For thirteen years, she had stood beside Clint Eastwood on the screen, in a western, in a police thriller, in two comedies with an orangutan. But in April 1989, while she was at work directing a film of her own, the locks were changed on the Bel Air house she had spent years rebuilding. Her belongings were packed up and taken away. Within weeks, she was suing him.

By one account in the case that followed, the man she had lived with called her a part-time roommate. By the end of 1990, she was in chemotherapy, signing a studio deal worth $1. 5 million. Not one of the more than thirty films she brought to that studio was ever made.

Who was really paying for that deal? And why did nobody tell her? The story begins in July 1967, with a young woman from Tennessee walking into an audition to play a girl of fourteen. She was twenty-three.

She had bound her chest flat, bleached her eyebrows pale, and chosen her hair and clothes to look like a child who climbed trees. The date of birth she gave was six years later than the true one. She was born Sandra Louise Smith on May 28, 1944. She never knew her father, a soldier who left her mother before the baby arrived.

Her mother Pauline worked in a pencil factory. In 1948, Pauline married Alfred Lach, a man who owned a building firm, and the little girl took his surname. She grew up in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and in the small town of Wartrace nearby, a long way from any film studio. By the accounts that survive, she was a studious child, finishing high school at the top of her class in Shelbyville with an average of 97 percent.

She read hungrily, and years later she would name J. P. Donleavy and Iris Murdoch among her favorite writers. She went to Middle Tennessee State University to study theater in 1962 and stayed about a year, then left to work.

Nashville gave her a living if not a career: receptionist, bookkeeper, a job at radio station WSM in 1964, then its television station the year after. She modeled clothes for the fashion page of the Tennessean. She acted in a handful of plays. She changed the spelling of her first name from Sandra to Sondra because she disliked being called Sandy.

There was one constant in all of it. His name was Gordon Anderson. They had found each other as teenagers in Tennessee, bonding over the books of J. R.

R. Tolkien, and he became her closest friend, her coach, her confidant, and something like a brother. Gordon was gay, and Gordon believed in her more fiercely than anyone else did. When word came that a studio was searching the country for an unknown to play the lead girl in a new film, it was Gordon who helped her become someone she was not.

The film was *The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter*, adapted from Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel. Warner Brothers–Seven Arts would release it, Robert Ellis Miller would direct it, and Alan Arkin was already cast. The casting director, Marian Dougherty, wanted a newcomer for Mick Kelly. Turner Classic Movies records how the part was described: Mick was to be an unspoiled tomboy of fourteen, not beautiful but appealing, not grown up but not a child.

She was not fourteen, and she was not a newcomer to work. So she and Gordon made her one: the chest binding, the pale brows, the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the six missing years. Another young actress, Bonnie Bedelia, later said the production decided she was too old for the part. The girl from Nashville never gave them the chance to decide that about her.

By one account, she was competing with 590 other young women from the South and New York. She was twenty-three, presenting as seventeen to play a girl of fourteen, and reportedly paid about $15,000 once she had the part, though she later claimed it was less than a third of that. The finished film would earn about $1. 1 million in the United States and Canada.

She got the part. Filming began on September 18, 1967, in Selma, Alabama, with the great cameraman James Wong Howe behind the lens. One week later, on September 25, she married Gordon Anderson at the First Presbyterian Church in Nashville. The marriage was real on paper, and on paper it stayed.

By testimony that later came out in court, it was never consummated. A sworn statement in 1989 reportedly described it as tantamount to sister and brother. Decades later, the obituaries would say they lived like sister and brother. They never divorced.

When she died fifty-one years later, he was still her husband. The studio presented her as its discovery, a teenager plucked from nowhere. The press materials left out her year at university and her life in Nashville. When the film opened on July 31, 1968, Sondra Locke was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the first screen role she had ever played.

She was nominated for a Golden Globe as well, and for Most Promising Newcomer at the Globes. By one account, she was the oldest nominee in her category, and she made sure nobody knew it. Both awards went to Ruth Gordon for *Rosemary’s Baby*. There were smaller honors: the exhibitors who ran America’s movie theaters gave her an award at their convention in Kansas City, and in the Laurel Awards she came second for best supporting performance by an actress that year.

That year, she gave an interview that sounds, from this distance, like a woman reading her own future. “Sometimes I wonder whether I would have ever taken the drastic steps I did but for Gordon,” she said of herself. “There must be a core of iron. ” She would need it.

