Clint Eastwood (13 page)

There is one more aspect of Chekhov’s system that Clint does not mention, but Beatrice Straight and others do. That is what she calls “
reaching out to your partner and to the audience … beaming an aura, sending out qualities in an almost mystical sense.” It was at the development of this capacity that all the instruction was aimed, and ultimately, perhaps, that’s what all star actors do in the movies. However they come by this capacity, whether by training or birthright, it is what sets them apart from other performers who may be technically their superiors. Who can doubt that the vengeful protagonist of the Sergio Leone westerns, or Dirty Harry Callahan, or for that matter Will Munny, are beaming something at us that goes beyond characterization as it is usually defined in films and theater? It is admittedly odd, even vaguely comical, to trace the creation of these figures back to ideas that can, in turn, trace their roots back to turn-of-the-century Moscow. But if that journey seems too long and winding to undertake, it should be obvious that in the minds of most of his audience the screen presence we know as “Clint Eastwood” is more aura than man, created out of a lifetime of gestures, which derive not from a complex whole, but from certain aspects of that whole—“centers,” if you will—that he chose to develop and exploit.

One does not want to make too much of all this. Some of what he saw—and did—when, a little later, he became an active participant in, rather than an observer of, acting classes struck him as ludicrous, and still does. The only time he had a conversation with Marlon Brando it was about their student days, and Clint remembers him saying “he felt like a fool in classes because he was playing chickens and I said, ‘Well, shit, I had to do that too.’ I mean, we did classes where we were chickens or inanimate objects, even.” He seems to recall having impersonated a teapot somewhere along the line.

On the other hand, one should not make too little of his studies, either. The depth of his interest and the length of his involvement with the study of acting may come as a surprise to some, since he has never spoken at length in public about it. The unsophisticated like to believe
that movie stars are untutored; this helps sustain the fantasy that their fame and wealth are accidental, thus democratically available to all. Some sophisticates like to believe the same thing; it helps them to sustain their contempt for popular successes they believe to be unearned. But the fact is that Eastwood took much of what he learned very much to heart, and it is still there, informing his work.

Clint was certainly not above trying to advance his career by means cruder than dutiful study. Chuck Hill encouraged him to visit the Universal lot, and Clint took him up on the invitation. As Steven Spielberg did later, he learned how to sneak into the studio. “I just visited their sets and just kind of hung out.” Was he hoping to be discovered? Surely by this time he had some idea of the striking first impression he was capable of making.

But acting was still an exotic thought. Besides, there were distractions, most notably, Maggie Johnson. Clint had continued to see her since arriving in Los Angeles, and their relationship was deepening. They particularly loved the beach. Surfing was not then, according to Clint, the teenage fad it was soon to become among young Californians. It was a sport for people in their twenties and thirties, and he and Maggie were often at Huntington Beach or San Onofre with their boards. They also liked to bodysurf on gray days at San Clemente after a storm had stirred the waters.

At the time Maggie was living in Altadena, working for a manufacturer’s representative. The long distance separating them, and their busy work schedules, helped to make the idea of marriage more attractive to them. Clint thinks he was more reluctant than she was to take the step. He thought they were too young, not well enough established. But, when it comes to marriage, “Guys never have much say about it.” Clint shrugs. After all, Maggie came from a nice middle-class background, and in those days young women like her expected to marry after a courtship had proceeded for a certain length of time. Clint, being the obliging young man that he was, never overtly rebellious against social conventions, was not hard to win over, especially since he had the example of his parents’ youthful marriage before him.

Above all, marriage “was doable.” Clint was still managing the apartment house on Oakhurst Drive, assuring them an affordable rent. If they combined her salary and his odd-job money he could continue his education at City College and they could get by. So on December 19,
1953, they were married in a respectable church wedding, after which they honeymooned in Carmel for a few days.

In retrospect, it seems so terribly fifties. Prosperity, postwar exhaustion, Cold War anxieties—so many large forces have been cited for creating a culture of small, safe hopes, a culture that was conspiring to push young people into marriage as soon as possible. Whatever their immediate prospects, the idea was to get them snugged up and heading toward suburbia. Indeed, Clint and Maggie were slightly above the median age at which Americans married in this decade of falling divorce rates and rising birthrates. But the broad sociological statistics always reckon without restless young men who, for whatever reasons, decide to swim against dictates of caution and the tides of the moment. And Clint Eastwood, as silent as any member of the Silent Majority could possibly be, was one of them. Whatever his goal, it was not a suburban split-level.

R
eflecting on the difficulties he experienced establishing himself as an actor in the 1950s, Clint Eastwood once said: “
I just lacked the look that decade seemed to call for.” There’s something in that. He did not have the introspective sensitivity, or the self-consciously suppressed violence, of Brando or Dean, nor did he have the passivity, the gentility, if you will, of Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, young dreamboats whose lack of danger and incisiveness suited the other mood of this erotically confused moment.

Tall, solidly built but slender, sandy haired, with cool, appraising blue-green eyes, Clint seemed, if anything, a throwback to the Gary Cooper-Jimmy Stewart type. Those men were still prospering in the movies, of course, but their appeal was to the older audience. The kids seemed to want something else, or so studio executives believed.

