Scottish Daily Mail

Has lady-killer Clint finally met his match?

His new love, 33 years his junior, is accused by her ex of being a husband beating gold-digger

- from Tom Leonard

She has attended 15 classes on anger management Eastwood was a voracious womaniser

ALTHOUGH it wasn’t to be his night f or his latest film, American Sniper, Clint Eastwood at least got to show off his attractive new girlfriend at this year’s Oscars. At 51, blonde Christina Sandera is 33 years younger than the 84-year-old but that’s a much narrower age gap than his previous relationsh­ips. What is rather more shocking, it has emerged, is that Sandera has a murky history.

Before she got a job as a restaurant hostess at Eastwood’s beautiful hotel, the Mission Ranch, in Carmel, California — where she met the star — Sandera was embroiled in a turbulent 11-month marriage that ended in her arrest for domestic battery.

Police reports reveal that even before she married Paul Wainscoat in 2003, he called officers after accusing her of attacking him. The officers noted a strong odour of alcohol on her breath as they arrested her.

However, Mr Wainscoat, who owns a local bakery, did not press charges and they went ahead and married, only for him to call police again a year later, claiming he ‘was being battered by his wife’.

She had woken one night in a rage over the recent death of her cat. Screaming: ‘Where are my kittens?’, she had punched him repeatedly in the face. He still didn’t press charges, blaming her drinking, but he did divorce her. In court papers, he painted her as a spendthrif­t gold-digger who expected to be treated like a ‘queen’ and a violent alcoholic, once threatenin­g to chop up their furniture with an axe.

Sandera denied she was an alcoholic but admitted she had been to Alcoholics Anonymous and undergone 15 anger management classes. She denied domestic violence but admitted she had pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace.

When Sandera was first photograph­ed with Eastwood last June insiders said she had moved into his home months earlier — the £13 million mansion he had built for his second wife Dina, before they ended a 17-year marriage in 2013.

The same insider told an entertainm­ent magazine that Eastwood was ‘with Christina and happy’. So happy that he had introduced her to his family. ‘Clint’s kids have all met Christina and like her,’ said the source, who added that the children all thought she was ‘normal’.

In his divorce legal papers, Mr Wainscoat claimed he had spent $90,000 (£60,000) on their wedding, i ncluding spending heavily on ‘special matching jewellery ’ she bought, an ‘ extravagan­t honeymoon’ and dental work she wanted to have done before the ceremony.

He said the wedding’s extravagan­ce was ‘impossible to overstate’ but she had promised to pay half from a large trust fund she claimed to have. She never did. Sandera, who has no children, ‘insisted the wedding be so grand that she be viewed as a queen for the day,’ he said. ‘As part of her obsession to be the perfect bride at the perfect wedding’, she ‘sought to acquire a perfect smile with perfect teeth.’

Her spending was always extravagan­t, Mr Wainscoat claimed. He said he got heavily into debt, ‘lured’ by her assurances of her trust fund into buying four horses, new cars — including a Land Rover — and expensive furniture. He later discovered her trust fund was empty.

Mr Wainscoat said he had even paid for her legal and bail bills on the two occasions she was arrested for attacking him. His lawyer noted that if he had ‘lifted his shirt to show his injuries’ at the time, the consequenc­es for her would have been ‘much more severe’.

He said that Sandera’s ridiculous spending was ‘complicate­d’ by her alcoholism as well as suffering from depression, paranoia and insecurity. The anger management didn’t appear to have worked, he said.

Mr Wainscoat told me all the abuse laid out in the court papers had happened but he genuinely wished her well with Clint Eastwood.

‘Everybody makes mistakes and we married too quickly. I watched her on the red carpet at the Oscars and I thought she looked happy,’ he said. ‘I wish him all the luck in the world with her — and I genuinely mean it.’ Some of the women in Eastwood’s life may be less favourably inclined, regarding it as poetic justice if, in romantic terms, he has finally bitten off more than he can chew.

The superstar who played the laconic The Man With No Name in Spaghetti Westerns and police detective ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan was, supposedly, a loyal husband and devoted family man.

His reluctance to discuss his private life was seen by his many fans as proof of his natural modesty. But the real Clint was one of Holly- wood’s most voracious and callous womanisers.

Two marriages, the first lasting 31 years and the second for 18, would on paper qualify him as a model of Hollywood fidelity. But, according to a series of unauthoris­ed biographie­s, there has quietly been an endless parade of women — mainly blonde — through Eastwood’s life.

He has fathered at least seven children by five women — with four of those offspring conceived out of wedlock. And that, say observers, may be a conservati­ve estimate.

Unlike other Hollywood lotharios such as Warren Beatty, he avoided liaisons with fellow stars as they would be likely to attract publicity.

According to respected biographer Patrick McGilligan, the first writer to document the seamy side of Eastwood’s life, the actor largely confined his attentions to less establishe­d actresses and other minor players in the film industry, often getting them roles in his movies so they were to hand while he was away from home filming.

His frequent affairs were ended by him the moment shooting finished. Often, they were devastated.

In the early Seventies, Eastwood set up a bar called the Hog’s Breath Inn in Carmel — where he later became mayor and where he reportedly had l overs dotted around the seaside town. He proceeded to sleep his way through the waitresses, said Paul Lippman, his business partner.

The affair that broke up his first marriage to maggie was with waifish actress Sondra Locke. Their relationsh­ip started when he chose her to star in his acclaimed 1975 Western The Outlaw Josey Wales and she went on to star in a string of Eastwood movies.

In a bizarre romantic arrangemen­t, throughout Locke’s 14 years with him she remained married to her openly gay husband, Norman Anderson. He lived with his boyfriend in a house bought by Eastwood. It all ended messily in 1989 when he had the locks changed on their Los Angeles home while Locke was away, having her possession­s boxed and put in storage.

She didn’t go quietly, writing an excoriatin­g autobiogra­phy — The Good, The Bad and The Very Ugly — in which she described Eastwood as a ‘monster who thought nothing of destroying anything inconvenie­nt to him’.

In 1996 he married for a second time — to Dina Ruiz, a TV presenter almost half his age. But in 2013, the second Mrs Eastwood announced she was filing for divorce, citing ‘irreconcil­able difference­s’.

Eastwood was photograph­ed with his new belle at an LA supermarke­t. It was a picture of domestic bliss with Ms Sandera pushing the loaded trolley. Will she be the one who finally tames Dirty Harry?

‘They could be the perfect couple,’ Mr Wainscoat told me. History suggests otherwise.

 ??  ?? Make my day: Clint Eastwood and Christina at the Oscars
Make my day: Clint Eastwood and Christina at the Oscars

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