Authors: Richard Schickel
Clint remained as indifferent to formal education as he was to formal religion. “What he did, he did very well,” his mother says, thinking about
the time he lavished on his cars and his music, “but he was no scholar.” As he entered high school this became a serious issue. There is some dispute as to whether he voluntarily left Piedmont High or was asked to leave. It seems likely that, for a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with his indifference to his studies, he contrived to get himself removed from a place where he was not comfortable. His pals, of course, were happy to set a bad example for him. Naturally, the report cards with their observations about a kid not working to capacity flowed in. Naturally Clinton Eastwood Sr. sternly lectured his son on the need to apply himself.
Clint’s problems, however, were not entirely academic. They were social, too. He fit in happily enough with his own small crowd, and the guys loved hanging out at the Eastwood house, for as Manes puts it, “
If a kid could ask to have dream parents it would have been Clint Sr. and Ruth.” She was always cooking meals for them, and Clinton Sr., boyish and expansive, was someone to whom they could express themselves freely, a nonjudgmental father figure who, in Manes’s account, at times seemed more like an older brother. When they were a little older beer was permitted, and so was smoking (though Clint, even then, avoided cigarettes). But he could not or would not try to expand beyond this circle. “He was off rebuilding a transmission in the afternoon, while we were at football practice, or tearing down an engine,” Manes would recall. He didn’t even like hanging out at Bud’s Bar, where the Piedmont jocks and those from the University of California often met. There was no live music there, only a jukebox stocked with mainstream pop.
He was beginning to gather a sense of Piedmont’s contempt for people who didn’t match its norm, a contempt that included Clint. “The kids were driving better cars than my parents were,” he recalls, “and I learned very early on that I was at the low end of the social structure.” His mother confirms this assessment. “Particularly in his class there were an awful lot of wealthy kids, and I could see where Clint would have a funny-looking car and they would have Cadillacs or something.”
The prejudices he encountered extended beyond the automotive. He vividly remembers some junior-high schoolmates asking him what his father did, and putting him down when he told them that he worked in a shipyard. Their dads, they proudly told him, were merchants and executives, and his argument that his father was at least engaged in vital war work made no impression on them. He was, as well, acutely conscious that there were no blacks in Piedmont, no Asians, only one or two Jewish families. And precisely because it was so “white bread” (Manes’s description) the place was rife with a kind of heedless bias.
“That’s where I was first introduced to bigotry,” Clint recalls, and though he says he doesn’t know how or when the conviction came to him, “I never could stand intolerance. In my soul, I couldn’t buy into it.”
His response was, as he gently puts it, “Fuck you and move on.” Which was quite all right with Piedmont High and, as it happened, with his mother. “That didn’t worry me at all, because I knew he was going to be different than the rest of the group.” She can’t say why, exactly. “Something told me. I never worried about what he was going to do.”
When the inevitable call came to meet with an assistant principal to discuss other academic alternatives, she was serene. When she talked these over with her husband, Oakland Technical High School seemed to make the most sense. It offered a course in aircraft maintenance, and that interested Clint more than any of the shop courses at Piedmont. Wartime aviation movies had stirred in him a romantic feeling for flight, and he had even journeyed out a couple of times to Walnut Creek, where there was an airfield and five dollars would buy you a half-hour trip across the Bay Area skies in a light plane.
The youngster (and helicopter-pilot-to-be) who loved tinkering with engines found aircraft maintenance a thoroughly satisfactory subject. But he was not encouraged to see it as his life’s work. The instructor constantly reminded his students that this was a poorly paid occupation. “The guy used to joke about it, the teacher: ‘Well, there’s no real dough in it. You make as much being an auto mechanic, and you don’t have the responsibility.’ ”
In other respects, though, Tech worked out pretty much as Eastwood—and his parents—had hoped. “He was more relaxed at Tech,” his mother says simply. He was never a big man on campus. His high-school yearbook records only very few officially sanctioned extracurricular activities. But he liked its ethnic diversity—“it just seemed like it was more real”—and he continues to believe that if he had gone to school in Piedmont, “I would have been stuck in a groove.”
