aWhen actress Jean Seberg started up an affair with Clint Eastwood on the set of the 1969
film Paint Your Wagon, she thought that the romance was going to last forever.
This came in spite of the fact that the actress was currently married to her second husband,
and Clint had recently had his first child with his first wife.
When filming of the picture came to a close, Jean was devastated when Clint acted as if
he barely knew her from that point forward.
Meanwhile, other events in the actress’s life seemed to be conspiring against her as
she found herself the unwitting victim of COINTELPRO.
A decade after Paint Your Wagon’s release, Jean was found dead from an apparent suicide.
However, many continue to speculate that foul play may have been involved.
Join Facts Verse as we explore how an affair with Clint Eastwood left Jean Seberg utterly
traumatized.
Paint Your Wagon was a strange musical Western that came early on in Clint Eastwood’s career
and cast the actor alongside actress Jean Seberg.
The film has gone on to achieve cult status but wasn’t incredibly noteworthy upon its
1969 release.
During the production of the film, stars Clint and Jean reportedly started up an on-set romance.
However, both stars were married at the time, and Jean wasn’t even the only person on
the film’s set that Clint was cheating on his current wife with!
Clint was also supposedly having an affair with one of the film’s extras, with him
having gotten her the position so that they could continue their already established romance
during the movie’s filming.
At this point in Clint Eastwood’s career, the leading man was one of the most notorious
womanizers around!
Although the star had been married to his first wife for over a decade, he had become
known for his numerous extramarital affairs.
Clint was particularly notorious for becoming romantically involved with his costars on
the set of his films.
However, these flings rarely lasted beyond the time period of the movies’ productions.
Apparently, Jean Seberg wasn’t aware of this habit.
When Clint romanced her on the set of Paint Your Wagon, she thought that their romance
was going to last forever.
Jean took the romance so seriously that she filed for divorce from her then-husband.
When the filming of Paint Your Wagon ended, Jean Seberg was taken aback when Clint Eastwood
subsequently began acting like he didn't even know her.
In later interviews, Clint would express that the two stars had simply grown distant naturally.
However, Jean’s side of the story always seemed to indicate that she had wanted their
relationship to continue past the film’s production.
The affair between Clint and Jean was only one of many elements that came together to
make the production of Paint Your Wagon singularly chaotic.
The film’s premise had been balked at from the get-go, with Clint Eastwood and costar
Lee Marvin having been cast in a musical despite the fact that neither knew how to sing.
Meanwhile, vagrants crashed the film’s set and ended up having to be integrated into
the film’s production as extras.
When shooting of the film was finished, director Joshua Logan famously burned the set down.
Jean Seberg had risen to some prominence before taking her role in Paint Your Wagon, but both
her career and her personal life would take a downward trajectory after its production.
The film wasn’t positively received.
Although its negative reception didn’t have much of an effect on Clint Eastwood’s career,
Jean’s star power hadn’t yet solidified to the point where her own career was able
to take the blow.
Meanwhile, the dissolution of her second marriage and extramarital relationship with Clint Eastwood
had dealt a similar blow to the actress’s sanity.
Though Clint Eastwood is still alive and working today at the age of 91, the same sadly can’t
be said for actress Jean Seberg.
A decade after Paint Your Wagon’s release, the actress would be found deceased from suicide.
The actress’s days during that decade hadn’t been very pleasant, though her traumatic affair
with Clint Eastwood hadn’t been the only contributing factor to her misery.
In addition to being an unwitting victim of burgeoning star Clint Eastwood’s womanizing
ways, Jean had also found herself the unwitting victim of the COINTELPRO.
Short for Counter Intelligence Program, the COINTELPRO referred to a series of operations
conducted by the FBI during the era of the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture movements.
As an outspoken civil rights advocate, Jean was deemed a threat by the FBI.
Of course, this fact continues to make the actress’s already mysterious suicide all
the more suspicious.
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Before starring alongside Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon, Jean Seberg had appeared
in the debut of French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.
That film was 1960’s Breathless, and Jean’s appearance in the feature quickly made her
an icon.
François Moreuil was the name of Jean’s first husband, and they were married from
1958 to 1960.
