Clint Eastwood (2 page)

David Thomson, the film historian, has specifically linked Clint’s screen character to those boyhood paradigms of masculinity—his “ease and authority” now “the last demonstration of what star glamor used to mean.” And, one must add, what star silence used to mean, too. For as another Wasp, middle-class contemporary, John Updike, observes in his novel
In the Beauty of the Lilies
, where he tries to link America’s loss of traditional religious faith with its rising worship of images graven on celluloid, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and their ilk were also “
beasts of burden, all but a few of them … unable to explain themselves and unapologetic about the lack; sons of an America where the Bible still ruled, they were justified in all their limitations by the Protestant blessing bestowed upon hardship and hardness.” Or, to put it another way, what we knew—Clint and I and others of our kind and time—about that most vexed of topics, being male, had been shaped by forces always cautioning us that real men don’t talk about real manhood.

Clint, however, was doing just that—in his way, in his movies. It was
almost two decades later that Janet Maslin,
The New York Times
critic, caught him out, suggesting that “
America’s daunting ideas about manhood” were the prime topics of his movies. I think she’s right, and, for that matter, so does Clint. His manner of representing maleness—with a sort of conscious unself-consciousness—is the largest source of his strength. A connection is made with our movie past and its traditional male modelings, but with a certain ironic distance maintained, no descent into nostalgia permitted. At the same time, certain connections with contemporary reality are established. He says he can’t play a role unless he finds something in it that mirrors some feelings he has experienced in life, and though he has certainly done movies where it is hard to imagine what those might be, that is true of all the work that has best defined our feelings for him.

But in this early period of our acquaintanceship, when he was making
The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but Loose, Escape from Alcatraz, Bronco Billy
and the movie that he was in New York promoting the day we had lunch,
Honkytonk Man
, I didn’t get, or perhaps chose not to get, that point. I liked all these movies to one degree or another, but it did not occur to me at the time that each in its way offered a portrait of—yes—a nice (or at least not bad) guy arrested for a moment on his fall toward the bottom of the standings and offered a last stark choice between two scary alternatives, redemption and annihilation.

When we met in Los Angeles in those days we did not automatically (or ever) head for Ma Maison. That was for Orson Welles. One time we ended up at a near-deserted lunch counter deep in the San Fernando Valley, where a friend of ours had told us the chili was extraordinary. It was, and so was the response of the proprietor as we settled on our stools. He recognized Clint, of course—with a silent nod. And got one in return. And that was it. We were served our food like any other customers and eventually took our leave in the same way: “Thanks.” “Come again.”

Another time, Clint had heard of a superior hamburger joint (in those days he could still occasionally be lured from his lean and leafy dietary path) somewhere near Western Avenue in one of the city’s less prepossessing districts. We piled into an old heap of a Cadillac that had escaped demolition in some movie car chase and that Clint occasionally used as a kind of vehicular alias and headed for what turned out to be an eatery heavily patronized by working-class blacks and Hispanics. Their response to Clint’s presence was the same as it had been in the Valley—nods, smiles, no exchange of words after we had placed our orders.

There was in these expeditions an assertion of his right if not to good-guy status then to ordinary-guy status. He has never wanted his stardom to interfere with his ability to go where he wants to go, when
he wants to, on his own recognizance. In this age of violently gaga fandom, there is something attractive and refreshing in Clint’s determination to go it alone, though it surely helps that he is so tall, in such obviously good shape (so many movie stars are disappointingly short, fragile and vulnerable looking when you encounter them). It helps, too, that people confuse his screen character and his actual one; they vaguely suspect that he might carry a .44 Magnum in real life.

But pleasing as it is when we witness a celebrity claiming common humanity in commonplace venues, these encounters offer something more curious to consider. They put a witness in touch with the salient quality of Clint’s screen character, which we might identify, oxymoronically, as a kind of infectious self-containment; that is to say, with the kind of self-possession that encourages its observers to answer in kind.

There’s an edge of humorous self-awareness in this posture, a sense that it is something a man is supposed to master, because—well—our fathers and grandfathers, the whole endlessly instructing masculine world, for some reason seemed to value it. To be ironically (but not cynically) aware of the traditions you represent—and this awareness marks not just the way Clint plays his screen character, but the deadpan playfulness with which he toys with the hoary conventions of genre movies—is, of course, to slightly destabilize them. The impulse to subversion in the postmodern world almost always begins in self-consciousness.

Which, of course, must stop well short of self-mockery, avoiding the perils of the obvious put-on, the campy send-up and, worst of all, that hint of self-contempt that makes us want to avert our eyes. Clint’s gift is to let us see the dark comedy in the American male’s contorting, distorting attempts to achieve his masteries of the moment while at the same time not entirely discrediting the tradition that bids him make this effort.

This is, indeed, more than a gift. It is a saving grace. It redeems from meanness the anger that is also very much a part of his screen character. It redeems his realism, a value he stresses, too, from hopelessness. Perhaps most important of all it is the secret of his stardom’s longevity, for this quality also humanizes heroism, draining it of its tiresome and threatening elements. Put simply, irony is both the source of that cool that he has personified for our time and the heart of that unknowability that causes men and women alike to draw in as close as they can to him, trying to catch his message.

