spouting Shakespeare. He was unhappy. He drank … he was just tired of living.” It was a powerful cautionary tale for the always-careful Clint.

Elizabeth Taylor—Liz, as everyone who knew her called her—was another story. She stayed only briefly in Salzburg, leaving shortly before the filming of the most difficult physical scenes—she could not stand to watch them because the untimely death of her third
husband, producer Mike Todd, in a plane crash still haunted her dreams. While in Salzburg, she formed an easy, informal friendship with Clint.
^*
Often while Burton was off doing a scene, Liz and Clint would sit and talk—about their careers, their lives, their loves, their dreams. Early on Taylor knew she wanted to work with Clint. She received dozens of scripts every day from producers and studios hoping to work with her and had recently come across one she liked. It was about a nun caught in the crossfire of a Mexican insurgency and an American mercenary who rescues her from being raped and murdered and helps to bring her to safety. The plot had a few clever twists—the mercenary at first doesn’t know the woman is a nun, and she winds up at one point rescuing him. Whatever her motives—friendship, mutual attraction, rivalry (on both their parts) with Burton—Taylor thought the script was perfect for herself and Clint, he in the role that would naturally have gone to Burton if he had been in better shape and if he had had any interest in that type of film, which he didn’t. Not even opposite her. Or
especially
not opposite her.

By now Burton had—inevitably, perhaps—begun to feel negatively about sharing the stage with his wife’s all-encompassing persona. The problem was, she was a far more limited actor (as far as he was concerned), and their films together were the least worthy—if, ironically, most successful—of his career. Clint, who lacked any classical training or pretenses to greatness, had no such concerns.

But their talks of working together went nowhere. As Clint later explained, “The script was given to me by Elizabeth Taylor when I was doing
When Eagles Dare
with her husband. We wanted to do it together, and the studio approved of the combination [of stars], but [as it turned out] she was going through some deal where she didn’t want to work [alone] unless it coincided with Richard’s working, so we had it set up to do in Mexico while Richard was working there on something else,
^†
but then there were other problems.” Whatever those problems may have been, the imagined Taylor-Eastwood collaboration never happened.

Before any of his
Eagles
scenes were shot, Clint had taken to altering
his dialogue. For the most part he disregarded Hutton, the director, whom Kastner had hired despite a notable lack of credentials. Hutton had directed only three films before
Where Eagles Dare: Wild Seed
(1965, aka
Fargo), The Pad and How to Use It
(1966), and
Sol Madrid
(1968), a detective story also known as
The Heroin Gang
. Before that he had worked occasionally as an actor, mostly in TV episodics. Kastner, with his partner Jerry Gershwin, had produced
Sol Madrid
and was impressed by Hutton’s abilities. The film’s financial success also helped Kastner to decide to go with Hutton on
Eagles
, even though it would be considerably more difficult and expensive to make. Because Burton’s fee took a lion’s share of the film’s budget, with Clint’s right behind, Kastner needed to keep the rest of his production costs down while maintaining an acceptable level of quality. Hutton may have been talented, but his best asset for this film was that he came cheap.

Burton did not waste much time studying his part in MacLean’s screenplay. To him, these films were all the same; he had a job to do, and he wanted to get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible. Clint, on the other hand, went through the script page by page. He was confused by the inconsistencies in his character’s dialogue, which made little sense. As he had for
A Fistful of Dollars
, and as he would do with every script henceforth, he went through it and slashed every unnecessary line of his own dialogue, leaving himself relatively little to say while he performs his character’s impressive physical feats, for which he was doubled most of the time. After the film was released, he joked to friends that it should have been called
When Doubles Dare
.
^*

The production encountered innumerable problems, including blizzards, four-foot snowdrifts, and avalanches; outbreaks of altitude sickness and frostbite; fistfights on a moving cable car (Burton); and a high-speed motorcycle ride through a fierce snowstorm on a winding mountain road (Clint). But when the film was finally finished and rushed into production, it received surprisingly good reviews.
Variety
said it was “so good for its genre that one must go back to [John Sturges’s 1963]
The Great Escape
for a worthy comparison.” Rex Reed,
then writing film reviews for
Women’s Wear Daily
, told his readers, “If you stop being so serious and sophisticated … you can have a wonderful time at
Where Eagles Dare.”
Andrew Sarris also liked it. “Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood,” he wrote, “balance out the savage and sardonic elements of the movie into an inconsistent but generally engrossing entertainment.”

