Читать книгу Clint Eastwood - The Biography of Cinema's Greatest Ever Star - Douglas Thompson - Страница 16

Nobody pushes Clint.’

EASTWOOD CO-PRODUCER BRUCE RICKER, 2003

CLINT was never again concerned about mortality; it was fate that dealt the cards. It was typical of him that he should survive on his own strength and merits. His image, his success, is all about the self-sufficient loner who can take care of himself and, if necessary, any trouble that happens.

The code, the driving force of his life, is individuality and getting on with the job. Watch him on a film set and he’ll be as likely as some casual worker to help move equipment or pour the coffee, a man in control of himself and the world around him.

That control is all-important to him. And that includes the women around him. He talks of the ‘strong’ women of film that he admires: ‘I love strong-women pictures. I don’t like the girl-next-door, namby-pamby stuff – I guess, because I was raised in an era of the strong woman on film, the Barbara Stanwycks, Bette Davises. They were wild; Bette’s presence was powerful.’

This admiration had never carried over into his relationships until he married for the second time. Until then he’d always been the Boss. He says his father told him: ‘Nothing comes from nothing and don’t plan on anything because no one gives you anything in life.’

It’s a cynical creed. But it is his appeal. People, audiences, want someone strong. They want to feel safe. They want assurance.

‘Part of his sex appeal is the constant mystery – how deeply does he feel? How deeply is he involved in life?’ says actress Susan Clark, who co-starred with him in 1968’s Coogan’s Bluff, the second movie in Don Siegel’s rogue-cop cycle about a country-boy cop taking on the big city, New York, as well as the bad guys.

His loose-limbed frame, the deep-set eyes and drawn cheeks on his parchment face – he can look ghostly in bad light – add to his enigmatic image. And nobody knows quite what he’s thinking. For his long-time lover Sondra Locke: ‘There’s a certain distance, a certain mystery. He’s always unapproachable to some degree.’

But not if you’re the right lady at the right moment. Fritz Manes is a stuntman and producer who knew Eastwood in the early days. ‘Even in Junior High School,’ he says, ‘Clint was a solid loner – he didn’t care for hanging out with the gang. He was always right on centre with himself, very sure of himself, so he didn’t need the support of a circle of friends. Not that Clint ever lacked for companionship.

‘In high school he had a kind of natural charisma that was really maddening. You could sit in class and do all the little tricks of flirtation, flex your muscles, shuffle your $10 bills, and nothing would work if Clint was in the room. He’d be sitting there doing nothing, just looking at the floor and all the girls would be looking at him as if they were in a trance, locked in on some secret magnetism he had. It was very demoralising for the rest of us guys.’

During his spell in the army Eastwood met young actors David Janssen (who would star in television’s The Fugitive and Harry O) and Martin Milner (television’s Route 66) and they kept saying Hollywood was also the place for him. He knew better. On the GI Bill he enrolled in a business course at Los Angeles City College.

The move was again motivated by a woman. Eastwood’s friend Don Horner had a date with a girl from the University of California at Berkeley. Eastwood had what he recalls as ‘tentative plans’ with another girl. But Horner wanted to arrange a double date and Eastwood went along. His blind date was Maggie Johnson, a five-foot-seven blonde – a true Californian girl in look and attitude. Clint liked her. A lot: ‘Maggie and I hit it off right away. I can’t say there was anything special about that night. I liked Maggie’s sense of humour. I had no idea about marrying her.’

What happened was like the plot of one of those absurd B-movie romances they were churning out in the early 1950s. He wasn’t thinking of marriage or commitment but this tall, suntanned and athletic girl graduated and was off south, home to Los Angeles. He decided to go too.

While at college there, he helped pay his rent by earning $30 a week for managing an apartment building in Beverly Hills. He worked at a garage in the evenings. At weekends he and Maggie went to the beach for barbecues, jazz and dancing, where they mixed with a young aspiring film crowd. His future wife said: ‘Clint was only 23 and so good-looking I couldn’t resist him. I was plain Maggie Johnson, a college student. We fell in love right away. We were married six months after we met.’

