Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  What feeds Clint’s temper is a profound sense of the world’s unreliability. As we will shortly see in more detail, he was a child of hard times. Born in the first year of the depression, his first memories are of dislocation, as for several years he and his family moved from place to place annually, trying to stabilize their economic lot. His parents were good people, he loved them, he vaguely understood the pressures they were under, but he hated the loneliness their travels imposed on him—always the new kid on the block and in the school, wondering how he got there. When he recalls these years, the angry note in his voice is unmistakable.

  In late adolescence and early manhood he endured what he would later refer to as his “lost years,” in which he wandered about, condemned to hard hourly labor, trying to find—imagine—a place for himself in a world still as unyielding and enigmatic as he had first experienced it. This added to his store of outrage. For the institutions he encountered in those years—educational, economic, governmental—were unresponsive, insensitive, clumsy in their impositions.

  He has never claimed trauma or even unbearable hardship for these experiences—but it is clear that they taught him two basic lessons: Do everything in your power to lessen the impact of mischance, whether it be cosmic or mundane; do not trust institutions to do this job. Or, to put the point more positively, turn yourself into an institution and set your own rules of work and conduct, your own boundaries against intrusion. Then insist that this institution, this lengthened shadow of yourself, devote itself to the celebration of characters variously subversive, antisocial, rebellious. In a phrase, place the rage for one kind of order in the service of a rage against a different sort of order.

  This irony is central to his career. In purely movie terms, Clint has taken the presentation of the heroic male into country he had not previously ridden. Since Howard Hawks placed it at the center of his adventure films, male bonding has been a great recurring motif in American movies, but it is a rarity in Clint’s. His great theme has been the opposite: the difficulty men have in making connections with any sort of community. Nor is an Eastwood hero usually granted the kind of relationship with a woman, bantering and antic, that Hawks permitted his protagonists. In most of Clint’s movies the male-female relationship is, at best, romantically perfunctory and without much in the way of even an implied future.

  Almost without exception his characters are deeply disaffected men, much more profoundly isolated than the kind of classic loners Hawks (and those who have followed him) contrived through his consoling conventions to redeem. When we speak of Clint’s films we are speaking of a loneliness more radical, of a protagonist more rebelliously withdrawn, than anyone has ever offered us as the hero of movies intended for, and embraced by, a popular audience. We are also speaking of—to use a phrase that will recur in this book—a kind of brutal frankness, a sense, always present in his work, of the role that chance and human unreliability play in anyone’s destiny, a sense that the distance between heroism and victimization is paper-thin. He once told Carrie Rickey, the film critic, that the body of his work adds up not to a politics but a morality, and this honesty of his is its source.

  Clint has also said, in a quotation that has been much requoted: “There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.” But not so deeply that it cannot be summoned forth to animate just about every film he has ever directed, every character he has ever played—fiercely, goofily, guiltily, stubbornly, arrogantly, dreamily, regretfully, romantically, even as a ghostly shade.

  What is in his soul is in all of our souls—that rage that we spend so much of our time suppressing and denying, allowing it at most to slip forth in subversive jokes and gossip about the rich, the powerful, the celebrated, in flashes of anger and equally quick descents into gloom about our jobs, our debts, our governments at once so intrusive and so impotent—and, yes, about our fundamental loneliness and isolation.

  Acting out for himself, he acts out for all of us, and the irony that by doing so he has himself become rich, powerful and celebrated—in charge of his life in ways denied both to his character and his audience—is not lost on him. It is why, off-screen, he considers himself a good and ordinary and lucky guy; a guy who doesn’t want to attribute too much consciousness or calculation to his achievement, a guy who senses that some of his luck consists of being the right man at the right time, capable of crystallizing and personifying a mood a lot of us are in, a mood that has, since the social and political upheavals of the sixties, when Clint first made his mark, deeply colored the life of our times.

  You can call what this man does an advance or a retreat from tradition, depending on your taste. But in a time when public figures are forever trying to ingratiate themselves with us, you can see something exemplary in his on-screen refusal to be easily liked, and in his offscreen refusal to be easily understood. In a time when that sometime cock of the walk, the Wasp male, has been obliged to change metaphors in midstream and now often sees himself as a stag at bay, you can find in this screen character, as it has developed over the years, some of the pain and puzzlement of transition.

  There are, naturally, people who have fallen out with him—most notably a woman who spent many years in a relationship with him that ultimately failed, but also professional colleagues whose associations with him soured—who see in him a deeper darkness than I perceive. There are also strangers who continue to resent and reject his message. This distrust, so widespread and so full of outrage in the early days of Clint’s career, is now greatly diminished, but it is there, especially in some of the odder corners of academia, and it is not without its murmuring influence.

  I, however, trust the many tales told on the screen over this long career, and I trust the honesty of their teller. I trust the authenticity of his conflicting rages, and even as I have tried to penetrate them, I trust the enigmatic silences of the man caught between those emotions. I see them as signs of honest, inarticulable puzzlement by a man acting cool and ironic, feeling much of the time otherwise.

