When Clint Eastwood was challenged to a real-life duel over an affair to remember

As Carmel’s one-time mayor Clint Eastwood began building a legendary film career celebrating models of American male rectitude, he often presented himself as the stalwart family man.

But in recent years, even Eastwood admitted that this image didn’t always match reality. Biographies and other accounts portray him as a serial philander who conducted numerous affairs during his 31-year first marriage and in his subsequent relationships. He also fathered at least seven children with five different women.

As the now 87-year-old Eastwood prepares to direct his latest film, “The 15:17 to Paris,” one of his affairs has popped up as a new storyline in the popular Hollywood history podcast “You Must Remember This.” The podcast currently focuses on the life and times of one of the women Eastwood reportedly bedded: actress Jean Seberg.

If you don’t know Seberg, she’s a screen icon in her own right — but one who died tragically by suicide at age 40 in 1979. She’s most famous as the blonde American beauty sporting a boyish haircut in 1960’s “Breathless,” Jean-Luc Goddard’s classic of French New Wave cinema.

In a sadder way, she’s also known as one of the most prominent targets of the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO project — covert efforts by J. Edgar Hoover to sabotage counter-culture groups in the 1960s.

As the 1960s came to a close, Seberg co-starred with Eastwood in the Gold Rush-era musical, “Paint Your Wagon.” Multiple accounts said the co-stars had an affair, and both were married at the time. The romance got intense enough that Seberg decided to end things with her then-husband, French novelist and diplomat Romain Gary. And that’s when talk of a duel came in.

When Eastwood and Seberg met while making “Paint Your Wagon” in 1968, both were at turning points in their lives and careers.

Eastwood wasn’t yet known for “Dirty Harry,” and his Academy Award-winning “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby” were decades off. Born in San Francisco and raised in Piedmont, Eastwood became a TV star in the 1950s in the Western series “Rawhide,” then became a movie star in the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone.

Looking for new challenges, he chose to star in a musical in which he would, yes, sing. Before he talked to an empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention, he sang the love song, “I Talk to the Trees,” to Seberg in “Paint Your Wagon.”

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Meanwhile, Seberg started out as a small-town Iowa teen — intelligent, spirited but also sensitive — who was plucked from obscurity when she was cast as Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of “Saint Joan.” She gained international fame three years later, playing the free-love American, French-speaking heroine in Godard’s “Breathless,” opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo.

She settled in Paris and continued to work in Europe. She married husband no. 1, a French lawyer, then started an affair with Gary, who was 24 years her senior (and at one point the French consul general in Los Angeles). Their affair created a minor scandal in Parisian society; When Seberg and Gary finally secured divorces from their respective spouses, they married discreetly and had to keep the birth of their son a secret for several years.

Seberg tried to get parts in American films, mainly because she needed the money. She was relieved to receive the offer for “Paint Your Wagon,” according to Karina Longworth, the host of the “You Must Remember This” podcast. She would co-star with both Eastwood and Lee Marvin, then an A-list star and Academy Award-winning best actor for “Cat Ballou.”

Unfortunately, “Paint Your Wagon” wouldn’t do a whole lot for her career. While the movie did OK at the box office, it was still a product of the dying Hollywood studio system — a bloated, somewhat old-fashioned, three-hour movie that went over way over budget.

“This symbol of the New Wave would now in star in one of the films synonymous with the dinosaurs of the studio system, limping into extinction,” Longworth said.

But Seberg couldn’t know that when she signed on. She was just excited to play the female lead: Elizabeth, the spirited second wife of a Mormon man who wanders into the Gold Rush mining camp. She’s auctioned off for marriage to Ben, a hard-drinking but good-hearted prospector played by Marvin. But she also falls in love with his handsome, soft-spoken partner, who is only known as “Pardner” and who is played by Eastwood.