That was on 19 December 1953 – Eastwood was on Christmas holiday from college – and they went on honeymoon to – where else? – Carmel. They were married and living in a tiny, one-room apartment in downtown Los Angeles. He was studying. She was working in the office of a Los Angeles export business and doing some modelling.

It all changed suddenly, as Maggie recalled: ‘I remember him coming home one night all excited. He had met someone who wanted to give him a screen test.’

Director Arthur Lubin had also offered tests to David Janssen and another aspiring actor hanging around the studios, called Rock Hudson. Eastwood knows the story frame by frame.

‘I’d met the director, who was under contract to Universal Studios, and he asked me: “Did they ever run a film test on you?” It had never occurred to me but I was definitely interested. I had nothing to lose but time. I went out to Universal the next week and it was fascinating. I’d never been in a film studio before. The director and the cameraman asked me if I’d ever done any acting. I told them about the school play. They decided to run a silent test on me to see how I photographed. I didn’t feel I’d ever make it – it seemed like a little fun. There was no harm in it. They said they’d call me and I thought: Don’t call us, we’ll call you. But I was riding high and Maggie and I celebrated with dinner and a bottle of wine.’

It was 17 days after his test that Universal Studios signed him to a contract. When he told his father he was going to be an actor he received the advice: ‘Don’t do that. You’ll never have a chance. It’s the stuff dreams are made of – don’t do that.’

He paid no attention.

His film career – at $75 a week – began with small parts in even smaller films, like 1955’s Revenge of the Creature and the talking-horse saga Francis in the Navy the same year. He lasted 18 months at Universal.

Clint and Burt Reynolds were fired on the same day by the same studio executive. Reynolds loves the story: ‘First he told Clint he had a chip on his tooth and said: “You should get that fixed.” Clint never did. He also said: “You speak too slowly – your Adam’s apple sticks out too far.” When he turned to me I thought he was going to say my ears were too small or something wonderful. You know, I could make them bigger or something. Or put gum behind them and make them stick out. And he said: “You have no talent.”

‘So we got out. We were walking up the street and I turned to Clint and said: “You know, I can learn to act. But you’re going to have a hell of a time getting that Adam’s apple out of your throat.”’

But for Eastwood acting wasn’t as much fun as the story. He did walk-on parts on television shows, some live TV work in New York and dug a lot of swimming pools back in Los Angeles. He was offered 1957’s Ambush at Cimarron Pass, a cheapie film made in eight days. He calls it ‘a Z movie, the lousiest Western ever made’, but back then it was work. ‘It was unbelievably bad and I said to myself: “If you have to do more of this junk then quit.”’

Westerns were the genre of the moment then on US television: Wagon Train was an enormous success and the CBS television network wanted their own Western series. With this in mind, they commissioned Rawhide and Eastwood’s agent, James Arthur, tried and tried to get him a shot on the series. He failed and failed. His wife encouraged him to keep going. And it was a friend of hers who accidentally got him his break. Maggie Eastwood’s best friend, Sonia Chernus, was a story consultant at CBS. Eastwood went to visit her and out of the door came Robert Sparks, a producer at the network. He stopped short and looked Eastwood up and down before hustling him into the office to meet Charles Marquis Warren, the producer of Rawhide.

The late Eric Fleming had won the role of trail boss Gil Favor, but the network wanted another leading man on the show and had written Rowdy Yates, the ramrod or second-in-command of the trail herd. Eastwood – with Frankie Laine booming: ‘Movin’, movin’, movin’, keep these cattle movin’. Rawhide!’ – was boosted high up in the saddle for seven and a half profitable years, coddling cattle in 217 episodes of the show.

His work and play on the basketball court, in the swimming pool and the Oregon forests paid off. He did his own stunts, and he looked like he was part of the horse.