The age she had invented would follow her into print for almost thirty years. In September 1996, when a wire service report gave her age in a courtroom story, it printed 49. She was 52. The image had been built in a single summer, and she would spend the rest of her life inside it.

The Oscar went to Ruth Gordon, and the telephone that should have kept ringing for the girl from Shelbyville rang less and less. Twentieth Century Fox signed her to a three-picture deal worth $150,000, the kind of contract that told a young actress she had arrived. Only one of the three pictures was ever made, a film called *Cover Me Babe*, released in 1970 with Robert Forster. It did nothing for her.

The other two simply never happened. It would not be the last time a contract with her name on it turned out to be mostly air. In December 1969, she appeared semi-nude in a pictorial in *Playboy*. The *Telegraph*’s obituary would call it reluctant.

For an actress sold to the public as an innocent, it was a strange turn, and it says something about how few doors were opening. The parts she wanted went elsewhere. By one account she pursued or was offered roles in *Last Summer*, *My Sweet Charlie*, *They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? *, and *True Grit*, and none of them became hers.

She turned down others herself, among them *The Sterile Cuckoo* and *Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon*. The films that did come were odd ones. In 1971, she appeared in *Willard*, a horror picture about killer rats. It was a hit, and the *Independent* judged it likely her best-known film that did not star Eastwood.

In 1972 came *A Reflection of Fear*, which featured one of the first transgender characters in American film. There was *Death Game*, made in 1974 and released three years later, and *The Second Coming of Suzanne*, which by one account found a cult following only much later. Each was a job; none was the next step up from an Academy Award nomination. Between films, there was television: *The F.

B. I. *, *Kung Fu*, *Planet of the Apes*, *Barnaby Jones*, *Night Gallery*. Steady work, but not the career the nomination had seemed to promise.

“Success in Hollywood,” she said years later, “was a matter of some fluky thing that can’t be described. ”

In 1972, the fluky thing walked into the room. Clint Eastwood was already a star, directing as well as acting. He was preparing his fourth film as a director, a picture called *Breezy*, and Sondra Locke came to audition for it.

She did not get the part. Three years later, in 1975, she was called in for a western called *The Outlaw Josey Wales*. The part was Laura Lee, the love interest of the outlaw hero. The original director, Philip Kaufman, had cast her—Turner Classic Movies says it was done against somebody’s wishes, though its wording leaves unclear whose.

Then Kaufman and Eastwood fell out, and Eastwood took over as director himself. The actress Kaufman had cast was now playing opposite the man who was running the picture. The *Independent* reports that she accepted a lower salary to take the role. The company went on location to Page, Arizona.

In October 1975, during the filming, she and Eastwood became lovers. Each of them was married. She had Gordon, the husband who was a brother in all but name; Eastwood had Maggie, his wife of more than twenty years, and by one account two children at home in Carmel. Turner Classic Movies notes that both of them were publicly married to other people when it began, and that the affair became public only after their work together was well underway.

He was born on May 31, 1930. She was fourteen years younger, though one review of her later book called him seventeen years her senior, because the date she had invented in 1967 was still doing its work. The western was a triumph. *The Outlaw Josey Wales* was made for about $3.

7 million and took nearly $32 million—every dollar Warner Brothers put in came back almost nine times over. A few years earlier, a studio had promised her three pictures and made one. Now she stood beside a man whose single film had paid for itself many times over at the studio that released his pictures. In time, the film would be added to the National Film Registry.

On the screen she was Laura Lee, the outlaw’s love. Off it, she was something harder to name: the partner of the star whose pictures kept that studio busy, the leading lady he had chosen, the woman who would share his houses for the next thirteen years. Over the next seven years, Sondra Locke appeared in five more feature films, and every one was a Clint Eastwood picture. The first was *The Gauntlet* in 1977, a police thriller once planned around Steve McQueen and Barbra Streisand.

She played a prostitute, and according to Turner Classic Movies it was the only film of her career in which she was billed above the title alongside him. It would not happen again. Then came the comedies. In 1978, Eastwood made *Every Which Way but Loose*, a rough comedy about street fighting with an orangutan named Manis as his co-star.

Sondra Locke played Lynn Halsey-Taylor, a country singer, singing her own numbers on the soundtrack. The film was the second-highest-grossing release of its year. Two years later came the sequel *Any Which Way You Can*, and she played the same singer again. She did not much like being there.

