Clint Eastwood (7 page)

A year later,
Yankee Doodle Dandy
had a greater impact, as did James Cagney. Superficially, it’s an odd coupling—the lanky, laconic westerner and the short, voluble New Yorker. But, of course, the simplicity of
Cagney’s attack, the straightforward way he mobilized his emotions onscreen, would resonate for Clint when he entered the profession. “Plant your feet and tell the truth,” was Cagney’s oft-repeated advice to young players, and that no-nonsense approach had an obvious appeal to him. He was also, visibly, a working-class guy (which is how Clint sometimes refers to himself) and a private and emotionally reticent man, which, possibly, Clint sensed in some way.

Double Indemnity
also made a strong impression on him, and so did Preston Sturges’s comedies, particularly
Sullivan’s Travels
(of Joel McCrea, he would say, “Maybe he didn’t have the stature of Gary Cooper, but he always gave the impression that more was going on inside him than he was revealing”). Treasured along with these films and stars is one slightly more exotic title,
Forty Thousand Horsemen
. The story of an Australian cavalry brigade that fought in Palestine in World War I, it starred Chips Rafferty, was made in 1940 and entered the world market a couple of years later. Its dialogue contained a few mild, but in those days shocking, cuss words. Clint remembers going to it with his family and, when the first “hell” or “damn” was heard, being aware of respectable citizens leaving the theater. The Eastwoods soon followed, but “I snuck back later, because I wanted to see the whole movie; it had a lot of action—horses, and lancers and what have you.”

“Snuck” is how Clint and his pals usually went to the movies. “About five or six of us would go, and one guy would go in and he’d leave the door ajar behind the exit curtains. Everybody’d come in and they’d crawl through all the gum and popcorn and spilled colas and stuff and crawl to the middle and pop up. Meantime, as you’re crawling by you’d try to pick up a thrown-away ticket stub, so you could say, ‘Oh, yeah, here’s my stub.’ ”

They were a lively, occasionally comically troublesome, group. Clint’s mother recalls, for instance, the case of stuffy Major Overton, a retired army officer, who, during the war, proudly raised a large American flag over his swimming pool every morning. One day he arrived to find a Japanese flag flying from his flagpole. Clint and his crowd had fashioned it from one of Ruth Eastwood’s bedsheets and run it up during the night. The boys were found out and forced to apologize in person to the major, who, in turn, wrote a letter to Clint, praising him for his honesty.

There is a certain typicality in these recollections. One can’t help but reflect that this is how American boys of a certain time, a certain class, grew up—mild mischief, scholarly inattentiveness, lack of focused ambition, bits and pieces of popular culture lodging in memory. The virtue
of being seen but not heard, much stressed in those days, seemed to be good advice, considering one’s shyness and inability to imagine what one might have to say that would make sense to a stranger anyway.

But the young Clint Eastwood cannot be portrayed in purely typical terms. He may at times have yearned for typicality—what kid does not?—but by the time he reached early adolescence, unusual self-sufficiency had become a trait of character. By this time, his interest in music had become something like an obsession, and that, too, set him apart.

In the long run it probably shaped his sensibility (and his laid-back manner) as much as anything. But in that time and place, experiments with the flügelhorn aside, musical talent was not widely encouraged or appreciated, especially in a quiet, gawky boy who had difficulty publicly discussing this curious interest. Then, too, music seems to have come easily for him, which is perhaps another reason he maintained a certain secretiveness about it; in those days everyone was taught that the triumphs we had to strive hardest for were the most valuable ones. Finally, as he grew more sophisticated in his tastes, Clint tended to contrast his talent to that of the jazz greats he was now beginning to idolize, and in that company, of course, his modesty was appropriate.

Still, undeniably, his was an authentic and precocious gift. Wherever the Eastwoods settled during their wandering years, Grandma Andy’s piano would be sent for, and Clint would fool around with it. Like his mother before him, he taught himself to play at an early age, picking out the tunes he was hearing on the jazz records she collected.

He recalls listening intently to her Art Tatum records and trying to emulate him. He remembers, too, that when Fats Waller died, his mother bought a number of his recordings and told her thirteen-year-old son: “This guy was brilliant and these are classics.” The humor of Waller’s lyrics—“Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Your Feet’s Too Big”—hooked him immediately. “Then I started listening to the way he played—he played that stride kind of piano—and I thought, Now that’d be fun to be able to play that.” So he tried, and accomplished a reasonable facsimile. Around the same time, he also started listening to the Bob Crosby Orchestra, which was one of the jazzier big bands of the time. Crosby and some of the band’s players also formed a band within the band, a smaller Dixieland group called the Bobcats, which cut a number of records, and these, too, caught Clint’s ear. His mother encouraged him.
“You ought to keep doing that, keep after this,” Clint remembers Ruth Eastwood saying. At some point in their Piedmont years she even paid for some piano lessons with a teacher in Berkeley.

One Crosby record that particularly caught Clint’s ear was “Honky Tonk Train”; he liked it so much that he found the original record by Meade Lux Lewis, the pianist who wrote the song, and taught himself to imitate it. Then, “One time I was at a party and was standing around and nothing was happening, so I played ‘Honky Tonk Train’ and everybody went, ‘Wow, hey,’ and all of a sudden the chicks started looking at me like I wasn’t just this gawky kid sitting in the back.” All of a sudden, in fact, he was—pleasingly—the center of attention, “sitting there with the tuna oil in your hair, you know, and the gals around in bobby sox rolled down. It was kind of like that.”

One probably should not make too much of the incident, which seems not to have been repeated. Indeed, Fritz Manes has no memory of Clint confessing, or demonstrating, his musical gifts quite so early. In his recollection, Clint tended to avoid parties most of the time, and it was not until two or three years later that his friends became aware of his musical passion.

