His response was, as he gently puts it, “Fuck you and move on.” Which was quite all right with Piedmont High and, as it happened, with his mother. “That didn’t worry me at all, because I knew he was going to be different than the rest of the group.” She can’t say why, exactly. “Something told me. I never worried about what he was going to do.”
When the inevitable call came to meet with an assistant principal to discuss other academic alternatives, she was serene. When she talked these over with her husband, Oakland Technical High School seemed to make the most sense. It offered a course in aircraft maintenance, and that interested Clint more than any of the shop courses at Piedmont. Wartime aviation movies had stirred in him a romantic feeling for flight, and he had even journeyed out a couple of times to Walnut Creek, where there was an airfield and five dollars would buy you a half-hour trip across the Bay Area skies in a light plane.
The youngster (and helicopter-pilot-to-be) who loved tinkering with engines found aircraft maintenance a thoroughly satisfactory subject. But he was not encouraged to see it as his life’s work. The instructor constantly reminded his students that this was a poorly paid occupation. “The guy used to joke about it, the teacher: ‘Well, there’s no real dough in it. You make as much being an auto mechanic, and you don’t have the responsibility.’ ”
In other respects, though, Tech worked out pretty much as Eastwood—and his parents—had hoped. “He was more relaxed at Tech,” his mother says simply. He was never a big man on campus. His high-school yearbook records only very few officially sanctioned extracurricular activities. But he liked its ethnic diversity—“it just seemed like it was more real”—and he continues to believe that if he had gone to school in Piedmont, “I would have been stuck in a groove.”
There was no danger of that at Tech. To Fritz Manes, the Tech guys looked like tough guys. And there certainly were gangs in the school, though Clint avoided them. By his own (and Manes’s) account he bopped all over the Oakland area, drinking beer illegally, looking just a little bit delinquent (a photo from the period shows him wearing a duck’s-ass haircut and a leather jacket). He kept up his friendships with his Piedmont pals, but made no attempt to meld this group with the others he knew—it was part of the slightly mysterious air that he began cultivating then, and which he has never abandoned. It is based on nothing more than a natural disinclination to explain himself to anybody.
He continued to work in his after-school hours, and during his high-school summers he worked strenuously. One year during school vacation he baled hay on a farm belonging to one of Jack McKnight’s relatives near Yreka, in northern California. The next summer he worked for the state forestry service in Butte County, also in the northern part of the state. It was often extremely hard labor. Butte ranked second among the state’s counties in number of fires, and “it was a very hot summer up there, in the hundreds every day, and very dry—lots of brush fires would start. And when there wasn’t a fire you’d go out and cut trails and cut timber.”
Sometimes in those years he would cut himself a little slack by joining his parents at a vacation cabin they had on a lake near Fresno, and he remembers a couple of summer romances from those days. But his relationships with young women, numerous though they were, do not define Clint in these years any more than his schoolwork or his part-time jobs or his fascination with the internal-combustion engine does. It was, finally, jazz that did so.
He was becoming more and more sophisticated in his understanding of it, in part because of his environment. Oakland at that time had the largest black population of any city west of Detroit, and rhythm and blues was in the air, on the air, constantly. One of the local radio stations, KWDR, devoted a three-hour afternoon slot exclusively to this music, and Clint was addicted to the program. He began playing, as best he could, the tunes he heard on it.
Not that it was the only influence on him. He recalls the Frisco Jazz Band and Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, both Dixieland groups. Clint and friends would drive out to a place called Hambone and Kelly’s in El Cerrito, which was basically a black jazz club (and was casual about checking IDs), to listen to music.
There was also a small club on Lake Shore Avenue where Dave Brubeck’s trio (it included Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty) “drew like crazy” as he established his style. Clint became a devoted fan, following Brubeck to San Francisco when he began playing there. He also remembers hearing Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker when they came through town.
Despite the presence of Brubeck and Paul Desmond, the Bay Area in the forties was not yet the avatar of the new jazz sound that it would soon become. In his definitive history, West Coast Jazz, Ted Gioia describes it, in these days, as “the last bastion of the mouldy figs.” He argues that New Orleans jazz made its way along the railway tracks to San Francisco at about the same time it made its way up the Mississippi to Chicago, but that most of the jazzmen who got their start on the West Coast developed their mature styles (and their reputations) only after they moved east. The San Francisco jazz scene, generally less venturesome than the one in Los Angeles, remained essentially committed to the past. Gioia observes that the San Francisco musicians’ union remained divided into a black local and a white one as late as 1960.
Clint ventures no opinion about the Bay Area’s degree of hipness in those days. His tastes were eclectic. He was buying Charlie Ventura’s records, and listening to Woody Herman’s various herds, soaking up a hipper big-band sound than was generally available locally. And he was aware that bebop “was coming in real big,” and so he found himself “going around trying to understand bop and what it was about and not being sure I understood it, but wanting to learn more about it.” To this end, he went to hear Dizzy Gillespie, the figure who would provide the moral contrast to Charlie Parker in Clint’s Bird some four decades later, when he appeared with a seventeen-piece band at a club in San Francisco.