The series was a hit around the world. Clint Eastwood became a television star – but not immediately. ‘I made the pilot film and the first ten episodes and then nothing for six months. We had to wait until it was aired by CBS in order to see how the audience liked it and if we would continue. But the airing was postponed indefinitely. It didn’t happen in September and by the terms of my contract, I couldn’t see about other parts. Then, in December, as we were about to take the train to San Francisco to spend Christmas with my folks, a telegram arrived. It said Rawhide had been scheduled as a mid-season replacement.’

It began in January 1959.

Eastwood was cautious with his success and remembers his thoughts at the time: ‘After a few years I would have liked to have done something else, but Rawhide was security. I remembered all those months without work and thought I’d ride it. Another disquieting thought was that few big television personalities ever transferred successfully to theatrical films. What hope did I have?’

He wasn’t so cautious about romance. Incredibly, he has pursued a career in one of the most public of arenas but his secret life has only now become public. The way Maggie Eastwood talks, it is as if they had an open marriage for many years. Certainly, people who have worked with Eastwood on his films have talked about how brazenly he has pursued the ladies. And not just to flirt but in a serious way. There was a lot of talk about his extramarital love life – talk that didn’t get into the Hollywood gossip columns.

A crew member who worked on one of his films said: ‘Clint goes where he wants, does what he wants – goes to dinner with a girl if he wants. Maggie doesn’t say a word. Clint is the undisputed boss.’

Eastwood was asked about this and responded at the time: ‘Maggie doesn’t chain me down. The worst thing is owning people. I don’t want to be owned by anybody – maybe shared, but not owned, lock, stock and barrel. Like: “Where were you?” or: “Who’s that?”

‘That’s like two attorneys battling – the beginning of the end. It kills more relationships than anything – clutch, grab, lust. Squelches the spirit. To me love for a person is respect for individual feelings. Love is respecting privacy, accepting faults.

‘But don’t believe it’s a one-way street. The sophisticated woman accepts the chances are a guy’s not being 100 per cent faithful. If she talks about it, it only makes it worse; best way to get a guy to be unfaithful is to talk about it.

‘The beginning is infatuation – after that it becomes other things. Love isn’t across a room: it is a long time. Sex is a small part of life – 99.9 per cent of your life is spent doing other things. And if you accept a guy, you have to make that guy feel important so he gets satisfaction. It’s selfish – you give love to get love. Women have the toughest roles – it’s easier to be on the offensive than the defensive.’

Eastwood and Maggie, who was also his career mentor, pushing him forward for roles and advising him on scripts, waited 15 years after their marriage in December 1953 before their son, Kyle, was born. When Clint is asked about it he shoots off: ‘Planned parenthood’, but people close to the couple in those days believe that Maggie had to fight to have her first child. She herself says: ‘Clint and I were both “moving” people and we didn’t think we could manage in a one-room apartment. We decided we wouldn’t have kids until we could afford help.’ Kyle Eastwood was born in 1968.

Clint’s illegitimate daughter was born four years earlier, on 17 June 1964, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. It was a secret for more than a quarter of a century. Rawhide was a success in 1959 when Clint first met Roxanne Tunis, who was then 28 and a tall, stunningly attractive brunette. He was the star. She was a sometime screen extra, stuntwoman and occasional actress. According to those who worked on the series, Roxanne Tunis was no starry-eyed fan. Like so many, she was overwhelmed by the Eastwood charm. They acted like a couple on the set of the series while his wife Maggie was back at home in Carmel.

With Eastwood’s help, Roxanne found more success as an actress and became pregnant. He has not talked about it, so we can only imagine the dilemma. He was a star and he was married, and in 1964 the term ‘love child’ had not even been used.

There was potential for scandal and he was still working at establishing his career, but he was pragmatic – and so was Roxanne. She would have the child but in secret and he would support them for the rest of their lives. There would be no gossip. They have both kept to their bargain and in 2005 Kimber is married for the second time.

