Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  There was, undeniably, an impatience in the man, a restlessness about him. It was always there, beneath the genial sociability and the professional adaptability. Some of that eagerness to move on, not to dither unduly over details, is in his son; so is the determination to hide ambition under an easygoing and affable manner. The difference between them would seem to be very largely one of self-presentation, with the father much the heartier and more apparently open. Both, not to put too fine a point on it, are Californians, not given to the darker forms of introspection, loyal to friends and family, yet also resistant to rootedness, perhaps because historically their native landscape always seemed so spacious and there was so much of it to explore. Doubtless hard times impelled Clinton Sr. to range freely in search of suitable work. But one can’t escape the feeling that, no matter what his circumstances, it would have suited him, still a young man in his twenties, his wanderlust not entirely quenched, to keep moving on.

  The Eastwoods stayed in the Palisades for roughly a year, then moved briefly to a bungalow in Hollywood (where Clint remembers a stray kitten appearing on their doorstep and becoming a permanent member of the household). Thereafter they moved on virtually an annual basis, first to Redding in northern California (where Clinton Sr. was “the bond man” at a Bank of America branch), then to Sacramento (more bond selling, for a brokerage firm), then to the Glenview section of the East Bay (now he was working in a San Francisco jewelry store), finally back to Piedmont (where they rode out the war with Clinton Sr. working in a shipyard).

  There was never any panic or desperation in these moves. The elder Eastwood always had a job lined up before his family began packing. And Clint never felt unloved or abandoned at any time during this period; his parents were obviously caring and conscientious. Moreover, little as he may have appreciated it at the time, he sees now that they provided him with valuable life lessons unobtainable by the more settled children of his generation, or by the children of later, more prosperous generations.

  When they moved, the Eastwoods would load their belongings into a little two-wheeled cart, which would bounce along behind their car. From the backseat the kids would sometimes see shantytowns sheltered under highway overpasses, where less fortunate itinerants found refuge. The shacks, Clint would later recall, were “made out of Prince Albert cans [tobacco tins and the like]—they’d take and mash all these cans and nail them up in some sort of way.” He still sometimes refers to the hoboes they occasionally encountered at rest stops as “knights of the road,” using the old phrase not entirely ironically.

  There were always surprises along the way, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not. On their way to Sacramento, for example, they encountered a stray dog—“half cocker spaniel, half whatever, but it was a terrific dog”—along the road and took it in. Like their cat it would attain great age in the Eastwood household. On the other hand, when they moved into their new home there (it was half of a duplex), they found it “was loaded with mice,” and Clint still remembers, with a slight shudder, “mousetraps going off all night” until the pests were disposed of. (His mother, it should be noted, has no such memory, insisting on the niceness of this little house a few miles out of town, and is a little cross with her son for implying that their digs were ever, even for a moment, infra.) Clint also remembers a sizable chicken coop out back and his father and their neighbor remodeling it into a rentable apartment, though they kept one of its former inhabitants, “Hennypen,” as a pet.

  A boy could learn a certain kind of realism from this kind of life, a cool ability to accept things and people, success and failure, as they came, and this lesson, especially valuable to actors in their up-and-down lives, Clint Eastwood, steady in adversity and in fame, thoroughly absorbed.

  In its way this acceptance of life’s changeability supports his habit of restlessness, and his latter-day glamorization of it. How many of his screen characters come from nowhere, heading nowhere? How many of them are men on the loose, questing along open American roads, open American back roads? He has homes in Los Angeles and Carmel, a ranch in northern California, a ski lodge in Sun Valley, and when he is not working he is constantly on the move among them. Or he is traveling to promote one of his movies or, in recent years, to accept some award for, or tribute to, his life’s achievements. Or he is trying some golf course he has not played, testing some powder he has not skied.