  ONE

  NOTHING FOR NOTHING

  What an American was Clint Eastwood,” Norman Mailer wrote as he worked his way toward the peroration of a 1983 Sunday supplement article on him—as usual for Mailer on these occasions, a blend of interview and meditation on his own and his subject’s celebrity. “Maybe there was no one more American than he.” Maybe that is true, defining the term traditionally, as it was still possible to do in those days, before multiculturalism became one of our reigning pieties.

  Talking to the writer, Clint stressed the lack of grandeur in his background. “My dad was Scots-English; my mother’s Dutch-Irish. Strange combination. All the pirates and people who were kicked out of every place else.” In other words, there are no Eastwoods in the Society of Mayflower Descendants. It is sometimes Clint’s pleasure to slightly overemphasize his lack of early promise, not so much to stress the pluck that underlay his rise in the world, but the luck involved. For example, at the Cinémathèque in Paris in 1985 this exchange between Clint and a questioner from the floor occurred:

  “Did you once describe yourself as a bum and a drifter?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “A bum and a drifter.”

  Actually, he had once been so quoted, and there is at least a half-truth in the wisecrack. He was never a bum, but there was a time, during his late adolescence, when he was definitely a drifter. And before that, when Clint was a child, the entire Eastwood family could perhaps have been described as drifters—though scarcely purposeless ones—as Clint’s father, Clinton Eastwood Sr., pursued job opportunities up and down the West Coast during the depths of the depression. His son’s most basic characteristics—his physical restlessness and his low tolerance for boring routine, his loyalty to the people he works with, his pleasure in, and loyalty to, the little filmmaking community he created around him—can probably be traced to these years. The former qualities he learned by experience; the latter ones he understood as ideals to
be strived for.

  Still, Clint’s heritage is far from piratical. It is essentially middle class, marked by the kind of modest strivings, setbacks and successes common to that class. His father and mother, Clinton Sr. and Margaret Ruth Runner—always known by her middle name—were sweethearts from a very tender age. He was fifteen, she thirteen, when they met in Piedmont, California, not long after her family moved from San Francisco to this prosperous Bay Area suburb, which lies due east of Oakland, due south of Berkeley. His father, Burr, built a house there soon after Clinton Sr. was born and worked as a manager in a wholesale hardware concern. Ruth’s father, Waldo, had been a railroad executive—she moved back and forth across the country several times as a child because of his work—and then founded, with a partner, the Graybar Company, which manufactured automobile bumpers and luggage racks.

  Clinton was tall and good-looking, star and ultimately captain of the high-school football team, a mainstay of the swimming team and an outgoing, popular young man—then as always, “the first one at a party and the last one to leave,” in Ruth’s fond description. Their son remembers his mother saying, more than once, “It’s a shame he wasn’t born rich, because he could have had so much fun.”

  Ruth was herself tall and attractive—too tall, as it happened, to realize her girlhood dream, which was to become a ballet dancer. She enrolled in a ballet class, taught by one of her grammar-school teachers, when she was eight or nine and from then until she was sixteen dance “was my main purpose,” she says. Like her father, who was a talented amateur clarinetist, she had a natural gift for musical expression; when her older sister, Bernice, started taking piano lessons, Ruth would study the exercise book she brought home, teaching herself to play without benefit of formal instruction.

  Both Clinton and Ruth endured tragedies in midadolescence, his by far the more poignant. Jesse, his pretty and spirited mother, was stricken with cancer when she was in her forties and struggled against the disease for several years. A graduate of the University of California, where she had been active in dramatics, she, too, had a natural gift for music. Her mother had taught voice and piano in San Francisco, supporting four daughters through this work, after her husband had deserted them.

  When his mother fell ill Clinton was obliged to rush home after athletic practices to tend to her until his father arrived home from work. She died when the boy was sixteen. Ruth says her husband almost never discussed Jesse’s illness or death and that she cannot remember ever meeting her. Jesse Eastwood did, however, pass on an important legacy, her mother’s German-made upright piano—always referred to as “Grandma Andy’s piano” (for Anderson, her maiden name)—which would follow Clinton and Ruth on their many travels through depression America and remains in the family, in excellent working condition, to this day.

  Ruth’s world was sundered when she was sixteen and her parents separated, though apparently with very little bitterness (they never formally divorced). Indeed, if Clint Eastwood is any judge, his maternal grandmother, Virginia McLanahan Runner, preferred the single life. She was a strong-minded, independent woman, who, after her children were grown, lived in a succession of rural retreats, each of them a little more distant from the Bay Area—Hayward, Sunol and finally Arnold, a sometime-goldmining community in Calaveras County.

  Clinton Eastwood tried college for a short time—at the University of California—but received virtually no support from his father and did not like school well enough to work his way through it. He was not yet what he would become, a hardworking man successfully struggling against his basic aversion to hard work. It was easier for him, now, at the height of 1920s prosperity, to rely on his charm. He became a bond salesman.

  He married pretty, sensible Ruth Runner in 1928. He was twenty-one; she was nineteen. They took an apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland and were managing well enough until October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Ruth was pregnant at the time, but her account of what must have been for her an anxious period is remarkably calm—“Well, everyone was in the same boat on that one; none of us had anything and we hadn’t had time enough to save very much”—perhaps because her husband had not immediately lost his job and perhaps because she was so happily preoccupied with the impending birth.

