Clint Eastwood (83 page)

But for all the punctiliousness Clint brought to it, much of
Bird
’s distinction derives, paradoxically, from its very free structure. Covering Parker’s last months, beginning with a suicide attempt, ending with death suddenly choking off his laughter at a television show, but illuminating this passage with a deliberately disorderly array of flashbacks, it is Clint’s only radical break with linear narrative, and with what one might call linear morality, that is to say, the pistol point QED that brings most of his movies to an end. Finally, to risk stating the obvious, this film is the
freest of the burden of self-reflection that the presence Clint Eastwood, actor, inevitably imposes on Clint Eastwood, director.

Bird
was almost invariably described as a “personal” film by the press when it was released, since it was obvious that a powerful star had persuaded his studio to allow him to spend major money exploring an obsession shared by no more than a minor cult. What only a few observers saw was that something more than nostalgia was moving in
Bird
. Reflecting on the life of Charlie Parker, Clint was able to reflect on certain issues in his own life.

When he reviewed
Bird
for the Chicago
Tribune
, Dave Kehr drew an apt analogy between jazz and the kind of vernacular American moviemaking Clint practices. Both, he said, “
operate in the gray areas between the popular and the personal, the bluntly commercial and the purely idealistic,” therefore “as much as it is a movie about jazz, it is a movie about filmmaking as practiced by Clint Eastwood and the generations of self-effacing American moviemakers who have come before him.” This was more than a matter of riffing on popular themes as most genre movies do. Kehr daringly analogized Charlie Parker’s saxophone to Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum; both are “outsized tools used by the individual to confront society, to give expression to emotions and impulses that otherwise would remain bottled up,” presenting their adepts with enormous issues of self-control, issues that Harry (narrowly) overcomes and Bird succumbs to. Finally, like the adolescent Clint, he observed that playing an instrument is “a way for the individual to hide his identity while channeling his emotions into a less personal, less threatening form.”

One of the film’s severest critics, Stanley Crouch, suggested, without knowing he was doing so, a more basic connection between director and subject. In reviewing
Bird
he compared Charlie Parker to “
the gangster hero, the charming anarchist that Cagney introduced in
Public Enemy.”
To Crouch, the musician was, like Cagney, all “velocity,” a man rubbing out musical clichés with the same joyous élan with which Cagney erased his thickheaded enemies in a film where, like Bird, he lived fast and died young.

Parker was, however, more awesome and, in a certain, narrow sense, more imitable to Clint than the actor was. Surprisingly, Clint told one reporter in a prerelease interview that he had, in adolescence, thought of himself as “
really a black guy in a white body.” Now he consciously understood what he had no more than instinctively grasped as a young man: that bebop, so spiky and challenging to traditionalists, was, as many jazz experts now claim, protest music—or at the very least a radical assertion of black singularity.

Clint also understood that Bird’s racial experience, like the deepest sources of his genius, was impenetrable to an outsider (it is the film’s great strength that it offers no simple dramatizations of either). He was, however, “
the single most confident individual I’ve ever seen in my life when he was playing the saxophone,” Clint says, yet when he was finished, “he would just drift into the woodwork.” Clint would do his idol the honor of presenting him in a movie in the same way that he presented the characters he himself played—coolly, unsentimentally, enigmatically.

Still, he believes those possessed by genius have certain obligations to it, and he needed to make that point too. There is in
Bird
a central symbol, which is in fact a central cymbal. Legend has it that when Parker was a kid, playing out of his league in a Kansas City jam session, a drummer sailed one at him in disgust. This was a turning point. Bird took his horn into a retreat during which, for three or four years, he did nothing but play alone, eleven to fifteen hours a day, obsessively evolving the style by which he would create his musical revolution. The image of that cymbal, traveling through the air in slow motion, recurrently haunts
Bird
, signifying death and rebirth and, above all, the film’s morality, which holds that redemption is achieved only through disciplined effort in whatever work we undertake.

About this, Clint was quite clear. “
Everyone,” he told jazz writer Gary Giddins, “is the product of some sort of setback or something, the thing where you snap and say, I don’t give a crap what they say, I’m going to overcome this.” Pressed to name such a moment in his own life Clint rather diffidently offered that matinee showing of
Ambush at Cimarron Pass
, when, after the embarrassment and despondency passed, “I mustered up the sand and said, I’m going to win this game.”

What he could not understand was why, having made a similar, more consequential effort, Charlie Parker would not husband the grace it granted him and build on it, morally as well as musically. That mystery is set forth in a remarkable sequence that is scarcely mentioned in any of the critical writing on the movie, perhaps because it is not musical, perhaps because it is so austerely realized. We do not expect a movie’s turning point to consist of insert shots of typewriter keys striking paper and platen and a monologic voice-over.

Bird is playing in California, shacked up with another woman, when a telegram from Chan arrives, informing him of their daughter’s death. He then composes a series of telegrams attempting to justify his failure to return to his daughter’s bedside (and now to her obsequies) and, more significantly, all his failures as husband, father, artist. It was, as Clint says, the point of no return in Bird’s flight, so crucial to our
understanding of him that he reshot the inserts when it was discovered that they had in minor ways misquoted the originals. “Reading them in sequence,” Clint says, “you can just see the whole story unfolding, you can see the man collapsing, mentally just disintegrating in that period of an hour or two.”

There is no more possibility of “understanding” a human failure of this kind than there is a possibility of “understanding” genius. One may respond to it with compassion, just as one may respond to sublime artistry with awe. But, finally, they are enigmas. What the movie does, in compensation, is posit an alternative Bird, a morally instructive double in the figure of Dizzy Gillespie (splendidly played by Samuel E. Wright).

