Acclaim for
RICHARD SCHICKEL’S
CLINT EASTWOOD
“Fascinating … Schickel doesn’t know how to be dull.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A highly readable and nuanced portrait.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“An introduction to a complex, intriguing man of significant accomplishment and seriousness of purpose.… Well worth the price of admission.”
—Baltimore Sun
“No mere celebrity bio, this is a beautifully written, comprehensive and astonishingly insightful study.… Outstanding.”
—Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY RICHARD SCHICKEL
The World of Carnegie Hall The Stars
The Disney Version
Second Sight: Notes on Some Movies, 1965–72
His Picture in the Papers
The Men Who Made the Movies
Another I, Another You
Cary Grant: A Celebration
D. W Griffith: An American Life
Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity
James Cagney: A Celebration
Schickel on Film
Brando: A Life in Our Times
RICHARD SCHICKEL
CLINT EASTWOOD
Richard Schickel has been reviewing movies—first for Life, then for Time—for exactly as long as Clint Eastwood has been starring in them. He is the author of many books about film and filmmakers, among them The Disney Version; His Picture in the Papers; D. W. Griffith: An American Life; Brando: A Life in Our Times; and a collection of essays, Schickel on Film. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the British Film Institute Book Prize. For more than two decades he has been making television documentaries, mainly about the history of movies. He lives in Los Angeles.
Copyright © 1996 by Richard Schickel
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Rowdy” by Jesse Lee Turner, copyright © 1963 by Painted Desert Co. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Schickel, Richard.
Clint Eastwood : a biography / by Richard Schickel.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78813-9
1. Eastwood, Clint. 2. Motion-picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. 3. Motion-picture producers and directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.E37S35 1996
791.43′028′092—dc20 [B] 96-32836
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
For
Helen Schickel
and
Frances Grace Freeman
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books By This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE: Straight Strands
ONE / Nothing for Nothing
TWO / Kind of a Magic Life
THREE / Refined, Ambitious and Cooperative
FOUR / Idiot of the Plains
FIVE / Breaking All the Rules
SIX / What Would You Rather Be?
SEVEN / Lessness Is Bestness
EIGHT / I’m an Actor, You Know
NINE / Shady Habits, Archaic Responses
TEN / Authoritative Normalcy
ELEVEN / A Labor of Love
TWELVE / I’m Who I Want to Be
THIRTEEN / My Father’s Dream
FOURTEEN / The Moth Side
FIFTEEN / Fringed Out
SIXTEEN / Lucky in the Order
SEVENTEEN / Natural Eminence
EPILOGUE: The Back Nine
Filmography (1955–96)
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
STRAIGHT STRANDS
One day in December 1982, when he was in New York on business, Clint Eastwood called and invited me to join him for lunch at his hotel. We had met some five years earlier, at the home of mutual friends, and had since kept in touch in just this casual way—the random meal, the casual note or phone call—our agreeable but scarcely intimate relationship surviving even an unfortunate Time cover story I had written about him and Burt Reynolds.
As we entered the restaurant this noon we were observed by another acquaintance of mine, a television executive, who was seated at a table with three other men. Putting it mildly, the greeting he waved in my direction was more enthusiastic than I might otherwise have expected. As our meal proceeded I became aware, as well, that he was keeping an eye on Clint and me.
As it happened, both parties rose to leave at the same moment and intersected on the way to the exit. Introductions were now inescapable, and it turned out that one of the men dining with my friend was Abba Eban, the Israeli statesman. As Clint extended his hand to him, Eban, instead of grasping it, dropped into a slight crouch, drew his hand up from an imaginary holster, pointed a finger at Clint and gave a very passable imitation of a six-shooter being fired.
Clint did not catch Eban’s name or recognize him (foreign affairs are not his strongest suit), thus did not see this gesture for what it was in part—an invitation to bonding between the two most celebrated figures present. To him, this stranger was just another in a long line of temporarily unhinged fans to be gently turned aside. True to his image, he remained cool under fire, smiling bemusedly until Eban shook off his fit of boyish regression and, at last, shook hands.
I record this anecdote not to embarrass a man whose ebullience is, I imagine, quite unembarrassable, but to suggest that even sophisticated people have a tendency to understand Clint too quickly, too easily. In those days, of course, it was convenient to see him simply as a cowboy or a cop. Now, having won his Oscars for Unforgiven and his Irving Thalberg Award two years later, having in 1996 received his Life Achievement Awards from the American Film Institute and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, having simply been before us, on the screens of our theaters, on the screens of memory, for so many years, there is a tendency to think of him as “an American Legend” or “an American Icon,” empty phrases that help us to evade his singularity in another way.
