About the particulars of most of these encounters, memory does not serve him particularly well. Or so he says. He does fondly recall dating a beauty who would a little later be named Miss Oakland, losing her to a “gorilla,” then briefly rekindling the relationship many years later, when they were grown-ups. He remembers still more affectionately his first steady relationship, when he was seventeen, with “a cute little Irish girl” named Mary Ellen McElvaney. “I was nuts about her,” he says simply, and they were together, to the exclusion of all others, for six or eight months.
But as he edged toward high-school graduation, other concerns began to press in on him. Sometime after the war, Clinton Eastwood Sr. improved his lot substantially. He got a job in sales at the California Container Company, which would soon be absorbed by the Container Corporation of America, in whose ranks he would subsequently rise to executive positions, eventually, according to his wife, becoming manager of the northwest territory. A few months before Clint was due to graduate from Oakland Tech his father was transferred to Seattle. It was decided that Clint would move in with Harry Pendleton (whose family owned a small apartment complex) so that he could graduate with his class, then rejoin his own family in Seattle.
But the question of what he would do with himself after that remained totally unsettled. He spent the summer after commencement with his parents in Seattle, working as a lifeguard at Renton Beach, then decided to return to Oakland, where he settled back into his little apartment and got a job at the Continental Can factory. But that was too confining, so he returned to Seattle, bringing Jack McKnight with him. They hung out for a while, doing some odd jobs until his father got jobs for them with Weyerhauser timber in the Willamette Valley.
“For some reason, I was really adrift in those years,” Clint says. “I was sort of on a sea somewhere, not knowing where I wanted to go, but wanting to go somewhere, wanting to be on my own.” He says he even abandoned his interest in music during this time, ceasing to play, not even listening to jazz with his former attentiveness.
Considering what music had meant to him, this is a good measure of his confusion—and, possibly, of his anger at his inability to find himself. He lumberjacked for a while in Oregon, and was injured, not as seriously as he might have been, but with minor lasting effect. He was on a conveyor belt, armed with a sort of grappling hook, the job being to straighten logs so that they slid smoothly into a large circular saw at the far end of the belt. The timber was being dropped onto it by a crane whose operator at some point loosed a load before Clint was ready for it. It crashed down on his legs, pinning him briefly, possibly giving him an undiagnosed hairline fracture, leaving his legs and lower body black and blue, and one of his knees “screwed up” for life.
After this incident he went to work in a pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon—the low point of this period. The smell in the mill was overpoweringly “putrid” and the air outside, trapped in this valley in the Cascade Mountains, was almost equally foul. Clint and Jack lived in a tiny apartment, and in the winter, when the rains came, the damp seeped in everywhere.
About the only thing he got out of this experience was the beginning of an interest in country music. Being lonely, he asked some of the guys he worked with where one went to meet chicks. They named a roadhouse near the Fernridge Dam. That it featured country music didn’t sound too promising, but he relented, and found Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys—“more of a western swing band, and I liked him, he was really good, nice musicians, and there were some gals out there. I didn’t know how to do a western two-step or whatever. But you’ll try anything when you get desperate.”
It might be argued that at this time he was claiming his manhood in the only way he knew how, emulating his father’s peripatetic course as Clint had seen it when he was a child. It might also be argued that he was paying the price for his trade-school education. Whatever its virtues, Oakland Tech was not oriented toward college prep. It did not offer much in the way of literature or the arts, certainly nothing that might have encouraged a bright, unfocused young man to think seriously about further formal education.
This lack of intellectual grounding remains a source of some insecurity for him. He is very self-effacing about his lack of formal learning and abstract knowledge. In one of their television interviews Barbara Walters asked him how, when he was directing himself, he knew if a performance was not working. He made a drilling gesture with his finger at the back of his head and replied: “There’s a little guy right inside the back there, and he says, ‘Don’t do that.’ I don’t have a lot of brains, but I have a good gut feeling.” She followed up: “Do you really feel you don’t have a lot of brains, or is that just a kind of ‘Aw, shucks’?” “Well, I’m reasonably intelligent,” he said, “but I’m not a person who is of high scholastic learning, and I feel that where I’ve gone today [has] been mostly based on instinct, animal instinct.”
