(LifeSiteNews) — A new biography of the legendary actor and director Clint Eastwood reveals, in grim detail, Eastwood’s self-described “addiction” to promiscuity.
In Clint: The Man and The Movies, Shawn Levy details Eastwood’s affairs, troubled marriages, and persistent, casual adulteries. Indeed, Eastwood even welcomed children with other women while married to his first wife, Maggie Johnson.
Not all of Eastwood’s children were fortunate enough to be welcomed. Levy revisits revelations by Sandra Locke, an actress cast by Eastwood in his 1975 film, The Outlaw Josey Wales. In her 1997 biography The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey, Locke wrote that Eastwood pressured her to have two abortions and, eventually, a tubal ligation, because he didn’t want any more children. (Eastwood later denied the claims.)
READ: British pop star Lily Allen laughs as she recounts multiple abortions
Eastwood has been much celebrated by conservatives for his all-American persona, his film oeuvre celebrating American heroes, and his occasional support for Republican candidates, but the star has always been candid about his pro-abortion views. This should come as no surprise; Hollywood historians have long documented the sordid history of studio bosses and leading men using abortion to use women.
Locke was far from the only actress to discover that abortion was very often a Hollywood expectation. Judy Garland was forced to abort two babies by the studio she worked with. So was Jean Harlow; in both cases, the studios wanted the young women to maintain their youthful beauty, which might be “spoiled” by pregnancy or childbirth. Lana Turner was also forced by her studio to get an abortion while on a publicity tour; they even docked her pay for the time away.
Ava Gardner aborted two of her husband Frank Sinatra’s children, one because her studio threatened her with violation of contract if she didn’t comply. The studio flew her out of country to get the abortion with a studio watchdog. Sinatra was reportedly heartbroken when, years later, he found out about the two children he never got to meet.
Dorothy Dandridge was also forced to have an abortion; Lupe Velez killed herself rather than have the abortion expected of her. Ironically, many of these abortions were mandated under studio “morality clauses” that prohibited out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
As Vanity Fair put it several years ago in a chilling essay titled “Classic Hollywood’s Secret: Studios Wanted Their Stars to Have Abortions”:
“Abortions were our birth control,” an anonymous actress once said about the common procedure’s place in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s … in Old Hollywood, the decisions being made about women’s bodies were made in the interests of men – the powerful heads of motion pictures studios MGM, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., and RKO. As Aubrey Malone writes in Hollywood’s Second Sex: The Treatment of Women in the Film Industry, 1900-1999, “If you want to play in this business, you play like a man or you’re out. And if you happen to be a woman, better not mention it to anybody.” From the very infancy of America’s film industry, abortions were necessary body maintenance for women in the spotlight.
In fact, abortions – both chosen and coerced – were so common that women who refused to kill their pre-born children were, according to Vanity Fair, rare:
Ironically, the rebel of her day was Loretta Young – not because she had an abortion, but because she refused to have one. A devout Catholic, Young journeyed abroad in 1935 to recuperate from a “mystery illness,” after she found herself with child by Clark Gable under shady circumstances – and avoided the press. She gave birth to her daughter at home in Los Angeles. Young initially gave the child up for adoption – and then, a few months later, officially adopted her, according to The Fixers.
Clint Eastwood, it turns out, appears to have embraced a Hollywood norm – even during the classic era that so many view with such nostalgia. For the storytellers of the Silver Screen, abortion was as American as apple pie.