In an interview with the *Los Angeles Times* in 1996, she was blunt about why she had made the orangutan pictures at all: she was there because “I was in love and because he wanted me to be there. ” Of sharing the billing with the ape, she said simply, “I didn’t want to be up there with the orangutan. ” Also in 1980 came *Bronco Billy*, in which she played a circus assistant. Then in 1983, *Sudden Impact*, the fourth Dirty Harry film.

She played a woman seeking revenge on the men who raped her and her sister. The accounts differ about where the picture came from. Turner Classic Movies says the story had first been written for her and then reworked into a Dirty Harry film. Another account says it had been her own project, one she hoped to direct, until Eastwood bought the material and turned it into his.

Either way, the picture that might have been hers became his. She was reportedly paid $350,000, a distance from the $15,000 of fifteen years earlier. Sondra Locke later said that Eastwood insisted she work only with him, and that he also wanted her to use his agent. For seven years, the films she made were the films he made, released by the studio that released his.

The one exception proves how firm the rule was: in 1982, the singer Rosemary Clooney asked for her personally to play Clooney’s own life story in a television film for CBS. There was almost nothing else. The critics noticed what the arrangement did to her. By one account, Gene Siskel called her wasted; Vincent Canby, more kindly, found her occasionally genuinely funny.

Neither was describing the woman who had been nominated for an Academy Award in her first role. There is a darker pattern in those films, too. The *Independent* counted it: in four of the six films she made with Eastwood, the character she played was raped or nearly raped. At home, the language between them was softer than anything on the screen.

Her memoir, published years later, records their pet names for each other: Hobbit and Snow White, a pair of names out of story books. There was another name, too. Eastwood, she wrote, asked her to call him Daddy. He was older, richer, and more powerful, and he wanted to be called by the name a child gives a father.

When Sondra Locke moved in with Clint Eastwood, she had a husband and he had a wife. Neither marriage was ended. Her husband was Gordon Anderson, the friend from Tennessee, the sculptor she had married one week into filming her first picture. He was gay, and their marriage had never been a marriage in the ordinary sense, but it was legal, and she never dissolved it.

His wife was Maggie Johnson, whom he had married in 1953. According to the published record, Maggie hired a lawyer in 1978 to pursue a legal separation, and a notarized separation agreement took effect in January 1979. The divorce itself did not come until years later. Papers were filed on May 18, 1984, and it was final on November 19 of that year.

Maggie’s settlement was reported at between $20 and $25 million. By Sondra Locke’s account, Maggie wanted nothing to do with her. She was barred from Maggie’s property and not even allowed to telephone the house at Pebble Beach. So for most of their life together, the couple lived as husband and wife without being husband and wife.

Sondra said they did not need papers to validate the commitments they had made. It was a romantic thing to say, and she seems to have meant it. It would also prove to be the most expensive belief she ever held. Why did she never divorce Gordon?

The two sides tell it differently. Eastwood’s authorized biographer, Richard Schickel, put the trouble between them down to her staying married to Anderson, reportedly for tax reasons. Her version was that she offered to divorce Gordon if Eastwood would agree to go to couples’ therapy with her, and that he refused. Eastwood had his own way of putting it: “She’s married to someone who doesn’t work.

So what does that do? That makes me the sole provider. ” She answered that he had never supported Gordon at all and that she had supported Gordon herself. What is not in dispute is where they lived.

At first they moved between Eastwood’s houses in Carmel and Sherman Oaks and rented homes in San Francisco and Tiburon. Sherman Oaks never felt like hers; it was Maggie’s house. So Eastwood bought another: an estate in Bel Air, built in 1931, at 846 Stradella Road. He paid $1.

125 million for it. It ran to about five thousand square feet and needed work, so she gave it the work. The remodeling took three years, and she oversaw it. This was the house she would later say she believed he had given her.

When the divorce was final in November 1984, the last legal obstacle on his side was gone. He was free to marry. He did not marry her, and she did not divorce Gordon. There were other gifts: a Mercedes, and a house in West Hollywood where Gordon Anderson lived.

Gordon was more than a legal husband kept for appearances. He was her muse, her acting coach, and her agent. From 1982, by one account, Eastwood leased the West Hollywood property to him. So the man she lived with owned the roof over her head, and he also owned the roof over the head of the man she was married to.

