American Rebel

by Marc Eliot

  By overstaying his time in Seattle—spending it not with his parents but with the girl—Clint had technically violated his leave and nearly drowned. Although in later years he underplayed the incident, likely because of its decidedly unheroic backstory, he did occasionally talk about this early adventure but always matter-of-factly. Still, the momentary drama would later be useful for publicity purposes when he became an action star.

  The crash also introduced him to a bit of momentary fame. Although he didn’t feel especially heroic, just Clint-lucky to be alive, the local press lauded him as a hero for surviving the crash and, in accounts, helping to rescue pilot Lieutenant F. C. Anderson (who was actually rescued separately). Clint was portrayed heroically, photographed on the scene bare-chested and dripping wet, looking for all the world like a hero. But the episode also introduced him to the very real notion of mortality. Defiantly looking into the face of death would have a powerful and lasting effect on him.

  Although Clint never left the States while in the service, several of the fellow recruits who did basic training with him were sent overseas and saw action in the war. One was Don Kincade, whom he had known since high school. Immediately after being discharged in January 1953, Kincade enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley on the GI Bill. That spring Clint hitched a ride to Berkeley to visit him.

  Kincade, who was by now dating a sorority girl, offered to set Clint up on a blind date with her best friend. He assured Clint he wouldn’t be disappointed; Maggie Johnson was a beauty—tall, good face, terrific body. And, he added, she was dating someone else, so this would be a guaranteed one-shot affair.

  As it turned out, Clint and Maggie hit it off, and when the weekend came to an end, they promised to try to get together in the fall, when Clint’s active service time was up and Maggie had graduated and returned to live with her parents in Alhambra, a suburb of Los Angeles.

  She quickly got rid of the other guy.

  As his tour of duty wound down, Clint gradually reverted to the easy syncopations of pre-army days. After two years of his laid-back conscription, he had little “military” to get rid of. He had long ago let his hair grow out, rarely wore a uniform, and more or less came and went as he pleased. By the time of his summer 1953 discharge, he had already made plans to return to Seattle, where a cushy civilian job as a lifeguard was waiting for him. Only he didn’t go, at least not for long. Staying for just a few days to visit his parents, he quickly took off for Los Angeles to be with Maggie Johnson.*

  Down in L.A. Clint trudged through a series of day-to-day jobs until he landed a full-time one managing a building on Oakhurst Drive, several miles south of Beverly Hills, which he supplemented by working at a Signal Oil gas station. Hoping college credits would help him get a better job, he started taking classes in business administration at City College in downtown L.A., on the GI Bill. School still bored him, and just to break things up he sat in on a few acting seminars with Chuck Hill, one of many noncom show-business dreamers he had met at Fort Ord.

  Hill was a gay man who had slipped through the screening processes of the wartime military. What would, years later, be known as the “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy was actually in full, if unofficial, effect in the 1950s. Even if homosexuals wanted to enter the military, the military wanted nothing to do with them, partly, as the bizarre thinking of the day went, because they wouldn’t be able to fight as well among other males or control themselves in the communal shower rooms. Hill, who wanted a show-business career working behind the scenes, had spotted Clint and was struck by his good looks, and told him to look him up after his discharge, which Clint did while he was pumping gas.

  Because this was Los Angeles, essentially a one-industry town, every college and university had drama and film departments superior to those of any other institution outside of L.A. At Los Angeles Community College (LACC) George Shdanoff was on the teaching staff. Shdanoff was a practitioner of the methods of Michael Chekhov, who in turn was a disciple of the Stanislavsky “Method” school of acting, and his was the class that Clint and Hill sat in on. Unfortunately, much of what Shdanoff offered was wasted on Clint, who at the time was not all that introspective, an aspect crucial to the Method. Most of the time he just sat there among the more serious acting students who tried to absorb the daily theoretical lectures.

  Meanwhile Clint reconnected with Maggie Johnson, who had relocated to Altadena, about ten miles out of L.A. in the San Bernardino mountains, with a spectacular view. There she had found a job as a manufacturer’s representative for Industria Americana. They started seeing each other on a regular basis, and soon the subject of marriage came up. In early 1950s America “nice” girls only dated “good” men with an implied promise of a ring for their finger. With her solid upper-middle-class background, Maggie’s choice of Clint as the one to fulfill her dreams might seem a bit odd, even more so because, by every account, she was the aggressor. Maggie was pretty, from a good family, and nothing like the easy women he had been with during his army stint. Marriage to the right girl was what he thought he was supposed to do. So he did it.

  On December 19, 1953, Clinton Eastwood Jr. married Maggie Johnson in South Pasadena before a Congregational minister, the Reverend Henry David Grey. After a brief honeymoon in Carmel, Clint resumed his studies and his part-time gig at the filling station and Maggie went back to work. The only difference was that now she could properly move into Clint’s small house on South Oakhurst.

  Soon enough, though, Clint’s new and quite normal life would take a dramatic and unexpected turn that had very little to do with married life but a whole lot to do with, of all things, making movies.

