THE COWBOY AND THE LADY

They did not come easily to Iowa. Meryl Streep hated the book. When her assistant asked to borrow one of the several copies of The Bridges of Madison County that friends had pressed on her, she refused. "I'm not going to let you read it," she said. "It's a crime against literature." She told her agents she was not interested in doing the movie version.

Clint Eastwood didn't hate the novel. What he loathed were several early-draft screenplays based on it. They tried to flesh out Robert James Waller's slight narrative with flashbacks and fantasy sequences, and one of them even imposed a conventional happy ending on it, in which the most famously sundered lovers of our time, roving photographer Robert Kincaid and farm wife Francesca Johnson, were reunited in Katmandu. Eastwood also fell into mutually uncompromising disagreement with the original director, Bruce Beresford, about casting the feminine lead. He told the producers he would move on if these problems weren't solved.

But now, here they were on a fine October morning in Winterset, Iowa-cloudless sky, heatless sun, a soft breeze rustling leaves that had turned to perfectly photogenic reds and golds. Beresford was gone; Streep was present; Eastwood was directing as well as co-starring; the script was finally right and so was today's pretty location, through which an aged Francesca was supposed to wander distraught (she has just learned that her long-ago three-day lover has died). As Eastwood ambled over to discuss the day's first shot with his longtime cinematographer, Jack Green, he was heard to murmur, "Great, they'll put me on the cover of Cahiers du Cinama."

He was kidding. But Streep was not when, later in the day, she declared this shoot to be "one of my favorite things I've ever done in my life," thus confounding widespread skepticism over how the cowboy and the lady-representing to the ever gossiping, always clueless outside world what seemed to be utterly antithetical styles and methods of work-would get along. Their contentment with each other and their project was by this time near to purring.

The harmony stemmed from several sources, the first of which was Richard LaGravenese's screenplay, which silenced the doubts of both stars not by adding to the book but by gently pruning and slightly reshaping it. Eastwood's confidence in his role helped too; he didn't have to waste a lot of energy looking for his character. "I've been that guy," he said of Kincaid a few days before he set out to make the movie. He was referring to a detached and wandering period in his young manhood, "years of being lost" on the American back roads, unable to define what he was looking for. Those years, those feelings are long gone, but other aspects of that young guy still cling to him; he remains restless, self-sufficient, with a large tolerance for his own company and an equally large indifference toward the good opinion of strangers. "I've always had the theory," he once said, "that actors who beg their audiences to like them ... are much worse off than actors who just say, 'If you don't like this, don't let the door hit you in the ass.'" All these are pretty much Robert Kincaid's sentiments.