There was no danger of that at Tech. To Fritz Manes, the Tech guys looked like tough guys. And there certainly were gangs in the school, though Clint avoided them. By his own (and Manes’s) account he bopped all over the Oakland area, drinking beer illegally, looking just a little bit delinquent (a photo from the period shows him wearing a duck’s-ass haircut and a leather jacket). He kept up his friendships with his Piedmont pals, but made no attempt to meld this group with the others he knew—it was part of the slightly mysterious air that he began cultivating then, and which he has never abandoned. It is based on nothing more than a natural disinclination to explain himself to anybody.
He continued to work in his after-school hours, and during his
high-school summers he worked strenuously. One year during school vacation he baled hay on a farm belonging to one of Jack McKnight’s relatives near Yreka, in northern California. The next summer he worked for the state forestry service in Butte County, also in the northern part of the state. It was often extremely hard labor. Butte ranked second among the state’s counties in number of fires, and “it was a very hot summer up there, in the hundreds every day, and very dry—lots of brush fires would start. And when there wasn’t a fire you’d go out and cut trails and cut timber.”
Sometimes in those years he would cut himself a little slack by joining his parents at a vacation cabin they had on a lake near Fresno, and he remembers a couple of summer romances from those days. But his relationships with young women, numerous though they were, do not define Clint in these years any more than his schoolwork or his part-time jobs or his fascination with the internal-combustion engine does. It was, finally, jazz that did so.
He was becoming more and more sophisticated in his understanding of it, in part because of his environment. Oakland at that time had the largest black population of any city west of Detroit, and rhythm and blues was in the air, on the air, constantly. One of the local radio stations, KWDR, devoted a three-hour afternoon slot exclusively to this music, and Clint was addicted to the program. He began playing, as best he could, the tunes he heard on it.
Not that it was the only influence on him. He recalls the Frisco Jazz Band and Lu Watters’s Yerba Buena Jazz Band, both Dixieland groups. Clint and friends would drive out to a place called Hambone and Kelly’s in El Cerrito, which was basically a black jazz club (and was casual about checking IDs), to listen to music.
There was also a small club on Lake Shore Avenue where Dave Brubeck’s trio (it included Cal Tjader and Ron Crotty) “
drew like crazy” as he established his style. Clint became a devoted fan, following Brubeck to San Francisco when he began playing there. He also remembers hearing Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker when they came through town.
Despite the presence of Brubeck and Paul Desmond, the Bay Area in the forties was not yet the avatar of the new jazz sound that it would soon become. In his definitive history,
West Coast Jazz
, Ted Gioia describes it, in these days, as “
the last bastion of the mouldy figs.” He argues that New Orleans jazz made its way along the railway tracks to San Francisco at about the same time it made its way up the Mississippi to Chicago, but that most of the jazzmen who got their start on the West Coast developed their mature styles (and their reputations) only after
they moved east. The San Francisco jazz scene, generally less venturesome than the one in Los Angeles, remained essentially committed to the past. Gioia observes that the San Francisco musicians’ union remained divided into a black local and a white one as late as 1960.
Clint ventures no opinion about the Bay Area’s degree of hipness in those days. His tastes were eclectic. He was buying Charlie Ventura’s records, and listening to Woody Herman’s various herds, soaking up a hipper big-band sound than was generally available locally. And he was aware that bebop “was coming in real big,” and so he found himself “going around trying to understand bop and what it was about and not being sure I understood it, but wanting to learn more about it.” To this end, he went to hear Dizzy Gillespie, the figure who would provide the moral contrast to Charlie Parker in Clint’s
Bird
some four decades later, when he appeared with a seventeen-piece band at a club in San Francisco.
But the aesthetic turning point for him was a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Oakland in 1946: Coleman Hawkins, Flip Phillips, Lester Young—“I mean, he was like the cat’s ass, you know, for tenor saxophone”—and, yes, Charlie Parker, all on the same program.
