In the Line of Fire

The bar at Clint Eastwood’s Mission Ranch is jumping. It’s a Friday night, long about 10, and the crowd is pressed against the piano bar where someone is doing an incredible impression of John Denver. No, take another look, it is John Denver, one of the celebrity golfers in town for the following week’s Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. He just sat down to give everyone a free Rocky Mountain high.

Eastwood himself, the chairman of the golf tournament, is sitting in another room in the restaurant having a meeting. After all, the Mission Ranch, the dairy-cum-inn that Eastwood bought in 1986 and restored, is Malpaso North, his business address when he’s not in Hollywood. And lately, he’s not in Hollywood as much as possible.

“It’s hard to pry Clint away [from Carmel] these days,” said his longtime publicist, Marco Barla, when he invited us to the ranch to talk to Eastwood about his latest movie, “Absolute Power.” “He’s always loved it up there, but now, it’s his life.”

“Absolute Power,” based on David Baldacci’s bestseller about a cat burglar who witnesses a murder involving the U.S. president, is a misnomer by the book’s own judgment. The film’s key players--the president (Gene Hackman), his cynical chief of staff (Judy Davis), his Secret Service henchmen (Scott Glenn, Dennis Haysbert) and the thief (Eastwood)--all have power, but nothing remotely absolute.

“I don’t think there is any such thing as absolute power, unless it’s a dictatorship or some sort of monarchy,” Eastwood says over a quiet lunch the day after the impromptu Denver concert. “In our government, the president is the closest thing to that, but the process has its checks and balances.”

“Absolute Power,” adapted by William Goldman with an assist from the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, is a political potboiler and a matching bookend for “In the Line of Fire,” the other White House thriller Eastwood recently did for Castle Rock.

In that hit 1993 picture, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, Eastwood plays a veteran Secret Service agent trying to protect his president while being personally harassed by an assassin. In “Absolute Power,” which he directs himself, he plays a John Robie-style cat burglar who goes after the president while personally harassing a pair of Secret Service assassins.

“It’s a what-if story,” Eastwood says. “What if the president is in this situation where a crime is committed and it gets out of control, and people start trying to cover it up? What if there’s a witness, but the witness is committing a crime when he sees what the president does? I think the intrigue is a lot of fun.”

It is suggested to Eastwood that, in real life, most of us face something close to absolute power every day, from people working 9 to 5. Ever try to rush a clerk at the DMV? Run a tollbooth? Tell a cop what he can do with his ticket?

“It’s true, everybody has a certain amount of power,” he says. “It’s what you do with it. People abuse power all the time and it’s the most unattractive thing on the planet. Sometimes, they abuse it just because they have it. When I was in boot camp, we called that RA--regular Army. . . . Some guy would get an extra stripe and start snapping at everyone.

“I had an incident where I had to have my rifle inspected to get weekend liberty. It was this old beat-up M1, it had all kinds of nicks inside the barrel. I used lighter fluid to make it shine, and this guy with almost no rank at all looks down the barrel and says, ‘It looks like crap.’ I said, ‘Let me explain.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. No pass for you.’ ”

Incidents like that, Eastwood says, produce the kind of rebellious attitude he romanticized in his “Dirty Harry” movies.

“I had dozens of piddling things like that in the Army,” he says. “That’s why everybody wants to be Sgt. Bilko.”

“Relative Power” would be a really bad name for a thriller, but that, and a dose of star power, are a fair description of the good life Eastwood leads in Carmel. He’s lived here for more than three decades, before directing his first film (“Play Misty for Me”) in its hills in 1971, and long before becoming its one-term mayor in 1986.

That political turn, by the way, was a response to a power play, too, Eastwood says. He’d bought an old building in downtown Carmel, right next to his Hog’s Breath Inn restaurant, with plans to tear it down. The town council turned down his architectural plans for a replacement without explanation.

“I went before the council and said, ‘Don’t just turn it down, tell me what’s wrong with it, I’ll change it.’ They said, ‘We can’t do that, you’ll have to go through the process again.’ ”

Instead, Eastwood started a lawsuit and compelled the council to state its objections and got his building finished. Then he ran for mayor.

“I figured if they’re doing that kind of thing with me, and I have the wherewithal to take them on a bit, what are they doing to people who can’t afford to fight them?”

Eastwood still has his detractors in Carmel, and there were objections to his plans for Canada Woods, a hilltop golf course and home development passed last year that is due to be completed by the end of 1998. That’s just one of the things keeping him around more. He also has a new wife, 30-year-old Salinas TV personality Dina Ruiz, a new baby, 7-week-old daughter Morgan, and 18 golf courses within 20 minutes.

And he has the Mission Ranch for entertaining, as he is doing at the end of this same weekend, on Super Bowl Sunday. More than 200 people, mostly Eastwood’s Carmel friends, but a few celebrities as well--Denver, James Woods, Barbra Streisand and her boyfriend James Brolin--are packed into what they call the Little Barn, watching the Packers beat up on the Patriots.

“Who do you have?” Denver yells to Eastwood, who’s been circling the room, visiting with people.

“Patriots,” Eastwood says.

“Me, too,” Denver says. “How many points?”

“Fourteen!”

“Good bet, I’ve only got 10,” Denver says.

“This is a nice affair, Clint,” someone else says.

“Yeah, this all turned out pretty nice, didn’t it?” he says. “Everyone seems to be having a good time.”

What’s the old saying, “Life begins at 40”? How about 66?

“It begins whenever you want it to,” Eastwood says.

If you have the power.