The law had something very particular to say about couples like them. In 1976, the California Supreme Court decided a case brought by a woman named Michelle Triola against the actor Lee Marvin, with whom she had lived from 1964 to 1970 without marrying. On December 27 of that year, in an opinion written by Justice Stanley Mosk, the court held that agreements between unmarried cohabitants are valid and enforceable unless they are explicitly based on sexual consideration. The newspapers gave the idea a name: palimony.

But *Marvin v. Marvin* did not give an unmarried partner a share of anything. It only allowed her to try to prove that a promise had been made and that it had been broken. After all of it, Michelle Triola was awarded $14,000 for what the court called rehabilitation purposes.

In 1979, by her own account, Sondra Locke had an operation at UCLA Medical Center that meant she would never carry a child. She said it was a tubal ligation. She was thirty-five. The timing is hard to ignore: that same year, the notarized separation agreement between Eastwood and his wife took effect.

In the same year, the woman he lived with gave up the chance of a family of her own. It came after two other losses. In the late 1970s, by her own account, she had become pregnant by Eastwood twice, and twice she had ended the pregnancy. She later said she had been reluctant about the second.

Her memoir, published in 1997, said that he had urged both abortions and the sterilization. Eastwood has always denied it. “I adamantly deny and deeply resent the accusation,” he said, and he maintained that the decisions had been hers and that he had encouraged her to consult a physician. What can be said is that she remembered it as his wish.

She wanted to direct. Her first chance came in the mid-1980s. The picture was called *Ratboy*, a strange fable about a creature half human and half rat, found in a dump near Los Angeles by two men who want to put him on show for money. She directed it and played the promoter who becomes his protector.

It was made for Malpaso, Eastwood’s own production company at Warner Brothers, and produced by Fritz Manes. One report put the budget at $8 million. By her own account, this was the moment the relationship began to fray. “I believe that he really did not want me to direct,” she said later.

She remembered him saying about the film, “Well, I’m not going to put my name on it. ” She noted dryly that the Malpaso name went on it anyway. *Ratboy* opened in 1986. In America, it flopped.

Roger Ebert reviewed it on November 10, 1986, opening by calling it “a perplexing movie about a perplexing hero,” and ending with a sentence that must have stung: “Ratboy is very odd, but not in an interesting way. ” For her performance in it, she was reportedly nominated for a Golden Raspberry. In Europe it was a different story; it was praised at the Deauville Festival. By the end of 1988, the strain was out in the open.

By her account, she confronted him on December 29, 1988, about the way he had been treating her. A week later, on January 6, 1989, they made what is reported to have been their last public appearance together at the American Cinema Awards. Then, by her account, came the telephone: she later wrote that in early March 1989 he had put a tap on the telephone at home and listened to her calls with a divorce lawyer, Norman Oberstein. Another account says Eastwood acknowledged tapping her phone and explained that he had been the victim of a stalker.

Theresa Russell was in front of the camera playing an undercover vice officer, and Sondra Locke was behind it when the house on Stradella Road was closed to her. The film was *Impulse*. Russell played Lottie, a police officer working undercover posing as a prostitute, with George Dzundza and Jeff Fahey playing the men around her. The script was by John DeMarco and Lee Chapman, and the finished film would run 109 minutes.

Early in April 1989, by her account, Eastwood made the situation plain, on the 3rd or the 4th of the month. She later wrote that he told her she was sitting on his only real estate in Los Angeles, then left. About a week later, while she was at work on the film, men employed by Malpaso came to the house in Bel Air. By her account, they changed the locks, packed up her belongings and took them away to storage, and posted guards at the property.

The versions of that day differ in their details. One obituary says a moving company packed everything into storage. The Associated Press, drawing on her own later telling, said her belongings were placed outside a home she believed Eastwood had given her. Another account says her things were taken to Gordon Anderson’s house in West Hollywood.

Her memoir went further still, saying that her clothes were thrown out and her car was vandalized. There is a moment in the *Telegraph*’s obituary that, if it happened as reported, is the saddest image in the whole story: it says she fainted on the set when Gordon Anderson read her a lawyer’s letter demanding that she leave the house she believed was hers. On April 26, 1989, she filed suit against Clint Eastwood. The papers called it a palimony suit.