  *A story keeps popping up that has Clint staying a bit longer, getting a Seattle girl pregnant, and borrowing money from his parents to pay for an abortion, all of which hastened his decision to get out of town, but no hard and detailed evidence of it can be found.

  THREE

  With Carol Channing in The First Traveling Saleslady, 1956

  I had a premonition that acting might be a good thing for me. I had done some of it in school and little theaters in Oakland, but I never did take it seriously then. I got serious after a director talked to me about my chances.

  —Clint Eastwood

  Nineteen fifty-four was a pivotal year in American movies. Without question the explosive Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront made a huge mark on the popular mores of American male youth. Brando would win the Best Actor Oscar for his indelible performance and change forever the notion of what a movie leading man could look like, sound like, behave like, and be. The role as written may not have been earth-shattering—it had classic Hollywood plot devices of attempting to change the world while managing to win the heart of the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. But the way Brando brought it to life on the screen surely was.

  In the aftermath of Brando’s performance, Hollywood saw a policy shift in the casting departments of the major studios. Now they all wanted their leading men to be beautiful but rebellious American youths. At first this policy would work against Clint, who was cool and laid back more than burning and restless. But Brando’s youth and brooding appeal would nevertheless lay the foundation for Clint’s unique brand of hero, even as the young, handsome gas station attendant with only the slightest interest in acting and even less in the movies was about to be discovered by the men who made the movies.

  The details surrounding Clint’s signing with Universal Pictures have always been murky, in numerous slightly differing (and at times overlappingly repetitious) accounts of the actual events. Clint himself has remained vague even about the details of what attracted him to the movie business. One reason is his natural reticence to talk about his personal life, but perhaps he also wishes, maybe needs, to take the focus off the overly eager women, the gay men, and the singularly opportunistic “suits” who helped launch his career.

  What is certain is that, as 1954 began, Clint was attending classes a
t LACC while working at the gas station, and Maggie was continuing at her full-time job and earning additional income doing part-time modeling work. Also that Arthur Lubin, a short, stubby, hustling contract director at Universal—best known at the time for his insanely popular Abbott and Costello films and the Francis the Talking Mule series—was looking for someone to help boost his standing at the studio. He needed a project or a star that would help him up the prestige-and-profit ladder. According to Lubin, “Someone took me to meet Clint at the gas station.” Very likely it was Chuck Hill, looking to secure a position at Universal as well and figuring that Lubin might be interested in Clint and return the favor.

  Under the shrewd machinations of Lew Wasserman, Universal had moved into TV production earlier than most of the other major studios. They were still trying to compete with television, an increasingly losing proposition, rather than become a profitable partner in it. In the early 1950s Wasserman had created a self-contained TV unit, called Revue, to produce shows exclusively for the small screen. To find, train, and develop new young talent to appear on television (something most major motion picture stars were still reluctant to do), Wasserman approved the creation of the Universal Talent School (UTS), offering in-house “acting” classes run by coach Sophie Rosenstein. The school’s mandate was to discover new talent, to bring young actors up to professional speed, and when they were ready, to sign them to the studio at relatively cheap and long-term contracts and use them either in movies (part of the lure) or, more likely, in TV.

  UTS was not all that easy to get into. Admission was determined by a complex multiaudition process. Only two applicants were allowed to audition every day, and only the best were even awarded a screen test. A handful were picked to attend the school and of those about one in sixty were actually given a Universal contract for up to $150 a week, for which they were to appear in whatever productions they were assigned.

  Lubin insisted that the school give Clint an immediate audition, even though he was not exactly the next Brando the studio was looking for; an intense actor who gave off a lot of heat fueled by his repressive darkness. Clint had none of it. Nor was he the usual beautiful, romantic type that the studio could always use as screen filler and never seemed to find enough of who had some actual talent, like Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis.

  Moreover, Clint had no real experience as an actor. He didn’t know how to move like a movie performer, how to react, how to talk, how to “think” for the camera, or how to smile for a close-up. The smile thing was a special problem; Clint’s teeth were yellow, too small, and curved inward, which caused him to smile with his lips closed—something the movie camera did not show well. Too good-looking to be a character actor but not good-looking enough to be a traditional leading man (according to the conventional studio wisdom), he was the least likely prospect for a screen test.

  But somehow Lubin made it happen. When Clint saw his audition film, he knew immediately how badly he had come off. “I thought I was an absolute clod. It looked pretty good, it was photographed well, but I thought, ‘If that’s acting, I’m in trouble.’” Nonetheless, seventeen days later Universal signed him to a provisional seven-year learning contract starting at $75 a week.

  He quit his gas station job and began taking full-time classes at UTS. To his surprise, these lessons—essentially teaching how to look good in front of a camera without tripping over your own feet (or your lines)—were infinitely more valuable to him than had been the internal agonies of his Michael Chekhov–based acting-class theoreticals. All of it meant nothing to him.

  Besides taking classes, Clint worked out at the studio gym and kept his eye on the gorgeous young starlets all over the place. All the young female students of the UTS, he quickly found out, were single, hot, and available. According to one of them, wannabe sex kitten and B-movie starlet Mamie Van Doren, a demi-Monroe whose career never fully blossomed (she would appear with Clint in Charles Haas’s 1956 Star in the Dust, in which she was the costar, he a walk-on), sex was rampant among the students, and she and Clint had spent more than one afternoon in her dressing room contributing to the count.