Kimber Tunis has her father’s face and there is also a family resemblance in her son – Eastwood’s grandson – Clinton Eastwood Gaddie, who was born on 21 February 1984, in Oxnard, California. Clinton is from her 1983 marriage to gardener and tree specialist Anthony Gaddie, from whom she is now divorced. In 1974 Kimber had moved from Los Angeles to Denver, Colorado, with her mother. Eastwood provided funds for schooling and holidays and treats for Kimber as well as buying their home in Denver. They were all sworn to a secrecy pact but when Kimber grew up and had a child of her own she said of her father: ‘I don’t make any decisions without him. He takes the decisions about every part of our lives. He loves his grandson and sees him when he can.’

Maggie Eastwood knew about the other family and even met Roxanne on the set of the film Breezy, which her husband was directing in 1972. Eastwood went white – he was totally shaken – when Maggie arrived with their son Kyle and confronted Roxanne. But the two women had a ‘civilised’ meeting and Roxanne played with Kyle while Eastwood shied away, supposedly concerned about a camera set-up with his star, William Holden.

It was an intriguing time in Eastwood’s love life. That year he had also met Sondra Locke, who had auditioned for a role in Breezy, a role which Eastwood would decide was not for her. But he remembered her later.

The former Mrs Eastwood will not be drawn into discussions about meeting Roxanne, just as she says, ‘No comment’ when asked about her feelings towards Sondra Locke. But she does tell us enough to see what was going on in Eastwood’s life – a busy one socially as well as professionally – at the time he first became involved with Roxanne.

‘With Rawhide everything changed,’ she says. ‘Before we knew it we had some money, a house with a pool and were forever posing for pictures as Hollywood’s latest young and exciting couple. It was new to us, so we didn’t mind all the publicity and the pictures. We didn’t live the Hollywood life, but we went to some parties. The glamour and the glitter weren’t our whole life. In Hollywood people said we had a perfect marriage. Well, it wasn’t always perfect. No marriage ever is. In a way, the end of our marriage was inevitable.

‘Other women? I was never realistic about some things. I used to always hope for the best. I wanted to protect myself. I wondered about it but I didn’t dwell on it because it would probably have driven me insane. I just preferred to hang in there and not to worry too much about it.’

While Maggie Eastwood was keeping her private feelings somewhat concealed, professionally it was Eastwood who was feeling frustrated. He had been hunky Rowdy Yates for seven years – and how long can you take Frankie Laine booming in your ears? When Rawhide had begun on American television, there were 40 other Western series in competition on screen. As the years went on, Eastwood learned about film editing, how each show was pieced together, and he asked if he could film scenes himself from horseback. Then he asked to direct an episode. He had watched James Garner move from Maverick on television to the big screen and seen Steve McQueen vault from Wanted Dead or Alive to become one of the world’s top movie stars. But the producers had enough evidence of stars messing up to say no.

Eastwood was fed up enough reluctantly to accept – after James Coburn had rejected the offer – the lead in a film which had the prophetic title A Fistful of Dollars. Much has been written about the minimalism of the film. It has been the subject of scholarly thought: what it meant; who Eastwood’s character the Man with No Name was.

In reality, it was a low-budget Western being made for $200,000 in Spain by a non-English-speaking Italian director named Sergio Leone. In 1964 no one was offering Eastwood anything else in the movies. And all involved got lucky.

What was to change Eastwood’s life and some aspects of movie-making was his own style and gut instincts. Leone, who died in 1991, had made sword-and-sandals movies like Sodom and Gomorrah and this was a similar exercise.

At first Eastwood reckoned that the less his character talked, the more mystique. But he doesn’t take the credit: ‘It was all there in the script. Even Yojimbo, the Samurai picture it was taken from, was the same. Yeah, a little broadness, but I’d been doing 200 Rawhides and I was ready for anything different in doing a Western. The Western in America had reached a real dead period as far as imagination was concerned.’

