How ‘Rawhide’ Launched Clint Eastwood to Stardom: An Exclusive Look Behind the Scenes

The word icon is thrown around a lot, even when it’s not always appropriate, but are you going to tell Clint Eastwood that he’s not one? As iconic a star as there’s ever been, he made his name in a number of genres as both an actor and director, but his work in Westerns — consisting of only 10 films, ranging from the Man with No Name trilogy to Unforgiven and the television series Rawhide — has been legendary.  

And while it’s impossible to know just how many people remember the 1959 to 1965 Rawhide, representing only the start of his 70-year- career, it is the first project that not only brought Eastwood into people’s living rooms on a weekly basis, but eventually caused them to take notice of him.

Boyd Magers of WesternClippings.com, describes Rawhide as “one of TV’s epic westerns with more of an authentic feel than most others.” Of its origins, he adds, “Producer Charles Marquis Warren (who had been writer/director and producer at the start of Gunsmoke in 1955) had an idea for a show concerning a cattle driver but could get no network interested. The idea was shelved for three years and used as the inspiration for the feature Cattle Empire at Fox in ’58, with Joel McCrea. Among the cast were Paul Brinegar, Charles Gray, Steve Raines and Rocky Shahan, all of whom would become Rawhide regulars. This time when Warren pitched the idea of a series to CBS, they accepted.”

Eric Fleming was brought in for the role of Gil Favor, while Clint Eastwood was chosen to play the secondary role of Rowdy Yates.  

“Basically,” explains Magers, “the series depicted the exploits of the tough cattle drives between San Antonio, Texas and Sedalia, Missouri and San Antonio to Abilene, Kansas. Only the first two drives are episodically shown reaching their conclusion. The series owes much of its success to the top writers and directors employed over its eight-year run as well as a stirring theme song sung by Frankie Laine, written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington.”

Clint Eastwood moves into the starring role on ‘Rawhide’

David Greenland, author of Rawhide: A History of Television’s Longest Cattle Drive, points out, “Rawhide had the benefit of being launched at a time when Westerns were the dominant form of entertainment on television. Its creator and first producer, Charles Marquis Warren, was an old pro of the genre and assembled a large and diverse cast that came off as more authentic than the typical Hollywood cowboy. While Rawhide was never the huge hit that Gunsmoke, Bonanza or Wagon Train was, six of its eight seasons were always consistently well done and highly-entertaining.”

In the show’s seventh season, a huge shakeup took place that resulted in a new team of writers and producers being brought in, with Eastwood’s character moved up from a secondary position. The show’s newly arrived associate producer, Del Reisman, spoke to the Archive of American Television, stating, “We went in there and looked at some film and we all had the same idea at exactly the same time: The tall lean fellow over there on the edge of the frame has a great way of delivering lines; very droll, very dry. That was Clint Eastwood. And he was the sidekick, he was not the star. We thought, ‘We’ve got to build this guy up a little bit.’

“We didn’t know him,” he continued, “but he looked a little like Gary Cooper, an old Western star. So, we thought we will move him a little bit more into center stage, which we did. And so we worked very, very comfortably with him, and we turned out the shows.”

Series star Eric Fleming wasn’t happy, having been hired to be the star, and became more difficult to work with, resulting in CBS firing him. “And so,” said Reisman, “Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates was the centerpiece. And then Clint went to CBS and said, ‘You fired the wrong guy. I should have been fired,’ because he was very tired of the show.”

From ‘Rawhide’ to the Man with No Name

Although Reisman and those brought in with him would be fired, he did recall one historic — a word that seems appropriate given what would follow — moment that occurred, when Eastwood told him and another producer that his agent had gotten an offer for him to make a Western to be shot in Spain with an Italian director. ‘I don’t know about this,’ he said, ‘but they’re going to pay me $15,000,’ which to Clint at that time, to all of us, was quite a bit of money, so we talked about it. Clint finally said, ‘I think I’m going to take it. My wife has never been to Europe,’ so he went to Europe and made the motion picture A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which Sergio Leone directed.”

The film was brought back and screened, and it was immediately apparent why the audience in Europe — which had gotten the movie first — embraced Eastwood as a movie star. “You saw this little puff of cigar smoke,” Reisman mused, “and this guy comes around with the hat on and the look and everything, and you right away said, ‘My God, he’s a Western star!’ And that’s what happened.”

Elaborates David Greenland, “At first Eastwood’s portrayal of Rowdy Yates seemed to be above the status of tenderfoot, but not quite seasoned enough to be a top hand ready to take over as full-time trail boss. Eastwood himself referred to Rowdy as ‘idiot of the plains.’ Rowdy Yates was obviously more friendly and easy-going than the Man with No Name, a man of few words and more prone to violence, and whose background was always a mystery. Rowdy, on the other hand, had been a Confederate soldier from a Texas family who had spent time in a Union prison before becoming a cattle driver.

“But by the time his character did indeed become trail boss in the final season,” he adds, “Yates had lost a lot of his youthful charm, smiling a lot less and coming off as downright fatalistic. This could very well have been due to the fact that he had just finishing portraying the surly Man with No Name for the first time, in addition to the fact that he would have preferred leaving the series and having Eric Fleming continue as the lead.”

That being said, the actor certainly took a lot from Rawhide, telling interviewer Barbara Walters, “Having the security of being in a series week-in and week-out, gives you great flexibility. You can experiment with yourself, try a different scene in different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, ‘Well, I won’t do that again.’ We did honest stories, pretty much the way they happened. Now and then we may have rearranged things to heighten the drama, but in general, we respected the historical truth.”

Points out Greenland, “While Eastwood has said that Rawhide was a great learning experience both in terms of acting and filming techniques, he has usually credited film directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel with being his prime mentors. The late Ted Post, who directed several Rawhide episodes and some Eastwood features, told me he had given Clint some tips along the way.”

One could safely say that those tips just might have paid off.

Notes About Clint Eastwood:

• The Man with No Name Trilogy consists of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967), which together pulled in about 54 million dollars at the global box office.
• Clint Eastwood’s success with films like Hang ‘Em High and Unforgiven kept the American Western alive at the box office, the latter winning the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year (as well as Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman and Best Film Editing).
• Beyond Westerns, Eastwood has had great success with war films as well, including the Civil War (1976’s The Outlaw Josey Wales) and the 1983 American invasion of Grenada in Heartbreak Ridge (1986).
• Eastwood made his directorial debut on 1971’s Play Misty for Me.
• Among his most popular films was the Dirty Harry series in which he played San Francisco detective Harry Callahan. Entries in that series are Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988).