  In years past, before he settled more confidently into his celebrity, he would often put on a false mustache and glasses, pull a hat down low on his forehead, in order to attend some faraway sneak preview of one of his pictures or enjoy some other public occasion in anonymity. Disguise freed him from the encumbrance of an entourage, and as he told an interviewer in the early seventies, “I come and go like The Whistler on the old radio program,” that is to say, quickly, quietly, anonymously.

  Now that he has his own helicopter and his pilot’s license, it’s even easier to keep moving, and he sometimes feels something like the old pleasures of the road when he’s flying: “You get in and just declare your freedom.… All of a sudden you’re just a number in the sky. Nobody knows who you are unless you happen to be flying by an airport that’s familiar with you and they recognize your call number. But by and large you’re out there, going where you want to go, and landing where you want to land.”

  At the time, though, his family’s wayfaring made him miserable. Children are natural conservatives. There is comfort in a circumscribed life—it narrows the wide, strange world down to manageable proportions—and that comfort was denied him. He was always the new kid in class, the new kid in the neighborhood, and it made him angry: “I kept wondering why we were moving all the time. But [my parents would] say, ‘Well, you know, not for you to question why,’ and all that. Or just mostly, ‘Well, your dad’s got a job, so we’ve got to go there.’ And you always hated it, because, you know, you just get to know a few kids on the block and get accepted a little bit and then, all of a sudden, boom, you’re gone.”

  Always tall for his age (he was more than six feet tall when he was thirteen), he was more than usually self-conscious about his appearance, about his family nicknames (“Sonny” and “Junior,” both of which he hated), about his indifferent performance in school. Perhaps because he attended so many schools and was constantly befuddled by new environments and changed expectations, he frequently withdrew into dreaminess. “If I was sitting near the window and the leaves [were] blowing out there, my mind could be a thousand miles away. You sit there, you know, you feel the air … and boy I could go off on a trip.”

  Clint envied the students for whom things came easily. “I had a buddy in school [who] could dump all his books in a locker and go home and the only reason he got a B was through misconduct of some sort. I’d have to go in there and drill my brains to get a passing, decent grade.” From grade school through high school, this remained difficult for him. “I didn’t have a real go-home-and-study-for-two-hours-so-I’ll-get-an-A attitude. It’s like the physicist Edward Teller: He always said a genius is someone who does well with a subject he doesn’t like, and that would certainly eliminate me.”

  He was bad at math, liked history and “could have been all right drawing if I’d pursued it.” Somewhere along the line his natural left-handedness was trained out of him. He read the usual kid stuff—comics and Big Little Books—joined the family around the radio to listen to shows like Inner Sanctum and I Love a Mystery, saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—probably his first movie—when he was seven and spent a lot of time by himself, often in conversation with “Bill,” a toy soldier, if his mother’s recollection is right. Clint supplied voices for many of his playthings and made up adventures as he sprawled on the floor with them.

  Not close with his sister in those days, he seems to have kept his loneliness to himself. His mother, indeed, was unaware of it. “I didn’t realize how shy he was,” she says. “I’m not, and neither was his father. I don’t know where on earth he got it. But anyway, I guess it was har
der on him than I knew.” Her recollection is that wherever they went he always found one or two companions; one of them, Robert Baker, whom he met in Redding, remained a lifelong friend.

  In her eyes, then, he was all right. And perhaps precisely because she saw him so, that’s the way he turned out. Ruth, in Clint’s description, was “with all due prejudice a fabulous woman. She adored her children.” Above all, “she was very flexible. She was a very understanding mother.” Though his father was usually the family disciplinarian, she could be firm if need be. “They weren’t overly strict parents, but if you got out of line they’d swipe you on the behind.”

  And that would then be that; the elder Eastwoods didn’t hold grudges or nurse wounds. Clint describes them as extremely tolerant, entirely free of the bigotry and paranoia that so often afflict the temporarily declassed. “My parents never looked down on anybody. They were always fairly open-minded—conservative in handling their own lives, but liberal in their approach to other people’s existence,” including that of their children.

