COVER STORY : His Own Man . . . Always : Clint Eastwood used to be the actor with no name. Respect came, but only after years of spaghetti cowboy and Dirty Harry jokes. Now, as he saddles up again, he still deals with life on his own terms.

NEW YORK —  He doesn’t say much, so you find the clues where you can. Like his shoes: Big, spongy oxfords with a thick rubber sole and rust-red uppers that don’t look like leather. Real goofy ballast for The Man With No Name and the first giveaway that maybe you and the rest of America have figured it wrong.

Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s laconic cipher--sex and violence rolled into one lean, inscrutable superstar package--is ambling around his Manhattan hotel suite in a pair of weekend Dad-type shoes, bad ones at that. George Bush of the prairie.

“Hi,” he says in his whispery tough-guy voice, looking down from up by the ceiling of the “California Suite” (translation: yellow color scheme and an absence of crown molding) with a lazy bemused grin, the kind of cocky unself-consciousness needed to wear those godawful shoes. He chews gum and keeps smiling.

This is the guy who built his screen persona out of a purposed taciturnity and whose private self is said to be not much more garrulous. As actor Richard Harris, one of Eastwood’s co-stars in his new film “Unforgiven” says, “Clint has no persona. He is that guy you see on screen.”

“Want anything?” Eastwood asks, squinting a little and nodding at a sideboard stocked with bottles of soft drinks and waters of various pedigrees. The remains of his lunch litters the table; the suite smells faintly of onions. He takes a swig from a bottle of Perrier, runs a hand through his scruffy buzz-cut and chews his gum.

All his teammates swear up and down that “Clint is the best,” the coolest, handsomest guy going.

“A very, gentle, soft decent person,” says Joe Hyams, his point man at Warners for 15 years.

“Very down to earth,” adds Joel Cox, his film editor for the past 17 years. “Confident without any ego.”

“It’s real simple,” says David Valdes, Eastwood’s longtime executive producer. “Clint is just the greatest film star around.”

Yeah, but does he actually talk?

“Sure,” says Eastwood, easing his Gulliver-size frame onto a sofa with a graceful awkwardness, crossing his feet at the ankles, the shoes a bulky anchor to an otherwise lissome craft. “We can talk about anything you want.”

He made his name as a cowboy of few words. Rowdy Yates of TV’s “Rawhide” jump-started his film career in the mid-’60s by playing the Man With No Name who had even fewer lines in those Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns. Eastwood’s mouth was the permanent resting place for a series of smoldering cigarillos and a terseness that would become his signature during the next four decades. A famous Eastwood story: He dumped three pages of dialogue in Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars” to utter the lines, “I knew someone like you once.” He wanted, the actor said, “more mystery to the person.”

He came home to play more tough guys who refused to dance. “Hang ‘Em High,” “Coogan’s Bluff” and “Where Eagles Dare” were films that capitalized on Eastwood’s almost inconographic acting style. His soft menacing voice--which would be epitomized in his muttered taunt in the 1983 “Sudden Impact”--”Go ahead, make my day”--was simply verbal foreplay to the impact of that chiseled face with its permanent squint. By 1969, Eastwood was the world’s top box-office draw and critics loathed him.

He was faulted for what reviewers perceived as his Emperor’s New Clothes acting technique as well as his consistent portrayal of violent loners that several critics found fascistic. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, Eastwood’s most vociferous critic, greeted the release of “Dirty Harry” in 1971--the beginning of Eastwood’s best-known characters, Detective Harry Callahan--with the dismissive description “a man who essentially stands for nothing but violence.”

It took more than a decade before the critics would come around, a decade in which Republicans re-took the White House and Eastwood sagely balanced the commercial shoot-’em-ups with smaller, more personal films--”Honkytonk Man” (1982) and “Bronco Billy” in 1980 among them--many of which he directed, most of which spoofed his squint-and-shoot persona. By 1981, the New York Review of Books led this country’s critical reappraisal by crowning Eastwood “The Supply Side Star,” a genuine pop culture phenomenon in the John Wayne, Gary Cooper mode.

