Clint Eastwood (14 page)

For his part, the would-be thespian was more excited than he let on. On May 1, 1954, when he drove his battered Ford convertible, its body half covered in primer paint, its torn canvas top aflap, through the studio gates for the first time, he felt he was embarking on “a big adventure,” and it remained so for him “every day.” He very quickly came to think, as he puts it: “Shit, people are getting paid for this. This is kind of fun, you know.…”

He was aware, though not acutely so, that this was not the most propitious moment to embark on a career in the movies. The early fifties were, as every social history of the period stresses, a troubled time for Hollywood. Its unease is explained by a set of simple statistics: In 1949 approximately 87 million Americans went to the movies every week; in 1950 only 60 million people went, and in the years thereafter the trend continued steadily downward until finally, in the late sixties, weekly ticket sales stabilized in the 20 million range. Another set of figures explains the first ones: In 1949 about 1 million television sets were sold in the United States; thereafter sales rose exponentially to 4 million in 1950, and to 32 million in 1954.

Other factors also contributed to Hollywood’s discomfort, most notably the settlement, in 1948, of a long-standing antitrust suit under the terms of which the studios that owned theater chains were obliged eventually to divest themselves of them, thereby cutting off a reliable stream of profits and initiating an anxious competition for bookings in the ever-shrinking number of theaters that remained. With the industry’s founding leadership aging and adapting poorly to new conditions, many were predicting that the studios were doomed. Some even suggested that in a few years theatrically shown movies would be a thing of the past. No one clearly foresaw that the outcome of the less-than-dire evolutionary changes then beginning to occur would permit all but one of the major studios to survive and prosper. Certainly the untried actor reporting for his first day of studio work on a spring morning in 1954 had no way of knowing that these changes would eventually benefit him greatly.

Clint’s description of his new job as a continuation of schooling by other means had been more apt than he knew. Those in the new talent
program had a full schedule of classes, occupying five and a half days a week: acting, diction, singing, dancing, horseback riding. Their immediate supervisor, Joan McTavish, filed reports on their progress, or lack of it, every month to Robert Palmer, the studio executive in charge of the program.

On his very first day Clint was obliged to get up in front of the acting class and do a short scene with Susan Cabot, who had already played leads in a few minor films. Looking around the room he recognized other actors and actresses he had glimpsed in the movies, people he imagined to be far more expert than he. It was not a reassuring moment, and he flashed back on the last time he had been invited to make a fool of himself in public—the junior-high-school play.

But he had resolved that “I was going to stay and grind it out,” so he plunged ahead. “It was pretty sad,” he recalls. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, not one iota.” But when he finished, and settled back to watch the others, he had a minor revelation: “They weren’t so hot either. Even the people who thought they were hot weren’t so hot.”

He had observed enough acting classes by this time to recognize that “a couple of people had a little technique.” But he also recognized the evasions by which actors try to cover their insecurities, and it heartened him. “I thought, Yeah, if I’m going to do this, I’m really going to do this, I’m not going to just screw around with it. I figured I [had] six months to really get my act in gear.”

And that’s exactly what he tried to do—not always with the studio’s full support, as it turned out. He was not the best actor in the program—looking back, he thinks John Saxon (“
very intense,” in another student’s description) probably was—but he was almost certainly the hardest working. He had to be, for this was, by chance, quite a remarkable group of students.

Brett Halsey, later to be a leading man in a number of minor movies, was among them, and he recalls talking about the program to Robert Palmer when they were both working at Twentieth Century-Fox some years later. The executive told him that the studio would have considered the program a success if, say, one in two hundred of the talent program students had made it to stardom. But of the males in this program, by Halsey’s estimate, some 80 percent “made it, in the sense of making a living as actors”—among them John Gavin and Clint’s old army buddy David Janssen. Some of the women, too, became reasonably well known, including Mara Corday, Gia Scala and Mamie Van Doren.

Clint seems to have been more focused than he cared to let on to his friends in the program. His lifelong habit is to disguise his more passionate desires with a casual air, as if admitting them might bring bad
luck, or humiliation. He says he learned by steady, unspectacular accretion.

He was lucky that in his early months at Universal Katherine Warren was the acting coach. She was, in Halsey’s description, “very good and patient and knowing and very, very nice.” Practical minded (she had been a working actress for many years), she was, he says, “inspiring in her own way,” a very good teacher for an insecure and utterly untutored young actor. Some forty years later, when Clint won his
Unforgiven
Oscars, Halsey wired him, “Congratulations from the Katherine Warren School of Acting.”

Practicality and an avoidance of high-flying theory were, as always, the keys to Clint’s sensibility. When Jack Kosslyn (who would later teach Clint in his private classes and work for him as a casting director) came aboard, he decided to bring in some well-known figures (they included Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger and Lewis Milestone, the director) to speak to the students. Among them was Dan O’Herlihy, the distinguished Irish actor, who had lately received an Academy Award nomination for the
Robinson Crusoe
he had done under Luis Buñuel’s direction, and Clint has never forgotten his advice. “Oh, it’s really not so much,” he told the students, “just get up and do it.” At some point someone asked O’Herlihy what the difference was between acting on the stage and acting on the screen. “They’re absolutely the same; there’s no difference.”

“Everybody’s sitting there, waiting for this big lightbulb,” says Clint, “and it’s ‘Oh, you may have to talk a little louder in the theater, because you’re not miked up, but other than that, it’s the exact same thing.’ ” Clint loved O’Herlihy’s demystification of a topic often enough mystified by its adepts.

