That Self-Sufficient Thing

It was 1964. Italian Director Sergio Leone was casting the lead in an American-style western called A Fistful of Dollars. His eye was caught by a rangy young actor in a scene from the Rawhide TV series, even though the actor had no lines in the scene. Enthusiastic over the actor's "stillness," Leone signed him up. On location in Spain, the actor more than lived up to expectations: he kept falling asleep between takes. To some, it may have seemed that he fell asleep during takes. "In Italian movies," he later recalled, "they act a lot. They come from the Hellzapoppin' school of drama. To get my effect I stayed impassive, and I guess they thought I wasn't acting."

The actor was Clint Eastwood. Whatever it was he was doing, it was right. His slow-talking, fast-shooting performance in Fistful, for which he was paid $15,000, made him within months Europe's favorite American actor. Two more phenomenally successful Leone westerns followed, in which Eastwood's cut was sufficiently enlarged that he could return to the U.S. in 1967 not only a star but also a millionaire. His eight pictures released since then--many of them the stark, violent brand of adventure tale that has come to be known simply as an Eastwood movie--have made him the No. 1 box office attraction in the world, and No. 2 in the U.S. (behind Paul Newman).

Calm Strength. Which still leaves the perhaps irrelevant question: Can he act? Now Eastwood has neatly sidestepped the question by becoming a director. His first effort is the recent Play Misty for Me, in which he also stars as a disk jockey who gets involved with a psychopathic listener (played by Jessica Walter). His direction is better than might have been expected, and shows a solid gift for scenes of violence and tension (TIME, Nov. 22).

Behind the camera as well as in front of it, Eastwood is a commanding figure at 6 ft. 4 in., but he moves languidly, speaks little and seems to get things done through sheer force of presence. Working for him on Misty, says Actress Walter, "I didn't know what he was like inside, but he had this wonderful calm strength that was very reassuring."

Assurance is the basis of Eastwood's appeal, as he himself realizes. "A guy sits in the audience," he explains. "He's 25 and scared stiff about what he's going to do with his life. He wants to be that self-sufficient thing he sees up there on the screen in my pictures. A superhuman character who has all the answers, is doubly cool, exists on his own without society or the help of society's police forces." Adds Actress Susan Clark, who worked with Eastwood in Coogan's Bluff: "Part of his sex appeal is the constant mystery: How deeply does he feel? How deeply is he involved in life?"

Lone Drifrer. That has always been a mystery. Eastwood, 41, has lived the life of a lone drifter, not unlike his screen characters. The son of an itinerant cost accountant, he grew up moving from one California town to another. After high school he worked in a lumber mill, as a lifeguard, digging swimming pools. He had never thought of acting, but when a friend with a movie camera insisted on filming a screen test, he ended up with a contract at Universal. Bit parts there led eventually to his 71-year stint as Rowdy Yates on TV's Rawhide, and his discovery by Leone. Even today he shies away from what is left of the swinging life in Hollywood, living modestly 20 miles away with his wife of 18 years, working out daily in the garage, investing his money, sticking to a close circle of male cronies.

Some of Eastwood's recent films, such as Two Mules for Sister Sara and Paint Your Wagon, were beginning to take him into different, sometimes more complex styles than his monodramatizations in the old spaghetti westerns. Sensing a wrong turn, he set up his own company, Malpaso Productions. Last week he was on location high in the California Sierras as the star of Malpaso's latest feature, Joe Kidd, a story of a wandering gun fighter who aids some dispossessed Mexican farmers--in short, an Eastwood movie. Through Malpaso, Eastwood can not only pay himself many fistfuls of dollars per picture (around $1,000,000) but can choose the scripts, control the productions and assign himself director--something he intends to do frequently in the future. "I decided," he says, "that when you've done 250 hours of filming, you've had time to pick out the things and styles you like and put them all together."

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