New Book Unearths Secrets Involving Clint Eastwood’s Marriage to Maggie Johnson
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key TakeawaysClint Eastwood was married to Maggie Johnson from 1953 to 1984, but according to a new book, the Dirty Harry legend wasn’t faithful.
Far from it. “By many accounts, including his own, he more or less comported himself as if he were a bachelor,” Shawn Levy writes in Clint: The Man and the Movies. Levy claims Maggie knew all about her husband’s wandering eye and says Clint reportedly told Photoplay magazine in 1963, “One thing Mag had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t be married.”
Getty ImagesClint is also quoted as adding, “I’m independent … and [Maggie] accepts me as I am and doesn’t strangle me with female possessiveness.”
AdvertisementAdvertisement#_R_2lokr8lb2mav5ubsddbH1_ iframe AdvertisementAdvertisement#_R_4lokr8lb2mav5ubsddbH1_ iframeYears later, Clint told Playboy that he thought Maggie was “a woman who knows how much room I need.”
In his book, Levy says Clint would pick up women in his acting classes, on the studio lots where he was working and even in the apartment complex where he lived with Maggie.
The Rawhide star’s dalliances even produced children: He and stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis had daughter Kimber Lynn in 1964.
Cover ImagesClint also had a longtime romance with Sondra Locke, whom he cast in his 1975 Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales. Their affair ended in 1989. Sondra writes in her 1997 autobiography, The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey, that she had had two abortions and a tubal ligation because he didn’t want any more children — a fact Clint denies.
Sondra also claims Clint had told her that “there was no real relationship left” between him and Maggie. The pair divorced in 1984 after 31 years of marriage.