Luckily, this aspect of the current conventional wisdom had not been vouchsafed to a veteran cinematographer named Irving Glassberg. He was one of the people Clint had encountered in his forays on the Universal lot, or, to call it by its then-rightful name (which few did), the Universal-International lot. Glassberg saw in him a good-looking young man of a sort that had traditionally done well in the movies. He didn’t predict stardom. Indeed, at first he didn’t broach the subject of coming to work at the studio. Glassberg was “a real sports nut,” as Clint recalls, for whom swimming was a particular passion, and they talked more about that than they did about moviemaking. Clint and Maggie began seeing Glassberg and his wife socially, and eventually the cameraman mentioned the possibility of Clint auditioning for the studio’s talent program.

Most of the studios still had such programs, reminders of their glory days, when heavy schedules of in-house production made it useful to have lots of pretty faces and bodies under inexpensive contract—“
starlets
and studlets,” as Jack Kosslyn, an acting coach who began teaching at Universal around this time, characterized them.

The contract players received basic acting instruction and were, in turn, available for small roles and other chores around the lot—dubbing, posing for publicity photos, attending premieres, working in screen tests with still-newer newcomers. At this time, at Universal, they were often called upon to strike poses for the new 3-D cameras the studio was testing. Along with the wide-screen processes and stereophonic sound, 3-D was supposed to offer technological competition to small-screen, black-and-white television, then terrorizing the industry. The young women—some of whom were winners and high finishers in the Miss Universe contest, which offered contracts with the studio among its prizes—were expected to perform the traditional, distasteful starlet duties, which included serving as hostesses at studio functions and providing companionship for visiting exhibitors. The largest hope, both for the studio and the young contract players, was that one of the youngsters would catch the public’s fancy and become a star on the cheap, although that rarely happened. Usually they hung around for a year or two, going nowhere, and then were quietly dropped.

Still, it was a way to get started, and Clint was interested, though he insists his attitude remained “typical southern California,” meaning rather cool and laid-back. “It was nothing like this kid with a driving ambition, you know.” Nor did Glassberg make his suggestion with great fervor. “‘You oughta come out here, you oughta do that,’ ” Clint recalls him saying. “‘You know, guy like you … what the hell.’ I think maybe he was just being nice to me.”

But Glassberg actually harbored a little more conviction than that. He spoke of Clint to Arthur Lubin, a director with whom he sometimes worked, and arranged an introduction. Lubin, a onetime actor, had been directing at Universal since 1935, through the years handling every kind of film the studio made, from big-budget items like the Claude Rains
Phantom of the Opera
and the Maria Montez–Jon Hall Arabian epic
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
to the early Abbott and Costello comedies. Kindly, efficient, untroubled and untroubling, he was the kind of craftsman, competent but uninspired, who flourished when studios, functioning along industrial lines, needed to grind out “product” without temperamental fuss or delay for theaters that changed their bills twice a week. He, too, saw something old-fashioned in Clint, who recalls Lubin mentioning Joel McCrea for comparison’s sake—and not a bad one, considering Clint’s long-standing regard for the actor and his amiable way of presenting himself.

The two men prevailed on the studio to shoot an interview test of
Clint. This was not a screen test in the full sense of the word, in which an actor does a staged dramatic scene with another performer. Clint remembers it as “really weird, because they just turn the camera on and the guy says, ‘Now walk up here where the camera is. OK, and turn around … and turn to your right, and tell us why you want to be an actor’ or some dumb question like that. And you give them some really dumb answer.”

When Clint saw the test a few days later, he was appalled. As he once told an interviewer: “
I thought I was an absolute clod. It looked pretty good; it was photographed well [by Glassberg], but I thought, ‘If that’s acting, I’m in trouble.’ ” Still later, he put the point more vividly: “I went, ‘Oh shit. Boy this guy’ll never be anything.’ You’re going, ‘straighten up, don’t do that, what are you wincing about’—you know, all the self-critical things.”

But somebody up there—in the front office—liked him. Or at least didn’t hate him. The studio offered him a $75-a-week contract with an option renewable every six months (and a $25 raise each time it was picked up). It covered only forty weeks of the year, meaning that his salary worked out to something less than $60 a week, less taxes, when it was fully prorated. Still, the GI Bill was granting him only $110 a month, and even when he added in his earnings from odd jobs, his current income was less than Universal was offering.

Unfortunately, no one else shared his enthusiasm for this new prospect. “I don’t think there was any excitement, particularly on Maggie’s part. In fact, as I recall, she didn’t really like it.” Actually, she was ambiguous about it. “
I didn’t know what I thought of Clint’s becoming an actor,” she said later. “It was something I hadn’t planned on.” It was, she said, “a little spooky at first … but I got used to it.” There was, however, nothing ambiguous about her parents’ response; they were firmly opposed. “Her mother didn’t love me that much, anyway, and she thought, My God, my son-in-law being an actor!” When he broached the idea with his father, Clinton Sr.’s response was: “Goddamn. Why?” Even if he was not happy in school, his dad advised him, “Don’t do that shit. Don’t get into that dream stuff.” Clint temporized, saying he just wanted to try it for six months. If it didn’t work out, he promised he would resume college, possibly even relocate in Seattle. As he pointed out, he would be able to reclaim his government educational benefits if he went back to school within a year. But his most winning argument was that it should be considered merely as continued schooling, sort of like switching majors.

His father’s opposition subsided when a contract was offered and it became clear to him that Clint would be earning a steady, if modest,
salary for at least half a year. One could also, perhaps, look upon this as an entry-level position in a large, stable corporation—in the final analysis not so very different from the kind of jobs other young men were being encouraged to take as they began their careers in the era of the Organization Man. Or one could rationalize this as a way for Clint to get something out of his system before embarking on some more conventional career.