Clint Eastwood (4 page)

No, it isn’t—not in the strictest definition of the term, which, of course, simply means “author.” He’s very conscious that movies are a collaborative medium, which is why when he directs he does not take a proprietary credit (“A Clint Eastwood film”). But the word “author” has obvious derivatives, and the issue for Clint the director is akin to the one he confronted playing Clint the host: how to assert “authority,” “authoritativeness,” without embracing “authoritarianism.”

This is obviously a tricky realm, and mostly, as we have seen, he traverses it with a tactful regard for what we might call its psychic ecology. But it would be pointless to deny that some of Clint’s authority derives from the nuclear capability of his anger. For no one mistakes that explosive potential as merely curmudgeonly or as a colorful working ploy—akin, say, to those largely idle displays of ego and temperament that typically accompany what Ethan Mordden, the film historian, has neatly labeled the “high maestro” manner of filmmaking.

What feeds Clint’s temper is a profound sense of the world’s unreliability. As we will shortly see in more detail, he was a child of hard times. Born in the first year of the depression, his first memories are of dislocation, as for several years he and his family moved from place to place annually, trying to stabilize their economic lot. His parents were good people, he loved them, he vaguely understood the pressures they were under, but he hated the loneliness their travels imposed on him—always the new kid on the block and in the school, wondering how he got there. When he recalls these years, the angry note in his voice is unmistakable.

In late adolescence and early manhood he endured what he would later refer to as his “lost years,” in which he wandered about, condemned to hard hourly labor, trying to find—imagine—a place for himself in a world still as unyielding and enigmatic as he had first experienced it. This added to his store of outrage. For the institutions he encountered in those years—educational, economic, governmental—were unresponsive, insensitive, clumsy in their impositions.

He has never claimed trauma or even unbearable hardship for these experiences—but it is clear that they taught him two basic lessons: Do everything in your power to lessen the impact of mischance, whether it be cosmic or mundane; do not trust institutions to do this job. Or, to put the point more positively, turn yourself into an institution and set your own rules of work and conduct, your own boundaries against intrusion. Then insist that this institution, this lengthened shadow of yourself, devote
itself to the celebration of characters variously subversive, antisocial, rebellious. In a phrase, place the rage for one kind of order in the service of a rage against a different sort of order.

This irony is central to his career. In purely movie terms, Clint has taken the presentation of the heroic male into country he had not previously ridden. Since Howard Hawks placed it at the center of his adventure films, male bonding has been a great recurring motif in American movies, but it is a rarity in Clint’s. His great theme has been the opposite: the difficulty men have in making connections with any sort of community. Nor is an Eastwood hero usually granted the kind of relationship with a woman, bantering and antic, that Hawks permitted his protagonists. In most of Clint’s movies the male-female relationship is, at best, romantically perfunctory and without much in the way of even an implied future.

Almost without exception his characters are deeply disaffected men, much more profoundly isolated than the kind of classic loners Hawks (and those who have followed him) contrived through his consoling conventions to redeem. When we speak of Clint’s films we are speaking of a loneliness more radical, of a protagonist more rebelliously withdrawn, than anyone has ever offered us as the hero of movies intended for, and embraced by, a popular audience. We are also speaking of—to use a phrase that will recur in this book—a kind of brutal frankness, a sense, always present in his work, of the role that chance and human unreliability play in anyone’s destiny, a sense that the distance between heroism and victimization is paper-thin. He once told Carrie Rickey, the film critic, that the body of his work adds up not to a politics but a morality, and this honesty of his is its source.

Clint has also said, in a quotation that has been much requoted: “
There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul.” But not so deeply that it cannot be summoned forth to animate just about every film he has ever directed, every character he has ever played—fiercely, goofily, guiltily, stubbornly, arrogantly, dreamily, regretfully, romantically, even as a ghostly shade.

What is in his soul is in all of our souls—that rage that we spend so much of our time suppressing and denying, allowing it at most to slip forth in subversive jokes and gossip about the rich, the powerful, the celebrated, in flashes of anger and equally quick descents into gloom about our jobs, our debts, our governments at once so intrusive and so impotent—and, yes, about our fundamental loneliness and isolation.

Acting out for himself, he acts out for all of us, and the irony that by doing so he has himself become rich, powerful and celebrated—in charge of his life in ways denied both to his character and his audience—is not lost on him. It is why, off-screen, he considers himself a good and ordinary and lucky guy; a guy who doesn’t want to attribute too much consciousness or calculation to his achievement, a guy who senses that some of his luck consists of being the right man at the right time, capable of crystallizing and personifying a mood a lot of us are in, a mood that has, since the social and political upheavals of the sixties, when Clint first made his mark, deeply colored the life of our times.

You can call what this man does an advance or a retreat from tradition, depending on your taste. But in a time when public figures are forever trying to ingratiate themselves with us, you can see something exemplary in his on-screen refusal to be easily liked, and in his offscreen refusal to be easily understood. In a time when that sometime cock of the walk, the Wasp male, has been obliged to change metaphors in midstream and now often sees himself as a stag at bay, you can find in this screen character, as it has developed over the years, some of the pain and puzzlement of transition.

There are, naturally, people who have fallen out with him—most notably a woman who spent many years in a relationship with him that ultimately failed, but also professional colleagues whose associations with him soured—who see in him a deeper darkness than I perceive. There are also strangers who continue to resent and reject his message. This distrust, so widespread and so full of outrage in the early days of Clint’s career, is now greatly diminished, but it is there, especially in some of the odder corners of academia, and it is not without its murmuring influence.