  They were uninsistent religiously and politically. Ruth and the children quietly attended whatever Protestant church was near at hand wherever they settled. Politically, she and her husband apparently supported Roosevelt for two terms, then broke away to vote for Wendell Willkie in 1940. But there is no defining passion to be found in these commonplace religious and political convictions. It was common sense and common decency that ruled their lives, and it was those qualities that they passed on to their children. There were, one gathers, no hidden agendas in the Eastwood family, no dark, twisting pressures, just simple, straightforward expectations and affections, clearly expressed.

  Whatever insecurities their restless passage through the world in these years imposed upon their children, there was always, in the Eastwood home, a bed of feelings in which they could securely root themselves. And that, too, would become one source of Clint’s strength within his profession. There are no childish emotional needs for which he requires belated compensation from audiences, colleagues, studios. He long ago gathered all of that to him, and not alone from his mother and father. He has fond memories of visits to Grandpa Burr, who also upped stakes during the depression, surprising everyone by selling his Piedmont house and, with his second wife, buying a little farm devoted to apple trees and chicken raising near Sebastopol. It is, however, his maternal grandmother, Virginia Runner, who figures most powerfully in Clint’s reminiscences of these years. During their unsettled period it seems that the Eastwoods frequently circled back on her little house in Hayward, sixty years ago a semirural community where Mrs. Runner, then working as a bookkeeper for a food-processing company, could live in solitary contentment, a largehearted, sweetly eccentric woman, warm in her affections, setting for Clint a memorable, often-cited example of the independent life. Clint and his sister lived with her once for an entire school year during a particularly unsettled period, Clint happily sleeping in a tent he had pitched in the backyard. Afterward, he visited her as often as he could.

  Clint attributes his lifelong affection for animals to his grandmother, for there was always a shifting population of pets in and around her house. It may be that her move, a little later in Clint’s childhood, to seven acres of land, mostly given over to olive trees, near Sunol, was motivated by her desire to support a more extensive menagerie. There she kept chickens (a well-worn family story has Clint lying on the ground in the chicken yard and sprinkling corn across his body so the chickens would clamber up on him) and sold their eggs from a roadside stand. She had a swaybacked horse, raised a few pigs, even, for a time, kept a Nubian goat that was always trying to scale the walls of the garage. Her other daughter, Bernice, who was married to a dentist, lived in nearby Niles, and they, too, had a horse, a somewhat more spirited creature, the first one Clint remembers riding at a pace more exciting than a shamble. One time he spent a few days with them earning pocket money picking apricots on a nearby farm. He also remembers that on his visits to his grandmother he was able to range the nearby hills on long solitary walks, on which he acted out all kinds of imaginary adventures.

  Finally, though, the most important thing he took away from his visits with his grandmother was her uncomplicated faith that there was something special about him. He was, his mother says, her favorite grandchild—“anything he did was perfect”—and he knew it. She thought “I was terrific,” he told Barbara Walters in one of their television interviews. “I think she thought I was better than I really was.” Be that as it may, it was she, alone among this extended family, who predicted a future in some creative field for this seemingly unexceptional boy. He had, she firmly noted, “long hands,” which to her, in her grandmotherly wisdom, bespoke a natural gift for the arts. It is an interesting observation, because Clint’s use of his hands—graceful, precise and sometimes rather startling in the context of some of his roles—is one of the hallmarks of his acting manner. She did not live to see him become a movie star, but she did see him become a television star on Rawhide. “And she never let anybody forget it.”

  As the decade turned, so did the Eastwood family’s fortunes. In 1940 Clinton Sr. found a job—“the happiest thing he ever did,” says his wife—with Shreve, Crump and Lowe, the well-known San Francisco jewelers, then controlled by the family of a young man with whom he had once played football. They were now back on native ground, living in a pleasant little house in Glenview in the East Bay, where Clint’s interest in nature focused briefly on herpetology; one day he came home from a nearby park with no less than thirteen small snakes in his lunch pail. They shared his room peaceably enough—until his mother found one curled up in one of her towels and she ordered them returned to their natural habitat.