All of this is easy for me to say now, impossible for me to have said then. And that is not entirely because of my occasional physical proximity to
my subject, or my growing sense of psychological proximity to him. It has obviously required some time for Clint’s message to come through clearly, largely because of the critical-cultural static that surrounded him in the first decade and a half of his stardom. In those days, as Thomson said, “critics looked down on Eastwood. Thinking people shunned his films.” Which brings me to that failed
Time
cover story of mine. It was written in 1978, and into it went all the incapacities and blindnesses I’ve just discussed. But also into it went the dubieties of this moment. When my colleague Jay Cocks and I proposed—and reproposed—that piece, we did not include Burt Reynolds in our memos. We thought that more than a decade of unalloyed box-office success, the quality of Clint’s work, not to mention the controversy—however spurious we judged it—it had engendered, more than justified his solo appearance on our cover.

But that made our editors squeamish. They knew what “thinking people” thought of Clint. Besides, in those days a
Time
cover, particularly one about a cultural figure, was widely understood as an implicit endorsement of his or her career. And management did not want to seem to be doing that. On the other hand, were we to do a pair of “Hollywood Honchos” (as the cover line eventually identified them), plus a box on Charles Bronson, our editors felt we would be avoiding the hint of false idolatry and embracing a hint of redeeming sociology.

As I reread this effort now, I see that about half of it is devoted not to analysis, but to anxious self-justification: Honestly folks, we’re not pandering to the crowd; we have serious sociocultural issues on our minds. Nor was this its only defect. For a correspondent had been dispatched to conduct the main interview with Clint, who, in his shrewdness, judged him to be a good ole boy manqué, easily seduced from the paths of rigorous investigation. They had knocked back some brews together, kicked back in their chairs and talked about girls, golf, God knows what, but certainly very little that was usefully quotable.

Finally, the balance of the piece slid inevitably toward Burt Reynolds. He and Clint were friends at the time, and one could see why. Reynolds was the kind of guy Clint loved hanging out with—bright, funny, articulate and, for precisely those reasons, a great interview, too. That he was an actor who would soon blight his career by making all the mistakes Clint avoided—he began parodying himself and in his efforts to get chummy with the public let them in on too many of his mysteries—was not yet clear. In any case, the piece managed to take Reynolds more seriously than it did Clint, especially in the respect it accorded his directorial ambitions, although by that time Clint had directed more pictures (six) than his pal would in his entire career (four).

No harm, perhaps, was done; at least a respectable publication had tentatively suggested that there might be something more here than met the supercilious eye. Characteristically, Clint’s true feelings about the story were not revealed for some fifteen years, when he told me Reynolds had called him after the piece appeared, told him he was going to try to order a blowup of the cover photo for his office and asked if he should get one for Clint, too. “No thanks” was the reply.

Clint is not without a sense of his own stature, and though he would never say it, I’m sure he saw himself as a more substantial figure than his friendly rival, and therefore could not quite understand why they were obliged to share cover and coverage. Beyond that, he might have expected something more decisive and incisive of me. He was right on both counts.

And now—long, slow dissolve—it is 1987. I have moved to Los Angeles. I am producing a television documentary about Gary Cooper. I ask Clint if he will be its host and narrator. He thinks it over. He says yes. We agree that his fee will take the form of substantial donations to two charities he names. But financing for the program falls apart, and almost two years pass before it comes together again. Clint registers no impatience. “I’ll be around,” he says casually. And that is the extent of our understanding. It is unprecedented in my experience of these matters—no agent, no lawyer, not even a letter of agreement; just two people trusting their handshake. One day in the spring of 1989 we are finally ready to shoot his on-camera spots. That morning he doesn’t happen to notice when he grabbed a sports jacket out of the closet that the lining had come unstitched. Since he is without a makeup person (“what you see is what you get”), personal assistant or any other attendant, one of our production assistants safety pins the lining back into place. “The trouble with Clint,” Burt Reynolds used to say, “is that he doesn’t know he’s a movie star.”

Certainly he never wants to be accused of acting like one. So when he starts in on his first piece, Clint rushes, stumbling and mumbling, even as you or I might. We try a second take, with similar results. I’ve done a few shoots of this kind, and know this is a common problem. Some actors—maybe most of them—are uncomfortable before the camera, before an audience, when they are unable to wrap a fictional role around themselves and are obliged to play themselves or, more properly, seem to be playing themselves.

This is a role Clint knows how to do in public in only one way, with
extreme shyness and casualness. Authority, for him, is not something you assert; it is something you imply, but it is something someone fronting a nonfiction program—laying out facts and interpreting them—must offer.

I call a break. With some trepidation I suggest that he slow down. “Aw,” he says, “they don’t want to see all that much of me.” “Will you let me be the judge of that?” I reply. I know that if he were not here, none of us would be, for it is Clint Eastwood the network really wants on its air, not some old clips of Gary Cooper. This, however, is not the moment to discuss that fine point. I am favored briefly by the Eastwood glare. We go back to work. He slows down. He’s terrific.