  Clint, who had thus far refused to get his teeth fixed or darken his brown hair (to match Hudson’s and Curtis’s blue-black), had no problem attracting and sleeping with many starlets besides Van Doren. As far as he was concerned, he had no reason not to, least of all his marriage. Now in this new world of plenty, his marriage was, to him, like being on a diet in the biggest candy store in the world. Years later Clint would tell one writer that “the first year of marriage was terrible. If I had to go through it again, I think I’d be a bachelor for the rest of my life. I liked doing things when I wanted to do them. I did not want any interference … One thing Meg [Maggie] had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t be married.”

  In a rare interview in 1971 Maggie seemed to confirm Clint’s continuing independence when she described his behavior this way: “He is very much a twentieth-century cowboy. We’re not advocates of the total togetherness theory. I happen to like women with their own thing. I admire individuality and am not of the theory that ‘I’ll be an individual and you stay home.’” Whether out of choice or necessity, she had found a way to rationalize what both of them instinctively knew; that for Clint the notion of marital fidelity never held much sway. That he came home at all was what mattered to Maggie, and sooner or later he always did. Still, the unspoken-of friction it caused between them was palpable. Maggie, raised to be a traditional wife, understandably did not take easily to her husband spending his days among young and beautiful and (she suspected) easy girls in the glamorous world of sexy movie make-believe, with nothing to show for it—at least nothing she could see.

  When he wasn’t sneaking off with one starlet or another, Clint passed the time on the lot walking among the soundstages, where he’d often run into other recently signed actors, like John Saxon, Marty Milner, and David Janssen, his buddies from Fort Ord. The four would-be actors enjoyed hanging out at the studio in the daytime and in local bars at night; and occasionally on weekends, when the gas station called, he went back and filled in for a day or two, as he was always in need of extra cash.

  In class, Clint’s teacher Katherine Warren was joined by Jack Kosslyn, who brought in a parade of famous actors, including the great Brando himself, whose mere presence was a thrill and whose message to the students was not to try to “act,” but just to get on the sound-stage and let “it” happen (whatever “it” was supposed to be). Something and someone had, at last, made sense to Clint, and he concentrated on his acting with a seriousness and intensity he had not shown before.

  By May 1954 he was considered good enough to try for a real film, at an increased salary of $100 a week. At the same time he signed with a manager-agent, none other than Arthur Lubin, who was eager to get Clint out of the classrooms and into some films. The first picture Lubin wanted him to try out for was Six Bridges to Cross, which would be the first for the brooding, ethnic, East Coast, and utterly charming newcomer Sal Mineo. But despite Lubin’s enthusiasm, Bridges’s director, forty-four-year-old Joseph Pevney, was not impressed with Clint, dismissing him as a nonactor; despite Lubin’s pushing, Pevney refused to use Clint even in any background shots. In truth Pevney, like most of the directors at Universal, thought the talent school concept was a dumb throwback to the days when studios and training mattered. Journeymen like Pevney did not want the studio to supply him with students for his film; he preferred real actors.

  Lubin continued to try to get Clint a part in any film, even as he worked on a number of other, peripheral studio assignments. Lubin was, at the time, busy in postproduction on his latest talking-mule franchise, Francis in the Navy. He used Clint’s voice for some looping (overdubbing) and put him in a few crowd scenes, along with Milner and Janssen. Despite his microscopic participation, Lubin gave Clint on-screen billing, his name appearing at the end of the back-of-the-film
cast list.

  Not until May 1954 did Clint make his film debut as a real character in a real part (still uncredited), in actor-turned-director Jack Arnold’s Revenge of the Creature (1955),* a sequel to his unexpectedly huge hit of the year before, Creature from the Black Lagoon, which no doubt benefited from the big-screen hot fad of the time, 3-D. In his only scene as a lab technician, opposite the film’s star—western, war, and horror film staple (and former husband of Shirley Temple) John Agar—Clint’s unnamed character discovers a missing rat that has conveniently parked itself in his lab coat.

  The scene was shot in a single day (July 30, 1954) and was the first of a series of nondescript studio-assigned parts that included a role as “First Saxon” in the borderline sexploitation flick Lady Godiva of Coventry† (directed by Arthur Lubin, starring Maureen O’Hara and Rex Reason); in Tarantula (1955), another Jack Arnold film, Clint played an air force pilot assigned to kill the giant, irradiated insect-gone-wild. He got a half-minute of screen time playing a laboratory assistant, in service to Rock Hudson, in Never Say Goodbye, a 1956 medical melodrama about an insanely jealous doctor (directed by Jerry Hopper, featuring Janssen in a solid supporting role.)* Hopper suggested to Clint that he wear glasses to help him create a character, in the time-honored notion of no small parts, only small actors. The suggestion, and the attention given to Clint in his relatively tiny screen appearance, made Hudson furious. Always an insecure actor, Hudson insisted that his character—a doctor, after all—should be the one to wear the glasses.