Ultimately overbalancing this defect is what he gained from the “lost years,” from virtually all of his upbringing. Attending school with people whose chance of escape from relentlessly unrewarding labor was nearly nonexistent, then laboring beside them in thankless tasks, made him, as he puts it, “very sensitive toward people who work at jobs like that. You learn to kind of feel for them and understand how lucky you are to have moved beyond all that.”
In other words, he was forging a link with the people who would one day form his core audience. They tutored his “instinct,” permitting him to understand their favorite routes of escape. This empathy would ultimately inform Dirty Harry Callahan in one way, Philo Beddoe of the Which Way movies in another, Bronco Billy McCoy in still another. Whatever ambitions he later developed for the good regard of critics and more sophisticated moviegoers, he never turned against these early loyalists or talked down to them or behaved cynically toward them. To have done so would have been a betrayal—of himself as well as them.
Still, he did not want to lead a working-class life. If he had not certainly known that before, winter in the Willamette Valley taught him. One day he went to get his only suit out of the closet, found it “just soaking wet and all mildewy” and found himself saying, “OK, that’s enough of this crap.”
But there was a little more to it than that. He was beginning to hear the music again, specifically a swing band sponsored by Seattle University that he would catch on his visits home. It was good—Quincy Jones was playing in it—and its sounds kept echoing in his mind. When he asked around he discovered that this small Catholic institution harbored a first-rate music department that took the pop forms as seriously as it did the classics. Here was a chance, he thought, to get a formal grounding in the music he loved and buttress his confidence in his self-taught abilities. He decided to return to Seattle and see what it would take to qualify for admission.
He had to work, of course—first at Bethlehem Steel, where he joined the night shift tending the blast furnaces, then at Boeing Aircraft, where he found a job in the parts department. In the meantime, though, he applied for admission to the college and believed he had a good chance of acceptance. If not, he was determined to find a junior college where he could bring himself up to speed academically and then enter the school. It seemed to him that he had, at last, found his direction.
But now it was 1951. The Korean War had begun the previous year, and suddenly he was confronted with a draft notice. It had been forwarded on from one of his previous addresses, and he found he had only seven days before he was required to report for induction. He called the board, said he was about to enter college and asked for an exemption. But with a war in progress, draft boards were in no mood to indulge young men who had wasted years finding themselves while their more prudent contemporaries had been busy securing their college exemptions. Besides, “I wasn’t tricky enough or smart enough to dance around, or figure out how to dance around.” Clint’s tone is uncharacteristically bitter about this passage, and Fritz Manes remembers him turning up in Oakland a few days before induction and sp
ending most of the time drinking regretfully. Lost, he had been on the verge of finding himself. Now it appeared he must lose himself again in a newly massing army. He was sent to Fort Ord, on the Monterey Peninsula, for basic training.
TWO
KIND OF A MAGIC LIFE
It would be agreeable to report irony in full twist at this point in Clint Eastwood’s life, to observe this lost young man finding himself, despite his reluctance, trepidation and gloomy anger, in the United States Army. But when you loathe something as profoundly as Clint Eastwood did the military, and its exactions are imposed on you involuntarily, its instructive possibilities are likely to be modest.
Two years in the army, though, unquestionably helped him to develop certain significant aspects of himself. These included the discovery of a previously unsuspected ability to manipulate an institution and a situation not of his choosing to his own advantage, an embrace of a region, a landscape, that would claim his loyalty for the rest of his life and, finally, an encounter with mortality that would help both to focus his ambitions and to imbue him with that mild but palpable fatalism that marks his attitude toward his profession and his fame, armoring him against both disappointment and starry hubris.
