Clint Eastwood (10 page)

But now it was 1951. The Korean War had begun the previous year, and suddenly he was confronted with a draft notice. It had been forwarded on from one of his previous addresses, and he found he had only seven days before he was required to report for induction. He called the board, said he was about to enter college and asked for an exemption. But with a war in progress, draft boards were in no mood to indulge young men who had wasted years finding themselves while their more prudent contemporaries had been busy securing their college exemptions. Besides, “I wasn’t tricky enough or smart enough to dance around, or figure out how to dance around.” Clint’s tone is uncharacteristically bitter about this passage, and Fritz Manes remembers him turning up in Oakland a few days before induction and spending most of the time drinking regretfully. Lost, he had been on the verge of finding himself. Now it appeared he must lose himself again in a newly massing army. He was sent to Fort Ord, on the Monterey Peninsula, for basic training.

I
t would be agreeable to report irony in full twist at this point in Clint Eastwood’s life, to observe this lost young man finding himself, despite his reluctance, trepidation and gloomy anger, in the United States Army. But when you loathe something as profoundly as Clint Eastwood did the military, and its exactions are imposed on you involuntarily, its instructive possibilities are likely to be modest.

Two years in the army, though, unquestionably helped him to develop certain significant aspects of himself. These included the discovery of a previously unsuspected ability to manipulate an institution and a situation not of his choosing to his own advantage, an embrace of a region, a landscape, that would claim his loyalty for the rest of his life and, finally, an encounter with mortality that would help both to focus his ambitions and to imbue him with that mild but palpable fatalism that marks his attitude toward his profession and his fame, armoring him against both disappointment and starry hubris.

In 1951, at Fort Ord, his attitude toward the army and toward the Korean conflict was typical of many young men pressed into service for a war in which America’s interests were difficult to apprehend. The army was something to be endured with the least imaginable effort. Early in basic training, for example, one of Clint’s top sergeants several times proposed that he apply for Officer’s Candidate School—“I evidently depicted what an officer should look like”—and he repeatedly rejected the idea, on the grounds that it would increase his obligation to the army. “Two years is the maximum I want to be here,” he remembers saying to the sergeant.

As for the war itself, it was the trip to it rather than service at the front that scared him. “The boat trip over there would have killed me,” he says. “You’d hear all the horror stories of World War Two, when they shipped the guys across, and they were all sick on the high seas, and packed in there like sardines.” He shudders at the thought of such confinement,
the inability to get out and walk. “That’s the part you wouldn’t have any control over, because you can’t go in and volunteer, and say, ‘Hey put me in a plane and fly me in there, get me to Seoul real quick.’ ”

In these circumstances he did something totally out of character—at least as it had shown itself up to now. He worked a con, and his face still beams with pleasure as he recalls it. Having quickly observed that military life is “a constant game of trying to put yourself in a position to do less work,” Clint was eager to play. So was a new friend he had made at Fort Ord, a former schoolteacher named Dick Scott. One day, having endured many a dismal indoctrination class, Scott said to Clint, “Let’s go over to Division Faculty. I can teach these classes we’re all falling asleep in.”

“You can,” said Clint, “but I can’t. I don’t have any experience teaching.”

“Aw, what the hell. You oughta come over. We’ll fake it.”

So they did, and found themselves being interviewed by a dubious captain, when a lieutenant wandered by and said, “We need a couple of guys over at the pool.” That sounded just right to Clint. “I just casually leaned over and said, ‘They got some jobs in the motor pool?’ and the guy says, ‘No, no, the swimming pool.’ ”

Better and better. He had a lifesaving certificate from the Red Cross and had worked as a lifeguard, and so was qualified to administer swimming tests and haul floundering recruits out of the water. In those days, as Clint recalls, “I never pushed myself, I was not very assertive,” and his temptation was, as usual, to put himself forward very quietly—“I was always the kind of guy who would say, ‘Gee, if you ever need anybody.…’ ” But to his own astonishment, having just watched his friend do a wonderful pitch, he found himself “up and selling. ‘Have I got a deal for you …,’ starting to make it sound like I’d swum with Weissmuller in the Olympics.” He says it was as if he could see his whole life flashing before him: his past—full of self-effacement, hanging back—and his future—more basic training, shipping out to Korea, combat—and recognized that this was the brass ring “and I had to grab it.”

The captain was reasonably impressed with Privates Scott and Eastwood, but he was not terribly encouraging. The need for warm bodies overseas was pressing. They left his office not daring to hope for much more than “four or five weeks of goofing around and swimming or something.” But in a couple of days word came down: They were being transferred to Division Faculty and assigned to duty at the pool.

A master sergeant was in charge of this facility, and he was off partying much of the time, while Clint and Dick Scott did most of the
work, which, besides administering swimming tests and teaching the basic strokes, also included cleaning out the latrines.

Still, this was about as good as it got in that man’s army. Scott and the rest of the pool staff were soon shipped out, and Clint became the senior man poolside, where he would finagle living quarters. Eventually, he received permission to work out of uniform—in a sweatshirt and a pair of khakis. So it would remain for the rest of Clint’s hitch.

The pool became a kind of informal social center. Among those dropping by to improve their tans were a number of actors who had been drafted, including three who would ultimately gain fame as television series leads: Richard Long (77
Sunset Strip, The Big Valley
), Martin Milner
(Route 66)
and David Janssen
(The Fugitive)
. The oft-repeated story is that they encouraged the handsome young swimming instructor to think about an acting career when he got out of the service, but Clint doesn’t recall that. It’s possible, though, that their talk about their civilian careers piqued his interest. “They all seemed to enjoy themselves” was his dry comment to a later interviewer.

