From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
In the process of psyching up for the stunt work (which he prefers to do personally) for his latest epic, The Eiger Sanction, Clint Eastwood quietly tested himself last spring. It was not on that man-killing Alpine slope, the Eiger itself, but on a less challenging rock face at Yosemite National Park. Yet to the horror of Mike Hoover, the veteran mountaineer-cinematographer he took along, Eastwood suddenly "flamed out. He looked up at me," Hoover recounts, "and said, 'Gee, I don't think I can make it.' I said, 'Well, Clint, you really don't have much choice, do you?' Then he reacted characteristically—he got pissed off. He pulled in his chin and gritted his teeth and with absolutely no technique at all, just blood and guts, he moosed his way up. No skill, no brains, just pure muscle. It was gruesome to watch."

For years, that very same gruesome-to-watch feeling has afflicted film critics, especially the effete eastern contingent, as they appraised Eastwood's primitive acting style. They were also appalled by the seeming Mylai mentality of the passionless killers he has played from A Fistful of Dollars to Magnum Force. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael wrote him off as "a tall, cold cod...the first truly stoned hero in the history of movies."

While Clint professes to be unfazed by such knocks, friends report he has memorized them. "If critics like my films, I am pleased," he says, "but it is the public who tells you if your movies are good. My pictures don't play to empty houses—and that's more flattering." Which is an understatement. The world's No. 1 box-office draw this decade is not Barbra or Bronson, Harry Reems or Paul Redford (as Liv Ullmann once delightfully referred to that star parlay in a Freudian fluff). It is Clint Eastwood, whose films, even before his virtually fail-safe new blockbuster, Eiger Sanction, have grossed $150 million just since 1970.

That sort of macho magnetism has, perforce, earned Eastwood total control of his pictures and his own production company. It is named Malpaso, after a creek near his home in Carmel, Calif., for Clint's heart and hearth are in his native northern California. He is still the good old boy, loyal to the same beer-drinking cronies from the 1950s when Universal let his option run out and Clint supported himself digging swimming pools for those who had made it.

He was born 45 years ago (this week) in San Francisco, grew up wherever his accountant father could find work during the Depression. Following an Army hitch, Clint Jr. enrolled at Los Angeles City College in business administration but was lured away, after three semesters, by a $75-a-week contract with Universal. That lasted 40 weeks and produced such master-works as Francis in the Navy. By then he had married Maggie Johnson, a blond Berkeley co-ed, and her bathing-suit modeling fees helped them survive the three years until he lucked into the role of Rowdy Yates, the second gun on CBS's Rawhide.

In 1964, as the series neared its seventh and last season, Italian director Sergio Leone chanced upon some footage of the laconic Eastwood and offered him a role in the first major Western to be shot in Spain. The result, A Fistful of Dollars, blitzed Europe like a busload of 21-day tourists, as did its sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

But it was not until 1968 that Eastwood had a feather in his cap that wasn't macaroni: Coogan's Bluff, a McCloud-like Western. It was directed by cult favorite Don Siegel, who was to teach Clint the craft which has won him better notices as a director (as in Play Misty for Me) than he ever got performing. He is a hero with the bankrollers because he always brings his pictures in ahead of time and under budget. Crews respect him too. "I try to set a mood," explains Eastwood, who prefers to work away from Hollywood. "If you make a movie in a studio, everyone is always looking for the chair with his name on it. But on location, everybody is contributing. I listen to the coffee man. I know what I want, but I've had some great suggestions by not shutting myself off."

On Eiger, consultant Mike Hoover found that Eastwood was "the first guy to do the dirtiest job. If there's a heavy battery to carry, he's the one who does it—and not in a show-off way." Earlier on, Hoover confessed, "Clint seemed so simple I thought he was phony. But after a while, I realized how sharp he was. He isn't verbal, but he is one smart mother." Though not a mean one, according to Hoover. "He always comes off very callous and pragmatic, but inside, he's just mush." Clint Eastwood? Yes, continues Hoover, recalling the second day of shooting on the Eiger when a falling boulder fractured his own pelvis and killed an English mountaineering consultant. After Hoover somehow managed to clamber to safety, he found Clint so shaken by the accident "he even started to cry—he was ready to shut down the multimillion-dollar production."

Though he comes across invariably as a monster of sexism in his films, it should be noted that the first script Eastwood chose to direct, Misty, was by a woman, Jo Heims, an old friend and former legal secretary. Would he ever do a picture with a strong female character? "Of course. Although," he adds, "it would have to have a good part for me, I'm too much of an egotist not to want that. In the old movies, there were both strong men and strong women. Bogart and Bacall, Gable and Vivien Leigh. It's better that way. I think you would have to be daft to listen to the imbecile talk they give women to say in TV commercials—it makes them sound like they have a sub-70 IQ."

As for the charge that his career has cashed in on violence, Eastwood says, defensively, "Death and disaster are what people want to see. Look at the front page of the newspaper—you don't see the funnies or the nice news up there. A clerk or a pharmacist doesn't want to go to a movie about a clerk or a pharmacist, unless maybe the pharmacist is involved in intrigue."

Eastwood's own life, or at least what he reveals of it, seems pharmaceutical. "I haven't had five or six wives," he says. "I have no big shockers to lay on you." Then, he smiles, "And if I did, I probably wouldn't lay them on you. I have thoughts I don't even tell my wife. It's like the book says—being your own best friend."

Clint is still married to Maggie after 21 years, and they and their kids, Kyle, 7, and Alison, 3, avoid the Hollywood locustland like a plague. They live currently in an unpretentious house in Carmel, though they're building a dramatic new one on 12 oceanfront acres. To keep fit, he jogs three miles a day, works out in his gym, golfs or plays tennis, a game Maggie hooked him on. Otherwise, the Eastwoods' idea of socializing is a long weekend camping in a trailer with non-showbiz neighbor couples. One sport Eastwood avoids is hunting. The biggest-grossing screen killer doesn't, he says, "get knocked out killing living things" and favors "gun control to some degree."

What he is on the prowl for is real estate in the neighboring Monterey peninsula. "I don't have a lot of things I could have, like a yacht," says Clint. "I always think an actor ought to treat himself like a sports figure, for example a boxer who has to keep an eye on sudden and unexpected retirement. You've got to be a realist and think of the time when you want to quit or when the audiences don't dig you anymore."