Authors: Richard Schickel
All of that, of course, was far ahead in a future entirely unimaginable to him in 1946. What he did know without doubt, as he listened to Parker for the first time, was that this music spoke to him with an intensity that nothing else ever had: “I left there thinking, I gotta know more about that. So I started buying records, and listening to them and following him. I caught him at a couple of clubs in later years and we even drove down and saw him when he was playing in southern California.”
The richer and more various Los Angeles jazz scene was something Clint and his crowd regularly sampled in their high-school years, and after graduation, too. Typically, a bunch of kids would pile into a car and make the long drive south for weekends of music. They might catch Kid Ory one night at the Beverly Cavern, just to get in touch with the classic New Orleans manner, then hit the Oasis to hear something newer, or the Haig, near the Ambassador Hotel downtown, or the string of clubs lining Central Avenue, in those days the principal thoroughfare of Los Angeles’s principal black neighborhood. It was the heart of a jazz scene that began flourishing during World War II when the booming defense industry, working around the clock, had turned L.A. into an all-night town, with workers—a larger percentage than ever before being blacks—looking for off-hour entertainment.
By the time Clint and his buddies were hitting Los Angeles, you might have heard the new music all over town, though not without difficulties. The Los Angeles police, many of its officers unregenerate rednecks from the South, would often stop cars bearing racially mixed groups heading for a jazz club in Hollywood, and it is said that their hatred of the integrated audiences for music in the Central Avenue clubs played a key role in the avenue’s precipitate decline in the 1950s. It simply became too inaccessible for a significant segment of the audience.
Still, if you were lucky, there were great musicians to be heard here, and on one of these trips south Clint had his first direct contact with haute Hollywood. He and some of his pals were tooling along Sepulveda
Boulevard, skirting the western boundary of Bel-Air, when they were confronted by a small herd of horses, “right on the street, bopping all over the place.” The kids stopped, jumped out of the car and shooed them up a little canyon where they found an open gate. They got the animals into the corral and secured it, by which time their owner appeared—“very appreciative, very friendly.” They chatted awhile, and then the kids took off. One of them was excited—“You know who that was? That was Howard Hawks, the famous moviemaker!” Clint was impressed: “I was no cineast, but I knew who Howard Hawks was”—the director of
Sergeant York
and countless other action movies treasured by young men of his generation because they were about fractious but good-natured males bonding and working together toward some common goal.
The incident took on significance for Clint in the light of his subsequent career. Aside from a few weeks’ work in William A. Wellman’s last movie, it would remain his only direct early contact with a legendary figure from Hollywood’s Classic Age, a fact he would often publicly regret.
Movies, of course, were then a dream too absurd to countenance. What’s odd, all things considered, was that music was too. “I felt that I’d never be able to work doing that. To be a professional musician was awesome.” He was, of course, measuring himself against geniuses—Bird and Dizzy and the rest—and it did not occur to him that there might be another level of musical life where, possibly, he could find a comfortable niche. Nevertheless, around the time he first heard Charlie Parker, he began to play in public on a more or less regular basis.
The Omar Club was a long, narrow bar and restaurant on Broadway in downtown Oakland, across from the Paramount Theater. “It was a kinda crazy place,” as Clint recalls it, with “a bunch of nice guys that ran it.” He and his pals took to hanging out there because management had no objection to minors drinking beer “as long as you had the money to put on the bar. That’s the way it was in Oakland in those days—it wasn’t too strict.” One day Clint started fooling around at the piano, and the owners, liking what they heard, proposed that he play for whatever tips he could make. “So I kinda came down there and played, and then all of a sudden somebody was bringing me in pizzas, and all the guys, all my buddies, we’d be sitting around eating and drinking.”
He makes it sound cool and casual, just a bunch of kids kicking back, goofing off. And it may have been no more than that for his pals, but not for Clint. For he also admits that “you could channel yourself into an instrument,” let it say for you all the things you couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud. “It was almost like a wall you could hide behind.”
