Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  Anderson began to take Clint’s plight a little more seriously when his colleague, flying the plane in which Clint’s friend was riding, radioed: “By the way, your rear door’s open.” Clint, by this time, was trying to hold it shut with brute force, fighting tremendous pressure. “You’ve got to get that rear door,” Anderson ordered, some urgency now in his voice. Holding it with one hand, Clint groped around for some of the loose cable he had noticed and managed to wire the door shut—precariously. He was still afraid it was going to be pulled off its hinges.

  Their troubles were just beginning. Somewhere near Medford, Oregon, the pilot of their companion plane discovered, as Clint later found out, that his oxygen system wasn’t working, and radioed that he was going to set down for repairs. So they flew on alone, higher, too, as Anderson tried to get above the bad weather. Clint, finding himself getting woozy in the thinner air, grabbed the oxygen mask—and discovered that it, too, was inoperative.

  He reported this new problem to Anderson, and in the midst of their conversation, the intercom began to fail. Clint could hear Anderson, but the pilot could not hear him. Listening in on Anderson’s radio transmissions Clint now learned that he was beginning to have trouble transmitting and receiving. Then the intercom failed completely and all communication between pilot and passenger ceased. Clint had noticed some cables running through his compartment that had moved when Anderson had closed his canopy at the beginning of the flight. If they moved again it would mean, he thought, that Anderson was opening the canopy preparatory to bailing out. He vowed to keep his eye on the cables and to parachute out himself as soon as he saw them move.

  By this time the plane had been in the air somewhere between two and a half and three hours, and Clint judged they must be near the end of their fuel. He became aware, as well, that they were losing altitude. He guessed that, having lost the use of his electronic navigational aids along with his radio, Anderson was looking for a hole in the cloud cover, so that he could get a visual fix on his position. He also noticed that Anderson had turned west, out to sea, and for a moment Clint got a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco skyline. “And I thought, Oh, God, phew.”

  But his relief was short-lived. Anderson now turned north, heading toward Point Reyes along the Marin County Coast. (Clint discovered later that, knowing he was about to run out of fuel, Anderson was determined not to ditch above a populated area.) Clint was opening and closing his seat belt, practicing a quick release when the time came to bail out.

  But the cockpit cables remained stationary, and the plane was dropping lower and lower. Then Clint heard an explosion—Anderson had blown off an auxiliary fuel tank that was attached to the belly of the fuselage. It was becoming clear that “he wasn’t gonna just bail out and say, ‘Adios, kid in the back.’ ” Anderson was taking them down for a crash landing at sea.

  Soon they were skimming along a few feet above the water, and at that height Clint became aware of how fast they were going. “It was like being in a high-speed boat.” The thought running through his mind was “Well, some people have made it through these things before.… I guess I was scared, but I was more resigned.” Anderson dropped the tail, it hit the water, “and we bounced along for I don’t know how many yards, pancaked along, and then all of a sudden—pow!—we just nosed right in.”

  There was a brief struggle with the wire that had been holding Clint’s door on, but then Clint was out, clambering along the fuselage. The plane was canted in the water, but he was able to stand high and dry on the trailing edge of one wing. Now Anderson’s canopy popped open, and here came the pilot, unhurt, and “pretty cool. He wasn’t panicked for a guy who’d lost his plane in the ocean. He wasn’t seeing court-martials before his eyes.”

  They could see the cliffs at Point Reyes, three or four miles away, and they were aware that the plane was going to sink fairly quickly. Both of them knew that sinking ships drew survivors down with them, and though they weren’t sure the comparatively light plane would do the same, they weren’t in a mood to take the chance.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the hell outta here,” said Clint, and he jumped into the water and swam off to what seemed a safe distance. Anderson quickly followed. It was late afternoon, still overcast, and the ocean swells were high. They vowed to try to stay together as they struck out for land.