But the aesthetic turning point for him was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Oakland in 1946: Coleman Hawkins, Flip Phillips, Lester Young—“I mean, he was like the cat’s ass, you know, for tenor saxophone”—and, yes, Charlie Parker, all on the same program.
Bird was, for Clint, “a whole shock to the system. It was just amazing to see somebody do anything with that kind of confidence. He wasn’t arrogant or anything, he was just a guy standing there in a pinstripe suit, and when he started playing it was like, I guess, some sort of free painter, who’d just jump right in there and start slapping paint up there, a totally unplanned deal.” It was, perhaps, the sheer cool of Bird’s manner that got to him. “I’d never seen a musician play with such confidence. There was no show business to it in those days, and this guy just stood and played, and I thought, God, what an amazing, expressive thing.” More important, he went away thinking, It would be wonderful to have that kind of confidence doing something—anything—in life.
In his superb essay on Charlie Parker, Ralph Ellison makes a couple of apposite points. One is that when he was creating his legend, Parker meant more to young white jazz aficionados than he did to blacks. “They never heard of him,” Art Blakey, the drummer, said of the black audience. Ellison writes: “Parker operated in the underworld of American culture … where contemporary civilized values and hypocrisies are challenged by the Dionysian urges of a between-wars youth born to prosperity, conditioned by the threat of world destruction, and inspired—when not seeking total anarchy—by a need to bring social reality and our social pretensions into a more meaningful balance.”
“Dionysian” is obviously too large a term to apply to the activities and interests of the young Clint Eastwood, and it is difficult to see him as prosperous or much concerned about the threat of the atomic bomb, either. But his interest in modern jazz generally, Parker specifically, does coincide with his parents’ return to middle-class status and with his rejection of a middle-class high school in favor of a working-class institution, certainly an attempt on his part to rebalance “social reality
” and “social pretensions” as he experienced them. One can read into his passionate interest in the new music a kind of rebellion—or at least a determination to go his own way—that, though masked and politely stated, was quite determined, if narrowly focused. There is no evidence that the other interests that would soon define the fifties hipster—action painting, for example, or coffeehouse poetry—ever caught his eye. Even Stanislavskian acting, though he would eventually embrace some of its techniques, does not seem to have excited the kind of enthusiasm in him that it did in others of his generation. When he talks about actors he admired, figures like Brando and Clift do not figure heavily in his conversation.
Whether or not the modern jazzmen he idolized—instinctive postmodernists that they were—helped shape his own comparable instincts is hard to say. But they certainly had something to do with the way he would eventually present himself as an actor. Ellison observes that this younger generation of musicians consciously and angrily rejected the jubilant showmanship of Louis Armstrong and the other “hot” jazzmen. To them, this was Uncle Tomming, and it also led them to reject—wrongly, as Ellison says—the genius of Armstrong’s playing, and downgrade his historical significance. On the bandstands, the result was, as he puts it, “a grim comedy of racial manners; with the musicians employing a calculated surliness and rudeness, treating the audience very much as many white merchants in poor Negro neighborhoods treat their customers and the white audiences were shocked at first, but learned quickly to accept such treatment as evidence of ‘artistic’ temperament.… Today [Ellison was writing in 1962] the white audience expects the rudeness as part of the entertainment.” Or, if not that, then certainly an air of effortlessness, a feeling that the players are just casually knocking off their sometimes-astonishing effects.
Clint is not surly or rude as an actor, but his cool, by far the most obvious quality of his work, his powerful desire—amounting almost to a morality—not to woo the audience, his apparent indifference to their rejections, must be traced to the modern-jazz manner. So must his profound desire not to make what he does look costly to him, emotionally or intellectually. He says: “Good acting, like good anything, doesn’t look like there’s a lot of effort with it, you know. If a person believes, ‘Hey, I could do that, ’cause I’ve felt that emotion,’ then that’s good. I’m sure a lot of people sat there years ago and watched Nat King Cole [and] said, ‘Hey, I can sing like that—he’s not really doing anything.’ Or great musicians, you say, ‘What the hell, they’re not really doing anything.’ ” One could argue, as well, that some of his hallmarks as a director—his preference for letting actors riff on a theme, for example, or his characteristic lighting, which is often like that of a jazz club, general darkness with a few pinpricks of light illuminating the scene’s principals—have their roots in jazz.
All of that, of course, was far ahead in a future entirely unimaginable to him in 1946. What he did know without doubt, as he listened to Parker for the first time, was that this music spoke to him with an intensity that nothing else ever had: “I left there thinking, I gotta know more about that. So I started buying records, and listening to them and following him. I caught him at a couple of clubs in later years and we even drove down and saw him when he was playing in southern California.”
