American Rebel (5 page)

When he wasn’t sneaking off with one starlet or another, Clint passed the time on the lot walking among the soundstages, where he’d often run into other recently signed actors, like John Saxon, Marty Milner, and David Janssen, his buddies from Fort Ord. The four would-be actors enjoyed hanging out at the studio in the daytime and in local bars at night; and occasionally on weekends, when the gas station called, he went back and filled in for a day or two, as he was always in need of extra cash.

In class, Clint’s teacher Katherine Warren was joined by Jack Kosslyn, who brought in a parade of famous actors, including the great Brando himself, whose mere presence was a thrill and whose message to the students was not to try to “act,” but just to get on the sound-stage and let “it” happen (whatever “it” was supposed to be). Something and someone had, at last, made sense to Clint, and he concentrated on his acting with a seriousness and intensity he had not shown before.

By May 1954 he was considered good enough to try for a real film, at an increased salary of $100 a week. At the same time he signed with
a manager-agent, none other than Arthur Lubin, who was eager to get Clint out of the classrooms and into some films. The first picture Lubin wanted him to try out for was
Six Bridges to Cross
, which would be the first for the brooding, ethnic, East Coast, and utterly charming newcomer Sal Mineo. But despite Lubin’s enthusiasm,
Bridges
’s director, forty-four-year-old Joseph Pevney, was not impressed with Clint, dismissing him as a nonactor; despite Lubin’s pushing, Pevney refused to use Clint even in any background shots. In truth Pevney, like most of the directors at Universal, thought the talent school concept was a dumb throwback to the days when studios and training
mattered
. Journeymen like Pevney did not want the studio to supply him with students for his film; he preferred
real
actors.

Lubin continued to try to get Clint a part in any film, even as he worked on a number of other, peripheral studio assignments. Lubin was, at the time, busy in postproduction on his latest talking-mule franchise,
Francis in the Navy
. He used Clint’s voice for some looping (overdubbing) and put him in a few crowd scenes, along with Milner and Janssen. Despite his microscopic participation, Lubin gave Clint on-screen billing, his name appearing at the end of the back-of-the-film cast list.

Not until May 1954 did Clint make his film debut as a real character in a real part (still uncredited), in actor-turned-director Jack Arnold’s
Revenge of the Creature
(1955),
^*
a sequel to his unexpectedly huge hit of the year before,
Creature from the Black Lagoon
, which no doubt benefited from the big-screen hot fad of the time, 3-D. In his only scene as a lab technician, opposite the film’s star—western, war, and horror film staple (and former husband of Shirley Temple) John Agar—Clint’s unnamed character discovers a missing rat that has conveniently parked itself in his lab coat.

The scene was shot in a single day (July 30, 1954) and was the first of a series of nondescript studio-assigned parts that included a role as “First Saxon” in the borderline sexploitation flick
Lady Godiva of Coventry
^†
(directed by Arthur Lubin, starring Maureen O’Hara and Rex Reason); in
Tarantula
(1955), another Jack Arnold film, Clint played an air force pilot assigned to kill the giant, irradiated insect-gone-wild. He got a half-minute of screen time playing a laboratory assistant, in service to Rock Hudson, in
Never Say Goodbye
, a 1956 medical melodrama about an insanely jealous doctor (directed by Jerry Hopper, featuring Janssen in a solid supporting role.)
^*
Hopper suggested to Clint that he wear glasses to help him create a character, in the time-honored notion of no small parts, only small actors. The suggestion, and the attention given to Clint in his relatively tiny screen appearance, made Hudson furious. Always an insecure actor, Hudson insisted that his character—a doctor, after all—should be the one to wear the glasses.

Clint then did two more blink-and-you-miss-him roles, one in Pevney’s 1956 star vehicle for granite-faced Jeff Chandler,
Away All Boats
(Pevney was incensed at having been forced this time by the studio to use Clint, who is barely visible in the film—in one scene he calls for a “medic”), and a bit-bit in Charles Haas’s
Star in the Dust
(1956), a western starring Agar. “They made a lot of cheapies in those days, a lot of B pictures,” Clint later recalled. “I’d always play the young lieutenant or the lab technician who came in and said, ‘He went that way,’ or ‘This happened,’ or ‘Doctor, here are the X-rays,’ and he’d say, ‘Get lost, kid,’ I’d go out, and that would be the end of it.”