According to one account, she asked for $70 million, though that figure appears in a single source. She claimed breach of contract, emotional distress, and forcible entry. She asked for half of what he had earned during their years together, for an equal division of their property, and for title to two houses: the Bel Air house and the house in West Hollywood where Gordon lived. By one account, the suit also claimed possession of stolen goods.

She also named, apparently in public for the first time, the two abortions and the operation she said had been his wish. A ruling went against her. By one account, a judge ruled that she had no right to remain in the house. The home on Stradella Road would stay his, as it had always been his on paper.

She went back to work. She finished *Impulse*, which came out in 1990. Roger Ebert reviewed it on April 20 of that year. The critic who had dismissed *Ratboy* four years earlier found a different director: “She seems to have learned a lot about directing since then.

” He called the film good to look at and painfully intense at times. By one account, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert together gave it two thumbs up on their television program. In the depositions that followed, the man she had lived with for thirteen years found a word for her. By the accounts of the case, he called her his roommate.

Then, by one biographer’s account, he narrowed it further to part-time roommate. The *Independent* later reported a third version: occasional roommate. The defense was built on her marriage. She was married to Gordon Anderson, his side argued, and she had been married to him the entire time.

According to the *Independent*, Eastwood also said that she spent nearly all of her time with Anderson—98 to 100 percent of it, as he put it—and that he had grown bored with the arrangement. Then, in the middle of the case, she learned something that no deposition had prepared her for. An investigative journalist told her that Eastwood had two young children with another woman. Their mother was Jacelyn Reeves.

The boy, Scott, had been born on March 21, 1986. The girl, Kathryn, had been born on February 2, 1988. On both birth certificates, where the father’s name should have been, the record reads, “Father declined. ” The affair was first reported publicly in 1990 in an exposé in the *Star*.

By one account, a nurse confirmed to her that Eastwood was the father. Both children had been conceived while Eastwood was still living with her. In her memoir, she put it in one plain sentence: “Two babies had been born during the last three years of our relationship, and they weren’t mine. ”

Then, in the late summer of 1990, her body gave her another battle.

The accounts differ on whether it was August or September, but the diagnosis was the same: she had breast cancer. She underwent a double mastectomy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, followed by chemotherapy. By her account, she believed the stress in her personal life had been her enemy. By one account, she told him about the diagnosis.

By her account, Eastwood never reached out to her. One reviewer of her later memoir wrote that he offered neither support nor sympathy. “He doesn’t care if I live or die,” she said. It is her account of his silence.

There was one small mercy in that hospital year: during her care, she met a young doctor, by one account an intern assigned to her checkup after surgery. His name was Scott Cunneen, and he would be her companion for the next eleven years. The legal fight went on through all of it, lasting nineteen months from the spring of 1989 to the end of 1990. The settlement came on November 21, 1990.

Eastwood agreed to pay her $450,000 “on account of past employment and locks contentions” and to convey certain real property to her. By other accounts, the property was the house in West Hollywood where Gordon lived, reportedly valued at $2. 2 million, and the settlement also included monthly support. When Maggie Johnson divorced him in 1984 after a marriage of thirty-one years, her settlement was reported at between $20 and $25 million.

Sondra Locke, after thirteen years, left with $450,000 and a house for Gordon. The difference was a marriage certificate. Six days later, she signed something else. On November 27, 1990, Sondra Locke signed a contract with Warner Brothers.

A California appeals court would later set out its terms in detail. It came in two parts. The first was a first-look deal: for three years, Warner would pay her $250,000 a year, and in return, she would bring any picture she wanted to develop to Warner before she offered it to anyone else. The studio would then have thirty days to accept the project or turn it down.

The second part was a directing deal worth $750,000 on pay-or-play terms. When she signed, she was not a well woman—according to the *Hollywood Reporter*, she was undergoing chemotherapy after her double mastectomy at the time of the settlement. The studio gave her an office on the lot, gave her an assistant, and paid her in full the guaranteed sum of $1. 5 million.

She worked. She brought them projects, more than thirty of them, over those three years. One, by one account, had Arnold Schwarzenegger already attached to star. By another account, the list included scripts that later became *Junior* and *Addicted to Love*.

Warner developed none of them. It did not hire her to direct any of the pictures it was already developing for itself. She had the office, the assistant, and the money, and she had nothing to direct. Later in court, two pieces of testimony suggested an answer.