Today Eastwood is blessed with mass audience appeal and critical respect that have afforded him a career rare in its longevity, even rarer in its artistic and personal freedoms. In 1986, he took time out from his film career to serve a two-year stint as mayor of his home of Carmel, Calif. In 1988, Eastwood found an outlet for his lifelong interest in jazz when he directed “Bird,” a film about the legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Two years ago, Eastwood indulged a personal fascination in the life of director John Huston, when he made “White Hunter, Black Heart,” based on Peter Viertel’s chronicle of the making of the legendary Huston film “The African Queen.” After starring in 36 films and directing 16, Eastwood has amassed a body of film work that few film artists, with the possible exception of Woody Allen, can rival.

Now, this summer, Eastwood returns to the genre that first made him famous with “Unforgiven,” which also stars Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris. It is only Eastwood’s second Western in nearly 20 years--”Pale Rider” appeared in 1985--and the film’s trailer, attached to Warner’s blockbusters, “Lethal Weapon 3” and “Batman Returns,” has been eliciting whoops from audiences when Eastwood appears on screen, wordlessly tilting his head in the half-light, that famous squint sequestered under his hat’s flat brim, a face as totemic as Brando’s chalky, half-lit visage was in “Apocalypse Now.”

“I would never make a Western, just to make a Western,” he cautions. “It has to be the story.”

And, “Unforgiven” is a film unusual by Eastwood’s normal standards, a genre picture refracted through contemporary sensibilities. “It’s the first Western I’ve ever made,” he says, “where even the perpetrators of the violence are also affected by the violence.”

At the same time, Eastwood’s last three films, “Bird,” “White Hunter, Black Heart” and the Dirty Harry-esque “The Rookie,” have been a mixed bag at the box office. The question is not so much whether Eastwood needs a hit with “Unforgiven”--”I care about how audiences respond, but I can’t say I dwell on it,” he says--but whether at 62 years, he is making what is probably his last Western and also the final film in which he both directs and acts. His next movie, a rare non-Warners project, Castle Rock’s “In the Line of Fire,” features Eastwood as an actor--it’s directed by Wolfgang Petersen (“Das Boot”). After that he says, he will probably just direct. His first project is a thriller starring Kevin Costner.

Yet, typically, he seems in no hurry to complain or explain the continuing evolution of the Eastwood persona.

“I was never John Wayne’s heir. I was never anybody’s heir,” he insists. “It was a slow build. I never had the benefit of being the fair-haired guy. I was always the guy from outside.”

Eastwood approaches his career untortured by ambiguity or even great desire. Like how he refuses to develop scripts for himself--”that’s like commissioning air”--preferring to respond to what he is given. “When I read a script, it’s a tangible. And either I like it or I don’t,” he says.

He is, as he puts it, an instinct person. “And I also believe in things being the way they are. I’ve had a distinct persona based on certain successes in certain areas, but I don’t know quite why that is or what it is. I also don’t know how to counteract that. If it’s something I’m perfectly happy with and it’s going to change with maturity, then I’ll let it go its natural course. Maybe it would have wrecked my career if I had been more analytical.”

At the same time, Eastwood nurses an almost patriotic faith in the power of self-determination. His foray into acting, he reluctantly admits, feeds “that whole Walter Mitty thing,” he says. While he is fond of quoting Harry Callahan--”a man’s gotta know his limitations,” it is “Bronco Billy,” a genial comedy in which Eastwood plays a self-deluded but earnest rodeo rider, that remains his most personal film.

“I’ve always loved it,” says Eastwood about the film and its cheerfully anachronistic pieties and flag-waving values--”that you can be anything you want to be.” Bronco Billy, he adds, “was obsolete but he had a dream.”

As his friend Joe Hyams puts it, “Bronco Billy was a former shoe salesman from New Jersey. Clint thinks of himself that way too. Because what was Clint? He was a lifeguard from Oakland who became a cowboy.”