In 1951, at Fort Ord, his attitude toward the army and toward the Korean conflict was typical of many young men pressed into service for a war in which America’s interests were difficult to apprehend. The army was something to be endured with the least imaginable effort. Early in basic training, for example, one of Clint’s top sergeants several times proposed that he apply for Officer’s Candidate School—“I evidently depicted what an officer should look like”—and he repeatedly rejected the idea, on the grounds that it would increase his obligation to the army. “Two years is the maximum I want to be here,” he remembers saying to the sergeant.
As for the war itself, it was the trip to it rather than service at the front that scared him. “The boat trip over there would have killed me,” he says. “You’d hear all the horror stories of World War Two, when they shipped the guys across, and they were all sick on the high seas, and packed in there like sardines.” He shudders at the thought of such confinement, the inability to get out and walk. “That’s the part you wouldn’t have any control over, because you can’t go in and volunteer, and say, ‘Hey put me in a plane and fly me in there, get me to Seoul real quick.’ ”
In these circumstances he did something totally out of character—at least as it had shown itself up to now. He worked a con, and his face still beams with pleasure as he recalls it. Having quickly observed that military life is “a constant game of trying to put yourself in a position to do less work,” Clint was eager to play. So was a new friend he had made at Fort Ord, a former schoolteacher named Dick Scott. One day, having endured many a dismal indoctrination class, Scott said to Clint, “Let’s go over to Division Faculty. I can teach these classes we’re all falling asleep in.”
“You can,” said Clint, “but I can’t. I don’t have any experience teaching.”
“Aw, what the hell. You oughta come over. We’ll fake it.”
So they did, and found themselves being interviewed by a dubious captain, when a lieutenant wandered by and said, “We need a couple of guys over at the pool.” That sounded just right to Clint. “I just casually leaned over and said, ‘They got some jobs in the motor pool?’ and the guy says, ‘No, no, the swimming pool.’ ”
Better and better. He had a lifesaving certificate from the Red Cross and had worked as a lifeguard, and so was qualified to administer swimming tests and haul floundering recruits out of the water. In those days, as Clint recalls, “I never pushed myself, I was not very assertive,” and his temptation was, as usual, to put himself forward very quietly—“I was always the kind of guy who would say, ‘Gee, if you ever need anybody.…’ ” But to his own astonishment, having just watched his friend do a wonderful pitch, he found himself “up and selling. ‘Have I got a deal for you …,’ starting to make it sound like I’d swum with Weissmuller in the Olympics.” He says it was as if he could see his whole life flashing before him: his past—full of self-effacement, hanging back—and his future—more basic training, shipping out to Korea, combat—and recognized that this was the brass ring “and I had to grab it.”
The captain was reasonably impressed with Privates Scott and Eastwood, but he was not terribly encouraging. The need for warm bodies overseas was pressing. They left his office not daring to hope for much more than “four or five weeks of goofing around and swimming or something.” But in a couple of days word came down: They were being transferred to Division Faculty and assigned to duty at the pool.
A master sergeant was in charge of this facility, and he was off partying much of the time, while Clint and Dick Scott did most of the work, which, besides administering swimming tests and teaching the basic strokes, also included cleaning out the latrines.
Still, this was about as good as it got in that man’s army. Scott and the rest of the pool staff were soon shipped out, and Clint became the senior man poolside, where he would finagle living quarters. Eventually, he received permission to work out of uniform—in a sweatshirt and a pair of khakis. So it would remain for the rest of Clint’s hitch.
The pool became a kind of informal social center. Among those dropping by to improve their tans were a number of actors who had been drafted, including three who would ultimately gain fame as television series leads: Richard Long (77 Sunset Strip, The Big Valley), Martin Milner (Route 66) and David Janssen (The Fugitive). The oft-repeated story is that they encouraged the handsome young swimming instructor to think about an acting career when he got out of the service, but Clint doesn’t recall that. It’s possible, though, that their talk about their civilian careers piqued his interest. “They all seemed to enjoy themselves” was his dry comment to a later interviewer.
