DIRTY HARRY’S DIRTY SECRET
At first sight it’s an uplifting picture of ‘blended family’ harmony — all eight of Clint Eastwood’s children together for ~the first time. But as TOM LEONARD reveals, it hides a trail of his betrayed women and cruel abandonments
‘Laurie’s mother never told him she was pregnant’
CLINT Eastwood was at the wheel, but it was his striking passenger in a black leather jacket and tight jeans who grabbed everyone’s attention.
She was a glamorous 23-year-old called Noor Alfallah – and the Oscar-winning actor and director, 88, had dined with her at celebrity restaurant Craig’s, in Los Angeles, this week before driving off into the night with her.
Alfallah, a movie producer whose past dalliances included a fling with Mick Jagger, was quick to deny she is dating the Hollywood veteran. She was just a family friend, she said: ‘There is no relationship.’
Yet those who spotted the couple together could have been forgiven for thinking there might be. Not just because Alfallah seems blissfully unconcerned about stepping out with older men – in Jagger’s case there was a 52-year age gap. But also because, despite his clean-cut image, Clint Eastwood is one of Hollywood’s most voracious lotharios, having fathered children by no fewer than six women.
Last month, at the Los Angeles premiere of his latest drama, The Mule – in which he plays a neglectful father with estranged children – he was joined by his entire family, including his current girlfriend, Christina Sandera. What made this unusual was that there were eight children: one more than he normally recognises publicly as his.
The surprise addition was an attractive sixtysomething woman. She was photographed having a drink with Eastwood and in a line-up with his other grown-up children: Kimber, Kyle, Francesca, Alison, Kathryn, Morgan and Scott. Her name, she told puzzled photographers, was Laurie Eastwood.
Later, Eastwood’s youngest child, 22-year-old Morgan, put all confusion to rest, captioning a photo of the group on social media: ‘SO RARE for all 8 Eastwood siblings to be in one room!!!’
And so, after 64 years, the world finally discovered the identity of a secret daughter born when Clint Eastwood was a 24-year-old lifeguard about to embark on the path to Hollywood superstardom.
Laurie Murray, to give the 64-year-old mother of two her married name, is nine years older than her father’s girlfriend. News of her existence hasn’t exactly come out of the blue for those who know about Eastwood’s long and ignoble history as one of the film industry’s most relentless womanisers.
It is particularly poignant, too, as it was revealed recently that actress Sondra Locke, his longtime partner in the Seventies and Eighties, had died in November at the age of 74 after a cardiac arrest stemming from cancer.
While his publicists spent years doing their utmost to portray him as an all-American hero and a squeaky-clean married man, Eastwood quietly worked his way through women at a speed to rival that of less secretive ladies’ men such as Jack Nicholson and Warren Beattie.
Only three of his eight children were the product of his two marriages, and he went to considerable effort to keep secret for years the existence of at least three others.
For her part, Laurie has consistently refused to speak about her parents or identify her mother. However, her son, Lowell Thomas Murray, insists Eastwood remained ignorant for decades that Laurie even existed.
Adopted as a baby, it wasn’t until she reached her 30s that she decided to trace her biological parents and discovered paperwork listing the star of Dirty Harry and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly as her father.
Laurie’s mother ‘never told Eastwood she was pregnant or spoke to him again’, said Lowell of his illustrious grandfather. ‘It was clear he had no clue, so to make him look like a bad guy is inaccurate. He’s a class act, 100 per cent.’ He said Eastwood had been ‘a great father’ to his mother and was ‘always great to me and my family whenever we see him’.
Eastwood attended Lowell’s wedding six years ago. He is a 35-year-old aspiring actor and it’s understandable if he doesn’t want to antagonise his grandfather.
However, few others who are acquainted with Eastwood’s history as an absent father and cheating husband would quite describe him as a ‘class act’.
Laurie’s existence – or at least, the existence of a woman fitting her description – was first revealed in a 2009 biography by Patrick McGilligan. His book, Clint: The Life And Legend, cut through the ‘devoted family man’ image that had been erected around the star.
It exposed the ruthless philandering of a man who has boasted of losing his virginity at 14 and being stalked at 19 by a schoolteacher who became so obsessed with him that she threatened to kill herself.
McGilligan told me Eastwood’s mystery first child was the result of a 1953 affair with a young woman who was a fellow member of a small theatre company in Seattle, Washington State.
Eastwood, the son of indulgent and wealthy California parents, was working as a beach lifeguard when he joined the theatre group to please a girl he was chasing – although he already had a girlfriend, swimwear model Maggie Johnson. He duly discovered that he loved acting – but left Seattle because, as he confided to a few friends, he had got his Seattle theatre-group girlfriend pregnant.
His horrified parents knew the parents of the young woman involved and, riding to the rescue as they often did, provided Eastwood with the money for an abortion, says McGilligan.
Eastwood gave the money to the woman and left for Los Angeles, where he began his film career.
In later years, Eastwood reportedly confided to friends that the episode had been devastating for him and that the woman he left behind in Seattle would always be the ‘true love’ of his life.
‘The Seattle vanishing certainly inaugurated a pattern for Clint of loves and families left behind,’ says McGilligan.
