The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(65)
I was shaken by the way Mrs. Baker had been treated. Totten and the other powers that be shrugged off her assault with a “boys will be boys” nonchalance. Even my parents, though they agreed that what happened was awful, took a cold view of the why of the incident. “Well, she made everybody mad,” Dad said. Like that made it okay. Totten didn’t fire the makeup artist or even discipline him. The responsibility for the assault never seemed to be assigned to its instigator.
At the time, I was left more confused than angry by what I had witnessed—how could people be so fun and seemingly good-hearted, yet sanction something so terrible? But since then I have come to recognize how toxic the culture of filmmaking was for women when I was a child actor. And it was too slow to improve. When my daughter Bryce entered the business twenty years ago, memories of this incident came rushing back and I shuddered. I had deep concerns for her emotional and, yes, physical safety. Fortunately, our industry has finally begun to evolve into a safer, more respectful one. But it took the #MeToo movement, and strong women like Bryce, to begin in earnest the process of bringing about wholesale change rather than incremental measures. This change has been too long in coming and can’t become the norm soon enough.
OUR TIME IN Jackson Hole coincided with the Manson-family murders, in which seven people were killed in two separate attacks in Los Angeles. The news cast a pall on our team, since we were mostly L.A. people and we sensed that the violence that had taken the lives of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy a year earlier had now come to our doorstep. We didn’t yet know who the killers were. There was only a widespread sentiment, based on reports that they had written RISE and DEATH TO PIGS on the walls in the victims’ blood, that “the revolution” was to blame.
For a relative innocent like me, this was another source of confusion. There were components of the 1960s cultural revolution that appealed to me, like rock music, the unapologetically transgressive films of Sam Peckinpah and Mike Nichols, and the antiwar movement. But was this part and parcel of a wider revolution that was killing people? I was also aware that the movie we were making was throwback entertainment, bearing little to no relation to 1969 cultural mores, despite Bob Totten’s maverick intentions. Where did I fit into the new cultural wave? It was a lot to process.
No matter what, I was pleased with the performances that Clint and I turned in. Especially Clint’s. His character, Andrew, carries the emotional weight of the film, dealing with the fallout as his family’s unity is pushed to the breaking point by one setback after another: a tornado, Ab Cross’s harassment, a fire. When Vera Miles fights with Steve Forrest in one scene, threatening to move back to Pittsburgh, Clint performs the most convincing childhood breakdown I’ve ever seen. He cries tears of fear and heartbreak as he witnesses the worst thing a kid his age can witness: his parents screaming at each other, apparently coming apart.
CLINT
Someone on The Wild Country set said that I was a little Method actor. That’s the first time that I ever heard the term. I asked Dad what it meant, and he described it as “getting so inside the character that you really become him in the moment.” One of Dad’s great gifts was his ability to distill the Actors Studio approach into something that Ron and I could grasp and execute. But I looked at it the other way around—the character became me. Was this a child’s egocentric view of himself as the center of the world? Sure. But it was an approach that worked. I believed that I was more interesting than any character that someone might write, so I viewed the script as a set of parameters and circumstances dictating how I, Clint, might behave.
The resident Indian sage in The Wild Country was named Two Dog, played by Frank de Kova, an Italian American character actor whose dark skin and broad features earned him a long career playing Indians and Mexicans. This sort of casting would never happen now—the role would certainly and rightfully be given to a Native American—but that is not a rap on de Kova, who was a sweet person. He had played a Mexican colonel in Viva Zapata!, which starred Marlon Brando. On the set, Frank tousled my hair and said, “Clint, you remind me of Brando.” I had no idea who Brando was at that point, but today I would happily accept the compliment.
Hanging with Jack Elam and Frank de Kova proved crucial to me, in that I saw something of myself in them. It was the first time that I understood that I was not the same kind of actor that Ron was. He was more of a leading man, bearing a certain weight of responsibility to carry a film. I was not. I was a character actor. In Elam, de Kova, and a hilarious old-timer in the film named Dub Taylor, I recognized my tribe, my peeps. I was not going to be the Steve Forrest of any given picture but the Jack Elam. This epiphany granted me permission to be more fearless, more off-the-wall—the actor I became as an adult.
Disney flew us home from Jackson Hole on the late Walt’s personal airplane, a Grumman Gulfstream I that was known as The Mouse. The interior was beautifully done in mahogany wood and leather. We Howards had so much luggage from the multiweek location shoot that we loaded down that fancy plane like we were the Joad family. Walt’s own wings! This was living large.
I was proud of the work I did in The Wild Country and displeased that I didn’t get my due in the opening credits. The movie came out more than a year after we wrapped, in December 1970. Disney held an advance screening for the press in a big theater on its Burbank campus, and our whole family was there as the lights went down. Steve Forrest got first billing. Fine. Then the names of Ron—still “Ronny” then—and Jack Elam shared a screen. Fine. Then Frank de Kova and Morgan Woodward. Hmm. Then Vera Miles got her own title card. Fair enough, but still: Where was Clint? And then, at last, came my name . . . in small type, sharing a title card with four other actors’ names. What the hell? I was a colead! I was a more mature kid than I had been when making the movie—when you’re young, the difference between eleven and ten is not insignificant—but that didn’t stop me from bursting into tears at my mistreatment. I felt like I had been shit on.