But Eastwood almost didn’t become ‘Il Cigaro’ to the Italians, ‘El Cigarillo’ to the Spanish or ‘Herr Wunderbar’ to the Germans and box-office magic worldwide to audiences who hung on his every silence. He recalled his first days in Spain: ‘I scuffed around in the dirt all morning waiting for the director and the crew to quit arguing. The talk was all in Spanish and Italian and I didn’t understand a word but I could tell there was a violent discussion going on about something. I hoped they’d get it straightened out before we blew the whole morning without getting one shot. Finally, Sergio called me over.

‘“OK, Clint, you can start making up,” he said through his interpreter. What the heck, I decided – they were always at it. Trouble was, this outfit didn’t have much money, so there was always arguments about paying the crew. But then I wouldn’t have been in Spain if they had a lot of money – they’d have gone for James Stewart or Bob Mitchum if they’d been loaded. So I figured I’d put up with some disorganisation.

‘Making-up was a nice, slow job if you didn’t mind the sticky heat and the flies and the dust. The scene called for a lot of make-up because my face was to be badly swollen from being beaten up by a whole gang.

‘I came out from under the job feeling hot and uncomfortable and headed for the set. I was literally the most alone man in Spain. The set was deserted. No producer, no director, no crew. Only the big arc lamps standing there like Spanish vultures.

‘It seems the crew hadn’t been paid for two weeks and they had left the set until someone came through with their money. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. It was just one foul-up after another. But this time, with one eye sealed shut by make up and all the other junk on my face, I’d had it.

‘Maybe I hurt too easily inside. I used to flare up at the drop of a hat until I learned better.

‘I made a decision – I told them they could find me at the airport. Fortunately, Sergio caught me before I left the hotel. He apologised and promised it wouldn’t happen again. Things ran a little smoother after that, but they were far from perfect, but we got through the film.’

Maggie Eastwood remembers: ‘He was paid $15,000 for that. Suddenly we heard the critics in Europe loved the film. That’s when I knew Clint was going to be a big star.

‘Well, for years I was the Woman with No Name. I was this big Hollywood star’s wife, yet I never had an identity of my own. He had this thing about being a loner, like I didn’t exist at times. He’s a very complex person.’

Buoyant and burly Sergio Leone would not have used the word ‘complex’ about his American star. He found him ‘strange’ and not at all what he expected when their partnership began. Eastwood was changing the rules: ‘I always was a different kind of person even when I started acting,’ said Clint, before making the wonderful admission: ‘I guess I finally got to a point where I had enough nerve to do nothing.

‘My first film with Leone had a script with tons of dialogue, tremendously expository, and I just cut it all down. Leone thought I was crazy. Italians are used to much more vocalising and I was playing this guy who didn’t say much of anything. I cut it all down. Leone didn’t speak any English, so he didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but he got so he liked it after a while…

‘The original screenplay had endless pages of dialogue all explaining the character’s background, but I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time – keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long.

‘I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience. You never knew who he was, where he came from and what he was going to do next.

‘I had spent many years playing the sort of Mr Good Guy. There was something I liked about going against every Western tradition. Usually, no one played the protagonist where he enters town and sees a woman and child crying for help and essentially rides on. But that gives him somewhere to go during the movie. He can become interested in the parties against his will. The producers thought something was really awry. “Hey, this guy isn’t doing anything – he doesn’t even have a name.” But when they saw it assembled and how it went over with the public, they realised what it was. The “No Name” guy soon became a very imitated character.’

‘Eastwood was the character,’ said Leone recalling the early days of their partnership in the American magazine Film Comment in 1978. A decade later he admitted in a conversation in Beverly Hills that he had felt intimidated by Eastwood – but it didn’t stop him cashing in on the cult he had created with his star.

After A Fistful of Dollars (originally The Magnificent Stranger) in 1964 came For a Few Dollars More in 1965 and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966. For whatever reason, and it would seem to be more happenstance and the circumstances of the 1960s than some cleverly thought-out promotion, Eastwood rode off on a mule at the end of A Fistful of Dollars and into the sunset and cult status.

The poncho.