The truth about Clint Eastwood obviously lies somewhere between the old simplicities and the new pieties. But it is not easily arrived at. For he likes to think of himself as a simple man, operating mainly out of straightforward instincts, sharing with the rest of us the habit of avoiding his own complexities. Whatever the ambiguities of his screen presence, off the screen, in interviews and public appearances, he has presented himself primarily as a nice guy—casual in manner, tolerant of other people’s lifestyles and opinions, sensible in the management of his career, unassertive in the conduct of a celebrity’s life.
Certainly the man I met for the first time in the summer of 1977 wished to be apprehended that way, which proved to be not at all difficult. The appraising taciturnity of Clint’s screen character, not without its occasional menacing undertones, gave way in our friends’ living room to a more agreeable kind of reserve. He spoke quietly and listened attentively. He was curious; he had opinions; he expressed them with a certain irony—and a certain surprising volubility. But he did not have the star’s typical need to dominate the occasion. More important, he was without that anxious pretense, that desperat
e desire to be understood as a serious—even an intellectual—fellow, that so many major Hollywood players manifest around journalists.
These qualities, the intervening two decades of friendship have taught me, are authentic. But if they were his sum and substance he would have made no large claim on our attention; in America, nice guys finish anonymously. But our attention he surely had. For his rise to movie stardom out of television, whence in those days few stars arose, by the circuitous route of spaghetti westerns, where stars were not born, but rather went to die, intrigued with its novelty. And the largely fatuous controversy over Dirty Harry’s alleged “fascism” had made him seem a dangerous character, a subject for much cheap moralizing in what were then regarded as the better critical circles.
As a reviewer I had been as wary of him initially as any of my colleagues (though not as hostile as some of them), but by the time we met I had started to come around. I had not written about Dirty Harry, but I had liked the movie and liked his work in it—that arresting combination of coolness, ferocity and isolation. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot reinforced the conviction that he was a more supple and humorous actor than he was generally credited with being; The Outlaw Josey Wales demonstrated that he was a director of more power, range and ambition than most people had so far noticed. You could sense in these movies an intelligence and a restlessness, a desire to test the limits of star expectations and genre conventions that suggested he was not going to be trapped forever within the limits other people set for him.
A decade later, Richard T. Jameson, the editor and critic, caught some of Clint’s qualities in words of a kind I couldn’t quite find earlier: the nice guy, he wrote, was not “an uncomplicatedly nice guy, nor a warm and cuddly one. No movie star of his magnitude has ever been so private at the center of celebrity, or played so openly and artfully with the mysteriousness, the essential unknowability, of his personality.”
But I no more than Abba Eban or virtually anyone else wanted to embrace such complexities just then. So during the next few years, I settled comfortably for the knowable Clint. That was particularly easy for me, since we are of the same generation and we come from similar backgrounds—Wasp and the striving edge of the middle class. Growing up, we had gone to the same movies, listened to the same radio shows, devoted more of our reveries than we ideally should have to the likes of Linda Darnell and, of course, to those masculine exemplars with whom they shared screen time in our inner lives.
David Thomson, the film historian, has specifically linked Clint’s screen character to those boyhood paradigms of masculinity—his “ease and authority” now “the last demonstration of what star glamor used to mean.” And, one must add, what star silence used to mean, too. For as another Wasp, middle-class contemporary, John Updike, observes in his novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, where he tries to link America’s loss of traditional religious faith with its rising worship of images graven on celluloid, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and their ilk were also “beasts of burden, all but a few of them … unable to explain themselves and unapologetic about the lack; sons of an America where the Bible still ruled, they were justified in all their limitations by the Protestant blessing bestowed upon hardship and hardness.” Or, to put it another way, what we knew—Clint and I and others of our kind and time—about that most vexed of topics, being male, had been shaped by forces always cautioning us that real men don’t talk about real manhood.
Clint, however, was doing just that—in his way, in his movies. It was almost two decades later that Janet Maslin, The New York Times critic, caught him out, suggesting that “America’s daunting ideas about manhood” were the prime topics of his movies. I think she’s right, and, for that matter, so does Clint. His manner of representing maleness—with a sort of conscious unself-consciousness—is the largest source of his strength. A connection is made with our movie past and its traditional male modelings, but with a certain ironic distance maintained, no descent into nostalgia permitted. At the same time, certain connections with contemporary reality are established. He says he can’t play a role unless he finds something in it that mirrors some feelings he has experienced in life, and though he has certainly done movies where it is hard to imagine what those might be, that is true of all the work that has best defined our feelings for him.