  They were trying to swim straight in to shore. But the current kept pushing them northward. “And then it started getting dark, and I lost him. I didn’t know whether he was alive or where the hell he was. And I wasn’t about to start yelling, because it wastes a lot of energy. I went through jellyfish schools and all kinds of things, and they became fluorescent at night. It was like some science-fiction deal. By this time, you know, your mind is—talk about hallucinating.” Occasionally he could see the lights of houses and, as he told one reporter, “All I could think of was there was some guy up there sitting in front of his fireplace, having a beer. I wanted to be doing the same thing.”

  Luckily, he didn’t find out until some years later that this area was a breeding ground for sharks, “or I probably wouldn’t have lasted. Just the thought of it, you know.”

  Once he had cleared the jellyfish Clint found himself in a kelp bed. He employed a shallow breaststroke to avoid entanglement with the seaweed and managed to maintain slow headway. “And then I got in past the kelp and started hearing surf up there. On the one hand, you’re excited to go in, on the other, you could just get pounded on the rocks. There was a lot of phosphorus in the water that night, and the phosphorus was making the water really glow—it was strange.”

  But by this eerie light he could make out a spot on the beach where no spray was being tossed up—perhaps, he hoped, a small beach. “So I kind of worked my way into that—just partly luck, because everywhere the water was very rough. And I got into this spot and had a really rough time climbing out.” A strong undertow had carved steeply into the beach at this point, and it also kept pulling the exhausted swimmer back into the water. But he found a boulder to cling to and, after catching his breath, was able at last to make his way onto the beach.

  Clint had nothing on but a khaki shirt and pants. He had long since kicked off his shoes. He was freezing cold, and he could see that the boulders surrounding his refuge were huge and difficult to climb. The hallucinations worsened now. By the light of the phosphorescent sea he kept thinking he saw Anderson in the water. “I’d run out and grab this one rock and I’d run back and sit there. And then I could see the rock moving back and forth, and I’d run back and I’d grab the rock.”

  Finally, he calmed himself, accepted the fact that Anderson was nowhere to be found and pulled himself painfully up through the rocks around the cove and emerged on a broad beach, with a strong steady light beckoning in the distance, closer to him than the Point Reyes lighthouse. The straightest line toward it took him across a lagoon, where he startled a flock of birds, which flew up around him unnervingly, and then to a massive chain-link fence. “Your imagination says, ‘Well, it’s some sort of concentration camp, or some electrical field, I might be killed in here.…’ ” But he climbed the fence anyway, making his way through a field of small antennae, heading toward a concrete blockhouse with the light that had guided him and a very tall antenna on top of it.

  The installation was, in fact, an RCA relay station, transmitting radiograms across the Pacific. Inside, he found “this one lone guy, and he looked up and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said it like it was definitely private property, and I said, ‘I’ve just been in an accident,’ and he says, ‘You mean in an automobile?’ And I’m standing there, I’m just looking like shit, and I said, ‘No, we were in a plane crash, we were in a plane out here.’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I heard that Alameda was reporting somebody was missing.’ ” The radio operator added that he had seen flares being dropped by a search mission.

  So the great adventure came to an end, with stunned banalities on the one hand,
strangely incurious ones on the other. The Coast Guard was informed, a pickup truck was dispatched to retrieve Clint, and he was reunited with Anderson, whom the tide had drawn farther north than it had Clint, at the Coast Guard station. They spent the night there, and then Clint was returned to the Presidio, the army base in San Francisco, where he was told that there would be an inquiry and that he would most likely be called upon to testify at it. He thinks it possible that he was never sent to Korea because the army wanted to keep him conveniently available for the investigation into the crash, but he was never required to speak on the record about it.

  The crash, as it happened, was almost as frightening for his mother and father as it was for Clint. His mother recalls a Seattle newspaper reporter awakening her the next morning to ask, “‘Are you related to the Eastwood who went down in San Francisco Bay last night?’ And, of course, I almost fainted, because I had put him on that plane.… It was very harrowing.”