Splayed on a sofa at an Upper East Side hotel dressed in baggy white trousers, sneakers and a sweat shirt adorned with a Wimbledon logo, Richard Harris looks a far cry from the black-hatted, ghostly figure he plays in “Unforgiven,” a neo-morality tale set in the American West, circa 1880. Written by David Webb Peoples, (“Blade Runner”) in the mid-1970s, the film is a decidedly revisionist take on the genre, one that draws its knotty metaphysical attitudes toward violence and valor from such earlier films as “The Wild Bunch” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”

“Clint’s idea was that there were no heroes and no villains,” says Harris, a self-described “passionate Western buff.” His character in the film is an English hired assassin. “It was to be a slice of American life that debunks the myth of the West. You know, that they couldn’t shoot each from 100 paces, that they were filthy and that the West was this infinity of rock and burnt-out bush. I loved it.”

Shot largely in Alberta, Canada, last fall, the film centers on William Munny, a widowed father of two young children, who returns to bounty hunting when his more plebeian, breadwinning efforts as a hog farmer fail. Hired by prostitutes of a nearby town--the mythic Big Whiskey, Wyo.--to hunt down a short-tempered Lothario who has slashed one of the women, Munny embarks on a journey that brings him into conflict with not only the villains, but with himself as well as the local sheriff, (played by Gene Hackman) who has his own, fascistic ideas of meting out justice.

If the film’s structure--Eastwood’s quasi-vigilante squaring off with an imperfect justice system--carries echoes of several of his previous films, from “Hang ‘Em High,” “The Outlaw Josey Wales” to the “Dirty Harry” series, the director is quick to point to the film’s more nuanced and unusually empathetic attitudes toward the characters as distinctive.

“I’ve been part of the nameless act of shooting people off buildings in satiric movies to more realistic ones,” says Eastwood who concedes that the film “has that revenge theme that a lot of Westerns have. But the reason I liked this film is because even the perpetrators of the violence are touched by it and a lot of good people are victims.” His own character he describes as “a bad guy longing to be a good guy, but who somehow feels that he had failed, that he is unworthy.”

Actress Frances Fisher, who plays the avenging madame, says “Unforgiven” is a step ahead of the usual genre picture not only because the women serve as the film’s catalyst, but also because of its Rashomon-like attitudes. “There are so many different points of view,” says the actress who first worked with Eastwood in the 1989 comedy “Pink Cadillac.” “And who is to say who is right? The sheriff? A lot of people will see the events through his eyes. Others will think the women are right.”

Indeed, Eastwood cast his film with an eye toward those actors capable of conveying what executive producer Valdes calls “various shades of gray, nothing black or white.” Hackman, says Eastwood, “has to portray someone with a lot of strength, but also with that little flipped switch thing, so he is not quite there. He’s also playing a congenial guy who just wants to retire and sit on his porch and watch the sunset.”

The selection of Morgan Freeman to play a fellow ex-bounty hunter who eventually buckles at the idea of murder, added a layer of sociological subtext not in the original script. “I stayed away from (most of) the racial things you could draw into it,” says Eastwood, who did add a whipping scene to the film. “The message being that he, a post-slavery renegade, is the innocent victim who (as a former bounty hunter) isn’t innocent.”

Whatever philosophizing goes into his selection of the film, however, Eastwood on a set is known as a quick-shooting, pragmatic director who has little use for artistic hand-wringing or Angst. “He is very, very, very, very laid-back,” says Harris. “And terribly polite. He knows precisely what he wants on the set. And while he is, in his own way, political and very concerned about America, he never once related that to the movie.”

Although Eastwood insists “you never make a film hoping it has an empty house,” he concedes that “Unforgiven” can be considered one of his more personal films. He resisted any pressure to pitch the movie, top-heavy with older actors, toward the “Young Guns” audience by casting “some flavor-of-the-month,” as he puts it, to play the film’s lone twenty-something gunslinger, choosing instead the unknown Canadian actor, Jaimz Woolvett. “Everybody is in this for his ability,” says Eastwood.

He refused to tamper with the film’s somber ending as well as suggestions he tone down the body count. “Some people said that (several characters) didn’t deserve to die. But that’s the whole point, they don’t deserve to die. How audiences respond, I don’t really care.”