He is the true hero of this film, a man whose contributions to the evolution of jazz were as significant as Parker’s, but who was utterly responsible to his talent, his colleagues, his race. “They’re going to talk about you when you’re gone, Bird,” he says, understanding it will be more romantic and intense than whatever may be said about himself. But he also insists, this wise and distinctly undizzy man, that especially for a black man in racist America, blowing your own horn is not enough, no matter how entrancingly you do so. It is necessary also to maintain your sharpness and stamina, to be, if you are gifted with talent and fame, “a leader of men,” which Gillespie, who played on serenely into his seventies, surely was.

To put it another way, the purpose of
Bird
was to glorify its protagonist’s music, but not to further romanticize yet another of art’s youthfully fallen heroes, a man who, as Clint (who does rather tend to personalize this loss) once put it, “
takes his genius away from us as fast as he came on the scene and gave it to us.” His film, he acknowledges, “was actually a way, a left-handed way, of paying tribute to all the great geniuses—the Ellingtons, the Dizzy Gillespies, the Count Basies, the Fats Wallers—the people over the years who did live normal lives, and did have a normal existence.”

This refusal of conventional sentiments and simplicities is the film’s great strength. No moral judgment is passed on Bird’s descent into drugs. Nor is any easy explanation—the childhood trauma, the shattering love affair—offered for it. But neither is blame shifted decisively to others, so that Bird can be read as society’s victim. Bird is the sole author of his own misery—and quite unapologetic about it. He
likes
drugs, likes what they do for him. And the dark glamour with which Clint realizes the jazz world becomes their objective correlative—a moral (actually an immoral) force in the story. Bird is, in every way, an addict of half-lights, real and chemically induced. It is—to tell the truth of this movie—where he does his best work.

Clint completed principal photography on
Bird
toward the end of January 1988. He would finish postproduction and have it ready to enter in competition at Cannes three months later. It was not his only service to jazz in this period. When producer David Valdes and production assistant Tom Rooker were scouting possible locations for the film in Kansas City, they noticed in a musicians’ union hall a poster for a jazz documentary called
The Last of the Blue Devils
, about a regional group of the late 1920s that included Count Basie and others who would later form the core of his legendary band.

They pulled it in, and everybody liked it so much that Clint got in touch with its producer, Bruce Ricker, and bought from him the French and Italian rights to it, releasing it in those territories under Clint’s name, in part because Joe Hyams thought it would help establish his credentials as a jazz enthusiast prior to
Bird
. But there were larger consequences to this action. Ricker had for years been trying to put together a documentary on Thelonious Monk, drawing on some twenty hours of previously unseen cinema verité material that had been shot by a filmmaker named Christian Blackwood as well as rare performance footage. He had fought his way through problems involving rights and finance, but still needed $400,000 to complete the film. He mentioned this to Clint one day. In less than twenty-four hours Clint called back to say Warner Bros. would put up the finishing money. The resulting film,
Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser
, edited and directed by Charlotte Zwerin, is a hypnotizing portrait of a figure every bit as enigmatic and as significant to the history of modern jazz as Charlie Parker was. “We made money on it, too,” Clint adds proudly.

As if this were not enough activity, Clint knocked out
The Dead Pool
while
Bird
was in postproduction. Morally, if not contractually, he felt he had to cross-collateralize the commercially chancy
Bird
with this surefire
Dirty Harry
sequel. As of a few months earlier, Detective Callahan “had been pretty much in my mind a closed chapter,” he says. But his interest in diet and health had brought him into contact with Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, authors of a best-selling self-help book called
Life Extension
, in which a regimen they had tailored for Clint was discussed. Soon after publication they let it be known that they were developing some ideas for him, in which they were aided by a young writer named Steve Sharon. Among them was the story that became
The Dead Pool
.

One of the things Clint liked about it was the sequence that turned out to be the one (and only) thing most people remember about the finished film—a car chase in which Harry and his partner (this time an
Asian played by Evan C. Kim) are pursued by a toy vehicle, radio-controlled and loaded with explosives. It was, he thought, a nifty parody of the famous
Bullitt
car chase.

So … all right. He would run and jump, shoot and snarl, more or less as before—under Buddy Van Horn’s amiable direction. Doing his best to keep Harry within the conventions of the series, he would show his age—many reviewers mentioned his graying and receding hair, the ever more visible throbbings in the prominent vein in his temple—but he would not allude to it as openly as his Tom Highway character had. He would let his anger show, but more often than not as a kind of senior-citizen grumble rather than as full-throated rage. And though he would now and then sneer contempt at departmental fumblings, his heart would not truly be in it. For what Sharon’s script put at the forefront of Harry’s mind was something that had not escaped Clint’s attention—celebrity and the media’s dance of attendance on it.

His testimony at a Mafia trial has made Harry locally famous, and now he can’t do his job without someone thrusting a microphone or a TV camera in his face. Then confirming his new status, he discovers that his name is entered in the “dead pool” being run by Peter Swan, a grimly pretentious horror-picture director, played with appropriate grandiloquence by Liam Neeson. In this game entrants make up lists of well-known people they expect to die within the year, the person with the most correct guesses being the winner. Soon enough listees are being murdered with alarming regularity, among them a female movie critic (perhaps some wish fulfillment here) and a trashed rock idol—hilariously played by Jim Carrey, then billing himself as James, in his first telling movie role. The young actor—cheeky, bright and anarchic—was Clint’s kind of kid, and a mutual admiration society formed. Clint would give Carrey a small role in
Pink Cadillac
, and when stardom came to him, Clint appeard with him at his Chinese Theater footprints ceremony. Carrey, in turn, cohosted Clint’s AFI Life Achievement banquet.