If anyone directly encouraged him to think about acting it was Norman Barthold, who gained a measure of local fame at Fort Ord when a picture he appeared in before being drafted, She’s Working Her Way Through College, starring Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan, played the post theater. It was a dismal remake of the James Thurber-Elliott Nugent play and film The Male Animal, but the guys were impressed that their buddy had worked in such close proximity to its luscious leading lady, if not the future leader of the free world. Barthold’s army job was in classification and assignment, so he was the source of valuable information about who was and was not about to be shipped out. Since his office was nearby, Clint encouraged him to hang out at the pool as much as he liked. “The more I talked to him, the more I thought I wouldn’t mind studying acting,” he recalls. But he still insists the idea was idle and passing, not a turning point.
Indeed, it may be that the Fort Ord experience that most affected his future work occurred not at the pool, but in various Division Faculty classrooms, where he was expected to take over the occasional teaching assignment and to run the movie projector when visual aids were part of the curriculum. He prepared his material carefully—military history and recognizing military insignia were two of the subjects—and gained a little confidence about making public appearances. But it was a film he was frequently called upon to run that made the most lasting impression on him. This was the documentary John Huston had made for the signal corps during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro. It is, of course, a superbly intimate account of a battle, narrated understatedly in the Hemingway manner by Huston himself. Running it over and over Eastwood became interested in Huston’s work and absorbed the cadences of his unique voice. Almost four decades later, these memories contributed to his decision to make the screen adaptation of White Hunter, Black Heart, Peter Viertel’s roman à clef about the director, and to Clint’s ability to mimic Huston accurately when he played him.
Not long after he settled into his pleasant routine at the swimming pool, Clint got a weekend pass and decided to return to Seattle to visit his parents and see a young woman he was interested in. A friend told him that if y
ou wore a uniform you could hitch a ride on a military aircraft, and so one Friday afternoon they both turned up at a naval air station on the Monterey Peninsula. Sure enough, a twin-engine Beechcraft was heading for Seattle, and they jumped in for a bumpy, but otherwise uneventful, trip north. On Sunday afternoon, he and his friend reported to the Sands Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, not at all certain about getting a return flight.
They discovered, however, that a couple of Douglas ADs, dive-bombers under the command of naval reservists, were about to take off for the Alameda Naval Air Station near Oakland, close enough to Fort Ord for them to make it back to the post before their passes expired. These were not, perhaps, ideal aircraft for a person of claustrophobic temperament. The pilot’s compartment contained just one seat. There was another tiny compartment in the tail of the plane for a radar operator, with a small window, some mysterious instruments, an oxygen mask and an intercom, with which one could talk to the pilot. Clint somehow folded his large frame into this tight space.
Somebody showed him how to activate the oxygen and the intercom, and helped him buckle on a parachute and strap himself into the seat. He was dubious—“I notice it’s kind of trashy in there, pieces of cable laying around”—but with no other options available, he made himself as comfortable as he could, thus beginning a journey into hell. It is not a trip that Clint has discussed in much detail in the past. He has usually skimmed rather quickly over it in interviews, lest it be mistaken for a heroic adventure. It was not—but it was suspenseful and shaping.
The weather was overcast as they took off—not uncommon in Seattle—but Clint imagined that once they left the area it might improve. Visibility, however, remained low for the rest of the flight. Worse, about the time they reached cruising altitude, his door popped open. Air pressure would sometimes close it, but then it would fly open again. He reported this distressing news to the pilot, a Lieutenant Anderson, who told him just to twist the latch shut. He struggled with it for about fifteen minutes, with no success; it was broken beyond in-flight repair. “It was rather chilly in there,” Clint recalls mildly. “This is not a heated plane, or pressurized.” Once again he reported his difficulties to Anderson, who responded, “Look, I’m busy right now. I’ve got to get back to you.”
Clint Eastwood Page 7