The richer and more various Los Angeles jazz scene was something Clint and his crowd regularly sampled in their high-school years, and after graduation, too. Typically, a bunch of kids would pile into a car and make the long drive south for weekends of music. They might catch Kid Ory one night at the Beverly Cavern, just to get in touch with the classic New Orleans manner, then hit the Oasis to hear something newer, or the Haig, near the Ambassador Hotel downtown, or the string of clubs lining Central Avenue, in those days the principal thoroughfare of Los Angeles’s principal black neighborhood. It was the heart of a jazz scene that began flourishing during World War II when the booming defense industry, working around the clock, had turned L.A. into an all-night town, with workers—a larger percentage than ever before being blacks—looking for off-hour entertainment.
By the time Clint and his buddies were hitting Los Angeles, you might have heard the new music all over town, though not without difficulties. The Los Angeles police, many of its officers unregenerate rednecks from the South, would often stop cars bearing racially mixed groups heading for a jazz club in Hollywood, and it is said that their hatred of the integrated audiences for music in the Central Avenue clubs played a key role in the avenue’s precipitate decline in the 1950s. It simply became too inaccessible for a significant segment of the audience.
Still, if you were lucky, there were great musicians to be heard here, and on one of these trips south Clint had his first direct contact with haute Hollywood. He and some of his pals were tooling along Sepulveda Boulevard, skirting the western boundary of Bel-Air, when they were confronted by a small herd of horses, “right on the street, bopping all over the place.” The kids stopped, jumped out of the car and shooed them up a little canyon where they found an open gate. They got the animals into the corral and secured it, by which time their owner appeared—“very appreciative, very friendly.” They chatted awhile, and then the kids took off. One of them was excited—“You know who that was? That was Howard Hawks, the famous moviemaker!” Clint was impressed: “I was no cineast, but I knew who Howard Hawks was”—the director of Sergeant York and countless other action movies treasured by young men of his generation because they were about fractious but good-natured males bonding and working together toward some common goal.
The incident took on significance for Clint in the light of his subsequent career. Aside from a few weeks’ work in William A. Wellman’s last movie, it would remain his only direct early contact with a legendary figure from Hollywood’s Classic Age, a fact he would often publicly regret.
Movies, of course, were then a dream too absurd to countenance. What’s odd, all things considered, was that music was too. “I felt that I’d never be able to work doing that. To be a professional musician was awesome.” He was, of course, measuring himself against geniuses—Bird and Dizzy and the rest—and it did not occur to him that there might be another level of musical life where, possibly, he could find a comfortable niche. Nevertheless, around the time he first heard Charlie Parker, he began to play in public on a more or less regular basis.
The Omar Club was a long, narrow bar and restaurant on Broadway in downtown Oakland, across from the Paramount Theater. “It was a kinda crazy place,” as Clint recalls it, with “a bunch of nice guys that ran it.” He and his pals took to hanging out there because management had no objection to minors drinking beer “as long as you had the money to put on the bar. That’s the way it was in Oakland in those days—it wasn’t too strict.” One day Clint started fooling around at the piano, and the owners, liking what they heard, proposed that he play for whatever tips he could make. “So I kinda came down there and played, and then all of a sudden somebody was bringing me in pizzas, and all the guys, all my buddies, we’d be sitting around eating and drinking.”
He makes it sound cool and casual, just a bunch of kids kicking back, goofing off. And it may have been no more than that for his pals, but not for Clint. For he also admits that “you could channel yourself into an instrument,” let it say for you all the things you couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud. “It was almost like a wall you could hide behind.” Manes, perhaps exaggerating, remembers him playing eight, ten, twelve hours at a stretch, sometimes until three or four in the morning.
Music became a defining element in his relationships with young women: “I don’t think I was ever attracted to a girl who didn’t like music, who didn’t have some interest in it. We’d spend a lot of time talking about it, listening to the radio and stuff.” Some of them, he admits, may have been faking their passion for jazz. And why not? He was a good-looking kid, combining his slightly dangerous air with an agreeably uninsistent manner. “He’s always been catnip to the women,” his mother
says equably, adding that he was never secretive about his relationships; he always brought his serious girlfriends home to meet his parents. Manes, who is a talkative man (Clint used to call him “the Long Goodbye”), says, “The not joining—what it did was create a suction, people wanting to know what made this guy work, what made him tick, what is he all about?”
It worked for him then, as it would later work for him on-screen. And as it generally is in his movies, so it was with his high-school romances—not many heavy commitments. According to Manes, “There were a bunch of romances, until they got to the point of getting really serious and then he’d be off and running.”
It is a reasonably accurate description. But Clint was possibly in a little more conflict than he permitted himself to show. Wartime Oakland, with its transient population, had been barraged with propaganda about the dangers of casual sex, and he had absorbed all the official strictures. On the other hand, he was beginning to have some idea of how attractive he was, and an even more urgent sense of how attractive certain members of the opposite sex were to him. In the end, he resolved the issue straightforwardly: “You could sit there and ponder it, and say, ‘Well, it’s because I feel in control of myself,’ or ‘I feel flattered,’ but really what it boils down to is, ‘I don’t care. I want you.’ ”
Clint Eastwood Page 6