Eastwood also can’t relate to the suggestion that as the de facto heir to John Wayne, he is carrying the banner for Westerns by making “Unforgiven.” “I’ve had some luck with them,” he says dryly. “But I don’t think in terms of that. I just think in terms of the story. It couldn’t just be, ‘Oh, Clint Eastwood, you’ve done a few (Westerns), you do it.”

He grew up in Northern California during the Depression. The older child of Clinton and Ruth Eastwood, (he has a younger sister, Jeanne), he attended eight grammar schools as the family moved from town to town, a one-wheel trailer dragged behind the car, as his father looked for work. “I was always the new kid,” says Eastwood, an introvert in the making.

He attended high school in Oakland, a blue-collar neighborhood where he played basketball and swam competitively and had no dreams of becoming an actor. Instead, Eastwood channeled whatever nascent artistic leanings he possessed toward an interest in music. He taught himself to play jazz piano, and he performed for free meals at a local club.

After graduation, he drifted from one job to the next, working as a lumberjack, forest firefighter and steel worker. “I really had no idea what I wanted to do,” he says, except for a determination “never to be dependent on anyone.”

It wasn’t until he was drafted during the Korean War and stationed at Ft. Ord where he became friends with several actors, including David Janssen, that Eastwood began to consider working in Hollywood. After his discharge in 1953, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College under the G.I. Bill and made the rounds of the studios. Universal signed him as a contract player for $75 a week. He had bit parts in “Francis the Talking Mule” movies and was primarily noticed by studio secretaries who dubbed the lanky actor, “ ‘Coop,’ because I was this shy kid who never said anything,” recalls Eastwood.

Although Universal eventually released him, by 1958, Eastwood was playing Rowdy Yates on “Rawhide,” which ran until 1964. He had been cast, after a producer spotted Eastwood, then a sometime actor, a sometime laborer, in the CBS cafeteria.

“I was the dumb sidekick, the one who wasn’t too swift, the one with a little slack lip,” he says tugging at his own lip so his words sort of slur together. “I remember when the reviews came out--because there were a lot of Westerns on TV at the time--someone said, ‘Great, just what we need, another Western.’ ”

The show proved popular despite the competition, and if Eastwood chafed a bit at his dim-witted good-guy role, he found an outlet for nascent villainy in Leone’s oddball offer to come to Italy during the show’s hiatus to star in “A Fistful of Dollars,” an Italian Western whose plot was cribbed from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film “Yojimbo.”

“Sergio Leone has made only one movie, ‘Colossus of Rhodes,’ and I thought, ‘Here I am going over to make this movie with a guy who’s only made one movie,’ ” recalls Eastwood. “I thought I would at least get a trip to Europe out of it.”

That film, released in 1964, earned more than $11 million in Europe and launched Eastwood as an international star. It also marked the official debut of Eastwood’s violent screen persona--and the beginning of a controversy that would run through the Dirty Harry films more than a decade and a half later. Eastwood’s updating of the 19th-Century Western hero to 20th-Century audiences--Leone’s parodistic, opera-buffo style notwithstanding--embraced a chilly amoralistic attitude toward violence. “I thought the public was ready for that kind of character,” says Eastwood. “An operatic approach with a little bit of satire but (without) sacrificing the adventure.”

At home in Hollywood, however, the film “didn’t change a thing,” says Eastwood. “People still looked down on using television actors in films.” It took the European success of two more Leone spaghetti Westerns, “A Few More Dollars” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (1966) and their subsequent American theatrical release in 1967, before U.S. producers wanted Eastwood’s anti-heroic heroism on the big screen.

He formed his own production company, Malpaso Productions, in 1968 and made in quick succession, “Hang ‘Em High,” which featured Eastwood playing an American counterpart to the Man With No Name--”the hero (who) can shoot a man in the back,” he says--and “Coogan’s Bluff,” which featured an Eastwood performance that prompted Vincent Canby of the New York Times to write “Eastwood doesn’t act in motion pictures; he is framed in them.”

That film, however, was the beginning of what would become a pivotal relationship between Eastwood and director Don Siegel who would, three years later, direct “Dirty Harry.”