The badly chewed cigars: ‘If I had to be in an unpleasant frame of mind, I took a couple of draws and, boy, I was right there.’

And the squint and fast draw compromised the picture of the grizzled gunslinger, the anti-hero, the Man with No Dialogue as well as no name.

It was a role of the times.

In the upheaval of mid-1960s Britain, Michael Caine had just created Len Deighton’s working-class hero from The Ipcress File on screen in 1965, and that womanising bounder Alfie the following year.

In America, which was entering equally turbulent times, Eastwood was the icy-eyed icon of the age of Vietnam. ‘Clint is the quintessential Western man. He has a certain code and he adheres to it religiously,’ said Susan Clark.

After working with him, the late Richard Burton said his co-star in Where Eagles Dare had ‘dynamic lethargy’. Nearly 40 years on, Eastwood laughed about that description: ‘Well, AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] might have been where he was at the time.

‘I loved Richard – he was a terrific guy and I enjoyed working with him. And he was great at coming up with things like this. I’m not sure what he meant, though.’

You could also get away with Burton’s words for Lee Van Cleef, another American actor imported by Sergio Leone for his Westerns. Van Cleef believed For a Few Dollars More to be the best movie by the Eastwood-Leone partnership. In an interview before his death he told me: ‘It had more depth to it. There was more subtlety about the film and about the performance. And Clint had the confidence then. He had the character down. He’s playing it minimal and it worked.’

Van Cleef, who went along with Eastwood and Eli Wallach in search of hidden gold in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, said: ‘We had a good time. Clint was really easy to work with. He was professional. And while it was clear he had that star quality, it didn’t make him anything other than one of the guys.’

The actor, who played bad guys for most of his career, knew a lot about his fellow stars. He rode the spaghetti-and-paella train in Italy and Spain for several years after Eastwood returned to mainstream American movies. ‘I think Clint’s timing was good,’ he said. ‘He was fresh then, a new face for the movies and he had the experience from all those years on Rawhide and working with Leone. I knew when I worked with him that it was just a matter of time. He always had control of the situation. There were all those guys babbling away – at times we couldn’t understand them and at times they didn’t have a clue what we were saying. But, somehow, it all worked. And then when the movies were seen outside Europe there was no stopping.’

A Japanese film critic put the stamp on the legend when he called the trio of Eastwood films ‘macaroni Westerns’. One man’s pasta became another man’s spaghetti, but it wasn’t suddenly all a champagne life – or a very public one.

In the 1960s he had been happy to pose with Maggie by their swimming pool, learning his lines, having her trim his hair and finding other excuses for different sorts of publicity pictures to promote Rawhide. But, after filming The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he returned to California with a completely different attitude. He wanted control. Total control of his career and of his marriage. Hollywood thought he had got lucky in Europe. ‘Just fluke hits,’ they said. He says his thoughts then were: ‘I was appalled not only at the way money was misused but also the lack of control that an actor had over characters.’

The Italian producers of the spaghetti Westerns had not envisioned how much of a box-office superman their nihilistic hero was to become and had not arranged all world copyrights. When they were legally able to release the Leone films in the United States, Eastwood hit American cinemas with a one-two-three punch and scored a knockout every time as the three movies were shown in the one year – 1967.

And he kept up the pressure by starring that year in Ted Post’s Hang ’Em High, which might have been made in the USA but for its strong flavour of Leone. The movie did wonderful business, returning costs in ten weeks, the fastest turnaround in the history of United Artists’ studios.

Still more fun and better received was Coogan’s Bluff, which gave us Eastwood as a hayseed Old West lawman going against the odds in the big city. The film, the basis of the television series McCloud, which starred Dennis Weaver, was made the same year as Hang ’Em High and was to begin Eastwood’s high-energy work pattern.