  A day or two later, Clint found himself back at the swimming pool, staring into space “like a person feels when [he’s had] a concussion,” trying to digest the experience, which had not quite run its full course. Four or five months later, he decided to revisit his folks in Seattle. This time, taking no chances, he booked himself on a commercial flight. There was, though, no getting above the clouds in that plane, either. It plowed right through a storm system, “and, Jesus, trays were hitting the ceiling, people were yelling, and it was just a terrible flight.” He got off the plane shaking and ashen, and his mother, meeting the flight, thought he was ill. He dismissed her concern casually, but he did not fly again for several years thereafter. “I figured somebody was trying to tell me something.”

  The question is, what did he tell himself in the aftermath of these experiences? He agrees with his mother, who, considering his several youthful brushes with disaster, not to mention his subsequent good fortune, says that “he’s had kind of a magic life.” But that has not made him feel invulnerable. Rather the opposite: Clint’s struggle with the sea seems to have granted him an abiding sense of the individual’s smallness when it is measured against the forces of nature, the vastness of the universe.

  Thinking back on his misadventure, Clint also recalls flying across the country in the days before jet planes, when slower speeds and lower altitudes encouraged reflection on the lives being lived on the ground sliding by below, and thinking: “What would happen if a giant stepped on this town? It would be a massive news thing, but from a perspective up here it would be nothing. I mean, there’s galaxies going on out to the Milky Way, and you see there are billions of stars.” Personalizing the thought, he adds, “If I get hit by a bus somebody will say, ‘Oh, Clint Eastwood was run over by a bus,’ but it’s not going to change anything on the planet. You’ve just got to be realistic. You get a break, you’re here, you do the best you can with it.”

  He feels approximately the same way about aging. “If you never take yourself too seriously, you’re realistic about what happens. Thirty years from now there’s going to be a whole new set of people here, and Tom Cruise will be an old guy, and he’ll be sitting around going, ‘Well, geez, what’s my next project?’ It’s just the way the world is.”

  Or, at any rate, one thinks, it’s the way Clint Eastwood began to perceive the world one night when he dragged himself out of the Pacific Ocean, shivering and seeing things, and realized that he had been given a break, was still here, spared for some purpose it was now up to him to imagine.

  Nothing came to him immediately, except, perhaps, a vision of where he would like to spend most of whatever time he had been granted. Clint had a car on the base, and one night, when he had a pass, but not enough time to travel up to San Francisco or Oakland, he decided to visit Carmel, just twenty minutes away, and see if it matched its reputation. In his eyes, it did: He took to driving over there whenever he could.

  “One day I was down there, and it was a real beautiful day, the fog bank was moving back, and I was wandering around and thought, you know, if I ever had a buck I’d sure like to live here.” Carmel was then largely a community of second homes for people from the Bay Area, but there was a little group of former servicemen who had discovered it while stationed at Ord and had found jobs in Carmel, and that made it seem a plausible goal for him.

  For the moment, despite—or possibly because of—his easy duty he found his contempt for the army growing into what would become a lifelong distrust of bureaucracies, especially government bureaucracies. The ill-kempt navy plane that had almost cost him his life had not improved his view of what he describes as “the biggest, most poorly run corporation in the world—the government.” But he doubtless would have come to this view even in less dramatic circumstances. Many did. As the economist Milton Friedman has observed, for millions of young Americans military service “enhanced their appreciation of the value and meaning of individual freedom” by giving them a close-up view of “a collectivist organization in action.” Clint Eastwood was certainly one of them: “The only saving grace we have is that the armies of potential enemies are probably just as screwed up.”

  In a way, he was being ungrateful. The relatively easygoing atmosphere at Fort Ord permitted Clint a life as unsoldierly as a soldier’s could be. He supplemented his pay—and supported his car—by working first at a nearby sugar refinery, then as a bartender and “floor manager” (a euphemism for bouncer) at the Non-Commissioned Officers Club.