Manes, perhaps exaggerating, remembers him playing eight, ten, twelve hours at a stretch, sometimes until three or four in the morning.
Music became a defining element in his relationships with young women: “I don’t think I was ever attracted to a girl who didn’t like music, who didn’t have some interest in it. We’d spend a lot of time talking about it, listening to the radio and stuff.” Some of them, he admits, may have been faking their passion for jazz. And why not? He was a good-looking kid, combining his slightly dangerous air with an agreeably uninsistent manner. “He’s always been catnip to the women,” his mother says equably, adding that he was never secretive about his relationships; he always brought his serious girlfriends home to meet his parents. Manes, who is a talkative man (Clint used to call him “the Long Goodbye”), says, “The not joining—what it did was create a suction, people wanting to know what made this guy work, what made him tick, what is he all about?”
It worked for him then, as it would later work for him on-screen. And as it generally is in his movies, so it was with his high-school romances—not many heavy commitments. According to Manes, “There were a bunch of romances, until they got to the point of getting really serious and then he’d be off and running.”
It is a reasonably accurate description. But Clint was possibly in a little more conflict than he permitted himself to show. Wartime Oakland, with its transient population, had been barraged with propaganda about the dangers of casual sex, and he had absorbed all the official strictures. On the other hand, he was beginning to have some idea of how attractive he was, and an even more urgent sense of how attractive certain members of the opposite sex were to him. In the end, he resolved the issue straightforwardly: “You could sit there and ponder it, and say, ‘Well, it’s because I feel in control of myself,’ or ‘I feel flattered,’ but really what it boils down to is, ‘I don’t care. I want you.’ ”
About the particulars of most of these encounters, memory does not serve him particularly well. Or so he says. He does fondly recall dating a beauty who would a little later be named Miss Oakland, losing her to a “gorilla,” then briefly rekindling the relationship many years later, when they were grown-ups. He remembers still more affectionately his first steady relationship, when he was seventeen, with “a cute little Irish girl” named Mary Ellen McElvaney. “I was nuts about her,” he says simply, and they were together, to the exclusion of all others, for six or eight months.
But as he edged toward high-school graduation, other concerns began to press in on him. Sometime after the war, Clinton Eastwood Sr. improved his lot substantially. He got a job in sales at the California
Container Company, which would soon be absorbed by the Container Corporation of America, in whose ranks he would subsequently rise to executive positions, eventually, according to his wife, becoming manager of the northwest territory. A few months before Clint was due to graduate from Oakland Tech his father was transferred to Seattle. It was decided that Clint would move in with Harry Pendleton (whose family owned a small apartment complex) so that he could graduate with his class, then rejoin his own family in Seattle.
But the question of what he would do with himself after that remained totally unsettled. He spent the summer after commencement with his parents in Seattle, working as a lifeguard at Renton Beach, then decided to return to Oakland, where he settled back into his little apartment and got a job at the Continental Can factory. But that was too confining, so he returned to Seattle, bringing Jack McKnight with him. They hung out for a while, doing some odd jobs until his father got jobs for them with Weyerhauser timber in the Willamette Valley.
“For some reason, I was really adrift in those years,” Clint says. “I was sort of on a sea somewhere, not knowing where I wanted to go, but wanting to go somewhere, wanting to be on my own.” He says he even abandoned his interest in music during this time, ceasing to play, not even listening to jazz with his former attentiveness.
Considering what music had meant to him, this is a good measure of his confusion—and, possibly, of his anger at his inability to find himself. He lumberjacked for a while in Oregon, and was injured, not as seriously as he might have been, but with minor lasting effect. He was on a conveyor belt, armed with a sort of grappling hook, the job being to straighten logs so that they slid smoothly into a large circular saw at the far end of the belt. The timber was being dropped onto it by a crane whose operator at some point loosed a load before Clint was ready for it. It crashed down on his legs, pinning him briefly, possibly giving him an undiagnosed hairline fracture, leaving his legs and lower body black and blue, and one of his knees “screwed up” for life.