Over the course of eighteen months, Clint received good reports that had resulted in an increased salary of $125 a week. But on October 23, 1955, he was unexpectedly and unceremoniously let go by Universal because, the executives said, he just didn’t have the right look. They especially objected to his teeth and a rather prominently protruding Adam’s apple. Janssen was also let go, because of his receding hairline and distracting facial tics (which would serve him well in his portrayal of Richard Kimble on the 1960s classic TV series
The Fugitive)
. The studio also released a young Brando look-alike who, unfortunately, they felt couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, or control his real rage and channel it effectively onto the screen, an unknown by the name of Burt Reynolds.

After their dismissals, Reynolds and Clint went out to the parking
lot together and found that Burt’s name on his reserved space was already being stenciled over for western TV series up-and-comer Clu Gulager. Clint’s was still there. “Don’t worry,” Burt said to Clint. “I may learn to act someday, but you’ll never get rid of that Adam’s apple.”

    
C
lint was not prepared for this unexpected turn of events. He had been sure he had a future at Universal, so sure that he and Maggie moved to better quarters. The Villa Sands, at 4040 Arch Drive, just off Ventura Boulevard, was close enough to the studio that Clint could walk to work on a slow day. The one-bedroom apartment offered a communal pool for its tenants to share; at $125 a month, a relatively expensive rental for California in the 1950s. Clint had heard about it through a couple of his UTS classmates who lived there, young starlets-in-the-making Gia Scala and Lili Kardell.

Soon after Clint moved in, Bill Thompkins came down from Seattle and took an efficiency in the complex, as did Bob Daley, who’d moved to L.A. via Chicago, Texas, and California and was currently working at Universal’s budget department dealing with production schedules and costs. Daley and Clint had met before, at the studio, but now, as neighbors, became friends and joined the Villa Sands–Universal youthful associate social scene, where no one was over twenty-eight, everyone was good-looking, loose, and into jazz that played all day, thanks to a phonograph someone had rigged at one end of the pool.

Needing work, Clint went back to day jobs, mostly digging swimming pools and other such work, all of it off the books so he could collect unemployment. He auditioned for the other studios, using a scene from Sidney Kingsley’s
Detective Story
, which he had practiced at UTS, playing the part that Kirk Douglas had done in the film version.

For Clint, neither a sentimentalist nor an especially high achiever at this point, that might have been it for him and the movies, had it not been for the incessant drive of Arthur Lubin, who remained steadfast in his belief that he could do for Clint Eastwood what director Douglas Sirk had done for Rock Hudson. Eight of Sirk’s biggest 1950s films had featured Hudson, beginning when the actor was still an unknown contract player as the romantic lead opposite Piper Laurie
in
Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
(1952). By the time they had made their last movie together,
The Tarnished Angels
(1958), Hudson was a major Hollywood star.
^*

Lubin, who did not have the success or the talent of Sirk, admired him less for his movies than for his relationship (whatever it might have been) with Hudson. Lubin believed that he too could become an important director working with the right actor, and that Clint was that actor. Likely Lubin’s attraction to Clint had as much to do with his being gay as with his opinion of Clint’s abilities. Homosexuality was not unusual in Hollywood. (Both Hudson and Sirk were gay, although there is no evidence that they were ever actually involved.) But in the simplest terms Lubin wanted to continue his professional association with Clint (who had shown no signs of being anything but a raging heterosexual) as a way to remain relevant in his life while making both of them stars.

Meanwhile, Maggie suffered a life-threatening bout of hepatitis. Because she and Clint had no medical insurance, it hit them hard financially as well as emotionally. He continued to dig ditches for swimming pools and, thanks to Lubin’s unerring drive, landed a couple of minor TV bits—too small to actually be called parts—that helped him get by. His motorcycle abilities got him a quick shot on
Highway Patrol
, a vehicle for Broderick Crawford that introduced the aging Academy Award-winning actor to television viewers. Crawford, an alcoholic, had a habit of trimming his lines down to a sentence or two because he couldn’t memorize them or easily read them off cue cards. Clint had only one quick scene with him but it was enough for him to realize how excessive most dialogue really was (despite the negative reason for it in this case). And, although his part was minuscule, Clint actually received a piece of fan mail.

He landed a bit in another series,
TV Reader’s Digest
, based on the popular magazine, but that was it. After Maggie’s recovery, money was so tight that she had to return quickly to her day job and take on additional
part-time work doing showroom modeling of bathing suits; the long hours wreaked havoc on her feet. She also managed to find occasional TV work as living wallpaper for Jimmy Durante’s semiregular popular Sunday-night variety show.

