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.
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.”
