Before there was Depp v. Heard, there was Locke v. Eastwood. In 1989, actor Sondra Locke sued Clint Eastwood, her romantic partner of about 13 years, for palimony, and the tabloids went wild. It was a celebrity bust up replete with accusations of abuse and wiretapping, all the more shocking because Locke and Eastwood had been seen as a golden couple, and had made six hit films together. Eastwood was 58 at the time of the lawsuit—the same age Johnny Depp is now; Locke, who died in 2018, was 44. She said she thought Eastwood had ended their relationship in a funk of bad feelings “because he wasn’t number one at the box office anymore, or because he was facing his mortality,” as biographer Patrick McGilligan put it.
The similarities between the two cases are striking—a younger, blond actor, viewed as a lesser talent, was pitted against a powerful male Hollywood icon—and so it seems odd that it hasn’t been mentioned in the reams of hot takes about Depp-Heard that have continued into this week, when their jury is about to go out for deliberations.
But then, Eastwood-Locke happened at a different time in celebrity culture, when celebrity media consisted mainly of People, the National Enquirer, and Star. There wasn’t endless coverage of the case in major newspapers or on the TV news; no lofty op-eds about its meaning. Though Locke battled Eastwood in court for 19 months—developing breast cancer during the ordeal—the court proceedings were not televised; her lawsuit came just before the launch of Court TV in 1991. Celebrity was not yet the lens through which we seem to see just about everything.
And yet, the implications of the case were similar, in the sense that Locke arguably lost her career because of it, despite claiming Eastwood had been abusive. At one point, she asked Judge Dana Senit Henry to keep Eastwood away from their Bel-Air home “because I know him to have a terrible temper…and he has frequently been abusive to me.” (Eastwood denied her allegations.) But Locke’s abuse claims were not even the focus of the media coverage, nor have they stuck to Eastwood. What people seemed to care most about was the money.
Locke’s daring to ask for palimony seemed to strike some as untoward, since she was still married to her childhood friend Gordon Anderson, who was gay (they had a platonic relationship). And palimony itself—often wrongly depicted in those days as a way for women to bilk hard-working men—was a hot-button issue at a time of peak backlash against the women’s movement. (Susan Faludi’s feminist classic Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women came out in 1991, exposing a media-driven strategy of blaming the victim and the feminist movement itself for women’s oppression.) When Locke died in 2018 of cardiac arrest brought on by bone and breast cancer, cruel commenters online called her a “gold digger,” and Jezebel criticized The Hollywood Reporter for running an obituary that referred to her in its original headline as an “embittered ex,” and seemed to portray her as “money-grubbing.”
Meanwhile, Locke was an interesting artist—not just an actor but a director, producer, and singer. In 1986, she directed a bizarre comic horror flick, Ratboy, which was hailed by French critics at the Deauville American Film Festival. Years before she met Eastwood, she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968). It could be argued that Eastwood’s midlife success—which comprised some of the highest-grossing pictures of his career up to that point, including the orangutan-buddy action-comedy Every Which Way But Loose (1978)—was due in no small part to his steamy onscreen chemistry with Locke.
They started dating in 1975 on the set of The Outlaw Josey Wales, while he was still married, as well, to his first wife, Maggie Johnson. Locke wrote in her autobiography, The Good, the Bad, & the Very Ugly, that her attraction to Eastwood was immediate and powerful, and that he used to sing to her, “She made me monogamous.” That didn’t prevent him from cheating on her, however, as well as secretly fathering two children with another woman, Jacelyn Reeves, in the late ‘80s, while he and Locke were still together. Locke, meanwhile, alleged in her palimony suit that Eastwood had pressured her have two abortions as well as a tubal ligation, or sterilization surgery. (Eastwood denied these allegations.)
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