Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  He was enrolled in the business administration program at City College—“You know, what everybody takes when they don’t know what they want to do”—which he found generally uninteresting. On the other hand, City College, which is close to downtown Los Angeles and boasts a brick, ivy-colored administration building, which in those days occasionally doubled as an eastern college in the movies, had a strong drama department, and Clint began “looking into” its programs, auditing the odd class now and then. The drift toward an acting career was starting to accelerate. Fritz Manes thinks that Clint was beginning to contrast what he was gathering from his courses about the restrictiveness of business life, bound to a desk from nine to five, subject to all manner of corporate constraints, with what he was beginning to sense about the actor’s much freer life. “I mean, can you imagine Eastwood in a bank? Or as a real estate broker—take all those tests and do all that stuff? I don’t think he wanted to do something that was too taxing. I don’t think he realized how taxing acting was.”

  Certainly the people encouraging his hesitant ambitions in this direction had no sophisticated understanding of what the work entailed. They included Hill, who around this time obtained a job at Universal, and a law student named Howard Cogan, who was for a while Clint’s roommate and ran with a young showbiz crowd (he introduced Clint to Mort Sahl, among other aspiring performers). These men didn’t know or care much about acting, but they did recognize a hunk when they saw one. Like Manes, they had observed that Clint was “a tremendous presence. He’d walk into a bar and sit down, and you’d see gals start to look over, and you’d see guys start to wonder.”

  The town is always full of young studs like that—and their gorgeous female equivalents—waiting on tables, waiting for the big break, which just enough of them obtain, thus keeping an essentially hopeless and sometimes self-destructive dream alive. But however others might have seen him, Clint didn’t regard himself as beefcake. He simply thought that if looks might possibly get him past some studio gate, then he’d better be “prepared to take advantage of that chance when it came along.” So in the evenings he began auditing more acting classes, which were held at the various studios springing up around town in imitation of the Stanislavsky-based instruction available in New York, then far along in the process of revolutionizing the profession.

  He was still hanging back a bit, still not entirely committed to this radical course, and he says now, “I probably shouldn’t have been an actor at all. I had no great quest to stand up in front of people, in front of an audience.” To this day he thinks “the ideal thing would be to act just by yourself, in a room somewhere,” though he concedes that “the next-best thing is doing it in front of a minimal crew [i.e., on a movie set],” and, after that, appearing before small audiences of people “who really enjoy it [i.e., in acting classes].”

  Looking back, he says, “You thought if the guy had a Russian name that meant that he knew how to teach acting,” and adds, “I’m not sure how much benefit they [the acting classes] had. Really, it was sort of a pseudointellectual thing, a fad that people were going through at the time.” He cites Paul Mazursky’s movie, Next Stop, Greenwich Village, as a reasonably realistic representation of the moment’s mood as he experienced it.

  Actually, Clint seems to have been more interested than he allowed himself to show then or to admit now. If he did not at first understand how deep the “dream of passion” (to borrow the title of Lee Strasberg’s memoir) ran, and knew next to nothing about the long history and high reformist ardor that informed the Stanislavskian tradition, he did see what everyone who cared anything about acting in those days saw: that the success of a rising generation of actors (of whom Marlon Brando was, of course, the most visible), trained in one version or another of Stanislavsky’s system (the word he preferred to “method,” which was Strasberg’s coinage), was increasingly inarguable.

  This triumph had been long in coming and owed much to such European theatrical émigrés as the director Richard Boleslavsky, the actress Maria Ouspenskaya (both trained in Stanislavsky’s company) and Erwin Piscator (a German director who founded the Dramatic Workshop at New York’s New School, which sheltered both Strasberg and his rival, Stella Adler, in their early teaching days). After the sensational visit of Stanislavsky’s company to New York during the 1922–23 season, many in the American theater were awakened to the value of a new, more intense psychological realism in performance. Boleslavsky’s Laboratory Theater kept the flame alive, the Group Theater fanned it, and Piscator guarded it in the years between the Group’s failure and the founding of the Actors Studio in 1947. More directly relevant, around 1940 a Stanislavskian outpost, the Actors Lab, was established in Los Angeles. Many of the teachers Clint encountered were or had been connected to the lab, which was also the object of intense scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee during its wildly misplaced investigation of communism in Hollywood.

  The Stanislavskians were a contentious and schismatic crowd, but they all shared an implicit belief that by turning acting into a teachable discipline with generally acknowledged standards they might impart to this craft the respectability of a profession. In turn, they hoped this new status would aid them and their disciples in rescuing Broadway and Hollywood from their shabby commercialism. In this, they failed, but they did at least radically change the way actors looked at themselves and their work. In effect, they were given permission to take themselves seriously. This was no small gift to, among others, Clint Eastwood, so dubious about this occupation, so unwilling to enter it if it represented no more than another form of drifting.