In 1962, Jean married a man by the name of Romain Gary, and it was from him that she
filed for divorce after striking up her affair with Clint Eastwood years later.
Jean’s second marriage, as well as the dissolution of her first, had been the result of the actress’s
infidelity.
She had begun having an affair with the man that would become her second husband while
married to her first, and she had similar aspirations when developing a relationship
with Clint Eastwood on the set of Paint Your Wagon.
However, Clint Eastwood had other plans.
Though Jean divorced from second husband Romain, Clint wasn’t there to take his place.
Jean subsequently married a filmmaker by the name of Dennis Berry in 1972.
Though they ended up separating in 1976, they never officially divorced before Jean’s
supposed 1979 suicide.
Jean had two children with her second husband, one of which died prematurely.
Jean’s suicide note was allegedly addressed to her surviving son.
While Jean had been married to second husband Romain Gary for several decades before starting
her extramarital affair with Clint Eastwood, Clint had been married to first wife Maggie
Johnson for over a decade!
Clint and Maggie married in 1953 and technically remained married until 1984.
Despite this fact, Clint and his first wife separated during the 1970s and Clint started
a live-in relationship with actress Sondra Locke that would last past the point of his
and his first wife’s official divorce.
Clint wouldn’t go on to officially remarry until 1996, with him having been married to
wife, Dina Eastwood from 1996 until 2014.
Years after the filming of Paint Your Wagon, it was revealed that Jean Seberg wasn’t
the only actress that Clint Eastwood was having extramarital relations with on the set of
the film.
Before production on the film had begun, Clint had apparently started up an affair with a
fledgling actress and had secured her a role as an extra on the feature so that he could
keep her on hand as his extra on-set lover.
This actress later came out with her story, claiming that Jean Seberg had been completely
unaware of her existence.
Jean Seberg’s drama with Clint Eastwood certainly contributed to the actress’s distressed
state during her final years, but it was later revealed that the actress was also being targeted
by the FBI.
Specifically, Jean had been subject to targeted campaigns by the FBI’s notorious Counter
Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO.
The actress’s targeting came mostly as a result of her affiliations with various civil
rights groups, to which she both provided financial support and advocated for with her
celebrity.
The FBI targeted Jean Seberg under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, and the targeting can
certainly be said to have contributed to the actress’s downfall.
However, there’s also the fact that the actress’s later suicide was relatively suspicious
and may have involved some foul play.
Shortly after the actress’s funeral service, the FBI finally came out and announced that
it had been targeting the actress over the preceding decade.
This targeting by the FBI was done with the intent to decrease Jean’s credibility with
the public.
The most notable result of the FBI’s targeting of Jean Seberg was a story that was planted
in 1970 suggesting that the actress’s current pregnancy was the result of an extramarital
affair with a known member of the Black Panthers.
Though Jean didn’t realize that the rumors had been planted by the FBI, she blamed the
subsequent harassment from this story for that very child’s premature birth and death
shortly after.
Besides the false story suggesting that Jean Seberg had been having an extramarital affair
with a Black Panther, other consequences of the actress being targeted by the COINTELPRO
included various forms of surveillance that the actress was unknowingly subjected to during
her final years.
Many have also speculated that the FBI played a role in Jean having a hard time finding
work after the filming of Paint Your Wagon.
During the final year of Jean’s life, she struck up a relationship with a man by the
name of Ahmed Hasni that proved disastrous.
This man allegedly convinced the actress to sign him over all of her money.
Shortly after this, Jean went into hiding from Ahmed, claiming that she was afraid of
him.
Not long after, she was found dead.
Jean was found deceased in her car in September of 1979 with a suicide note and a bottle of
barbiturates.
However, the overwhelming presence of alcohol found in the actress’s system despite the
lack of any bottles in the car that she was found in made authorities scratch their heads.
To this day, they can’t understand how she could have wound up like that unless someone
else had been present during her death.
Jean Seberg may have thought that she was going to marry Clint Eastwood and remain romantically
involved with him forever after the filming of 1969’s Paint Your Wagon came to an end,
but this sadly didn’t pan out.
Now it’s time to hear from you: did you know that iconic New Wave actress Jean Seberg
was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO during the 1970s and that many continue to disbelieve
the official story of the actress’s supposed 1979 suicide?
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