Whether its audiences came to see Burton or Clint or both, the film grossed more than $15 million in its initial domestic theatrical release, enough to make it MGM’s top earner of 1969. A million more was tacked on when the film was released worldwide.

    
A
t home things were changing as well. In May 1968, after fifteen years of marriage, Maggie gave birth to a baby boy whom she and Clint named Kyle Clinton Eastwood. The baby’s arrival was a mixed blessing. For Maggie, Kyle was an undeniable reaffirmation of her unusual marriage. In a rare interview the two gave shortly afterward, Maggie explained that the secret to their long and successful marriage (as she described it) was “We don’t believe in togetherness!” Clint echoed that emotion, although he put a slightly different slant on it: “By [the time we had our child], I knew we could get along well enough to last … that we’d stay together.”

    
A
mid all the change and accolades, Clint went straight off to make yet another movie; but this one would come to be universally regarded as one of his worst.
Paint Your Wagon
was a big-screen version of a relatively obscure 1951 Broadway musical that had yielded only one semi-hit song, “They Call the Wind Maria.” It was a collaboration of Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had also done several other musicals, most notably
Brigadoon
(1947),
My Fair Lady
(1956), and
Camelot
(1960). All of these Broadway shows had been made into hit movies, leading the way to the film version
of Paint Your Wagon
.

Movie musicals were a huge gamble in the late 1960s as the song-and-dance era of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly was long over; still,
My Fair Lady
(1964), directed by George Cukor, won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and was nominated for four more; its star, Rex Harrison, won Best Actor. But only three years later Harrison nearly single-handedly destroyed the genre and his own career (and along the way 20th Century–Fox, still reeling from the debacle
of Cleopatra
, in
which he costarred) in Richard Fleischer’s ill-conceived, poorly executed, and publicly ignored
Doctor Dolittle
, which inexplicably received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The film’s poor showing appeared to have once and for all put an end to big-budget musicals—until Paramount decided to try to turn
Paint Your Wagon
into a $14 million cinematic musical extravaganza.

Since the end of Hollywood’s studio era, a new logic had taken over the industry.
Paint Your Wagon
was (at least ostensibly) a “western”—another troubled genre, thanks mostly to the proliferation of westerns on TV. So the studio wanted the last big Hollywood “cowboy” star around, Clint Eastwood, to help revive both genres. To get him, they created a role, Pardner, that had not existed in the original Broadway version. Pardner was a curious mixture of the “good” Rowdy from
Rawhide
and the “bad” Man with No Name from the spaghetti westerns. The producers paired Clint with Lee Marvin, who had played “grizzled” to Oscar-winning perfection in Elliot Silverstein’s
Cat Ballou
(1965). In Hollywood terms, it was “can’t miss” casting. Added to the mix was Pulitzer Prize–winning director Joshua Logan,
^*
whose film versions of several other Broadway musicals, including the mon-eymaking
Camelot
(1967), seemed like the financial icing on the cake.

Clint very much wanted to be a part of this project. He had always liked Joshua Logan’s films, believing he was an actor’s director, and felt he needed to work with someone like that after Brian Hutton’s mechanical directing on
Where Eagles Dare
. He also very much looked forward to working with screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who promised a radical rethinking of the original Broadway book that would make it infinitely more screen-friendly. And finally Clint liked Andre Previn’s easygoing musical style; Previn had been hired to write several new songs specifically for Clint, and he promised to make them close to the quiet, jazzy style Clint favored and that was easy for him to sing.