A producer named Joseph Terzi testified that he had told a Warner executive, Bob Brassel, that Sondra Locke had a deal on the lot and that she was interested in five projects. He heard nothing back. Then, Terzi said, Brassel told him plainly: “Joe, we’re not going to work with her. And that’s Clint’s deal.

” Her development assistant, Mary Wellnitz, gave a sworn statement about a conversation with Lance Young, then a senior vice president of production at the studio. He began kindly: “Mary, I want you to know that I think Sondra is a wonderful woman and very talented. ” Then, she said, he told her that Bob Daly, the head of the studio, would tell her to forget it. And then came the sentence that summed up three years: “They are not going to make a movie with her here.

”

Here, at last, is the answer to the question this story began with. The appeals court set it out in a single passage: Eastwood had agreed to reimburse Warner for the cost of her contract if her projects were not produced. Sondra Locke did not know, and early in the second year of her deal, Warner charged $975,000 to the budget of an Eastwood film. The film was *Unforgiven*.

It would win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was a western. Her life with Eastwood had begun on the set of a western, *The Outlaw Josey Wales*, in the Arizona desert in 1975. Seventeen years later, the cost of her contract sat in the budget of another one.

Her case was that Warner never intended to make films with her at all and had entered the agreement only to help Eastwood settle his litigation with her. The studio had chosen to pay. It had never chosen to play. Had she known who was paying, she said, she would never have accepted the deal, because it showed the studio had no investment in her and did not take her seriously as a filmmaker.

In March 1994, she took it to court. On February 17, 1995, a judge ruled that Warner Brothers had done nothing the law could punish. Her suit, filed on March 10, 1994, made four claims: that Warner had denied her the benefit of her deal because she was a woman; that it had broken the contract by refusing to consider her projects at all; that it had broken the duty of good faith that every contract carries; and that it had committed fraud because it never intended to honor the deal when it signed. Warner answered that it had considered every project she brought, and that turning them down was not a breach because the odds of getting any project into development are slim.

The trial court agreed. She appealed, and in June 1995 she opened a second front, suing Clint Eastwood himself for fraud, for intentional interference with her ability to earn a living, and for breach of fiduciary duty. Her lawyer, Peggy Garrity, called his conduct “the ultimate betrayal. ” He called her case “a dime novel plot” and said it was about getting something for nothing.

The trial began in September 1996 in the Superior Court in Burbank. On September 10, after the jury was sworn, Judge David M. Schacter issued an order from the bench: all proceedings held outside the presence of the jury would be closed to the public and the press, to protect the jury from what it might learn through the media. The Los Angeles television station KNBC, together with the *Los Angeles Times* and California Community News, asked a higher court to overturn the order.

On September 17, the Court of Appeal did. The evidence that followed showed that Eastwood had arranged her directing deal at Warner and that he had secretly agreed with the studio to cover its costs. Her income in 1994, she told the court, had been zero, and in 1995, zero again. By one account, she was asking for $2 million; another account puts it at $2.

5 million. The jury went out, and on September 24, 1996, while the jurors were still deliberating, the two sides settled. The terms were never disclosed. Outside the courthouse, Peggy Garrity told reporters that ten of the twelve jurors had favored her client; two had sided with Eastwood.

Nine were needed for a verdict. By one report, the jurors had already moved on to the question of damages when the settlement came. “We believe that it’s very clear that the jury believed her,” Garrity said. “Her rights have been vindicated.

” The forewoman, Brenda Williams, spoke too. She said she believed that keeping the payment terms secret had been a fraud by Eastwood and by Warner. “Her career has been ruined,” she said. Eastwood’s lawyer, Raymond C.

Fischer, said the settlement was “quite mutually satisfying to both parties,” that his client believed he had always acted in good faith and tried to help her career, that he found the litigation extremely regrettable, and that he wished her well. The settlement, Fischer added, included terms to prevent further litigation. She spoke to reporters as well: “I don’t have to worry about working. ” The suit, she insisted, was never about money.

“It was about my fighting for my professional rights. ” The wire report on the settlement added one more line: she had directed *Ratboy* and *Impulse*, and she had not directed anything since. At the bottom of the wire story, two ages printed as plain fact: Eastwood, 66; Locke, 49. She was 52.

Twenty-nine years after a girl from Nashville took six years off her life to win a part, the newspapers were still printing the number she had invented. The appeal against Warner came back the following summer, and it went her way. On August 26, 1997, the California Court of Appeal, in an opinion by Presiding Justice Joan D. Klein, revived two of her claims, for breach of contract and for fraud.

