FLIRTY HARRY

Clint Eastwood’s emergence as a revered cinematic artist has happened despite severe storms in his private life. In Clint: The Life And Legend, (St. Martin’s Press), an unauthorized biography published in 1999, writer Patrick Mcgilligan was not offering a life of unblemished perfection — instead he presented readers with a serial womanizer (some of whose children were illegitimate), a ruthless control freak and a cunning manipulator of the media.

Mcgilligan only talked to Eastwood once in preparing that book — unlike critic Richard Schickel who talked to him many times for his own earlier biography and who later expressed outrage over the Mcgilligan version of events.

But there was a time when allegations of a messy private life did threaten to cast a shadow over his life work.

One weekend in New York, at a time when Eastwood was still in the throes of a protracted and highly public legal dispute with ex-girlfriend Sondra Locke, I had a few moments alone with him and decided to ask him about it. I had been warned by one of his closest colleagues that he’d likely refuse to answer, but Eastwood did have something to say.

He admitted that the ending of a relationship was usually painful. “It can be tragic for anybody. But hell

— I have no theory about all this. When people break up, they get mad. They call each other names. But for this to go on nine years later, for the better part of a decade — when does one stop?”