  Despite these exertions, Clint had plenty of spare time, some of which he devoted to following a jazz group headed by Lennie Niehaus to its off-post gigs. A onetime reed player and arranger with Stan Kenton, Niehaus would turn out to be perhaps the most significant friend Clint made at the swimming pool. They met when the musician fell and gashed his foot climbing out of the pool. Clint helped him up and conducted him to the infirmary, then stayed with him while stitches were taken. When a medic ordered him to put his boot back on and report to his unit, Clint spoke up for him—“This man has had a serious injury and can’t walk”—gaining Niehaus a day or two of limited duty and his lifelong regard as well. They lost touch when they were mustered out, but met later when Niehaus was orchestrating for composer Jerry Fielding. Clint later called him “out of the blue” to score Tightrope and he has done the same for the majority of his films since then.

  Not that jazz was Clint’s sole nonmilitary interest. He also dropped in fairly frequently at Carmel’s Mission Ranch—which he would later buy and renovate—for teachers’ night, which attracted single schoolteachers with an offer of half-price drinks. There were no serious romantic encounters, at least on his part, but there was one woman who developed an obsession with him, threatening (with what degree of seriousness he could not tell) self-destruction when he tried to end the affair. He would recall this incident, he says, when he read the script for Play Misty for Me; it confirmed its realism for him.

  But as his military service drew to a close, he was spending more time thinking about his future than he was about casual romance. He was more determined than ever to go to college, and the GI Bill made that more feasible than before. He considered Monterey Peninsula Junior College and College of the Pacific at Stockton, either of which would do for a semester or two, so he could get his credits in order and reapply to Seattle University and its music course. Then a friend of his named Chuck Hill started talking about Los Angeles City College, making it seem, in some way that Clint can’t quite remember, rather appealing. Maybe it was its proximity to the well-remembered L.A. jazz clubs. Maybe it was its proximity to the movie industry, for by this time he had made another acquaintance, an assistant film editor in civilian life, and he, too, began encouraging him to try acting. But as with Norman Barthold, there was no urgency in the advice. “I never had anyone say, ‘Yeah, here’s what you have to do.’ ” As with so much else in his life at this time, he simply caught a dispassionate drift, and applied to the Los Angeles institution, where he was accepted.

  Clint had a few months to spare bet
ween discharge and the beginning of school and spent most of the summer in Seattle with his parents. At the end of the summer Clint went to San Francisco to see Don Kincade, among other pals, and to hitch a ride south from there with Chuck Hill. Before leaving San Francisco, Clint was recruited by Kincade for a blind date. He was going with a sorority girl at Berkeley, and she had this friend, Maggie Johnson.

  She was, as Kincade recalls, going pretty steadily with another guy. But she agreed to a casual double date—just a few beers at a college hangout. She would recall: “I came down the stairs of the sorority house, and [Clint] had his back to me. When he turned around, I was amazed at what he looked like. Plus he was understated, and that kind of appealed to me. I’m kind of understated myself.”

  Maggie was tall and blond with a trim figure and a nice sense of humor. She also loved the outdoors, and as Clint told one interviewer, “We hit it off right away. She was the kind of girl I really liked; there was nothing phoney about her.” They dated a few more times, and since she was soon to graduate, and was planning to return to Los Angeles—her parents lived in Alhambra—that encouraged him to think that he had made the right choice of colleges.

  In Los Angeles, Clint got a job managing a small apartment building on Oakhurst Drive, far south in the Beverly Hills flats. He had been led to believe that the work would be light—minor repairs, showing vacant apartments to potential occupants. But in return for his greatly reduced rent he soon discovered that he was on call twenty-four hours a day for emergency repairs and that he was also expected to paint entire units when they fell vacant. It was difficult for him to manage, given his schedule at school. Moreover, since he needed cash, he had also taken a job at a gas station.