Clint Eastwood (6 page)

He was bad at math, liked history and “could have been all right drawing if I’d pursued it.” Somewhere along the line his natural left-handedness was trained out of him. He read the usual kid stuff—comics and Big Little Books—joined the family around the radio to listen to shows like
Inner Sanctum
and
I Love a Mystery
, saw
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
—probably his first movie—when he was seven and spent a lot of time by himself, often in conversation with “Bill,” a toy soldier, if his mother’s recollection is right. Clint supplied voices for many of his playthings and made up adventures as he sprawled on the floor with them.

Not close with his sister in those days, he seems to have kept his loneliness to himself. His mother, indeed, was unaware of it. “I didn’t
realize how shy he was,” she says. “I’m not, and neither was his father. I don’t know where on earth he got it. But anyway, I guess it was harder on him than I knew.” Her recollection is that wherever they went he always found one or two companions; one of them, Robert Baker, whom he met in Redding, remained a lifelong friend.

In her eyes, then, he was all right. And perhaps precisely because she saw him so, that’s the way he turned out. Ruth, in Clint’s description, was “with all due prejudice a fabulous woman. She adored her children.” Above all, “she was very flexible. She was a very understanding mother.” Though his father was usually the family disciplinarian, she could be firm if need be. “They weren’t overly strict parents, but if you got out of line they’d swipe you on the behind.”

And that would then be that; the elder Eastwoods didn’t hold grudges or nurse wounds. Clint describes them as extremely tolerant, entirely free of the bigotry and paranoia that so often afflict the temporarily declassed. “My parents never looked down on anybody. They were always fairly open-minded—conservative in handling their own lives, but liberal in their approach to other people’s existence,” including that of their children.

They were uninsistent religiously and politically. Ruth and the children quietly attended whatever Protestant church was near at hand wherever they settled. Politically, she and her husband apparently supported Roosevelt for two terms, then broke away to vote for Wendell Willkie in 1940. But there is no defining passion to be found in these commonplace religious and political convictions. It was common sense and common decency that ruled their lives, and it was those qualities that they passed on to their children. There were, one gathers, no hidden agendas in the Eastwood family, no dark, twisting pressures, just simple, straightforward expectations and affections, clearly expressed.

Whatever insecurities their restless passage through the world in these years imposed upon their children, there was always, in the Eastwood home, a bed of feelings in which they could securely root themselves. And that, too, would become one source of Clint’s strength within his profession. There are no childish emotional needs for which he requires belated compensation from audiences, colleagues, studios. He long ago gathered all of that to him, and not alone from his mother and father. He has fond memories of visits to Grandpa Burr, who also upped stakes during the depression, surprising everyone by selling his Piedmont house and, with his second wife, buying a little farm devoted to apple trees and chicken raising near Sebastopol. It is, however, his maternal grandmother, Virginia Runner, who figures most powerfully in Clint’s reminiscences of these years. During their unsettled period it seems that the Eastwoods
frequently circled back on her little house in Hayward, sixty years ago a semirural community where Mrs. Runner, then working as a bookkeeper for a food-processing company, could live in solitary contentment, a largehearted, sweetly eccentric woman, warm in her affections, setting for Clint a memorable, often-cited example of the independent life. Clint and his sister lived with her once for an entire school year during a particularly unsettled period, Clint happily sleeping in a tent he had pitched in the backyard. Afterward, he visited her as often as he could.

Clint attributes his lifelong affection for animals to his grandmother, for there was always a shifting population of pets in and around her house. It may be that her move, a little later in Clint’s childhood, to seven acres of land, mostly given over to olive trees, near Sunol, was motivated by her desire to support a more extensive menagerie. There she kept chickens (a well-worn family story has Clint lying on the ground in the chicken yard and sprinkling corn across his body so the chickens would clamber up on him) and sold their eggs from a roadside stand. She had a swaybacked horse, raised a few pigs, even, for a time, kept a Nubian goat that was always trying to scale the walls of the garage. Her other daughter, Bernice, who was married to a dentist, lived in nearby Niles, and they, too, had a horse, a somewhat more spirited creature, the first one Clint remembers riding at a pace more exciting than a shamble. One time he spent a few days with them earning pocket money picking apricots on a nearby farm. He also remembers that on his visits to his grandmother he was able to range the nearby hills on long solitary walks, on which he acted out all kinds of imaginary adventures.