After this incident he went to work in a pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon—the low point of this period. The smell in the mill was overpoweringly “putrid” and the air outside, trapped in this valley in the Cascade Mountains, was almost equally foul. Clint and Jack lived in a tiny apartment, and in the winter, when the rains came, the damp seeped in everywhere.
About the only thing he got out of this experience was the beginning of an interest in country music. Being lonely, he asked some of the guys he worked with where one went to meet chicks. They named a roadhouse near the Fernridge Dam. That it featured country music
didn’t sound too promising, but he relented, and found Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys—“more of a western swing band, and I liked him, he was really good, nice musicians, and there
were
some gals out there. I didn’t know how to do a western two-step or whatever. But you’ll try anything when you get desperate.”
It might be argued that at this time he was claiming his manhood in the only way he knew how, emulating his father’s peripatetic course as Clint had seen it when he was a child. It might also be argued that he was paying the price for his trade-school education. Whatever its virtues, Oakland Tech was not oriented toward college prep. It did not offer much in the way of literature or the arts, certainly nothing that might have encouraged a bright, unfocused young man to think seriously about further formal education.
This lack of intellectual grounding remains a source of some insecurity for him. He is very self-effacing about his lack of formal learning and abstract knowledge. In one of their television interviews Barbara Walters asked him how, when he was directing himself, he knew if a performance was not working. He made a drilling gesture with his finger at the back of his head and replied: “There’s a little guy right inside the back there, and he says, ‘Don’t do that.’ I don’t have a lot of brains, but I have a good gut feeling.” She followed up: “Do you really feel you don’t have a lot of brains, or is that just a kind of ‘Aw, shucks’?” “Well, I’m reasonably intelligent,” he said, “but I’m not a person who is of high scholastic learning, and I feel that where I’ve gone today [has] been mostly based on instinct, animal instinct.”
Ultimately overbalancing this defect is what he gained from the “lost years,” from virtually all of his upbringing. Attending school with people whose chance of escape from relentlessly unrewarding labor was nearly nonexistent, then laboring beside them in thankless tasks, made him, as he puts it, “very sensitive toward people who work at jobs like that. You learn to kind of feel for them and understand how lucky you are to have moved beyond all that.”
In other words, he was forging a link with the people who would one day form his core audience. They tutored his “instinct,” permitting him to understand their favorite routes of escape. This empathy would ultimately inform Dirty Harry Callahan in one way, Philo Beddoe of the
Which Way
movies in another, Bronco Billy McCoy in still another. Whatever ambitions he later developed for the good regard of critics and more sophisticated moviegoers, he never turned against these early loyalists or talked down to them or behaved cynically toward them. To have done so would have been a betrayal—of himself as well as them.
Still, he did not want to lead a working-class life. If he had not certainly known that before, winter in the Willamette Valley taught him. One day he went to get his only suit out of the closet, found it “just soaking wet and all mildewy” and found himself saying, “OK, that’s enough of this crap.”
But there was a little more to it than that. He was beginning to hear the music again, specifically a swing band sponsored by Seattle University that he would catch on his visits home. It was good—Quincy Jones was playing in it—and its sounds kept echoing in his mind. When he asked around he discovered that this small Catholic institution harbored a first-rate music department that took the pop forms as seriously as it did the classics. Here was a chance, he thought, to get a formal grounding in the music he loved and buttress his confidence in his self-taught abilities. He decided to return to Seattle and see what it would take to qualify for admission.
He had to work, of course—first at Bethlehem Steel, where he joined the night shift tending the blast furnaces, then at Boeing Aircraft, where he found a job in the parts department. In the meantime, though, he applied for admission to the college and believed he had a good chance of acceptance. If not, he was determined to find a junior college where he could bring himself up to speed academically and then enter the school. It seemed to him that he had, at last, found his direction.