MAYOR CLINT MAKES HER DAY : How a Piece--Not a .44--Led to Eastwood’s Magnum Opus

Dear Clint--oh, jeez, I’m so sorry, I mean Mr. Eastwood:

Well, you did it. You won. But then again, you always do, you great big hunk of What’s Right With America. There’s not a scriptwriter alive--or who would wish to stay alive--who would dare to make you the second- fastest gun in the West, who would let you get knocked off, mission unaccomplished, in the last reel. It would be like letting Ronald Reagan lose an arm-wrestling match with Col. Kadafi.

And now you’re the select people’s choice for Carmel-by-the-Sea. Still no Oscar, but Hizzoner. Congratulations.

I followed this campaign avidly, you know. Because it was all my fault.

I wrote that article that evidently got the .44 magnum slug rolling, that helped you to make up your mind to run for office. You recall it, from last August--the one headlined “Scrooge City?” (I don’t write the headlines, sir, honest). It was about ice cream cones banned from the streets of Carmel, but it touched on the underlying problem, the grotesque but necessary symbiosis of quaint Carmel and its tourists, like the relationship between the tick-bird and the rhinoceros, or the remora and the shark. In practically every interview of yours that I’ve read, you mentioned something about my article, that it was not the kind of image Carmel needs.

If it riled you up, I’m glad, since that’s what a good story can do--prompt people to react to a problem. I’m just relieved that I was already back in L.A., and out of firing range, when you were doing all that reacting. From your reputation, I should have been quaking in my Maud Frizons.

And now that I’m down here and you’re up there, I can tell you something else: I’ve never been a real fan of yours. If I even go to the kind of movies you make, I spend half the time with my hands over my eyes; if the gore is particularly lengthy, I’m out in the lobby, leisurely resalting my popcorn. Maybe that’s why we still have a black-and-white television--I can’t stand the blood.

Actually, you did make one movie I really liked, whose name I can’t remember: a scary, sexy Gothic in which you played a Civil War soldier held prisoner in a girls’ boarding school just bursting with delicately bred young things who were bursting out of their pantalettes. But not a Russki, not a scumbag in sight.

So you understand my perplexity when I heard you had made a movie of “Foxfire.” I just couldn’t imagine you and Sondra Locke in the parts so wonderfully limned by Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Silly me. The movie was “Firefox,” and your love interest was a fighter jet.

Now you have a smaller, more critical audience for your new role--the 5,000 folks of Carmel, where there is no movie house and you’ll be performing live and in-person at council meetings, voting things down, not gunning them down.

You’ll do just fine in a town that once thought to build a wall around itself, where a proposal for public toilets can set neighbor against neighbor, where someone wrote a letter to the newspaper urging that not only ice cream cones but chewing gum be outlawed on village streets as well. It’s a tough town--just your kind.

Had I lived there, I might have voted for you, too, but for the wrong reason. I admire you for restoring the great American tradition of imperative verbs, with your gritty, too-often-quoted demand, “Make my day,” which takes its place with other immortal American commandments: “Go West, young man” . . . “Remember the Alamo” . . . “Turn that damn music down! “

A lot of people figure you’ll whip Carmel into shape--or else. The iron fist in the iron glove. Grim Government Is Good Government. Not I. I figure anyone with the sense of whimsy to name a restaurant “Hog’s Breath” must be laughing his head off at the visitors who jam in to eat Hog’s Breath food. You’re all right by me.

Glad to have you on our side--again--Mr. Mayor. And I sleep better at night, knowing you’re part of our coastal artillery.