Romantic Clint? Not Known For His Soft-Hearted Characters, Eastwood Tackles ‘Bridges’ With Gusto

Clint Eastwood appeared. He filled the whole doorway of his office bungalow. He wore a shiny maroon golf shirt, old blue pants hiked up high on his waist and black rubber loafers.

“Hi,” he said.

He had a curious shamanlike power.

He was a leopardlike creature who rode in on the tail of a comet.

He was a graceful, hard, male animal who did nothing overtly to dominate yet dominated completely.

He was a prairie wind you could ride like some temple virgin toward the sweet, compliant fires marking the soft curve of oblivion.

But enough wallowing, or Wallering, in the overripe prose of “The Bridges of Madison County.” Clint Eastwood, who was honored at the Oscars with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, is bringing Robert James Waller’s huge best seller to the screen in June.

He will trade in his spurs for the sandals of Robert Kincaid, the shamanlike, leopardlike, prairiewindlike photographer who falls for Francesca Johnson, an Italian-born Iowa farmer’s wife.

Francesca, played with dark hair and - no doubt - another perfect accent by Meryl Streep, senses that her lover is a “half-man, halfsomething-else creature.” He is, in Waller’s portrait, a vegetarian who wears a bracelet, names his truck, tacks up favorite words (“blue,” “woodsmoke”) on the wall, writes ditzy metaphysical essays and poetry (“Before I became a man, I was an arrow”) and, in the heat of passion, murmurs lines like this: “I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.”

Isn’t this the sort of guy Dirty Harry wouldn’t have even bothered to shoot?

Eastwood frowned a bit and languidly moved his Modigliani legs around, trying to find a comfortable place for them under, on top of or beyond the glass coffee table in his office at Malpaso Productions on the Warner lot in Burbank. The 64-yearold star does not see Kincaid as so far removed from his usual cadre of emotionally spare rebels.

“He is a vegetarian, but he’s smoking all the way through the thing,” Eastwood said in that famous voice, a mixture of caress and threat. “He’s lighting up Camels all the time, and they’re drinking beer all the time. He was a guy who was maybe a little more New Age. He’s sort of an aging hippie, you know.

“He’s traveling on these jobs in mid-America, and he meets that one woman. And everybody likes to think that there are moments in time when two people can just jell in the best possible way.”

With Sharon Stone doing Clint Eastwood in her turn as a sneering, taciturn gunslinger in “The Quick and the Dead,” it was perhaps inevitable that Clint Eastwood would go as soft and fuzzy as Alan Alda.

“I know a score of actors who would avoid exposing their emotions the way he does in this movie,” Streep said. “He was very raw. I was shocked. I think he’s just reached a point in his life where he doesn’t give a damn.”

She has not yet seen “Bridges” (the movie will open on June 2) but added excitedly, “I heard Steven Spielberg cried for 40 minutes” after a screening. Spielberg’s company Amblin produced the film with Eastwood’s company, Malpaso.

In a sign of these more tender times, Eastwood now keeps a stroller in his office for toddlers who drop by, among them Francesca, his 18-month-old daughter with the actress Frances Fisher, with whom he lives in Los Angeles. He met Fisher when she was cast in his 1989 film “Pink Cadillac,” and he gave her the part of an unforgiving prostitute in his Oscar-winning 1992 western, “Unforgiven.”

“I’m all for day care,” said the man who put the phrases “Go ahead, make my day” and “Do you feel lucky, punk?” into the national lexicon.

The actor who made a career out of blowing away bad guys says he enjoyed losing control in the tale of a man “desperately in love.” His longtime press agent, Joe Hyams, said that it was weird to watch a rough cut of the film. “Clint has kissed ladies before - he kissed that nice woman in ‘In the Line of Fire’ - but this is a serious romance,” Hyams said.

Eastwood said, “There are a lot more men that are romantics than I think people give them credit for.”

Is he one?

“Yeah,” he said. “I enjoy a fantasy thing like that.”

Asked his idea of a romantic evening, he replied, “I like atmosphere, candlelight, a nice glass of wine, good music.”

Is there a woman present?

He laughed. “Once in a while I call someone,” he said, “and tell her ‘You should have been here. I was never better than tonight.’ “

Eastwood comes across as the sort of man many women might want to run off to a covered bridge with, if they were anywhere near a covered bridge, which most people are not.

What is most noticeable is his stillness. He laughs easily, which is startling, since he hardly ever laughs in his movies. He looks laid-back, but there is also something coiled about him, a watchfulness.

When he talked this particular evening, he noted the importance of presence and mystery and great vocal quality. And certainly, in person, Clint Eastwood conveyed all those qualities, as he slouched on his couch, his face in the shadows thrown off by one dim lamp and his own famous image squinting down from posters for “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”

He has the cool economy of his characters, scorning the traditional excesses of Hollywood - from illegal drugs to bloated budgets to warped egos. This is not the sort of man who would find himself in a profligate fiasco like “Waterworld.”

He brags that he has the same brown curtains and nondescript beige office furniture that the guy who had the bungalow before him left behind two decades ago. “We may have had it recovered once,” he said, fondly patting the nubby cotton couch.

