by Marc Eliot
As a boomer, I grew up engulfed in the postwar media revolution that began with movies, black and white television, and, of course, rock and roll. I was a street kid from New York City, part of the working-middle-class mix in the West Bronx, and easily the most accessible forms of entertainment for my friends and me were TV, music on the radio, and 45s. Everyone my age was electronically weaned on Superman, Howdy Doody, Andy’s Gang, the greatest, purest, most genteel cowboy figure of them all, The Lone Ranger, and singing the songs we heard on AM on street corners or learning a few chords on a guitar or how to bang the bongos like Marlon Brando. And, of course, our parents had Sinatra; we had Elvis.
If I came early to movies as entertainment, I came relatively late to movies as art, for two reasons: you had to pay to get into movie theaters, and I rarely had enough extra money for that; and on those Saturday mornings when I did have that spare quarter, it was just too hard to physically go to the Loew’s Paradise or the RKO Fordham for the cartoon or sci-fi/horror marathons. The elderly, overweight, furious matrons used to drive kids crazy—they’d make us sit on the side, which meant watching the movie off the distorted edge of the screen, and then kicked us out exactly at three o’clock, to make way for the adults. At least in those days TV and the radio were free.
I remember the first film I ever saw—while I was still a toddler my parents took me to see Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (they didn’t believe in babysitters). But only in college did I find the full emotional depth of that movie, and movies in general. It happened with two encounters that awakened my senses, changed my thinking, and ultimately altered the direction of my life.
As a drama major at the High School of Performing Arts, I was a little teenage Method actor in blue jeans devoted to “the theater.” I knew very little of it—I didn’t see my first live, on-Broadway show until I was a senior—and just talking about wanting to be on television or in the movies was almost enough to get you expelled for a “lack of serious commitment to your art.” To the PA faculty, whom I loved dearly (and still do), and to whom I entrusted so much of my adolescent development, movies were about fake fame and corrupting money. No one ever discussed Alfred Hitchcock, for example, whom I already believed was the greatest director in the world. Instead, we were instructed in the art of sense memory, part of the “method” of acting that Stanislavsky had given the world. Sense memory? What was there to recall at the age of twelve?
A few years later, after a successful run as an actor on the stage and television, I attended City College (the City University of New York) for undergraduate studies. While there I participated in the usual run of student productions—Sophocles, Chekhov, Shakespeare, Miller, Williams. One semester I happened to take a film elective taught by Herman J. Weinberg, who had written a book about the film director Josef von Sternberg, whom I had never heard of. The title of Weinberg’s course was “Sternberg and Dietrich.” Each week we saw one of the legendary collaborations between the director and the star, and I looked forward to that class more than any other. In the darkness of that auditorium at City College on Convent Avenue, I first saw the full power of the magic flickering lamp.
For the first time, film was more to me than a surface experience. I was fascinated by Sternberg’s “presence” in every film, even though he never appeared on-screen in any of them; seeing all eight films together, displaying the arc of Sternberg’s and Dietrich’s careers, energized me.
In 1969, a year after I graduated from CCNY, I went off to do a season of summer stock and fell in love with a beautiful young actress. When we returned to New York City, we moved together into a small apartment in the Village so she could continue her college studies.
She was a student at the then-quite-radical NYU School of the Arts theater division and obligated to take an evening film survey course being taught by the relatively young and still mostly unknown Andrew Sarris. She came home quite animated one night after class and told me that if I really wanted to be an actor, I ought to go hear this man talk about movies. Somewhat skeptical, as I was about everything in those days (including love), I agreed to attend one class, more as a way of appeasing her than out of any real desire to hear someone else lecture to me on film, a subject about which I now believed I knew everything there was to know. But that Tuesday night, in a small classroom on Eleventh Street near Second Avenue, packed with students, a blackboard, a projector, and a pull-down screen, my head was completely turned around as Sarris spoke with great passion about his already controversial new critical methodology of film, the auteur theory.
An atomic bomb went off in my brain when he discussed how movies were not filmed theater, not dramatized novels, not acted-out historical re-creations, not moving pictures of paintings, but an art form unto themselves. It was an invisible art at that, or as he put it, “not a visual medium,” meaning that the artist’s personality—in this case, the director’s—was not readily apparent but materialized in the force and style of his direction. He said that because film could stand alone, what a film was about was less important than how its story was told, and that story content was far less riveting than stylistic context. For that reason those American films that had been relegated to the bottom of the conventional critical bill needed to be reevaluated and reordered. The auteur theory was a critical evaluation rather than an artistic device—no director could ever start out wanting to be an auteur.
Sarris’s words shook my creative soul. He had opened my eyes to what was great not only on the screen but within and beyond it. He was eloquent, beautiful, insightful, passionate, and profound, as inspiring to me as any song by Dylan or Phil Ochs or David Blue or Joan Baez or any of the other folkie idols of my teenage years. That night I was first awakened to what film really was and the power of what its art could do. Andrew Sarris was one of my primal influences as I shifted from performing the work of others to writing my own. (Five years later, when Sarris was my professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, we would become mentor/student and good friends.)
While I was still sitting in on Sarris’s classes at NYU, which I now attended religiously every week, a friend of mine from college, Joe Schneiweiss, showed up extremely excited about a film he had seen over the weekend. It was A Fistful of Dollars, and he literally pulled me by my coat sleeve down to where it was playing so I could see it for myself.