The role of Harry Callahan propelled the mythic loner Eastwood played in Westerns into the modern day. It was a quasi-vigilante persona that found immediate favor with a blue-collar ethic. He would reprise the role four times--”Magnum Force,” “The Enforcer,” “Sudden Impact” and “The Dead Pool”--but was ahead of critical tastes by almost a decade.

The New Yorker’s Kael characterized “Dirty Harry” as “fascist Medievalism,” an attitude she reinforced with her review of “Magnum Force,” which she called “carnage without emotion”--an appraisal that was widely echoed by other critics.

Eastwood says much of that criticism has to do “with the fact that we were entering the era of the fall guy, the name-calling generation, when everyone was an ‘-ist,’ a racist, or a communist or a fascist or an anti-feminist. Everyone categorized everyone and Kael was very clever about it. She seemed to understand the cynicism of the period and she played to it and nurtured it.” Also, he adds, “certain congressmen blamed the entertainment business for being violent and there was a certain criticism of my films then, but I don’t think by today’s standards they were violent.”

It wasn’t until the success of “Dirty Harry” in 1971 that Eastwood lost the fear that plagues every actor, “that every job will be your last.”

“That film was a great success and I felt that I had a career doing something, I just wasn’t sure of what it was.”

He fiddles with his wad of gum, trying to wedge it past the tiny lips of the empty Perrier bottle, while struggling to discuss his screen presence, specifically his ability to bring irony to roles that on paper read like garden-variety bullies and bigots. “A self-parodying subtlety” was an observation that the acutely intellectual French film journal, Les Cahiers du Cinema, made in 1981 after the release of the comedic “Bronco Billy.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he says, masking his discomfiture with rapt attention to the game plan for the gum. “And I strive for it,” he says, looking up hopefully. “But I don’t know how I strive for it.”

Although he likes to call himself a character actor, Eastwood is a full-fledged star--perceived by audiences to be playing himself while turning that self into a receptacle for other folks’ fantasies. But he has done so, without surrendering. “I never beg the audience” is as close a reading as he is willing to give it.

And there is no need to read him too deeply. As his friends and colleagues insist, he is what you see and what you see is what you get. “His favorite expression on a set is ‘Let’s not over-think this, folks,’ ” says Valdes.

“Clint likes first instincts,” adds Cox. “Freshness without over-dramatization.”

Eastwood makes a little joke out of it. “I’ve taken a lot of acting lessons to learn the ability, ‘don’t just do something, stand there,’ ” he says.

By 1980, changes had occurred in the nation’s mood and the message of “Dirty Harry” was in lock step with the tenor of the Reagan White House, while Eastwood was considered politically correct. “I wasn’t doing anything different,” he says. “Times change. You just have to outlive them all.”

The decade also saw several off-camera changes. In his personal life, Eastwood gained a measure of notoriety due to an acrimonious 1989 palimony suit filed by actress Sondra Locke, who had been his companion for 14 years. Eastwood had divorced his first wife, Maggie, the mother of his two children, son Kyle and daughter Alison, in 1984. Today Eastwood divides his time between homes in Carmel, Los Angeles and a ranch near Mt. Shasta, and his current companion is Frances Fisher.

After installing Malpaso at Warner Bros. in 1970, Eastwood pursued the delicate balancing act with his career that continues to this day--alternating movies aimed at mass audiences, “Escape From Alcatraz,” “Every Which Way but Loose,” with smaller, less commercial films, that range from his first directorial foray, “Play Misty for Me” in 1971, to this year’s “Unforgiven.”

“He’s an old-fashioned guy with old-fashioned ethics,” says Hyams. “The first time I heard him talk about financing, he said, ‘It’s not my money, it’s their money.’ ”

David Valdes describes the relationship with Warner’s in terms unusual by normal industry standards. “He decides what he wants to do and they say, ‘Fine,’ ” says the executive producer. “We tell them what the budget is and they say, ‘Fine.’ Clint has a real lucky star about him.”