Finally, though, the most important thing he took away from his visits with his grandmother was her uncomplicated faith that there was something special about him. He was, his mother says, her favorite grandchild—“anything he did was perfect”—and he knew it. She thought “
I was terrific,” he told Barbara Walters in one of their television interviews. “I think she thought I was better than I really was.” Be that as it may, it was she, alone among this extended family, who predicted a future in some creative field for this seemingly unexceptional boy. He had, she firmly noted, “long hands,” which to her, in her grandmotherly wisdom, bespoke a natural gift for the arts. It is an interesting observation, because Clint’s use of his hands—graceful, precise and sometimes rather startling in the context of some of his roles—is one of the hallmarks of his acting manner. She did not live to see him become a movie star, but she did see him become a television star on
Rawhide
. “And she never let anybody forget it.”

As the decade turned, so did the Eastwood family’s fortunes. In 1940 Clinton Sr. found a job—“the happiest thing he ever did,” says his wife—with Shreve, Crump and Lowe, the well-known San Francisco jewelers, then controlled by the family of a young man with whom he had once played football. They were now back on native ground, living in a pleasant little house in Glenview in the East Bay, where Clint’s interest in nature focused briefly on herpetology; one day he came home from a nearby park with no less than thirteen small snakes in his lunch pail. They shared his room peaceably enough—until his mother found one curled up in one of her towels and she ordered them returned to their natural habitat.

Around this time the family was favored by another stroke of good luck. Perusing the newspaper real estate section, the elder Eastwoods observed that one of Ruth’s aunts had placed her home in Piedmont on the market. “We knew the house very well,” Ruth recalls, “and so we went ripping up the next day and sure enough it was for sale and they would sell it to us for what we would give them. Houses weren’t selling in Piedmont at all, so we bought it for very little down and very little a month.” Ruth Eastwood was working, too, at this time, for IBM, and, at last, the family was able to settle down; the Eastwoods would remain in Piedmont for eight years, until Clint was in his last months of high school.

It was a middle- and upper-class enclave. Some of California’s oldest money (the Crockers of the bank, the Hills of the coffee company, the Witters of the Dean Witter stock brokerage) was settled here. The Eastwoods did not travel in those circles. Indeed, their modest shingled house was close to the Oakland line, and it was that blue-collar port and industrial city, always invidiously compared to glamorous San Francisco across the bay, not conservative Piedmont, that would eventually claim his loyalty. In interviews he gives it, not the suburb, as his hometown.

He attended Havens Elementary School, then Piedmont Junior High School. He made lifelong friends during his first years in Piedmont, among them a good-natured boy named Harry Pendleton, who spent much of his adult life on the fringe of lawlessness and died early; Jack McKnight, who in late adolescence would live with the Eastwoods for almost a year; Fritz Manes, who would eventually work for Clint as a line producer in his production company; Don Kincade, through whom Clint met his first wife, Maggie, and with whom he remains close. Indeed, as a youngster, Kincade was to Clint an exemplary figure, because he was the first in his crowd to articulate an ambition—he
wanted to be a dentist—and the only one to follow through on it. Thinking back, Clint shakes his head at the miracle of coherence, confidently knowing what you want and going out and getting it. It was beyond him at the time.

