Clint Eastwood (12 page)

But as his military service drew to a close, he was spending more time thinking about his future than he was about casual romance. He was more determined than ever to go to college, and the GI Bill made that more feasible than before. He considered Monterey Peninsula Junior College and College of the Pacific at Stockton, either of which would do for a semester or two, so he could get his credits in order and reapply to Seattle University and its music course. Then a friend of his named Chuck Hill started talking about Los Angeles City College, making it seem, in some way that Clint can’t quite remember, rather appealing. Maybe it was its proximity to the well-remembered L.A. jazz clubs. Maybe it was its proximity to the movie industry, for by this time he had made another acquaintance, an assistant film editor in civilian life, and he, too, began encouraging him to try acting. But as with Norman Barthold, there was no urgency in the advice. “I never had anyone say, ‘Yeah, here’s what you have to do.’ ” As with so much else in his life at this time, he simply caught a dispassionate drift, and applied to the Los Angeles institution, where he was accepted.

Clint had a few months to spare between discharge and the beginning of school and spent most of the summer in Seattle with his parents. At the end of the summer Clint went to San Francisco to see Don Kincade, among other pals, and to hitch a ride south from there with Chuck Hill. Before leaving San Francisco, Clint was recruited by Kincade for a blind date. He was going with a sorority girl at Berkeley, and she had this friend, Maggie Johnson.

She was, as Kincade recalls, going pretty steadily with another guy. But she agreed to a casual double date—just a few beers at a college hangout. She would recall: “I came down the stairs of the sorority house, and [Clint] had his back to me. When he turned around, I was amazed at what he looked like. Plus he was understated, and that kind of appealed to me. I’m kind of understated myself.”

Maggie was tall and blond with a trim figure and a nice sense of humor. She also loved the outdoors, and as Clint told one interviewer, “
We hit it off right away. She was the kind of girl I really liked; there was nothing phoney about her.” They dated a few more times, and since she was soon to graduate, and was planning to return to Los Angeles—her parents lived in Alhambra—that encouraged him to think that he had made the right choice of colleges.

In Los Angeles, Clint got a job managing a small apartment building on Oakhurst Drive, far south in the Beverly Hills flats. He had been led to believe that the work would be light—minor repairs, showing vacant apartments to potential occupants. But in return for his greatly reduced rent he soon discovered that he was on call twenty-four hours a day for emergency repairs and that he was also expected to paint entire units when they fell vacant. It was difficult for him to manage, given his schedule at school. Moreover, since he needed cash, he had also taken a job at a gas station.

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.