Clint Eastwood (5 page)

It occurred on May 31, 1930, at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. “I always said he was famous from the day he was born,” she says, “because he weighed eleven pounds, six ounces, and he was the biggest baby in St. Francis … so the nurses carried him all around and showed him to everyone.” One of the local newspapers even ran an item about the birth of this strapping lad. As for Ruth, “I fell in love with him immediately, and stayed that way ever since. He was a dear, charming boy.”

He was also a daring toddler. His mother remembers that when she took him for walks along the shore of Lake Merritt he always insisted on going as close to the edge as possible. One day he fell into the lake, “and I had to jump in, pink dress and all,” to save him. It was the first of several misadventures, at least one of which surely had a shaping effect on
his character, in which Clint encountered large bodies of water to dangerous effect.

The elder Eastwoods were by this time walking along a different sort of edge. Clint Sr.’s brokerage commissions had dropped to almost nothing, and he began looking for some other kind of work. As it happened, Ruth’s brother, Melvin, had a refrigeration business in Spokane, and he proposed that her husband come to work with him. This was the first of the many moves the family made during the thirties, though Clint has no memories of it or of their life in Washington. His mother, however, has one vivid recollection of him in this period. It seems they acquired a deer’s head and hung it over their mantel. When Clint saw it for the first time “he ran outside and around the house to find the rest of the deer.” They stayed in Spokane for just over a year, not very happily. “Working for one’s wife’s brother is not the most wonderful thing in the world” is the way Ruth puts it.

At that point they began the odyssey that would consume the rest of the decade. As recorded by various interviewers, the Eastwood family’s wanderings have taken on the cast of a Steinbeck novel, but that over-dramatizes the case, suggesting a desperation that Ruth never felt. “We didn’t even know we were poor … we just knew we didn’t have quite enough money.”

Her casual gallantry matches Clint’s recollections of the spirit in which his parents confronted adversity. “I don’t recall them ever complaining a lot. She’s a strong lady. She wasn’t a griper, and they always kind of made do—positive attitude.” That was Clinton Sr.’s way as much as it was his wife’s. He was, as Clint puts it, “a very personable guy. People liked him a lot and he liked people a lot—a lot more than I do, I think. I mean, he seemed like he was very much at home in the world.”

That held true no matter what unpromising corner of it he found himself occupying. After Spokane, the family returned briefly to Oakland, but Clinton Sr. found no work there. Some friends prevailed on an acquaintance of theirs, who worked for Standard Oil, to give him a post, and he was told there was something for him in Los Angeles—pumping gas, as it turned out, generally on the night shift, at the Standard station on Sunset Boulevard where it joins the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica.

If Clinton Sr. thought this a comedown, he said nothing about it, and the Eastwoods, who now had a second child, Jeanne, settled into half of a double house in Pacific Palisades, then no more than a sketch of a suburb that would not begin to be fully filled in until after World War II. There were only a few other houses on the street.

Clint’s memories begin here. He recalls his first encounter with an
angry dog, his fascination with an ostrich egg owned by one of their neighbors, seeing Catalina from the beach and imagining it was China. His mother recalls a little boy with more courage than sense. She remembers one day when he slipped out of sight and she found him pedaling his tricycle on a nearby boulevard, narrowly avoiding oncoming cars. On another occasion she looked up to see her five-year-old son clinging to the rear bumper of a neighbor’s car as it took off down the street. Older kids had put him up to this stunt, and by the time Ruth rushed out and flagged down the driver (who couldn’t see the little fellow who had attached himself to his vehicle) smoke was rising from Clint’s ruined shoes.

One day the family decided to go bodysurfing at Santa Monica beach. “I had Jeannie in the basket,” Ruth says, “she was just born, so I was sitting with her … and his father had Clint on his shoulder and he went out and this huge wave came in and washed over both of them, and the next thing I saw Clint was not there at all—little Clint. But I saw this foot coming up, and then it turned and went back again and then everybody that was there started to run toward him, including me, and I caught this foot. He was underwater long enough to be frightened.”

“It was kind of a big surf, pounding,” Clint recalls, “and I can still remember the greenness of the water, and coming up I remember seeing my mother running into the water. And so it made a big imprint on me at an early age.”

Once everyone calmed down, his mother sat with Clint at the water’s edge “and played in the small waves for a while, because I was afraid he’d never get over it.” He did, of course; he spent much of his young manhood around the water, as a lifeguard, a swimming instructor and a devoted surfer.

This was a family determined to put the best possible face on bad times. In this period Clint remembers his father and some friends organizing a garage band—Clinton Sr. played the guitar and also crooned a bit—which performed, usually unpaid, at weddings and other social events. “I don’t know how good he was,” Clint recalls, “but he would have loved to have been an entertainer of sorts.” His mother, who sometimes joined the group, playing a mandolin, agrees; her husband, she says, was an enthusiastic, if untutored, Bing Crosby imitator. “It could have been a good voice,” she says, “but he didn’t sit still long enough to have it trained.”

There was, undeniably, an impatience in the man, a restlessness about him. It was always there, beneath the genial sociability and the professional adaptability. Some of that eagerness to move on, not to dither unduly over details, is in his son; so is the determination to hide
ambition under an easygoing and affable manner. The difference between them would seem to be very largely one of self-presentation, with the father much the heartier and more apparently open. Both, not to put too fine a point on it, are Californians, not given to the darker forms of introspection, loyal to friends and family, yet also resistant to rootedness, perhaps because historically their native landscape always seemed so spacious and there was so much of it to explore. Doubtless hard times impelled Clinton Sr. to range freely in search of suitable work. But one can’t escape the feeling that, no matter what his circumstances, it would have suited him, still a young man in his twenties, his wanderlust not entirely quenched, to keep moving on.

