Clint Eastwood (15 page)

Eager and innocent of show business and its ways, Clint did not share his colleagues’ cynicism, at least in his first months at the studio. The talent program was housed in a bungalow to which a gym (which Clint used regularly) and a good-sized rehearsal hall had been added. One gets a collegiate, even locker-roomish, impression of life among the male students, who were outnumbered two or three to one by the women. They noticed, according to Halsey, that though many of the female students were not terrifically faithful in their classroom attendance, this didn’t seem to prevent them from getting such roles as were to be had. It was clear that some of them had, putting it gently, powerful male executives tending to their interests. On the other hand, some of the young ladies were glad to share private “rehearsals” (as the euphemism went) with male students. “We all had the same key to the boy’s dressing room,” Halsey recalls, “and we had to stagger our visits.” One actress in particular, a woman who would later gain a small measure of fame, was, as he puts it, particularly “free with her favors. I think she seduced every guy under contract the first week he was there.”

It seems unlikely that Clint totally avoided these extracurricular activities. Mamie Van Doren, beginning her brief career as a second-rank sex symbol, would say of him, many years later, when he was running for mayor of Carmel, “
He was always straight and direct—he always knew the most straight and direct path to my dressing room.” Clint, naturally, is much more comfortable talking about the guys. Halsey, for example, has remained his friend these many years, and he speaks with undiminished affection for Floyd Simmons, who was at the time his closest friend among his fellow students. He had won bronze medals in the decathlon in both the 1948 and the 1952 Olympics and, like Clint, he was far from being a natural actor (he became acutely nervous when he had to perform). Clint was also reasonably close with John Papero (who was saddled with an unfortunate nom de screen, Race Gentry), and he and David Janssen (who would eventually marry a student he met in the program, Dani Crane) occasionally sneaked away to play
golf—the beginning of Clint’s lifelong passion for the game. But generally agreeable as most of the group was, Clint remained true to his vow to “grind it out.” He was always up and doing, out and about. “It’s amazing how many people never went on sets,” he says of talent program colleagues. “I went on sets a lot.” He went, at first, to study the actors, but soon “
found myself becoming more and more fascinated with the directors and what they were doing, because they were obviously managing the total ensemble.”

To be actively in charge of things, compared to the more passive role of the actor, was extremely attractive to him, and some of what he learned in those early days would have a continuing influence on him: “The things that impressed you, you remember and use yourself and the things that didn’t impress you, you discard.”

He was, in fact, fascinated by the entire moviemaking process. This was, after all, a young man who loved to find out how things worked, and his interest in movie technology analogizes to his earlier fascination with the workings of automobile and aircraft engines. What he observed at a studio obsessed with efficiency and cost control, reinforced by his later experiences in series television, where the same values obtain, are clearly the basis of his own frugal working habits as a producer and director. Similarly, his taste for the camaraderie of the set, his sympathetic ways with crew members and small-part actors, stem from these days.

Not that he was uninterested in the comings and goings of the above-the-title crowd. A film he particularly remembers following through production was
Female on the Beach
, in which Joan Crawford played a wealthy widow who, visiting her late husband’s beach house, falls in love with the mysterious gigolo next door. He is played by a miscast Jeff Chandler, whom one doesn’t believe invulnerable Joan Crawford would either fall for or fear. Typical of the studio’s major efforts of the time, the film was neither stylish in the noir manner to which it aspires nor emotionally relevant in any way.
Its sole interest was as Crawford’s first picture on a new Universal contract (she was having an affair with one of the executives); she insisted on having a vast bungalow remodeled for her use, so she could live on the lot while the film was being made. Everyone was fascinated by the grandeur with which she carried herself, the habits of self-assertion she had learned at M-G-M in its glory days, the youngster in the talent program no less than anyone else. Clint remembers, too, the excitement in the commissary when Clark Gable, who was being wooed for a major production, ate lunch there one day: “That was a real star; not like those semi-stars we’d been dealing with.”

His favorite place was the back lot, one of the most extensive in the industry, with some of its sets dating back to silent-picture days. “You could go out anytime you wanted to and check out the horseback riding. I didn’t know how to ride, so I’d go riding with the old wranglers—hung out with them.” His report cards show Clint moving into the advanced group of riders quite quickly, and before long he was checking out horses and heading alone into the hills southeast of the studio (where D. W. Griffith had shot his major battle sequences for
The Birth of a Nation
four decades earlier). In the fifties, before the studio tour, and before the hotels and the Universal amphitheater were built on this land, it remained a wilderness: “Deer back in there—I’d run up there on horseback, and coyotes would be running across the road. It was really remote. It was really terrific.”

The rest of the time he spent prowling the producers’ offices, making himself known, offering himself for any available jobs. This was easy to do in those days, before the studio’s executive tower and its rather grand producers’ buildings went up. You could just wander into bungalow offices, chat up the secretaries and see what was doing. (Because he was lanky, taciturn and boyish, some of them took to calling him “Coop,” doubtless the source of his classroom flirtation with a Gary Cooperish persona.) His shyness did not hold him back. Making these rounds was like applying for odd jobs, and his father’s advice about showing employers a willingness to do anything that needed doing continued to guide him.