I saw it, and I got it. He was right; it was like nothing that I had seen in the movies before. Its “hero,” the Man with No Name, played by Clint Eastwood, was the first tough guy I had ever seen on the big screen who was anything like the real tough guys I’d known in the Bronx. He wasn’t prissy, he wasn’t verbally poetic, he didn’t ride a white horse like some knight in shining armor, and he didn’t care who (or how) he killed. He could fight and ride; he was big, strong, and completely believable in a film that was, for all intents and purposes, otherwise, to me, incomprehensible. His character was new and different and original, and his face I could not forget. If I didn’t yet understand what he and Sergio Leone were trying to do, I certainly experienced a visceral connection, both to the character and to the actor who played him. Not since James Dean in George Stevens’s Giant (1956) had a screen actor and the character he played shown me so much about me.
Not long after I read Sarris’s essay “The Spaghetti Westerns,” which began to explain Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood to me. Typically, Sarris was ahead of the curve. Whereas the rest of the critical pack disdained this and most genre films (and the actors who played in them), marking them as inferior to the standard Hollywood “product,” Sarris could see them for what they really were. He reevaluated them and the men who made them, including Hitchcock, Welles, Chaplin, Ford, Hawks, Walsh, Capra, and all the rest, who would eventually find not just reinstatement but anointment in the pantheon of American movies and their directors.
I believe that Clint Eastwood, as a director (and also as an actor) is a legitimate auteur. His personality is imprinted on his characters and films like a sig
nature indelibly written on a piece of paper, making them worthy of study and his life worthy of biography. That is why I have chosen to write about his work and his life.
It is always somewhat problematic, I think, to write about subjects who are still living. For one thing, their story has not yet ended. But a second and more difficult issue is cooperation. In my view “authorized” biographies (of which I have done a few) are really collaborations and should be called that, as I have called the ones I did with Barry White, Donna Summer, and James Brown, to name a few. The danger of cooperation is that the author may surrender editorial control in favor of providing so-called inside information (much of the time the truth turned into its most favorable limelight) and remove all blemishes and bad judgments and nastiness with the precision of a Photoshopped eight-by-ten. For this book, I decided not to contact Clint Eastwood, in view of his well-known aversion to public scrutiny; instead I chose to write the book from an objective distance. As a film critic and student of film history, I have always tried to write about filmmakers through the dual lenses of their lives and work, to see how one helps create the other.
When that subject is still alive, and is still a force in the industry he or she represents, getting people to talk about him or her on the record is nearly impossible. Hollywood is a place that operates out of fear more than any other emotion. Because I lived and worked there for so many years and have written extensively about the industry, I have many solid contacts. Several dozen primary sources did talk to me for this book, but because so many asked not to be named, early on I decided not to mention any of them. In the few places where this will be noticeable—“sources say,” “according to someone who was there”—I regret I cannot be more forthcoming, but I must respect the wishes of some and the integrity of all. I believe that enough secondary sources can verify my account. I am telling the story the way I feel it should be told.
To keep a flow of continuity, I used two other biographies as guidelines. Both were originally published at least a decade ago and as such miss the best and I think the most interesting decade of Clint Eastwood’s life. Richard Schickel’s 1996 biography, Clint Eastwood, suffers from the problem of trying to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. It is hopelessly hagiographic, and I am not (by far) the only one who feels this way. According to Stephanie Zacharek, “Schickel hammers a little too relentlessly on his own enthusiasms—his championing of Eastwood, in particularly, sometimes approaches fetishization.”* Too much of Schickel’s work suffers from the problem of cross-over, of wanting to be in an industry for which he is also a critic. He and I have tackled similar subjects in the past; both of us wrote biographies of Walt Disney, and there too our approaches and our results were strikingly different.
As for Patrick McGilligan, he unfortunately comes from the “gotcha” school of buddy-buddy insiderism that is meant to pass as serious biography. His book reads like an attack on Schickel’s and becomes, in the process, overly cynical and bitchily gleeful in pointing out Schickel’s many critical omissions (as does much of McGilligan’s biographical and critical work—of which I was a “victim” in the past for that Disney biography). He therefore errs on the other side of the coin of objectivity. Neither Schickel’s book nor McGilligan’s has a cinematically charged feel—they could have been written about a novelist, a painter, or a poet—but I found both useful and informative, especially in terms of chronology.
Sondra Locke’s memoir was also helpful, although not well annotated (it has no index or list of sources), and naturally enough, it is a bit overly subjective. It nevertheless pointed me in several useful directions, especially in tracking down legal documents and court records.
Also important to me was the great availability of Clint Eastwood’s movies. DVDs, videotape recordings, cable film channels, and other sources that eventually allowed me to see virtually every Clint Eastwood film. I thank all those who helped me find them.
I wish to thank the following people for their assistance and guidance: Mary Stiefvater, my wonderful sometimes assistant and researcher; overall good guy and researcher David Herwitz; my faithful editor, Julia Pastore; my publisher, Shaye Areheart; my agent, Alan Nevins; my photographer, and so much more, Xiaolei Wu; and all of the production and promotion people at Harmony Books.
To my readers, I thank you all, wish you the best, and know we will meet again a little farther up the road.
*Stephanie Zacharek, reviewing You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story (Schickel with George Perry, with an introduction by Clint) in the New York Times Book Review of December 7, 2008.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARC ELIOT is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen books on popular culture, among them the highly acclaimed biographies Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart; the award-winning Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince; Down 42nd Street; what many consider the best book about the sixties, his biography of Phil Ochs, Death of a Rebel; Take It from Me (with Erin Brockovich); Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen; To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles; and Reagan: The Hollywood Years. He has written on the media and pop culture for numerous publications, including Penthouse, L.A. Weekly, and California Magazine. He divides his time among New York City; Woodstock, New York; Los Angeles; and the Far East.
Visit the author at www.MarcEliot.net.
Copyright © 2009 by Rebel Road, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-46249-7
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