One might trace the beginnings of a new, less awkward relationship to the opposite sex to this moment, but, again, a certain caution seems to be in order. Clint says he lost his virginity when he was fourteen (“I had nice neighbors”), but that’s all he will say about that momentous occasion. He was then, as he was to remain, terribly discreet—not to say secretive—about his sexual adventures. And, besides, he was not that far removed from the tongue-tied grammar-school boy who pined for a pretty red-haired classmate, but could never find the nerve to speak to her.

If music and romance were matters for reserve, his obsession with cars was not, for it was widely shared. Oakland, Clint recalls, was “a town where people were nuts about automobiles. There was a whole society of hot rods and car building,” and though he couldn’t afford “the real flashy ones,” he learned to love beautiful automobiles, and it is a passion, like music, that he has never forsworn. His friend John Calley, who was head of production in Clint’s early days at Warner Bros., and who was a California teenager in the same era, understands what cars meant to him. “
He went to the drive-in theater and he wanted a chopped-top, lowered and frenched and all that stuff. We all did.”

It’s a standard form of California dreaming. Even when he was a near-penniless young actor, Clint managed to have a smart little sports car, and since achieving success, he has, it seems, owned at least briefly every known make of glamour vehicle—though most of the time these
days he gets around in trucks or truck-based recreational vehicles. The Mercedes, which comes out of the garage when the occasion seems to demand it, is over twenty years old; Calley remembers him driving it when they first worked together: “He likes it and that’s enough for him. He keeps it really sharp.”

He does that perhaps in tribute to all the unsharp heaps he desperately kept rolling as a teenager. His father bought Clint the first of them—a 1932 Chevy touring car the family referred to as “the bathtub” because it had no top—before it was legal for him to obtain a driver’s license. The rationale was that he needed it for his newspaper route, but according to Manes, lots of Piedmont kids had cars before they passed their driver’s tests; it was something of a local tradition. In Clint’s case, the gift was conditional; he was obliged to take full financial responsibility for the vehicle’s upkeep.

The bathtub soon gave way to a ’34 Ford, then to subsequent jalopies, even, for a time, a motorcycle. To support those ramshackle wheels Clint took on jobs in addition to his newspaper route: He bagged groceries at the Peabody Market, caddied at the Claremont Country Club. All his vehicles were “running on chewing gum and spit and wire. And brake rods’d be falling off and batteries wouldn’t start.” One time after one of his repair jobs, his mother remembers, he failed to reconnect the wheel to the steering column correctly, and the car rolled uncontrolled down a hill, with Clint in it, eventually coming to a violent halt against a tree, its driver unhurt, but with the vehicle totaled. It was, as Clint would later characterize it, an
American Graffiti
kind of adolescence.

An automobile was essential to Clint. Very simply, it was “your only form of independence,” and, once he entered high school, a vital dating tool: “Oakland’s a fairly sprawling city—you couldn’t date somebody on the other side of town unless you had a car, so you had to have something.” Thinking back, he grins. “Fast cars and easy women—in that order, I guess.”

As Clinton Sr. had doubtless hoped, the demands cars placed on his son’s wallet taught Clint the value of uncomplaining toil. “You get nothing for nothing,” his father would tell him. Or “Don’t think the world owes you a living, because it doesn’t.” When Clint would apply for his after-school jobs, his father would always tell him: “Forget about the dough. Go in there and show them what you can do. Make yourself so valuable that they just gotta have you.” It puzzled Clint sometimes—they were talking about bagging groceries and delivering newspapers, after all—but in some measure these exchanges left their mark on his character. Many years later, discussing his moderately troubled passage
through later adolescence, Clint would tell an interviewer, “
although I rebelled, I never rebelled against that.”

He did, however, rebel against conventional piety—very early and, in part, because of his hardworking life and his dad’s. During the war, Clinton Sr. was obliged to give up his agreeable life as a jewelry salesman. He was classified 1-A in the draft, and knew that if he was called up his family, with no savings to fall back upon, would be devastated. His only choice was to get a job in a vital defense industry. So he applied for work in a shipyard—not knowing “one end of a boat from the other,” Ruth laughs—and somehow got taken on as a pipe fitter.

The pay was excellent, but the hours were long and exhausting, as he pointed out to his son one day when Clint asked him why he did not join the rest of the family when they trekked off to church on Sunday. “It’s my only day off,” the elder Eastwood said simply. Clint thought that over and replied, “Well, it’s my only day off, too.” As a matter of fact, he didn’t even have that day entirely to himself, since he had to be up at dawn working his paper route. “Well, then don’t go,” said his dad. “There’s all kinds of ways to get a feeling of God, however [He] exists for you.”

This squared with Clint’s instincts. The Bible stories he had listened to in various Sunday schools had never appealed to him. They seemed terribly remote, and they struck him as distressingly violent, too—“the whole idea of religion based upon impaling somebody, the whole center, torture and torment.” Critics of Eastwood’s subsequent screen career, marked by so many bloody confrontations, may make what irony they care to out of this, but he says these views had begun to take shape even before this conversation, when he found himself contrasting the discomfort Christian myth stirred in him with the experience of visiting Yosemite National Park with his family.

“You looked down into that valley, without too many people around,” he says, “and, boy, that was to me a religious experience.” And not an uncommon one for a person of his birthright. “Born again,” the naturalist John Muir wrote in his diary upon seeing the same sight for the first time. This Pacific Rim Transcendentalism, a belief that nature in the several majestic aspects that California presents it, is the ultimate source of spiritual renewal widely shared by its citizens and has remained a major force in determining the way Clint has lived his adult life.