The Eastwoods stayed in the Palisades for roughly a year, then moved briefly to a bungalow in Hollywood (where Clint remembers a stray kitten appearing on their doorstep and becoming a permanent member of the household). Thereafter they moved on virtually an annual basis, first to Redding in northern California (where Clinton Sr. was “the bond man” at a Bank of America branch), then to Sacramento (more bond selling, for a brokerage firm), then to the Glenview section of the East Bay (now he was working in a San Francisco jewelry store), finally back to Piedmont (where they rode out the war with Clinton Sr. working in a shipyard).

There was never any panic or desperation in these moves. The elder Eastwood always had a job lined up before his family began packing. And Clint never felt unloved or abandoned at any time during this period; his parents were obviously caring and conscientious. Moreover, little as he may have appreciated it at the time, he sees now that they provided him with valuable life lessons unobtainable by the more settled children of his generation, or by the children of later, more prosperous generations.

When they moved, the Eastwoods would load their belongings into a little two-wheeled cart, which would bounce along behind their car. From the backseat the kids would sometimes see shantytowns sheltered under highway overpasses, where less fortunate itinerants found refuge. The shacks, Clint would later recall, were “
made out of Prince Albert cans [tobacco tins and the like]—they’d take and mash all these cans and nail them up in some sort of way.” He still sometimes refers to the hoboes they occasionally encountered at rest stops as “knights of the road,” using the old phrase not entirely ironically.

There were always surprises along the way, sometimes pleasant,
sometimes not. On their way to Sacramento, for example, they encountered a stray dog—“half cocker spaniel, half whatever, but it was a terrific dog”—along the road and took it in. Like their cat it would attain great age in the Eastwood household. On the other hand, when they moved into their new home there (it was half of a duplex), they found it “was loaded with mice,” and Clint still remembers, with a slight shudder, “mousetraps going off all night” until the pests were disposed of. (His mother, it should be noted, has no such memory, insisting on the niceness of this little house a few miles out of town, and is a little cross with her son for implying that their digs were ever, even for a moment,
infra
.) Clint also remembers a sizable chicken coop out back and his father and their neighbor remodeling it into a rentable apartment, though they kept one of its former inhabitants, “Hennypen,” as a pet.

A boy could learn a certain kind of realism from this kind of life, a cool ability to accept things and people, success and failure, as they came, and this lesson, especially valuable to actors in their up-and-down lives, Clint Eastwood, steady in adversity and in fame, thoroughly absorbed.

In its way this acceptance of life’s changeability supports his habit of restlessness, and his latter-day glamorization of it. How many of his screen characters come from nowhere, heading nowhere? How many of them are men on the loose, questing along open American roads, open American
back
roads? He has homes in Los Angeles and Carmel, a ranch in northern California, a ski lodge in Sun Valley, and when he is not working he is constantly on the move among them. Or he is traveling to promote one of his movies or, in recent years, to accept some award for, or tribute to, his life’s achievements. Or he is trying some golf course he has not played, testing some powder he has not skied.

In years past, before he settled more confidently into his celebrity, he would often put on a false mustache and glasses, pull a hat down low on his forehead, in order to attend some faraway sneak preview of one of his pictures or enjoy some other public occasion in anonymity. Disguise freed him from the encumbrance of an entourage, and as he told an interviewer in the early seventies, “
I come and go like The Whistler on the old radio program,” that is to say, quickly, quietly, anonymously.

Now that he has his own helicopter and his pilot’s license, it’s even easier to keep moving, and he sometimes feels something like the old pleasures of the road when he’s flying: “You get in and just declare your freedom.… All of a sudden you’re just a number in the sky. Nobody knows who you are unless you happen to be flying by an airport that’s familiar with you and they recognize your call number. But by and large
you’re out there, going where you want to go, and landing where you want to land.”

At the time, though, his family’s wayfaring made him miserable. Children are natural conservatives. There is comfort in a circumscribed life—it narrows the wide, strange world down to manageable proportions—and that comfort was denied him. He was always the new kid in class, the new kid in the neighborhood, and it made him angry: “I kept wondering why we were moving all the time. But [my parents would] say, ‘Well, you know, not for you to question why,’ and all that. Or just mostly, ‘Well, your dad’s got a job, so we’ve got to go there.’ And you always hated it, because, you know, you just get to know a few kids on the block and get accepted a little bit and then, all of a sudden, boom, you’re gone.”

Always tall for his age (he was more than six feet tall when he was thirteen), he was more than usually self-conscious about his appearance, about his family nicknames (“Sonny” and “Junior,” both of which he hated), about his indifferent performance in school. Perhaps because he attended so many schools and was constantly befuddled by new environments and changed expectations, he frequently withdrew into dreaminess. “If I was sitting near the window and the leaves [were] blowing out there, my mind could be a thousand miles away. You sit there, you know, you feel the air … and boy I could go off on a trip.”

Clint envied the students for whom things came easily. “I had a buddy in school [who] could dump all his books in a locker and go home and the only reason he got a B was through misconduct of some sort. I’d have to go in there and drill my brains to get a passing, decent grade.” From grade school through high school, this remained difficult for him. “I didn’t have a real go-home-and-study-for-two-hours-so-I’ll-get-an-A attitude. It’s like the physicist Edward Teller: He always said a genius is someone who does well with a subject he doesn’t like, and that would certainly eliminate me.”