One of the reasons the film went over budget is that director Joshua Logan wanted to shoot in a remote wilderness in northeast Oregon. But that isolation proved fruitful in some ways. During the long shoot, “Jean amused herself by having an affair with Clint Eastwood,” Longworth said.

Eventually, Gary finally turned up on location. Seberg told him what was going on with Eastwood. As she put it, according to Longworth: “I got a crush on someone else. Because I’m a bad liar, I had to tell Romain about it.”

Gary challenged Eastwood to a duel, though Longworth doesn’t say if Gary specified what weapons they should use.

“They never went through with it, and instead Romain left, and Jean called her publicist to confess she was madly in love with Clint Eastwood, and she needed help announcing she was getting a divorce,” Longworth said.

Seberg assumed Eastwood was madly in love with her, too, and was ready to leave his wife.

But for Eastwood, a workplace affair was nothing new.

“Eastwood’s ferocious sexual appetite was common knowledge in the movie industry,” says biographer Patrick McGilligan. In his book, “The Life and Legend of Clint Eastwood,” he said Eastwood slept with practically all his leading ladies and had a 14-year affair with a stuntwoman from “Rawhide” who gave birth to his oldest child, a daughter whose existence was kept secret from the public until a 1989 National Enquirer expose.

So, it probably came as a shock only to Seberg that the end of the location shoot also meant the end of the affair. Even more, “Clint totally ghosted her,” Longworth said.

“‘It was marvelous while it lasted,” Seberg said later, according to Longworth. “It’s always a bit of a shock that people aren’t sincere. Perhaps I have to grow up a little.”

Eastwood’s career really took off after “Paint Your Wagon.” In the next few years, he showed promise as a director, starring in and helming in the critically acclaimed “Play for Me.” He also created one of the great screen anti-heroes in “Dirty Harry.” Over the decades, he also had three more major relationships: with co-stars Sondra Locke and Frances Fisher, and his eight-year marriage to Castro Valley native and former KSBW anchor Dina Ruiz, who is 35 years his junior.

Seberg, on the other hand, struggled.

“When the dust settled, Jean found herself alone in her Coldwater Canyon house, paralyzed by depression,” Longworth said. “She drank too much, and too often mixed booze with valium, and she essentially stopped leaving the house for a while. ‘Without a man,’ she said, ‘I’m like a ship without a rudder.’”

More heartbreak came when the FBI targeted her for her support of radical causes, including for her $10,500 donation to the Black Panther Party, according to FBI documents that later become public. She was the subject of surveillance, threatening phone calls and home break-ins. Hoover even kept President Nixon informed of the FBI’s activities related to the actress. Perhaps most damaging, the FBI planted news stories that she was pregnant with a child by a Black Panther Party member.

Seberg was indeed pregnant but the father was a student revolutionary she met while making a film in Mexico in 1969. She claimed that the stress from the false news stories caused her to go into premature labor and give birth to a baby girl who died several days later. She also had a hard time getting work in Hollywood, probably because of a blacklist.

She returned to Paris and managed to work in European films but never got over the loss of her daughter and persecution by the FBI, according to accounts.
She continued to take sedatives and drink heavily. On August 30, 1979, she disappeared. Ten days later, she was found near her Paris apartment, dead from an apparent overdose of barbiturates. Her ex-husband Gary said she probably died by suicide.

Not too long ago, Eastwood finally opened up — just a bit —about Seberg in an interview with a German journalist (which is below, though in German).The interview took place in 2013 in Carmel. Eastwood doesn’t specifically acknowledge an affair but speaks of Seberg in a way that definitely sounds like a man who was once in love.

He called their months filming “Paint Your Wilderness” in the enchanting Oregon wilderness a “perfect life.” He said she seemed happy at the time. “I adored her,” he said, adding he would have loved to work with her again, especially on a film that offered her the chance to be “true to herself.”

After their parting, he tried to connect with her in Paris, but their final conversation was strained, “as if we were strangers.”

Still, when asked if he would remember Seberg the rest of his life, he said. “That’s for sure.”