I, however, trust the many tales told on the screen over this long career, and I trust the honesty of their teller. I trust the authenticity of his conflicting rages, and even as I have tried to penetrate them, I trust the enigmatic silences of the man caught between those emotions. I see them as signs of honest, inarticulable puzzlement by a man acting cool and ironic, feeling much of the time otherwise.

W
hat an American was Clint Eastwood,” Norman Mailer wrote as he worked his way toward the peroration of a 1983 Sunday supplement article on him—as usual for Mailer on these occasions, a blend of interview and meditation on his own and his subject’s celebrity. “Maybe there was no one more American than he.” Maybe that is true, defining the term traditionally, as it was still possible to do in those days, before multiculturalism became one of our reigning pieties.

Talking to the writer, Clint stressed the lack of grandeur in his background. “
My dad was Scots-English; my mother’s Dutch-Irish. Strange combination. All the pirates and people who were kicked out of every place else.” In other words, there are no Eastwoods in the Society of Mayflower Descendants. It is sometimes Clint’s pleasure to slightly overemphasize his lack of early promise, not so much to stress the pluck that underlay his rise in the world, but the luck involved. For example, at the Cinémathèque in Paris in 1985 this exchange between Clint and a questioner from the floor occurred:

“
Did you once describe yourself as a bum and a drifter?”

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

“A bum and a drifter.”

Actually, he had once been so quoted, and there is at least a half-truth in the wisecrack. He was never a bum, but there was a time, during his late adolescence, when he was definitely a drifter. And before that, when Clint was a child, the entire Eastwood family could perhaps have been described as drifters—though scarcely purposeless ones—as Clint’s father, Clinton Eastwood Sr., pursued job opportunities up and down the West Coast during the depths of the depression. His son’s most basic characteristics—his physical restlessness and his low tolerance for boring routine, his loyalty to the people he works with, his pleasure
in, and loyalty to, the little filmmaking community he created around him—can probably be traced to these years. The former qualities he learned by experience; the latter ones he understood as ideals to be strived for.

Still, Clint’s heritage is far from piratical. It is essentially middle class, marked by the kind of modest strivings, setbacks and successes common to that class. His father and mother, Clinton Sr. and Margaret Ruth Runner—always known by her middle name—were sweethearts from a very tender age. He was fifteen, she thirteen, when they met in Piedmont, California, not long after her family moved from San Francisco to this prosperous Bay Area suburb, which lies due east of Oakland, due south of Berkeley. His father, Burr, built a house there soon after Clinton Sr. was born and worked as a manager in a wholesale hardware concern. Ruth’s father, Waldo, had been a railroad executive—she moved back and forth across the country several times as a child because of his work—and then founded, with a partner, the Graybar Company, which manufactured automobile bumpers and luggage racks.

Clinton was tall and good-looking, star and ultimately captain of the high-school football team, a mainstay of the swimming team and an outgoing, popular young man—then as always, “
the first one at a party and the last one to leave,” in Ruth’s fond description. Their son remembers his mother saying, more than once, “It’s a shame he wasn’t born rich, because he could have had so much fun.”

Ruth was herself tall and attractive—too tall, as it happened, to realize her girlhood dream, which was to become a ballet dancer. She enrolled in a ballet class, taught by one of her grammar-school teachers, when she was eight or nine and from then until she was sixteen dance “was my main purpose,” she says. Like her father, who was a talented amateur clarinetist, she had a natural gift for musical expression; when her older sister, Bernice, started taking piano lessons, Ruth would study the exercise book she brought home, teaching herself to play without benefit of formal instruction.

Both Clinton and Ruth endured tragedies in midadolescence, his by far the more poignant. Jesse, his pretty and spirited mother, was stricken with cancer when she was in her forties and struggled against the disease for several years. A graduate of the University of California, where she had been active in dramatics, she, too, had a natural gift for music. Her mother had taught voice and piano in San Francisco, supporting four daughters through this work, after her husband had deserted them.

When his mother fell ill Clinton was obliged to rush home after athletic practices to tend to her until his father arrived home from work. She died when the boy was sixteen. Ruth says her husband almost never
discussed Jesse’s illness or death and that she cannot remember ever meeting her. Jesse Eastwood did, however, pass on an important legacy, her mother’s German-made upright piano—always referred to as “Grandma Andy’s piano” (for Anderson, her maiden name)—which would follow Clinton and Ruth on their many travels through depression America and remains in the family, in excellent working condition, to this day.

Ruth’s world was sundered when she was sixteen and her parents separated, though apparently with very little bitterness (they never formally divorced). Indeed, if Clint Eastwood is any judge, his maternal grandmother, Virginia McLanahan Runner, preferred the single life. She was a strong-minded, independent woman, who, after her children were grown, lived in a succession of rural retreats, each of them a little more distant from the Bay Area—Hayward, Sunol and finally Arnold, a sometime-goldmining community in Calaveras County.

Clinton Eastwood tried college for a short time—at the University of California—but received virtually no support from his father and did not like school well enough to work his way through it. He was not yet what he would become, a hardworking man successfully struggling against his basic aversion to hard work. It was easier for him, now, at the height of 1920s prosperity, to rely on his charm. He became a bond salesman.

He married pretty, sensible Ruth Runner in 1928. He was twenty-one; she was nineteen. They took an apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland and were managing well enough until October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Ruth was pregnant at the time, but her account of what must have been for her an anxious period is remarkably calm—“Well, everyone was in the same boat on that one; none of us had anything and we hadn’t had time enough to save very much”—perhaps because her husband had not immediately lost his job and perhaps because she was so happily preoccupied with the impending birth.