He was still dreaming away most of the school day, and staying pretty much aloof from its official extracurricular life. Sports, for example, were heavily emphasized, and most of his pals went out for them. But though he “teased around” with football and basketball in junior high, team sports didn’t really interest him. It was the same with school band. He loved music and, as we will see, was beginning to demonstrate his natural—and, given the musical gifts on both sides of his family, doubtless inherited—talent for it. Issued a flügelhorn, which is similar to a trumpet, but with a softer, warmer tone (some of his jazz idols, like Chuck Mangione and Red Rodney, often played it), Clint easily mastered its rudiments, practiced some with the band, but apparently never played it publicly—“you know, everybody looked down on the band when we were kids, and I was a big cat,” meaning he would be painfully visible marching along with his slightly exotic instrument.

His largest interest, very simply, lay in not calling attention to himself, not easy for a boy of his height to manage. There were well-intended attempts to “bring him out of his shell,” such as an infamous school play, often recounted in Clint Eastwood profiles and biographies. Their writers have enjoyed the irony of a man who has since become one of the world’s most famous actors forced by a teacher to perform in a skit in an all-school assembly, being deeply embarrassed by the experience and vowing never to repeat it. The story is true, but there is more to it than is usually reported. For anxious though the occasion made him in anticipation, Clint turned the event itself to reasonably good account, achieving a rare moment of recognition in his generally anonymous school career. And also learning, as he would later recognize, another little life lesson.

He was in the eighth grade when his English teacher, Gertrude Falk (“I remember her name very well,” he says grimly), announced that the class would be doing a one-act play for public consumption and, without auditions, ordered Clint to play the lead. “It was the part of a backward youth, and I think my teacher thought I was perfect casting,” Clint once said. His friend Harry Pendleton and a girl named Shuggie Vincent were assigned to play his father and mother, and a couple of other classmates had walk-ons.

He went to Miss Falk and tried to get out of the assignment, but she said, “Oh, you’ll be perfect for this,” adding that he and the others
would be graded on their work. The small consolation she offered was that there would be a prompter off stage in case he forget his lines.

Rehearsals were not reassuring to Clint, and the night before the performance he and Pendleton seriously discussed the possibility of feigning illness. But “I was too chicken to play sick,” and, besides, “by this time I’d memorized enough of the play so I thought, Well, we’ll go try it and it won’t be that bad.” Miss Falk, however, had one last surprise for her cast. She informed them, just before they reported to the auditorium, that this was to be a joint assembly with the high school; older kids, their contempt at the ready, would be looking on.

“Jesus, we just about crapped. But there we were, and it was too late; we couldn’t cut or run or go home or whatever. We had to go on with it. So we got out there and started in on the play, and everything started going wrong, of course. Harry was reading a newspaper and he had his script inside, and it dropped out on the floor, and I was tripping over things. But it started getting laughs. Even some of the lines started getting laughs. And all of a sudden, I don’t know what came over me, I felt I’m into this thing and we’re rolling. So we finished it with a minimum amount of screwup.” Indeed, in retrospect, he admits “there were moments that I actually felt that spark for a second.” He also recalls “guys from the senior high school walking up later in the day, and saying, ‘Hey, that was good,’ and I was like, ‘It was?’ ” Miss Falk, too, professed herself satisfied. “That’s fine,” he replied, but “I don’t ever want to do that again, ever in my life.”

That possibility seemed to him comfortingly remote. Acting was an unimaginably exotic profession, not to be spared another thought, though he liked going to the movies and remembers seeing such signature movies of the time as
Gone with the Wind
and
The Grapes of Wrath
. He has a particularly vivid memory of
Sergeant York
. The legend of the World War I hero, a simple mountaineer who set aside pacifist principles to join the army, and then, at the front, rescued his trapped unit, killing and capturing a vast number of German soldiers in the process, had an understandable appeal for Clint’s father. Here was a man who understood duty and loyalty—and making the best of a bad job—in the same way that Clinton Eastwood Sr. did. “He read everything that there was about
Sergeant York
,” says Clint, and when the movie (for which Gary Cooper won his first Academy Award) came along in 1941, he eagerly took his son to see it.