Meanwhile Clint’s only link to show business, Lubin, often took him to dinner when Maggie had to work late and invited him to informally join his social entourage of mostly gay companions.

    
A
t the end of 1956, when his initial contract with Lubin was up, Clint opted to let it expire, for a reason that even Lubin could not argue with: nothing was happening in his career. Clint replaced Lubin with Irving Leonard, whom he had met during his time at Universal and who, leaving the studio, had become a business manager specializing in actors who needed help handling their finances. Leonard often found parts for his clients who didn’t have agents, including a grateful Clint. Since in Hollywood someone could be poor one day and rich the next, Leonard could sign unknowns and bank on them while also banking for them. Leonard had noticed Clint at Universal, and when the young actor approached him, Leonard took him on. Soon afterward Leonard landed a position at Gang, Tyre & Brown (later Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown), a law firm that specialized in film clients, and brought Clint along with him. Once he had settled in, Leonard hooked Clint up with Ruth and Paul Marsh, who ran a small PR firm for actors and actresses that included a fair share of wannabes.

Lubin, meanwhile, disappointed and maybe even a little heartbroken, was determined to find a way to get Clint back, or at least to have him around. In the summer of 1956 Lubin landed his next assignment, at RKO, directing
The First Traveling Saleslady
and he quickly offered Clint a small part. It paid him little money but was his chance to get back into films.
^*

The First Traveling Saleslady
was a western comedy starring Ginger Rogers, Carol Channing, Barry Nelson, and the up-and-coming James Arness. (Arness’s friendship with John Wayne would result in his landing the starring role, after Wayne turned it down, in what would become the longest-running TV western series,
Gunsmoke.)
It was by far Clint’s biggest movie role to date, with a couple of comedy bits and
service as a love interest for Rogers. Clint had no use for the script, had no sense of comedy, and didn’t particularly like to play “love” roles, but when Lubin told him that after seeing the daily rushes, RKO was considering offering him a player contract, he was encouraged.

The contract never materialized, but Lubin did get another part for Clint—his fourth with Lubin—in his next film for RKO,
Escapade in Japan
, essentially an adventure movie intended for children. This time Clint played a soldier named, of all things, Dumbo, who leads two young boys on a runaway trip to Japan. The film almost didn’t open because prior to its release the cash-strapped studio was sold. Ironically,
Escapade
eventually reached theaters through a distribution agreement with Universal. But it made little difference which studio released the film; it was a complete failure at the box office.

With no prospects Clint, desperately in need of cash, this time took a weekend job as a sweeper at the Mode Furniture Factory in South L.A. while continuing to dig swimming pools during the week. As 1958 bled into 1959, he got an audition for
The Spirit of St. Louis
, the story of Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 heroic solo transatlantic flight. Called in to try out, Clint was optimistic about his chances, believing he physically resembled the real Lindbergh; but when he arrived, he found himself among hundreds of Lindbergh look-alikes. The role eventually went to Jimmy Stewart, who was twice as old as Lindbergh. Nonetheless Stewart could command the lead because he was a star. That was the kind of world Hollywood was, a world built on star power, a world Clint really wasn’t a part of.

He next landed a minor supporting role in William Wellman’s
Lafayette Escadrille
,
^*
conceived as a swan-song reflection of Wellman’s own life both in the military and in motion pictures. Wellman, known as “Wild Bill” for his aviator heroics during World War I, was a veteran director whose career reached all the way back to the silent era, highlighted by his direction of 1927’s
Wings
, winner of the first Oscar for Best Picture by the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film looked to be one of the bigger releases of 1958 after hot new actor Paul Newman was rumored to have signed on to play Thad Walker, the Wellman-like lead. Newman, however, decided at the last minute to pass in favor of playing Brick in Richard Brooks’s film version of Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Wellman had difficulty replacing Newman; finally Warner, the studio that was producing the film, pushed contract player Tab Hunter on him. Wellman had originally picked Clint out of a cattle-call audition (the only way he could get into any studios in those days), principally because Wellman felt he would play well in a supporting role behind Newman. But against the weaker Hunter, Clint was too imposing. His role went instead to a smaller and darker actor, none other than David Janssen. Clint wound up as part of the background, living scenery with no dialogue. This film too went nowhere and did nothing to advance Clint’s marginal career.