The critics liked Coogan’s Bluff. But still they were not convinced about the star. Clint was. He completed Coogan’s Bluff for Universal Studios on New Year’s Eve 1967. That same day he flew to London and reported for work on Where Eagles Dare on 2 January 1968. He was being paid $750,000 and getting the same billing as Burton, who was then an acting and marital legend. It didn’t bother Eastwood – the man with all that ‘dynamic lethargy’ – one bit. ‘People recognise me wherever I go and like it. But that’s just part of success.’

The other part was control and clout. And the luxury of having his views about violence and sex listened to. Of the first he said: ‘I am not an advocate of violence, but on the other hand, if it is one of the narrative elements in the story, I am not as upset by it as other people are. The world is a violent place – no one can escape that. In films, when it is justified, violence acts as a sort of release.

‘Sex? It’s used to stimulate and probably some people wish they were involved in the same situation they are looking at, but sex in the movies is not the type of animal release violence is, although sometimes it is intended that way. When I’m working, I like to use my imagination.’

He needed it after agreeing to star in his first musical, the $20-million-budgeted Paint Your Wagon. The director, Josh Logan, was delighted to get Eastwood in 1969, saying: ‘Fortunately, this is the year of Clint Eastwood. We were looking for a man who could be a leading man and a romantic threat to Lee Marvin’s love for Jean Seberg – he’s strong physically and as a personality.’

Yet, when Logan’s prized star turned up, driving his pick-up truck, for the first day of filming Paint Your Wagon, the studio guard refused to let him in.

‘What did I do? I turned around and went back to my office and got on with some work. Then the calls began coming in. I may say I took my time about getting back.’

Considering the film’s poor critical and box-office reception, it might have been better if he’d been kept out – along with the rest of the cast, including affable but vodka-prone Marvin and the fragile and beautiful actress Jean Seberg, both now dead.

Seberg always wanted real men. Eastwood personified her desires. And he was willing to go along with them. Those who were on location in Oregon support long-standing rumours that Eastwood and Seberg had a passionate affair during the making of the film. Eastwood himself has never acknowledged the affair. Or denied it.

He was quizzed about his marriage between the time of filming Paint Your Wagon and Two Mules for Sister Sara, which found him down in the Mexican jungle. The actress Susan St James was with him, but not exclusively. There was another, never-identified date.

‘Maggie doesn’t chain me,’ was Eastwood’s repeated reaction back then to the tales of the many ladies in his life, while his wife was back in Carmel, swimming or playing tennis, entertaining herself. And he expanded in 1969: ‘When I finish a film I drift back to my own little area where I can be with people I want to and ten minutes later with no one. I’m really all about Carmel, off-in-the-backwoods stuff. If I get really uptight, I go up alone or my wife will go ahead of me. Most of the time I’m off with a flick – I bounce back and forth. She usually comes to every location after I’m situated, visits awhile, and then leaves. She’s travelled all over the world, has demands at home. Selfishly, I like things organised.’

As another fast-gun drifter in Two Mules for Sister Sara he rescues co-star Shirley MacLaine’s Sara, a prostitute disguised as a nun, from three rapists. Sara, still in nun’s robes, then goes on a trek with her protector across Mexico until they take on a French garrison. Years later, Eastwood still gets enthusiastic about the film, which was directed by his friend and mentor Don Siegel, who died in 1991: ‘Westerns are designed as men’s shows. I haven’t worked with many actresses who have been turkeys. Once in a while you’d get a stiff who’d be baking in at the make-up table all the time.’

On location back then, he was asked point-blank: ‘Are you happy?’

The question was centred not on his career but his private life.

‘Either happy or extremely loyal,’ he answered.

‘Complex’, said Maggie Eastwood. ‘Strange’, said Sergio Leone. Also troubled? Certainly confident. And easily bored.

‘Paint Your Wagon took six months to make – it should have been three. It sent me crazy all that hanging around. Where Eagles Dare took five months. A monumental bore. I hated seeing money flung away like that. So I decided it was time to make my own pictures. If studios want to chuck their money away that’s up to them. I want no part of it.’

Eastwood was about to make the move which would turn him into one of the wealthiest movie stars in the world.