Eastwood professes not to understand the critical reappraisal of his work that occurred during the early 1980s--a rehabilitation that began with the shifting cultural Zeitgeist in France after decades of anti-Americanism and eventually included tributes from such disparate corners as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Paris’ movie museum Cinematheque Francaise, Britain’s liberal press, the New York Review of Books as well Norman Mailer.

However, those close to the actor say that reappraisal remains pivotal to his career.

“Yeah, but you can’t think about that,” he insists, restlessly planting his feet on the coffee table. “You can’t take yourself that seriously. What’s the good of that? After ‘Bronco Billy,’ the Museum of Modern Art gave a kind of big tribute. Well, OK, that’s a new group. The Cinematheque in Paris? All that becomes is like counting little placards to yourself.

“All the things you’ve attempted, where they fall, has a lot of fate involved with it. It’s like a wheel in motion, where it goes, we don’t know. The only thing you can hope for is to keep your balance, your head screwed on straight, and improve instead of degenerating into somebody that says, ‘This is American culture.’ Big deal! Big deal! You haven’t done anything that great, haven’t found a cure for heart disease or AIDS or solved the disassembly of nuclear weapons. You’ve created a certain amount of entertainment. That’s fun for people but that’s about all you can say for it. Maybe you’ve cast a litle message hear and there.”

Message? What message has Clint Eastwood meant to be sending us all these years?

“Oh, you’d have to tell me.”

Indeed, anyone looking for clues to Eastwood’s ability to spin a TV character into a 35-year film career will find themselves clawing at air. At least as far as Eastwood’s own explanations go. Despite Valdes’ assertion “that Clint thinks like a director,” Eastwood’s attitude toward his craft seems closer to a professional athlete’s--the grace is all on the field and any post-game analysis turns into mumbling self-effacement voiced in a locker room peopled by adoring teammates.

Acting? “I think everyone starts out being an actor,” he says blandly. “Kids are natural actors, so you have to study acting to become a kid again.” Any particular methodology? “I’ve played chickens walking across the floor, a bear in the woods. You feel like an imbecile but I guess it’s all stimulating the imagination.”

His approach seems ludicrously elemental and craftsman-like in its simplicity. To make a character believable, one simply “thinks the proper thoughts and the audience is attracted to that.” He is capable, he says, “of touching certain (emotions) in myself without having to go through a lot of gymnastics. I have a great touch with my own anger.”

That anger, about which Eastwood declines to elaborate, is bolstered by a sister emotion, a love of isolation that is both personal and cultural. “I guess as an individual I always wanted to flee the flock,” he says. “I don’t know why, I just always wanted to be out somewhere.”

That adherence to the rugged individualism ethic, however cliched, has long fueled Eastwood’s conservative politics. Although he was not a Ross Perot supporter, “I was hoping to see new blood in there. Everybody is talking about the new this or the new that, but it’s going to be business as usual, no matter who gets in there.”

Eastwood’s uneasy alliance with the group ethic has cut to the very heart of his career, and a need to balance his own artistic choices with the wants and needs of an audience.

“From ‘Bronco Billy’ to ‘Honkytonk Man,’ ” he says ticking off his films. “I’ve played an awful lot of characters and they’re all different . . . you always hoped the audience would follow you into expansion. I could have stuck with genre films and played it safe, but after 37 years or however long I’ve been hanging about, it would be terrible to just say I stayed on in Italy and did 10 more flicks or I did 20 more cop dramas and that was the end of it.”

Eastwood is interrupted by the arrival of some of his family and friends, including Fisher and his daughter Alison, who is recovering from a nasty leg wound inflicted by a pit bull two days before. There is much consternation expressed by Eastwood who speaks for several minutes about the nature of dogs, how they are bred to be carnivores and that instinctively they dislike children. One can hear in the discussion, not only a father’s concern for his child but also his respect for nature, “for the way that things just are.”

But then, like some Dirty Harry turned paterfamilias, Eastwood interjects himself into the scene. “Darlin’, if I had been there, the dog would not be alive,” he says, smiling a slightly wicked smile. “I would have kissed him on the lips and he would have stopped.”