CLINT EASTWOOD
HIS LONER PERSONA MADE HIM A MOVIE ICON — BUT CREATED PERSONAL STRIFE
Inside the rugged legend’s complicated life.
He became worldfamous as the Man With No Name, but in real life, Clint Eastwood often seems more like the Man With No Words. Dining out with her Every Which Way But Loose leading man in 1978, “people kept coming up to our table to get Clint’s autograph,” Beverly D’Angelo recalls to Closer. “Then, suddenly, it stopped. He didn’t say anything, but he exuded something to let people know he was not approachable.”
Dubbed Clint the Squint, the softspoken star has an innate desire for solitude that epitomizes his eternally cool and iconic characters as well. “I’m a little like Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name,” he says. “The loner who drifts in search of adventure is what I’m about.” That wanderlust has complicated his love life, though. At 87, he’s left a trail of broken hearts, fathering seven kids with five women. But “he’s always been a good dad,” daughter Alison tells Closer. “He made time for us, even when he was working.” Adds daughter Francesca, 23, “He’s the real deal. He taught me to trust myself and fight for what I believe in.”
The roots of Clint’s lonely nature run deep into his childhood. Growing up during the Depression, he moved frequently as his father sought work wherever he could find it. “Ten schools in 10 years,” Clint says. “I just drifted.” The gangly perpetual new kid mostly played alone and was often beaten up, and he learned to fight back: “A lot of my childhood was
spent punching the bullies out.”
After high school, Clint worked a series of menial jobs and at 22 married model Maggie Johnson. But he wasn’t cut out to be a family man. “The first year of marriage was terrible,” he said a decade later. “One thing Mag learned about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t be married.”
She also remained willfully oblivious to Clint’s frequent philandering, especially after he found TV fame as kindhearted ranch hand Rowdy Yates on Rawhide in 1959. “Clint had a lot of girlfriends at that time,” Barbara Eden, who guested on the show, tells Closer. “He flirted with everybody.”
In fact, he did more than that, fathering a daughter, Kimber, 53, with leggy stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis in 1964, just as Rawhide was ending its run and he achieved movie stardom with his first “spaghetti Western,” A Fistful of Dollars. Clint kept his paternity a secret, even from Maggie, but supported the child financially.
As the Man With No Name, Clint found an antihero in line with his own complicated morality. “I just don’t think you can make heroes in movies like in the old days where the good guys were all good and the bad guys were all bad,” he says.
He pushed those limits further as a solitary, trigger-happy cop in 1971’s Dirty Harry, a smash that spawned four sequels and almost as many catchphrases (“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’” “Go ahead, make my day.”) “It’s vengeance — getting even is an important thing for the public,” Clint says. “They work for some guy they can’t stand and they have to take it. Then they see me on the screen, and I kick the sh-- out of them.”
MAGNUM FORCE
Even as he carried on affairs, Clint remained wed to Maggie for 31 years and together they had Kyle, 49, and Alison, 45. “My brother and I often spent vacations with my dad while he worked,” Alison recalls fondly. “We always had chores we loved doing when we weren’t terrorizing craft services for candy and sweets.” Clint himself became sweet on Sondra Locke, his love interest in 1976’s Western The Outlaw Josey Wales. “I’ve never known anyone that I wanted to be around me all the time,” she says he told her. “I’m usually trying to get away.” After rumors of the romance became public, Clint and Maggie separated and eventually divorced in 1984. “He had this thing about being a loner, like I kind of didn’t exist at times,” Maggie says.
His rootlessness eventually drove a wedge between Clint and Sondra, who alleged in her 1997 memoir The Good, the Bad and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey that he urged her to get two abortions and a tubal ligation during their 13-year relationship. Clint “adamantly” denied those accusations and said the choices were “entirely” Sondra’s. But she says Clint lived in a “cold, indifferent, narcissistic universe all his own” and sued him for supposedly trying to torpedo her career following their split (the case was settled out of court).
All the while, Clint continued to go with his gut professionally. “My agent begged me not to do it,” he says of 1978’s redneck-comedy hit Every Which Way But Loose. “And the public
“I’ve been advised against nearly everything I’ve ever done.”
— Clint
loved it. If you make a couple decisions where your instincts worked well, why would you abandon them?”
He’d followed his intuition to become a director — “he knew what he wanted from every shot,” Donna Mills, co-star of his 1971 debut Play Misty for Me, tells Closer — and it paid off in a big way with 1992’s Unforgiven. The role of William Munny, a repentant gunslinger who rescues a group of endangered prostitutes, seemed profoundly autobiographical. “He’s a man with a very bad past, and he’s haunted by it,” Clint explains. “This is part of his penance for all his bad-boy activity when he was young.” The film earned more than $159 million worldwide as well as Academy Awards for best picture and director — and it marked Clint’s farewell to the Western genre.
At 62, Clint appeared ready to bid adieu to his wild-oat sowing as well, settling down with Unforgiven co-star Frances Fisher and doting on their daughter Francesca. After her 1993 birth, “he became the person I knew was in him,” Frances says. “I’d be nursing the baby, and he’d be feeding me so I could hold the baby.”
Yet Clint went back to his old ways. “Some women can overlook their partner’s occasional infidelities,” Frances says. “Not me. I didn’t want my daughter growing up seeing her mother stifled. So I decided to leave.”
SUDDEN IMPACT
Clint moved on with Dina Ruiz, a TV reporter 35 years his junior; they wed in ’96. “She’s the one I’ve been waiting for,” he said. Again he was an attentive dad to their daughter, Morgan. “Clint is great at changing diapers,” Dina cooed at the premiere of ’97’s Absolute Power.
His need for absolute independence, though, doomed his marriage to Dina, and they divorced in 2014. “The women he’s married expect him to be a normal husband,” Eliot says. “Come home, what’s for dinner, how are the kids, let’s go on vacation. None of that is in Clint’s playbook.” For the last few years, he’s dated Christina Sandera, a former hostess at a California hotel he owns who’s 33 years younger, and he shows no signs of wanting to wed again.
Still, Clint has taken his parental duties seriously. “He always let us kids be who we wanted to be,” Alison says. “He just wanted us to be happy.” He’s also built a bond with Scott, a son he had out of wedlock with flight attendant Jacelyn Reeves in 1986. “My father’s definitely old-school,” says Scott, who’s followed his dad’s lead by starring in action films like this year’s The Fate of the Furious. “He raised me with integrity — to be places on time, show up and work hard.”
The sudden death of Clint’s dad in 1970 from a heart attack shortly after retiring at 60 in 1970, drives the star to keep working (he’s now directing The 15:17 to Paris, a drama about Americans who stopped a terrorist attack). “A lot of people, when they retire, they just expire,” Clint says. As Dina tells Closer, “No way do I ever see him retiring.”
As he’s aged, Clint has tried to be there for his kids in a way his father couldn’t. “You always wonder if you could’ve spent a little more time with [them],” he says. “I had that regret when my dad died. My mom lived to be 96, so I compensated and spent a lot of time with her after he went.”
Clint took “the greatest woman on the planet” (as he called his mom) to the Oscars when he won best director and picture for 2005’s boxing saga Million Dollar Baby; she died a year later. He’s learned a hard lesson about the value of family and he hopes to remain active and engaged for years to come. “That’s the secret to life, really — never stop learning,” Clint says. “Never think you’ve got it all.”