While other big-name actors seem to work hard at projecting a certain image, Eastwood seems casual about his stardom. He once compared his shock at getting famous to waking up with an “ugly hooker.” Now he has a wry attitude about his status as an establishment favorite. “I didn’t worry about that when I was on the far outside, and I sure as heck don’t worry about it now,” he said.

He rarely watches his movies, except to catch a few moments of ones he likes on television, to see how they are holding up. And, like Cary Grant, he says he will stop acting when he no longer likes seeing that guy up on the screen.

Eastwood’s 31-year marriage to Maggie Johnson ended in 1984, following a long separation. His son, Kyle, 26, is a musician and appeared with his father in “Honky Tonk Man”; his daughter Alison, 22, who appeared with her father in “Tightrope,” is a model in Paris. But Eastwood’s second long relationship ended more acrimoniously.

He still faces legal fallout stemming from a nasty palimony suit filed against him in 1989 by his longtime co-star and girlfriend, Sondra Locke. It was a difficult period for Eastwood because it was the only time, as one of his pals told GQ magazine, that he wasn’t “treated like Mother Teresa” by the press. Locke, still bitter, has now involved him in a second lawsuit, this one over business matters.

Professionally, however, the man once scorned by the Hollywood elite as too right-wing and lowbrow continues to pile up accolades. He has been hailed as intellectually chic in Europe - despite appearing with an orangutan in “Every Which Way But Loose” in 1978 - and as a feminist director. Two years ago, he won Oscars for best picture and best director for “Unforgiven.”

The Thalberg award he received on March 27 has been given in the past to producers like David O. Selznick, Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Perhaps, by reshaping Waller’s New Age cowboy in his own lean image, Eastwood is hoping to capture the one honor that has eluded him - an Oscar for acting. It has been a gradual transformation from the cigarillo-smoking, dirty-ponchowearing Man With No Name and the flinty, squinty Dirty Harry to the romantic lead for the middle-aged version of “Love Story.”

His Secret Service agent in the hit 1993 thriller “In the Line of Fire” was a big jump on the evolutionary scale, the kind of guy who played “As Time Goes By” on the piano, sniffled helplessly with the flu and offered to give up his career for the woman he loved. Now the actor has gone that final step, as the star and director of “Bridges,” a purely sentimental movie.

Some are skeptical. Movieline magazine tweaked: “Sex objects (don’t laugh) Meryl Streep, Clint Eastwood.”

Some are thrilled. “My mother’s 86 and she liked the book and she’s very excited about me doing it,” Eastwood said. “She thought Meryl was a great choice.”

It might have seemed that there would be a clash of mind and spirit between Eastwood’s instinctive acting style and Streep’s elaborate technique. She was groomed at Yale Drama School and in Shakespearean drama.

After a stint as a lumberjack and some time in the Army, he was discovered hanging around the coffee wagon at CBS and learned his art playing Rowdy Yates in the television series “Rawhide” in the 1950s and early 60s.

“It doesn’t matter whether you get a Ph.D. in engineering or come up through the ranks as an apprentice to engineers,” he said. “It’s all the same knowledge.”

Streep objected to the notion, too, drawling, “I’m the instinctive one.”

As a director, Eastwood often tries to get a scene down in one take, a trait that some people ascribe to his notorious thriftiness. He said that working swiftly “keeps the energy and the inner life going” and that actors should not use the first 10 takes as a warm-up period. Was his speed a problem for the meticulous Streep?

“She loved to kind of go for it,” he said. “Sometimes we’d go for it without ever rehearsing it.”

Streep said she “fought long and hard not to do this movie” because she found the book overwrought. But when Eastwood sent her a script, she loved it. “All that florid stuff from the book is gone,” she said, slyly sending up Waller’s prose: “He still moves over me like a panther.” (Actually, it’s like “some fine leopard might do in long grass out on the veld.”)

“The only daunting thing” Eastwood said to her during the filming was - here she imitates the Eastwood purr - “I don’t think you should do an accent.”

“That threw me completely for a loop,” she said, “because Francesca had lived in Italy for the first 20 years of her life.” She had already prepared for the role by drawing on an Italian war bride who lived down the street from her when she grew up in Summit, N.J. When they shot the first scene, in which Robert Kincaid asks Francesca for directions, Streep simply came out on the porch and did her Italian accent.

“I ignored him like I do with most directors,” she said, “and he laughed.”

For the first two weeks he said nothing about her performance. Then he came up to her and said, “You know, if I don’t say anything, that means it’s good.”

These days he is spending time again being a father, and he has already noticed a genetic quirk. “My daughter doesn’t even completely talk yet, but sometimes she’ll look at me like this and go” - here Eastwood gives his famous squint - “or she’ll make a lot of faces like kids do and you’ll say, ‘OK, squint,’ and she’ll go” - again he demonstrates his daughter’s squint.

His idea of a good evening is still pretty basic: “I have two Budweisers in front of the fireplace. Squeeze the cans. Even though they’re aluminum and it’s easy to do nowadays, you know, you still feel kind of macho about it. You toss ‘em in the wastebasket, you belch three times and go to bed.”