  It occurred on May 31, 1930, at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. “I always said he was famous from the day he was born,” she says, “because he weighed eleven pounds, six ounces, and he was the biggest baby in St. Francis … so the nurses carried him all around and showed him to everyone.” One of the local newspapers even ran an item about the birth of this strapping lad. As for Ruth, “I fell in love with him immediately, and stayed that way ever since. He was a dear, charming boy.”

  He was also a daring toddler. His mother remembers that when she took him for walks along the shore of Lake Merritt he always insisted on going as close to the edge as possible. One day he fell into the lake, “and I had to jump in, pink dress and all,” to save him. It was the first of several misadventures, at least one of which surely had a shaping effect on his character, in which Clint encountered large bodies of water to dangerous effect.

  The elder Eastwoods were by this time walking along a different sort of edge. Clint Sr.’s brokerage commissions had dropped to almost nothing, and he began looking for some other kind of work. As it happened, Ruth’s brother, Melvin, had a refrigeration business in Spokane, and he proposed that her husband come to work with him. This was the first of the many moves the family made during the thirties, though Clint has no memories of it or of their life in Washington. His mother, however, has one vivid recollection of him in this period. It seems they acquired a deer’s head and hung it over their mantel. When Clint saw it for the first time “he ran outside and around the house to find the rest of the deer.” They stayed in Spokane for just over a year, not very happily. “Working for one’s wife’s brother is not the most wonderful thing in the world” is the way Ruth puts it.

  At that point they began the odyssey that would consume the rest of the decade. As recorded by various interviewers, the Eastwood family’s wanderings have taken on the cast of a Steinbeck novel, but that over-dramatizes the case, suggesting a desperation that Ruth never felt. “We didn’t even know we were poor … we just knew we didn’t have quite enough money.”

  Her casual gallantry matches Clint’s recollections of the spirit in which his parents confronted adversity. “I don’t recall them ever complaining a lot. She’s a strong lady. She wasn’t a griper, and they always kind of made do—positive attitude.” That was Clinton Sr.’s way as much as it was his wife’s. He was, as Clint puts it, “a very personable guy. People liked him a lot and he liked people a lot—a lot more than I do, I think. I mean, he seemed like he was very much at home in the world.”

  That held true no matter what unpromising corner of it he found himself occupying. After Spokane, the family returned briefly to Oakland, but Clinton Sr. found no work there. Some friends prevailed on an acquaintance of theirs, who worked for Standard Oil, to give him a post, and he was told there was something for him in Los Angeles—pumping gas, as it turned out, generally on the night shift, at the Standard station on Sunset Boulevard where it joins the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica.

  If Clinton Sr. thought this a comedown, he said nothing about it, and the Eastwoods, who now had a second child, Jeanne, settled into half of a double house in Pacific Palisades, then no more than a sketch of a suburb that would not begin to be fully filled in until after World War II. There were only a few other houses on the street.

  Clint’s memories begin here. He recalls his first encounter with an angry dog, his fascination with an ostrich egg owned by one of their neighbors, seeing Catalina from the beach and imagining it was China. His mother recalls a little boy with more courage than sense. She remembers one day when he slipped out of sight and she found him pedaling his tricycle on a nearby boulevard, narrowly avoiding oncoming cars. On another occasion she looked up to see her five-y
ear-old son clinging to the rear bumper of a neighbor’s car as it took off down the street. Older kids had put him up to this stunt, and by the time Ruth rushed out and flagged down the driver (who couldn’t see the little fellow who had attached himself to his vehicle) smoke was rising from Clint’s ruined shoes.

  One day the family decided to go bodysurfing at Santa Monica beach. “I had Jeannie in the basket,” Ruth says, “she was just born, so I was sitting with her … and his father had Clint on his shoulder and he went out and this huge wave came in and washed over both of them, and the next thing I saw Clint was not there at all—little Clint. But I saw this foot coming up, and then it turned and went back again and then everybody that was there started to run toward him, including me, and I caught this foot. He was underwater long enough to be frightened.”

  “It was kind of a big surf, pounding,” Clint recalls, “and I can still remember the greenness of the water, and coming up I remember seeing my mother running into the water. And so it made a big imprint on me at an early age.”

  Once everyone calmed down, his mother sat with Clint at the water’s edge “and played in the small waves for a while, because I was afraid he’d never get over it.” He did, of course; he spent much of his young manhood around the water, as a lifeguard, a swimming instructor and a devoted surfer.

  This was a family determined to put the best possible face on bad times. In this period Clint remembers his father and some friends organizing a garage band—Clinton Sr. played the guitar and also crooned a bit—which performed, usually unpaid, at weddings and other social events. “I don’t know how good he was,” Clint recalls, “but he would have loved to have been an entertainer of sorts.” His mother, who sometimes joined the group, playing a mandolin, agrees; her husband, she says, was an enthusiastic, if untutored, Bing Crosby imitator. “It could have been a good voice,” she says, “but he didn’t sit still long enough to have it trained.”