Bird was, for Clint, “a whole shock to the system. It was just amazing to see somebody do anything with that kind of confidence. He wasn’t arrogant or anything, he was just a guy standing there in a pinstripe suit, and when he started playing it was like, I guess, some sort of free painter, who’d just jump right in there and start slapping paint up there, a totally unplanned deal.” It was, perhaps, the sheer cool of Bird’s manner that got to him. “I’d never seen a musician play with such confidence. There was no show business to it in those days, and this guy just stood and played, and I thought, God, what an amazing, expressive thing.” More important, he went away thinking, It would be wonderful to have that kind of confidence doing something—anything—in life.
In his superb essay on Charlie Parker, Ralph Ellison makes a couple of apposite points. One is that when he was creating his legend, Parker meant more to young white jazz aficionados than he did to blacks. “
They never heard of him,” Art Blakey, the drummer, said of the black audience. Ellison writes: “
Parker operated in the underworld of American culture … where contemporary civilized values and hypocrisies are challenged by the Dionysian urges of a between-wars youth born to prosperity, conditioned by the threat of world destruction, and inspired—when not seeking total anarchy—by a need to bring social reality and our social pretensions into a more meaningful balance.”
“Dionysian” is obviously too large a term to apply to the activities and interests of the young Clint Eastwood, and it is difficult to see him
as prosperous or much concerned about the threat of the atomic bomb, either. But his interest in modern jazz generally, Parker specifically, does coincide with his parents’ return to middle-class status and with his rejection of a middle-class high school in favor of a working-class institution, certainly an attempt on his part to rebalance “social reality” and “social pretensions” as he experienced them. One can read into his passionate interest in the new music a kind of rebellion—or at least a determination to go his own way—that, though masked and politely stated, was quite determined, if narrowly focused. There is no evidence that the other interests that would soon define the fifties hipster—action painting, for example, or coffeehouse poetry—ever caught his eye. Even Stanislavskian acting, though he would eventually embrace some of its techniques, does not seem to have excited the kind of enthusiasm in him that it did in others of his generation. When he talks about actors he admired, figures like Brando and Clift do not figure heavily in his conversation.
Whether or not the modern jazzmen he idolized—instinctive postmodernists that they were—helped shape his own comparable instincts is hard to say. But they certainly had something to do with the way he would eventually present himself as an actor. Ellison observes that this younger generation of musicians consciously and angrily rejected the jubilant showmanship of Louis Armstrong and the other “hot” jazzmen. To them, this was Uncle Tomming, and it also led them to reject—wrongly, as Ellison says—the genius of Armstrong’s playing, and downgrade his historical significance. On the bandstands, the result was, as he puts it, “
a grim comedy of racial manners; with the musicians employing a calculated surliness and rudeness, treating the audience very much as many white merchants in poor Negro neighborhoods treat their customers and the white audiences were shocked at first, but learned quickly to accept such treatment as evidence of ‘artistic’ temperament.… Today [Ellison was writing in 1962] the white audience expects the rudeness as part of the entertainment.” Or, if not that, then certainly an air of effortlessness, a feeling that the players are just casually knocking off their sometimes-astonishing effects.
Clint is not surly or rude as an actor, but his cool, by far the most obvious quality of his work, his powerful desire—amounting almost to a morality—not to woo the audience, his apparent indifference to their rejections, must be traced to the modern-jazz manner. So must his profound desire not to make what he does look costly to him, emotionally or intellectually. He says: “Good acting, like good anything, doesn’t look like there’s a lot of effort with it, you know. If a person believes, ‘Hey, I
could do that, ’cause I’ve felt that emotion,’ then that’s good. I’m sure a lot of people sat there years ago and watched Nat King Cole [and] said, ‘Hey, I can sing like that—he’s not really doing anything.’ Or great musicians, you say, ‘What the hell, they’re not really doing anything.’ ” One could argue, as well, that some of his hallmarks as a director—his preference for letting actors riff on a theme, for example, or his characteristic lighting, which is often like that of a jazz club, general darkness with a few pinpricks of light illuminating the scene’s principals—have their roots in jazz.