There is some documentary evidence to support Clint’s growing feeling that he may, at last, have found himself professionally. Some of McTavish’s monthly reports on Clint survive, salvaged some years ago from a dumpster on the Universal lot by an acquaintance of his. At the end of his first month, for example, the always sympathetic Warren wrote that he was beginning to gain “
authority”; despite problems with projection she predicted he “can become a fine actor.” The point she stressed was that “he is natural and easy in what he does and has volunteered in classes to do things he isn’t suited for to help or gain experience. Cooperative, prompt, courteous and reliable.” The diction coach called him “completely green” to the whole business, but found his spirit and attitude “praiseworthy.” Summing up, McTavish wrote: “Our experience with him so far is excellent, as he gives promise of being one of the most conscientious boys we have ever had.… He is refined, ambitious
and cooperative … an extremely likable boy who has gained admiration from his associates by his good nature and eagerness to learn.”

The extant reports, which cover the first five months of Clint’s contract, continue to develop the themes set forth in the first of them. By August, Warren saw “strength beginning to show in his work … real progress.” Even Dr. Vandraegen, the diction coach, who remained the least enthusiastic of Clint’s teachers, began to find “surprising facets to his personality,” while noting that because so much of what he was doing was new to him, Clint was “slow to respond.” The movement and singing teachers were patiently noncommittal, though the latter eventually conceded that “in time” he might become a singing “prospect.”

By September Warren was claiming “Definite progress. He can attack parts he couldn’t have touched when he first came. Although a placid person, I have discovered some very definite traces of power.” In November she wrote: “Clint has evidently been told that he has the easygoing quality of Gary Cooper. We are striving to incorporate this natural quality into strength, virility, authority and versatility.” But, she added, he needed more consistent work. Summing up the month’s reports McTavish wrote that “he has both intelligence and understanding, and his feeling for dramatic value is unusual considering he has no experience.” But she, too, observed that he needed “more seasoning.”

Therein lay the rub, for it was hard to learn by doing at the studio in those days. This was ironic, because Universal was at that moment as busy and prosperous as it had ever been. The previous year it had produced more films and shown a greater profit than it had in a decade. Never having owned theaters, it was unaffected by the traumatic settlement of the antitrust case. Indeed, disadvantage was now turning to advantage, for, over the years Universal had been virtually shut out by its rivals’ urban chains, it had developed loyal customers among the independent theater owners of small-town America, whose market was the last to be penetrated and diminished by television. Then, too, with independent companies beginning to acquire the old studio chains in the cities, the studio was gaining easier access to those markets.

The problem for Clint and other low-level studio employees was that they were working for an essentially dysfunctional, but self-perpetuating, bureaucracy. Even when its founder, Carl Laemmle, and his son, known far and wide as Junior, were running the company, which has been doing business on the same piece of San Fernando Valley real estate since 1915, it was not known for strong management. The elder Laemmle was notorious for putting ne’er-do-well friends and relatives from his native Germany on the payroll. His son was famous for producing films too extravagant for the studio’s resources. Forced out in
1936, the Laemmles were replaced by characterless managers who year-in, year-out pursued the same policy; they made a handful of big-budget features, mainly for prestige, and counted on a large schedule of low-budget genre pictures (westerns, horror films, mysteries, lowbrow comedies and serials), which played well in the small towns, for profits. When William Goetz (Louis B. Mayer’s son-in-law) and Leo Spitz (a former RKO executive) merged their independent International Pictures operation with Universal and took over its management in the late forties, they did not radically change this policy, though they stopped producing serials and decreed that henceforth no U-I picture would ever be less than seventy minutes long.

They also arranged to distribute J. Arthur Rank’s prestigious English productions, brought in a few ambitious independent producers and, trying to offer what television could not, made a few more Technicolor spectacles than usual. But basically business remained pretty much as usual on Lankershim Boulevard, and Universal remained throughout this decade the town’s least interesting studio—cautious, conservative, without inspiration or aspiration. The strategy by which two other fringe majors, Columbia and United Artists, propelled themselves to the first rank in these days, winning Academy Awards and solid profitability, which was to finance independent producers making sophisticated movies that took up themes television could not touch, was beyond Universal-International’s range. Its idea of sophistication was a weepy romance starring a mature actress like Barbara Stanwyck or Jane Wyman or maybe a biopic about Glenn Miller or Benny Goodman.

For the rest, it required no stretch of anyone’s imagination to go on making Abbott and Costello movies, or to keep Ma and Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule up to their modest speeds. That’s what bureaucracies are good at, and as if to reassure this one, Goetz and Spitz appointed one of its creatures, Edward Muhl, who had been at Universal since 1927, head of production. Careful cost accounting insured them all against nasty surprises. Robert Daley, who would soon become Clint’s friend, and later his executive producer, worked in budgeting at the studio then and says that actual production costs never deviated from predicted costs by more than one-quarter of one percent: “
That’s the kind of control they exercised.”

In this environment the principal activity of every department head was defending his own territory against intrusion and making sure that nothing happened in his domain that would call unwanted attention to it from the front office. This defensiveness was the main reason the casting department, which one might have expected to look upon the new talent program as an asset, saw it instead as a threat. If producers used
these kids it meant there was less for the casting people to do. Then, too, many of the producers felt it was beneath them to use talent program players; in their minds, according to Halsey, it was tantamount to using nonprofessional actors. “Untouchables” is the word Clint uses to describe the young contractees. As a result, says Jack Kosslyn, the contract players “lacked motivation, because they weren’t getting parts in pictures.”