  Around this time the family was favored by another stroke of good luck. Perusing the newspaper real estate section, the elder Eastwoods observed that one of Ruth’s aunts had placed her home in Piedmont on the market. “We knew the house very well,” Ruth recalls, “and so we went ripping up the next day and sure enough it was for sale and they would sell it to us for what we would give them. Houses weren’t selling in Piedmont at all, so we bought it for very little down and very little a month.” Ruth Eastwood was working, too, at this time, for IBM, and, at last, the family was able to settle down; the Eastwoods would remain in Piedmont for eight years, until Clint was in his last months of high school.

  It was a middle- and upper-class enclave. Some of California’s oldest money (the Crockers of the bank, the Hills of the coffee company, the Witters of the Dean Witter stock brokerage) was settled here. The Eastwoods did not travel in those circles. Indeed, their modest shingled house was close to the Oakland line, and it was that blue-collar port and industrial city, always invidiously compared to glamorous San Francisco across the bay, not conservative Piedmont, that would eventually claim his loyalty. In interviews he gives it, not the suburb, as his hometown.

  He attended Havens Elementary School, then Piedmont Junior High School. He made lifelong friends during his first years in Piedmont, among them a good-natured boy named Harry Pendleton, who spent much of his adult life on the fringe of lawlessness and died early; Jack McKnight, who in late adolescence would live with the Eastwoods for almost a year; Fritz Manes, who would eventually work for Clint as a line producer in his production company; Don Kincade, through whom Clint met his first wife, Maggie, and with whom he remains close. Indeed, as a youngster, Kincade was to Clint an exemplary figure, because he was the first in his crowd to articulate an ambition—he wanted to be a dentist—and the only one to follow through on it. Thinking back, Clint shakes his head at the miracle of coherence, confidently knowing what you want and going out and getting it. It was beyond him at the time.

  He was still dreaming away most of the school day, and staying pretty much aloof from its official extracurricular life. Sports, for example, were heavily emphasized, and most of his pals went out for them. But though he “teased around” with football and basketball in junior high, team sports
didn’t really interest him. It was the same with school band. He loved music and, as we will see, was beginning to demonstrate his natural—and, given the musical gifts on both sides of his family, doubtless inherited—talent for it. Issued a flügelhorn, which is similar to a trumpet, but with a softer, warmer tone (some of his jazz idols, like Chuck Mangione and Red Rodney, often played it), Clint easily mastered its rudiments, practiced some with the band, but apparently never played it publicly—“you know, everybody looked down on the band when we were kids, and I was a big cat,” meaning he would be painfully visible marching along with his slightly exotic instrument.

  His largest interest, very simply, lay in not calling attention to himself, not easy for a boy of his height to manage. There were well-intended attempts to “bring him out of his shell,” such as an infamous school play, often recounted in Clint Eastwood profiles and biographies. Their writers have enjoyed the irony of a man who has since become one of the world’s most famous actors forced by a teacher to perform in a skit in an all-school assembly, being deeply embarrassed by the experience and vowing never to repeat it. The story is true, but there is more to it than is usually reported. For anxious though the occasion made him in anticipation, Clint turned the event itself to reasonably good account, achieving a rare moment of recognition in his generally anonymous school career. And also learning, as he would later recognize, another little life lesson.

  He was in the eighth grade when his English teacher, Gertrude Falk (“I remember her name very well,” he says grimly), announced that the class would be doing a one-act play for public consumption and, without auditions, ordered Clint to play the lead. “It was the part of a backward youth, and I think my teacher thought I was perfect casting,” Clint once said. His friend Harry Pendleton and a girl named Shuggie Vincent were assigned to play his father and mother, and a couple of other classmates had walk-ons.