Months later, Eastwood became engaged to Maggie Johnson and they married. Although they had two children, Kyle and Alison, he repeatedly cheated on her and even sired another daughter, whose existence also remained secret for decades. Meanwhile, Laurie was adopted and would reach her 30s before she decided to track down her biological parents.
McGilligan insists Eastwood would not have been surprised to find he was Laurie’s father after she contacted him. He knew he had got a woman from Washington State pregnant and – according to McGilligan’s ‘impeccable’ sources – had told friends he suspected he might have a child there.
According to McGilligan, Eastwood had his lawyers and business managers check Laurie before agreeing to meet her.
It would have helped that she
He said he had an open marriage
was married to a rich man – her husband, Lowell Thomas Murray III, is a scion of a wealthy family whose fortune is founded on a timber and investment business – and insisted she didn’t want any of the famously thrifty star’s money. It also helped that she was content to remain anonymous and not embarrass Eastwood. And so Eastwood had a ‘cordial, if awkward’ dinner with Laurie and her husband, and promised to stay in touch, according to McGilligan. Friends of Laurie say he has been true to his word. Father and daughter share passions for golf and the outdoors, and they and their families have holidayed together, skiing and several times spending Thanksgiving at Eastwood’s California home. She lives in Lakewood, an affluent town an hour’s drive from Seattle. She and her husband own homes in Lakewood, California and Hawaii. Eastwood and his second wife, Dina, loved visiting the Hawaiian getaway so much, they bought a house near by. Although few realised at the time, pictures show Laurie with her father, Dina and his late mother, Ruth, at the 2004 Oscars ceremony.
Laurie is one of his five children born out of wedlock – and biographers have speculated there may be more. ‘He moves very quickly through women,’ says McGilligan. ‘Perhaps he sometimes moves so quickly he doesn’t know he’s left a baby behind.’
Eastwood was a married man in his prime carousing years.
Apart from very public flings with Barbra Streisand and the French actress Catherine Deneuve, Eastwood – always very keen to project a familyman image – avoided becoming entangled with women who might attract attention.
He liked to give his conquests bitparts on his films, so they were available on set whenever he needed them. When filming was over, they could be dropped.
Jean Seberg, his co-star in Paint Your Wagon, was distraught when he dumped her, telling friends ‘it was as if Clint didn’t know who she was’. Other women with whom he reportedly had affairs were a swimmer, a model and a restaurant critic who interviewed him.
In 1964, Roxanne Tunis, a stuntwoman working on Eastwood’s TV series Rawhide, gave birth to his daughter Kimber during a reported 14-year affair. Eastwood – who visited her and the baby on his way home to his wife – hid the child’s existence until she was 25 and it was revealed by a magazine.
Eastwood once told Playboy that he and his wife had an open marriage, although it was unclear whether Mrs Eastwood ever knew about the baby.
By the time Maggie Johnson divorced Eastwood in 1984, Sondra Locke had been living with him for 12 years. Locke made six films with him and described him as so controlling that he insisted she work with nobody else. Locke said she had two abortions and was later sterilised during their relationship because Eastwood decreed that having more children wouldn’t suit his lifestyle.
But during the last three years of their stormy relationship, which finally ended in 1989, he had two children with an air stewardess named Jacelyn Reeves. The birth certificates of both children, Scott and Kathryn, didn’t mention his name and he saw little of them, though he supported them financially.
According to McGilligan, Ms Reeves was one of many mistresses Eastwood saw at a house he bought specifically for that purpose in the California seaside town of Carmel, where he became mayor in 1986.
The business partner at a Carmel restaurant owned by Eastwood claimed the actor slept his way through the waitresses.
Locke long remained ignorant of Ms Reeves, but later wrote: ‘Clint had been living this double life, going between me and this other woman, and having children with her.’ She described him as ‘a monster who thought nothing of destroying anything inconvenient to him’.
She sued him for palimony and fraud over a movie deal and he had to pay her more than $7 million.
In 1990, Eastwood started living with the British-born actress Frances Fisher and they had a daughter, Francesca. It was the first time he was at the birth of one of his children.
Fisher later complained that, as she lay in pain, he signed an autograph for a nurse. She left him in 1995, tired of his serial infidelity.
By then, Eastwood was dating Dina Ruiz, a TV journalist, and they married in 1996 and had a daughter, Morgan. Eastwood credited Ruiz with weaving all his children into an extended family. But she didn’t last either, went into rehab for depression and filed for divorce, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’.
The most recent addition to Eastwood’s patchwork family is girlfriend Christina Sandera, a former hostess at his Carmel hotel.
One of the women who had children with Eastwood witheringly told McGilligan that the Hollywood star was a ‘five-minute daddy’, cooing over babies and discussing nappychanging in interviews but actually leaving the mothers to do all the work and barely seeing his children.
Several film critics have speculated that he makes so many films about useless dads because he feels guilty. But Eastwood – the gruff tough guy described by one former lover as too arrogant ever to regret anything, suggests only that it’s because he has mellowed with age.
Asked once why so many women wanted to have his babies, Eastwood was momentarily stunned. ‘Something to do with the genes, I guess,’ he spluttered unconvincingly.