When a contract gives one side the power to decide, the court said, that power must be used in good faith. Warner was free to reject her projects on their merits, but there was a real question for a jury as to whether Warner had categorically refused to work with her, whatever the merits were. A jury, the court added, could infer fraud from a failure even to try to perform. Her claims of sex discrimination were set aside because her lawyers had raised them too late.

On November 19, 1997, the state’s highest court declined to review the decision. The case would go back for trial. In November 1997, she decided to tell the rest of it in her own words. The book was called *The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly*, a play on one of his own films.

The title, she told the Associated Press, was applicable to the story. “I try to cover the good years as well as the bad and the ugly,” she said. One reviewer found it full of fairy tales and pet names. Another found it a book of revenge.

In it, she was honest about her own feelings: “Even though I loved him deeply, I never viewed him as a highly evolved person. ” The response was swift. By one account, Eastwood’s lawyers sent a warning letter. An interview on *Entertainment Tonight* was cancelled, and she was bumped from the *Oprah Winfrey Show*.

The day after her book came out, a television special called *Eastwood on Eastwood* premiered on TNT, and she was not in it. His daughter Alison, by one account, said of the memoir, “I actually lost a lot of respect for her. ” Eastwood himself was harsher: “There’s never been anything truthful that she’s stated. She’s a professional victim.

” To the *Independent*, he put it another way: “Are they victims or are they volunteers? ”

The case against Warner Brothers, sent back for trial, never reached a verdict either. In May 1999, by then represented by a new lawyer, Neil Papiano, she settled with the studio out of court. The terms again were never made public.

Her former lawyer, Peggy Garrity, reportedly wrote later that it was many millions more than the Eastwood settlement. Sondra Locke was said to feel elated and to have called it a happy ending. Two months later, on July 27, 1999, the California Supreme Court ruled on the order that had tried to close her trial. In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice George, it held that the public and the press have a right of access to ordinary civil trials and that the closure order had denied them that right.

The case still bears her name: *Locke v. Warner Bros. *, which law students now read in their contracts courses to learn what good faith means. Her own career never recovered its footing.

She directed four films in all. After *Impulse* came a television film, *Death in Small Doses* in 1995, and *Trading Favors* with Rosanna Arquette in 1997. Nothing more from a major studio. She acted again in two small films at the turn of the century.

Much later, she executive produced *Knock Knock* with Keanu Reeves and made *Ray Meets Helen* with Keith Carradine, which reached a handful of theaters in the last year of her life. When she died, the actress Evan Rachel Wood, who had appeared as a small child in *Death in Small Doses*, wrote that Sondra Locke directed her in her first film when she was four years old: “She was fantastic. ” In 2013, she said she believed she had been blacklisted for going to court. In 2001, by one account, she bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and had it redesigned to resemble the house on Stradella Road.

For about twenty-five years after her surgery, by one account, the cancer stayed away. It came back in 2015 and reached her bones. Sondra Locke died at home in Los Angeles on November 3, 2018. She was 74.

The cause on her death certificate was cardiac arrest brought on by breast and bone cancer. Gordon Anderson, still her husband after fifty-one years, reported the death. By one report, she was cremated six days later. Nobody announced it.

The county was told, and the world was not. Forty-one days later, on December 13, a website called Radar Online found the death certificate and reported it. The Associated Press said it was unclear why the news had taken nearly six weeks to surface. The next day, December 14, Clint Eastwood’s new film opened.

It was called *The Mule*, the story of a man reconciling with his former wife as she dies of cancer. He made no public comment about her death. In February, when the Academy that had once nominated her for her very first role presented its in-memoriam reel, her name was not in it. By one report, she left an estate of about $20 million to the husband who had been at her side since they were teenagers.

Seventy-four years, fifty-one of them married to Gordon, thirteen with the man whose films made her famous. Forty-one days of silence before anyone was told. She once explained why she had called her book what she called it, and the answer is the closest thing she left to a last word: “Also that in even the worst ugly things there can sometimes be a lot that will make you a better person. ” The locks had been changed on the house in Bel Air, and it was never hers again.

But the record she left behind cannot be locked. It sits in the court reporter’s volumes and the law books, open to anyone who wants to read it, in a case that bears her name and holds that the doors of a courtroom must stay open.