In 1879 the lovesick 29-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Monterey in pursuit of the fascinating Fanny Osbourne, who was inconveniently married to someone else. Wandering the wooded hills and rocky coast, the impoverished, consumptive young writer also became fascinated by Father Serra’s Mission San Carlos Borroméo, which had been abandoned when the Spanish were driven out. “The church is roofless and ruinous,” he wrote, “seabreezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening the breeches.”
Beyond the mission, Stevenson, yearning for fame and Fanny, paced the marshy pasture and beach at the mouth of the Carmel River and clambered over the treacherous rocks of Point Lobos. Perhaps it is the ghost of the miserable young Scot that haunts the Mission Ranch farmhouse—built in the early 1850s by another Scottish couple, Elizabeth and John Martin—and the Mission Ranch kitchen. Inspired by love and the spectacular landscape, Stevenson returned to England and eventually made Point Lobos and the view from the Mission Ranch the setting for Treasure Island. He also married Fanny Osbourne.
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A century later, in 1986, a developer with plans to level the existing structures on the ranch and build condominiums began negotiating to buy it. Riding to the rescue in the nick of time, Eastwood stepped in, acquiring the twenty-two acres with their decrepit buildings for $5 million. “I had always loved the place and they were just going to flatten it. They said it was obsolete. I thought it should be preserved as what it was,” he says. He joined Junípero Serra and Robert Louis Stevenson in an unlikely dynasty of men who have left their mark on this small Pacific cove.
The Mission Ranch was a project only someone as stubborn and sentimental as Harry Callahan could love. All the wiring was shot and the pipes were leaking so badly that 40 percent of the gas piped in was lost underground. “When you open up a place like this, it’s like the bear who climbs a hill to see the next hill and the next hill,” Eastwood says. “It never ends.” As Eastwood quickly discovered, “there’s a big difference between doing preservation and advocating preservation. It’s different to put your money where your mouth is.” So far he has put in several million; he’ll consider the Mission Ranch a success if it breaks even in his lifetime. The gleaming buildings of Clint Eastwood’s Mission Ranch now offer thirty-one luxurious guest rooms, a renovated restaurant and bar and what are still the best views in California. Tennis courts and a state-of-the-art workout room are under construction. “I don’t buy anything I don’t love,” he says.
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Eastwood hired Alan Williams of the Carmel Development Company, which specializes in restoration, he had the chimneys rebuilt by the stonemason who had worked on the restoration of the Mission San Carlos Borroméo, and when the Mission Ranch needed furniture he used some old pieces from movie sets. Frances Fisher, his costar in Unforgiven, provided advice on the flower arrangements and quilts. “She cares more about details, I see the big picture,” Eastwood says. For more serious furniture he had North Carolina furniture manufacturer Edgar Broyhill—a friend from the golf course—design the Mission Ranch Collection. “Furniture is what gives a room its character,” Eastwood says. “I wanted this furniture to have a solid feel but be very comfortable.” The collection’s emphasis is on physical ease—there are lots of deep cushions—and practicality. “I’m not trying to make a style statement here,” Broyhill says.
Although Eastwood is a familiar figure at the ranch and around Carmel, he’s intensely reclusive and private. “I’m not the jolly host type,” he says. In person, this iconoclastic American icon is a modest and graciously friendly man who is eager to give credit to others and happy to downplay his own accomplishments. With his don’t-notice-me shamble and his baggy, dark clothes, he’s almost unrecognizable as the snakehipped aggressor he plays on screen. He pilots his own helicopter, often whirling up to Carmel from Los Angeles for a visit, and he says he loves the anonymity of being able to radio the tower without identifying himself. “I love it up there,” he says. “Up there I’m just a number in the sky.”
Clint Eastwood is sixty-three now, with more than thirty movies behind him. The love affair that began between the lanky kid and the small town has become a passionate alliance of natural beauty and worldly power. “Carmel is primo,” says the town’s first citizen. “The place just gets in your blood. When you’ve been away and you come back here, you always feel like you’re coming home.”
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