If anyone directly encouraged him to think about acting it was Norman Barthold, who gained a measure of local fame at Fort Ord when a picture he appeared in before being drafted,
She’s Working Her Way Through College
, starring Virginia Mayo and Ronald Reagan, played the post theater. It was a dismal remake of the James Thurber-Elliott Nugent play and film
The Male Animal
, but the guys were impressed that their buddy had worked in such close proximity to its luscious leading lady, if not the future leader of the free world. Barthold’s army job was in classification and assignment, so he was the source of valuable information about who was and was not about to be shipped out. Since his office was nearby, Clint encouraged him to hang out at the pool as much as he liked. “The more I talked to him, the more I thought I wouldn’t mind studying acting,” he recalls. But he still insists the idea was idle and passing, not a turning point.

Indeed, it may be that the Fort Ord experience that most affected his future work occurred not at the pool, but in various Division Faculty classrooms, where he was expected to take over the occasional teaching assignment and to run the movie projector when visual aids were part of the curriculum. He prepared his material carefully—military history and recognizing military insignia were two of the subjects—and gained a little confidence about making public appearances. But it was a film he was frequently called upon to run that made the most lasting impression on him. This was the documentary John Huston had made for the signal corps during World War II,
The Battle of San Pietro
. It is, of course, a superbly intimate account of a battle, narrated understatedly
in the Hemingway manner by Huston himself. Running it over and over Eastwood became interested in Huston’s work and absorbed the cadences of his unique voice. Almost four decades later, these memories contributed to his decision to make the screen adaptation of
White Hunter, Black Heart
, Peter Viertel’s roman à clef about the director, and to Clint’s ability to mimic Huston accurately when he played him.

Not long after he settled into his pleasant routine at the swimming pool, Clint got a weekend pass and decided to return to Seattle to visit his parents and see a young woman he was interested in. A friend told him that if you wore a uniform you could hitch a ride on a military aircraft, and so one Friday afternoon they both turned up at a naval air station on the Monterey Peninsula. Sure enough, a twin-engine Beechcraft was heading for Seattle, and they jumped in for a bumpy, but otherwise uneventful, trip north. On Sunday afternoon, he and his friend reported to the Sands Point Naval Air Station in Seattle, not at all certain about getting a return flight.

They discovered, however, that a couple of Douglas ADs, dive-bombers under the command of naval reservists, were about to take off for the Alameda Naval Air Station near Oakland, close enough to Fort Ord for them to make it back to the post before their passes expired. These were not, perhaps, ideal aircraft for a person of claustrophobic temperament. The pilot’s compartment contained just one seat. There was another tiny compartment in the tail of the plane for a radar operator, with a small window, some mysterious instruments, an oxygen mask and an intercom, with which one could talk to the pilot. Clint somehow folded his large frame into this tight space.

Somebody showed him how to activate the oxygen and the intercom, and helped him buckle on a parachute and strap himself into the seat. He was dubious—“I notice it’s kind of trashy in there, pieces of cable laying around”—but with no other options available, he made himself as comfortable as he could, thus beginning a journey into hell. It is not a trip that Clint has discussed in much detail in the past. He has usually skimmed rather quickly over it in interviews, lest it be mistaken for a heroic adventure. It was not—but it was suspenseful and shaping.

The weather was overcast as they took off—not uncommon in Seattle—but Clint imagined that once they left the area it might improve. Visibility, however, remained low for the rest of the flight. Worse, about the time they reached cruising altitude, his door popped open. Air pressure would sometimes close it, but then it would fly open again. He reported
this distressing news to the pilot, a Lieutenant Anderson, who told him just to twist the latch shut. He struggled with it for about fifteen minutes, with no success; it was broken beyond in-flight repair. “It was rather chilly in there,” Clint recalls mildly. “This is not a heated plane, or pressurized.” Once again he reported his difficulties to Anderson, who responded, “Look, I’m busy right now. I’ve got to get back to you.”

Anderson began to take Clint’s plight a little more seriously when his colleague, flying the plane in which Clint’s friend was riding, radioed: “By the way, your rear door’s open.” Clint, by this time, was trying to hold it shut with brute force, fighting tremendous pressure. “You’ve got to get that rear door,” Anderson ordered, some urgency now in his voice. Holding it with one hand, Clint groped around for some of the loose cable he had noticed and managed to wire the door shut—precariously. He was still afraid it was going to be pulled off its hinges.

Their troubles were just beginning. Somewhere near Medford, Oregon, the pilot of their companion plane discovered, as Clint later found out, that his oxygen system wasn’t working, and radioed that he was going to set down for repairs. So they flew on alone, higher, too, as Anderson tried to get above the bad weather. Clint, finding himself getting woozy in the thinner air, grabbed the oxygen mask—and discovered that it, too, was inoperative.

He reported this new problem to Anderson, and in the midst of their conversation, the intercom began to fail. Clint could hear Anderson, but the pilot could not hear him. Listening in on Anderson’s radio transmissions Clint now learned that he was beginning to have trouble transmitting and receiving. Then the intercom failed completely and all communication between pilot and passenger ceased. Clint had noticed some cables running through his compartment that had moved when Anderson had closed his canopy at the beginning of the flight. If they moved again it would mean, he thought, that Anderson was opening the canopy preparatory to bailing out. He vowed to keep his eye on the cables and to parachute out himself as soon as he saw them move.