But in this early period of our acquaintanceship, when he was making The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but Loose, Escape from Alcatraz, Bronco Billy and the movie that he was in New York promoting the day we had lunch, Honkytonk Man, I didn’t get, or perhaps chose not to get, that point. I liked all these movies to one degree or another, but it did not occur to me at the time that each in its way offered a portrait of—yes—a nice (or at least not bad) guy arrested for a moment on his fall toward the bottom of the standings and offered a last stark choice between two scary alternatives, redemption and annihilation.
When we met in Los Angeles in those days we did not automatically (or ever) head for Ma Maison. That was for Orson Welles. One time we ended up at a near-deserted lunch counter deep in the San Fernando Valley, where a friend of ours had told us the chili was extraordinary. It was, and so was the response of the proprietor as we settled on our stools. He recognized Clint, of course—with a silent nod. And got one in return. And that was it. We were served our food like any other customers and eventually took our leave in the same way: “Thanks.” “Come again.”
Another time, Clint had heard of a superior hamburger joint (in those days he could still occasionally be lured from his lean and leafy dietary path) somewhere near Western Avenue in one of the city’s less prepossessing districts. We piled into an old heap of a Cadillac that had escaped demolition in some movie car chase and that Clint occasionally used as a kind of vehicular alias and headed for what turned out to be an eatery heavily patronized by working-class blacks and Hispanics. Their response to Clint’s presence was the same as it had been in the Valley—nods, smiles, no exchange of words after we had placed our orders.
There was in these expeditions an assertion of his right if not to good-guy status then to ordinary-guy status. He has never wanted his stardom to interfere with his ability to go where he wants to go, when he wants to, on his own recognizance. In this age of violently gaga fandom, there is something attractive and refreshing in Clint’s determination to go it alone, though it surely helps that he is so tall, in such obviously good shape (so many movie stars are disappointingly short, fragile and vulnerable looking when you encounter them). It helps, too, that people confuse his screen character and his actual one; they vaguely suspect that he might carry a .44 Magnum in real life.
But pleasing as it is when we witness a celebrity claiming common humanity in commonplace venues, these encounters offer something more curious to consider. They put a witness in touch with the salient quality of Clint’s screen character, which we might identify, oxymoronically, as a kind of infectious self-containment; that is to say, with the kind of self-possession that encourages its observers to answer in kind.
There’s an edge of humorous self-awareness in this posture, a sense that it is something a man is supposed to master, because—well—our fathers and grandfathers, the whole endlessly instructing masculine world, for some reason seemed to value it. To be ironically (but not cynically) aware of the traditions you represent—and this awareness marks not just the way Clint plays his screen character, but the deadpan playfulness with which he toys with the hoary conventions of genre movies—is, of course, to slightly destabilize them. The impulse to subversion in the postmodern world almost always begins in self-consciousness.
Which, of course, must stop well short of self-mockery, avoiding the perils of the obvious put-on, the campy send-up and, worst of all, that hint of self-contempt that makes us want to avert our eyes. Clint’s gift is to let us see the dark comedy in the American male’s contorting, distorting attempts to achieve his masteries of the moment while at the same time not entirely discrediting the tradition that bids him make this effort.
&nb
sp; This is, indeed, more than a gift. It is a saving grace. It redeems from meanness the anger that is also very much a part of his screen character. It redeems his realism, a value he stresses, too, from hopelessness. Perhaps most important of all it is the secret of his stardom’s longevity, for this quality also humanizes heroism, draining it of its tiresome and threatening elements. Put simply, irony is both the source of that cool that he has personified for our time and the heart of that unknowability that causes men and women alike to draw in as close as they can to him, trying to catch his message.
All of this is easy for me to say now, impossible for me to have said then. And that is not entirely because of my occasional physical proximity to my subject, or my growing sense of psychological proximity to him. It has obviously required some time for Clint’s message to come through clearly, largely because of the critical-cultural static that surrounded him in the first decade and a half of his stardom. In those days, as Thomson said, “critics looked down on Eastwood. Thinking people shunned his films.” Which brings me to that failed Time cover story of mine. It was written in 1978, and into it went all the incapacities and blindnesses I’ve just discussed. But also into it went the dubieties of this moment. When my colleague Jay Cocks and I proposed—and reproposed—that piece, we did not include Burt Reynolds in our memos. We thought that more than a decade of unalloyed box-office success, the quality of Clint’s work, not to mention the controversy—however spurious we judged it—it had engendered, more than justified his solo appearance on our cover.
But that made our editors squeamish. They knew what “thinking people” thought of Clint. Besides, in those days a Time cover, particularly one about a cultural figure, was widely understood as an implicit endorsement of his or her career. And management did not want to seem to be doing that. On the other hand, were we to do a pair of “Hollywood Honchos” (as the cover line eventually identified them), plus a box on Charles Bronson, our editors felt we would be avoiding the hint of false idolatry and embracing a hint of redeeming sociology.
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