  Luckily, one of the first acting teachers he encountered was George Shdanoff, who was, in turn, a disciple of Michael Chekhov, who was reasonably well known as a character actor—he had won an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of a psychiatrist in Hitchcock’s Spellbound—but was, within the business, a legendary teacher and theoretician of acting. Nephew of the playwright and a sometime colleague of Stanislavsky in the Moscow Art Theater, Chekhov was at the height of his influence when Clint attended some of his lectures at Shdanoff’s studio, for in 1953 he had published his book, To the Actor, which he dedicated to Shdanoff. Much discussed in theatrical circles at the time, it distilled the wisdom of a lifetime (Clint still recommends it to young actors).

  Chekhov and his followers did not emphasize sense and emotional memory, cornerstones of Stanislavsky’s theories, particularly as the influential Strasberg taught them. The Chekhovians felt it limited the actor and was a detriment to ensemble work. Chekhov, like Stella Adler, believed the actor should not be obliged to reach too deeply into himself to pull up the materials of his performance. Rather, he taught actors to reach out to one another and to the audience as well. “The dramatic art is a collective art,” he wrote, “and therefore however talented the actor may be, he will not be able to make full use of his ability to improvise if he isolates himself from the ensemble, his partners.”

  Chekhov developed a psychology of gestures, offering his students a series of exercises to help them in this study, which he codified in his book. Beatrice Straight, the actress who was one of his earlier students and remained one of his most ardent champions, said this was “a way to help actors get the feeling they needed, without thinking.” Straight admitted that Chekhov’s fear of the intellect led him away from a concern with the well-spoken phrase. “You could spot any Chekhov student by how he spoke on the stage,” Straight told the writer Foster Hirsch, “not in the right way.” But, of course, a certain eccentric naturalism often arose out of this.

  Typically, a Chekhov class contained many eurhythmic exercises, and when, a little later, Clint began doing scenes in class, he remembers repeating certain sets of gestures before going on stage. “If you were playing a very aggressive person, you would do psychological gestures like punching. Or if you’re supposed to do a scene where you’re going to break up with this gal, you kind of do [brushing aside] gestures and then when you walk
on you automatically have that feeling of wanting to be away from that person.” In Clint’s summary, Chekhov believed that acting was built out of “certain instincts that you already have and the question is just to channel all that stuff into some sort of visual image for you.”

  In Clint’s early film and television work it is hard to discern much technique of any kind, let alone specifically Chekhovian technique. The parts are small and usually peripheral to the plot’s main business. He is, at best, an eager presence, trying (sometimes a little too hard) to be helpful to the work at hand and to establish his presence—very far from the easy naturalism of his mature screen presence. But in the long run, Chekhov’s influence on him would prove substantial. Chekhov’s distrust of an overintellectual approach to acting confirmed and rationalized a similar antipathy in Clint. And his appreciation as a director for the spontaneous gesture, his preference for the rough, unpolished line reading over the more-carefully-considered one, his overall belief that truth is more likely to be found in nonverbal rather than verbal expression, all surely have roots in Chekhov’s schooling.

  He is also, as both an actor and a director, someone who believes in ensembles—here his jazz aesthetic also comes into play—the atmosphere he established on his sets when he is directing being quite clearly aimed at reducing his actors’ isolation, forging them into a comfortably functioning unit. His willingness to let his actors find their roles in their own ways, not imposing on them, is of a piece with that philosophy. Even Stanislavsky’s books, as Clint reads them, are about “teaching you to teach yourself. He never talks about himself as a teacher.”

  But it was another aspect of Chekhov’s teaching that appealed to Clint with particular force, and which he found immediately useful in helping to overcome what we might call his stage shyness. That was Chekhov’s belief that the actor must “center” whatever character he is playing in some portion of his own physical being. This might be in the curl of his lips or the set of his hips, but whatever it is, that is the physical residence of the fictive figure’s primary emotions—the place he is coming from, as we would say now. For Clint, this was a godsend, because “in placing these centers you can actually take your self-awareness away to the point where you’re comfortable in front of an audience.” Working this way, he was not exposing his whole shy self, only a finite, objectively chosen part of that self. Again, an analogy to jazz occurs. These centers were to him what his piano had been, a way of objectifying emotions, expressing them without exposing himself totally.

  There is one more aspect of Chekhov’s system that Clint does not mention, but Beatrice Straight and others do. That is what she calls “reaching out to your partner and to the audience … beaming an aura, sending out qualities in an almost mystical sense.” It was at the development of this capacity that all the instruction was aimed, and ultimately, perhaps, that’s what all star actors do in the movies. However they come by this capacity, whether by training or birthright, it is what sets them apart from other performers who may be technically their superiors. Who can doubt that the vengeful protagonist of the Sergio Leone westerns, or Dirty Harry Callahan, or for that matter Will Munny, are beaming something at us that goes beyond characterization as it is usually defined in films and theater? It is admittedly odd, even vaguely comical, to trace the creation of these figures back to ideas that can, in turn, trace their roots back to turn-of-the-century Moscow. But if that journey seems too long and winding to undertake, it should be obvious that in the minds of most of his audience the screen presence we know as “Clint Eastwood” is more aura than man, created out of a lifetime of gestures, which derive not from a complex whole, but from certain aspects of that whole—“centers,” if you will—that he chose to develop and exploit.