People did begin to notice him. DeWitt Bodeen, then a contract writer at Universal, recalled that “
it was hard to miss him. His rangy height, his intense interest in anything to do with film, his wide-smiled friendliness, made him stand out.” Bob Daley, in his accountant’s office, saw Clint’s photograph with two starlets, all of them in bathing suits, on the cover of the studio house organ: “I took one look at this thing—and I didn’t know him then, I’d seen him on the lot a couple of times—but I said to somebody, ‘This guy is gonna be big. Because he doesn’t have the usual pretty-boy looks.’ ”

But that was precisely his problem. Universal was committed to pretty boys, the fast-rising Rock Hudson most prominently. He was a good-natured, rather passive actor, a seeming paragon of middle-class virtue, and the studio was using him as the earnest, nonthreatening male lead in its “women’s pictures” (idealistic doctors were one of his specialties), many of which were directed with a certain sober-glossy panache by the talented Douglas Sirk. (Hudson’s agreeable gift for light comedy was undiscovered in the early fifties.)

Also in favor at the time was the edgier and more urbane Tony Curtis,
whose best qualities management often buried by miscasting him in period pieces. Just below them on the roster came the wooden but agreeable Chandler and the rather bland George Nader. The most interesting Universal-International releases of the day were the tough westerns James Stewart was making with director Anthony Mann (Stewart’s deal was, it is said, the first in which a star participated in his pictures’ profits), but he was in a class by himself at the studio.

For all his winning ways, Clint couldn’t get in to see the likes of Sirk and Mann. He recalls well-meaning people around the lot proposing that he darken his hair, try dark contact lenses, get his teeth capped so he might more closely resemble the men on whom Universal had placed its largest bets. He remembers an executive telling him to study the way Rock Hudson entered the commissary, “like he owns the place.” Well, Clint thought, he does. He couldn’t act like Hudson on- or off-screen and saw no point in trying.

Yet eyeing his none-too-formidable competition he was slowly becoming convinced that he had something to offer, even if no one, including himself, could quite define it. He later told an interviewer that he knew he “
wouldn’t make any impact until my thirties. I was twenty-four then, looked like I was eighteen, and still had a certain amount of living to do.” So he contented himself with being considerate, helpful, good-humored—qualities all of us tend to stress when we’re new to a job, giving shrewd Jack Kosslyn a vivid first impression: “Nice guy—zip personality, zip talent.” He kept this opinion to himself, since the talent program faculty felt obliged to optimism about its charges.

Basically, the problem that everyone—Clint included—was addressing was the cognitive dissonance he set up in even his more sympathetic observers. From a physical presence this imposing, one expected strong stuff of some kind; what one got instead was a kind of boyish sweetness. The kinds of masculinity that interested the fifties audiences—tortured on the one hand, mature and responsible on the other—were not (as we now know) within his natural range. He wasn’t James Dean and he wasn’t Gregory Peck. His maleness is of a much more straightforward, unmediated kind. Freely mobilized, it is full of anger and free of guilt, and there was nothing in the reigning conventions of the screen, or for that matter in the culture, that encouraged the open expression of those qualities.

Moreover, his capacity for outrage somewhat frightened him. He had schooled himself to suppress the impatience, the anger, always simmering beneath the surface, and it was hard for him to deploy these qualities in his work at his age, in this buttoned-down moment. Away from the studio, however, his temper could let fly in an instant. Not long
after Clint started at Universal, Fritz Manes, who was serving the last of his time in the Marine Corps at Camp Pendleton, came to Los Angeles on a pass. One afternoon he repaired with Clint to a bar. “I had on my khaki uniform with the ribbons,” Manes recalls, “and we’re sitting in this place drinking beer and about six sailors are in there in their white uniforms and some guy says something to me and so, of course, I’ve gotta stand up and play macho.

“Five fuck yous and that was the last thing I ever said for the rest of the afternoon, because some guy got me right behind the ear, blind-side.” But it appears that the same sailor who bolo-punched Manes pulled Clint’s sports jacket up over his head, blinding and constricting him. The sailor then kicked him in the face, chipping a couple of teeth. This deeply offended Clint’s sense of fair play. So, freeing himself from his jacket, he proceeded to “just beat the shit out of him,” as Manes put it. By the time Manes’s head had cleared, the police and the shore patrol were on the scene, sailors were sprawled around the parking lot and an ambulance was wheeling up for the man who had led the attack.

It’s obvious that a rage this potent can be as scary to its possessor as it is to those on whom it is turned. It is equally obvious that for a man one cannot imagine trying any sort of psychotherapy—he never has—Clint had, at least in one sense, chosen the right profession: training as an actor teaches one how to control and channel dangerous emotions, make them work for you instead of against you. It also seems clear that at this moment his temper was in particular need of tempering.

Entering upon marriage and a new profession almost simultaneously, Clint had also entered into conflict. Both of them demanded that he abandon his footloose ways. Wives expect you home on time for dinner. Employers enforce regular attendance on their needs. Clint may have been essentially happy with both of his new commitments, but there is no question that he continued to heed the call of the wild. He still liked hanging out with the guys, liked heading out on a moment’s notice for a brew, some music, a day of surfing. A decade after his marriage, Clint told an interviewer: “
The first year of marriage was terrible. If I had to go through it again, I think I’d be a bachelor for the rest of my life. I liked doing things when I wanted to do them. I did not want any interference.… One thing Mag had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t be married.”

There’s an unwonted harshness in his tone here, an impatient immediacy
that belies the fact that he was discussing what were at the time ten-year-old feelings. Perhaps, more than he has ever admitted, he felt that he had not really chosen marriage, that it was another of those irresistible circumstances that had been imposed on him by life—like his childhood moves, and being drafted and falling out of the sky in an airplane. In any case, it is clear that the constraints of marriage came as a shock to him, a shock he never quite got over, as, perhaps, the fact that he remained at least technically a “bachelor” from the time of his divorce from Maggie until 1996 proves.