  One does not want to make too much of all this. Some of what he saw—and did—when, a little later, he became an active participant in, rather than an observer of, acting classes struck him as ludicrous, and still does. The only time he had a conversation with Marlon Brando it was about their student days, and Clint remembers him saying “he felt like a fool in classes because he was playing chickens and I said, ‘Well, shit, I had to do that too.’ I mean, we did classes where we were chickens or inanimate objects, even.” He seems to recall having impersonated a teapot somewhere along the line.

  On the other hand, one should not make too little of his studies, either. The depth of his interest and the length of his involvement with the study of acting may come as a surprise to some, since he has never spoken at length in public about it. The unsophisticated like to believe that movie stars are untutored; this helps sustain the fantasy that their fame and wealth are accidental, thus democratically available to all. Some sophisticates like to believe the same thing; it helps them to sustain their contempt for popular successes they believe to be unearned. But the fact is that Eastwood took much of what he learned very much to heart, and it is still there, informing his work.

  Clint was certainly not above trying to advance his career by means cruder than dutiful study. Chuck Hill encouraged him to visit the Universal lot, and Clint took him up on the invitation. As Steven Spielberg did later, he learned how to sneak into the studio. “I just visited their sets and just kind of hung out.” Was he hoping to be discovered? Surely by this time he had some idea of the striking first impression he was capable of making.

  But acting was still an exotic thought. Besides, there were distractions, most notably, Maggie Johnson. Clint had continued to see her since arriving in Los Angeles, and their relationship was deepening. They particularly loved the beach. Surfing was not then, according to Clint, the teenage fad it was soon to become among young Californians. It was a sport for people in their twenties and thirties, and he and Maggie were often at Huntington Beach or San Onofre with their boards. They also liked to bodysurf on gray days at San Clemente after a storm had stirred the waters.

  At the time Maggie was living in Altadena, working for a manufacturer’s representative. The long distance separating them, and their busy work schedules, helped to make the idea of marriage more attractive to them. Clint thinks he was more reluctant than she was to take the step. He thought they were too young, not well enough established. But, when it comes to marriage, “Guys never have much say about it.” Clint shrugs. After all, Maggie came from a nice middle-class background, and in those days young women like her expected to marry after a courtship had proceeded for a certain length of time. Clint, being the obliging young man that he was, never overtly rebellious against social conventions, was not hard to win over, especially since he had the example of his parents’ youthful marriage before him.

  Above all, marriage “was doable.” Clint was still managing the apartment house on Oakhurst Drive, assuring them an affordable rent. If they combined her salary and his odd-job money he could continue his education at City College and they could get by. So on December 19, 1953, they were married in a respectable church wedding, after which they honeymooned in Carmel for a few days.

  In retrospect, it seems so terribly fifties. Prosperity, postwar exhaustion, Cold War anxieties—so many large forces have been cited for creating a culture of small, safe hopes, a culture that was conspiring to push young people into marriage as soon as possible. Whatever their immediate prospects, the idea was to get them snugged up and heading toward suburbia. Indeed, Clint and Maggie were slightly above the median age at which Americans married in this decade of falling divorce rates and rising birthrates. But the broad sociological statistics always reckon without restless young men who, for whatever reasons, decide to swim against dictates of caution and the tides of the moment. And Clint Eastwood, as silent as any member of the Silent Majority could possibly be, was one of them. Whatever his goal, it was not a suburban split-level.

  THREE

  REFINED, AMBITIOUS AND COOPERATIVE

  Reflecting on the difficulties he experienced establishing himself as an actor in the 1950s, Clint Eastwood once said: “I just lacked the look that dec
ade seemed to call for.” There’s something in that. He did not have the introspective sensitivity, or the self-consciously suppressed violence, of Brando or Dean, nor did he have the passivity, the gentility, if you will, of Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, young dreamboats whose lack of danger and incisiveness suited the other mood of this erotically confused moment.

  Tall, solidly built but slender, sandy haired, with cool, appraising blue-green eyes, Clint seemed, if anything, a throwback to the Gary Cooper-Jimmy Stewart type. Those men were still prospering in the movies, of course, but their appeal was to the older audience. The kids seemed to want something else, or so studio executives believed.

  Luckily, this aspect of the current conventional wisdom had not been vouchsafed to a veteran cinematographer named Irving Glassberg. He was one of the people Clint had encountered in his forays on the Universal lot, or, to call it by its then-rightful name (which few did), the Universal-International lot. Glassberg saw in him a good-looking young man of a sort that had traditionally done well in the movies. He didn’t predict stardom. Indeed, at first he didn’t broach the subject of coming to work at the studio. Glassberg was “a real sports nut,” as Clint recalls, for whom swimming was a particular passion, and they talked more about that than they did about moviemaking. Clint and Maggie began seeing Glassberg and his wife socially, and eventually the cameraman mentioned the possibility of Clint auditioning for the studio’s talent program.

  Most of the studios still had such programs, reminders of their glory days, when heavy schedules of in-house production made it useful to have lots of pretty faces and bodies under inexpensive contract—“starlets and studlets,” as Jack Kosslyn, an acting coach who began teaching at Universal around this time, characterized them.