American Rebel (2 page)

Perhaps even more compelling than any of his movie roles (but what also makes them so compelling) is how Clint the real-life loner
struggled to find his way out of his own emotional wilderness. He was a child of the Depression, whose parents wandered from town to town to try to make ends meet. Not long after he finished high school, he was drafted into the army and fell in with a bunch of other tough young would-be actors, all of whom grew up in or near Southern California and quickly discovered they had what it took—rugged good looks—to make easier money as contract players, in the desperate declining days of studio-dominated moviemaking, than they could pumping gas.

After his discharge he followed their lead, but his emerging talent quickly separated him from the two he became closest to—Martin Milner and David Janssen—and the rest of the pack. Milner’s undistinguished career in movies led to an even less distinguished, if steady, one on television with
Route 66
(1960–64) and
Adam-12
(1968–75); Janssen briefly hit pay dirt on TV as Dr. Richard Kimble in the mid-1960s (1963–67), only to see his
post-Fugitive
career devolve into increasingly mediocre work. But Clint used the time he spent on TV as a film school. Amid tired and bored union men moving wagon trains onto and off of Universal’s back lot, he studied everybody and everything and learned not only how to make movies
(Rawhide
, a one-hour TV western series, cranked out a minimovie every week, thirty-nine weeks a year) but how to make them fast and cheap, telling a concise and comprehensible story, often the same one over and over with slight variations; these stories had a logical beginning, an action-filled middle, and a morally uplifting, perfectly plot-resolved end.

Years later, after establishing himself as a bankable star on the big screen, Clint finally got the chance to direct. Early on he had felt that that was where the real action was in movies, that it was ultimately better to play God than to play parts. Along the way to achieving that goal, he met Don Siegel, who would direct him in five films,
Coogan’s Bluff
(1968),
Two Mules for Sister Sara
(1970),
The Beguiled
(1971),
Dirty Harry
(1971), and
Escape from Alcatraz
(1979). These films greatly influenced Clint’s own early directorial style, especially their collective belief in human nobility as the ultimate redemptive force. Clint would, however, eventually shrug off nobility and redemption as his own style continued to develop and he realized these themes were not just overly derivative, but the least interesting aspect of what he wanted to put on film—less-plot-dependent movies that were, in
truth, feature-length, complex character studies of the leads he played, men who were aloof, estranged (from women and from the larger social order), detached, and embittered, up to and including Clint’s portrayal of Walt Kowalski in
Gran Torino
, a dark and chilling film where self-forgiveness and relief come in the form of self-sacrifice, in a single overwhelming (and shocking) attempt to connect in order to redeem another human being. As a showcase for his directorial style and his maturation as an actor—he was seventy-eight when he made it
—Gran Torino
, with no female romantic lead, no comic relief, and until the end, no obviously redemptive qualities in its leading character, perfectly caps the arc of Clint’s unique acting and directing style and his auteur’s quest to celebrate the loner as the ultimate hero, even (or especially) into old age. By doing so Clint demonstrated, once again, how unlike any other contemporary filmmaker or film actor he always had been.

Always unwilling to talk about his films as anything but entertainments, and even less willing to discuss his private life beyond delivering a certain set of rote answers to the press when promoting his latest film, the clues to who he is and what he does are, nevertheless, found not only in the content of the movies he makes but also within the context of the life he has led, beyond the PR pale, indeed in the symbiotic relationship between the two. He is a man who makes his living making the movies that in turn make the man. He is an American artist whose films are at once great entertainments and cautionary tales, and, as all great movies are, both windows and mirrors. They offer glimpses into his private contemplations even as they reflect universal truths to audiences everywhere.

What follows, then, is an examination of Clint Eastwood, the man he is and the artist he became, seen through the window of his real life and reflected again in some of the most offbeat, disturbing, provocative, and entertaining American films ever made.

A young Clint Eastwood
©
Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

T
he boy who would one day become famous for playing the Man with No Name did not have a well-defined self-image or a strong role model to follow growing up. In his formative years his father, forever in search of a steady job during the Great Depression, developed a deceptive California suntan, the mark of a hardworking outdoor laborer trying to avoid poverty rather than a man of sun-worshipping leisure and privilege.

Clinton and Francesca Ruth (sometimes recorded as Margaret Ruth, although she only used Ruth as her given name) were two good-looking California kids who met while attending Piedmont High School in Oakland. They dated each other and married young, before the market crashed, and took with it their romantic dream of the good life. Ruth’s family was Dutch-Irish and Mormon with a long line of physical laborers, including pickup fighters, lumberjacks, sawmill operators, and an occasional local politician. She graduated from Anna Head School in Berkeley, where she had been transferred to from Piedmont just before her senior year—a move that may have been prompted by her parents’ concern over an intense relationship she had begun with her high school sweetheart, Clinton Eastwood. Clinton was a popular, well-liked boy with strong American roots; his ancestors were pre–Revolutionary War Presbyterian farmers and men who sold goods by traveling from town to town, their carts bearing inventory samples such as women’s underwear and soap used to elicit orders from their customers. In the days before mail-order catalogs, most goods were sold this way outside the big American cities.

Despite Ruth’s parents’ attempts to put some distance between her and the economically deficient Clinton, upon graduating from high school they were married, on June 5, 1927, in a ceremony held
at Piedmont’s interdenominational church. Both newlyweds were lucky enough to find enough work to keep them going during the first years of their marriage. Ruth eventually landed a job as an accountant for an insurance company, and Clinton found one as a cashier. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, they clung to these jobs tenaciously.

Almost three years after their marriage, on May 31, 1930, Clinton Jr. was born. The boy weighed a whopping eleven pounds, six ounces, and was nicknamed “Samson” by all the nurses at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hospital.

At about this time Clinton Sr. managed to land a job selling stocks and bonds. At a time when stocks and bonds had been rendered all but worthless, Clinton was following the family tradition; he was now a glorified cart-man, weaving from town to town looking for those few elusive customers with enough cash to invest in their own future and therefore in his. That he got by at all was likely due to his natural charm and good looks.

But even those could only get him so far, and soon Clinton was selling refrigeration products for the East Bay Company, a position whose long-range prospects were little better than those of a seller of stocks and bonds. People had to have enough money to buy food before they could invest in ways to keep it cold. So in 1934, after the birth of their second child, a girl they named Jeanne, Clinton took to a more itinerant life, moving the family by car to wherever he could find pickup work. In a couple of his earliest recollections, Clint later said of those times:

My father was big on basic courtesies toward women. The one time I ever got snotty with my mother when he was around, he left me a little battered.

The attendant job was at a Standard Oil station on Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway, near a stretch of Malibu beach that was rapidly becoming the suburb of choice for the nouveau riche of the Hollywood film industry—one of the few businesses that actually benefited from the Depression. Films were both cheap and fanciful, the ultimate escape for those who could not afford to live out the American dream themselves but loved watching others do it for them on-screen. Those who lived in this part of town drove big cars that used a lot of gas, so Clinton had plenty of work. For the time being it was a good enough living if not exactly a great life. From the money he made he was able to rent a small house in the lush, hilly Pacific Palisades.

On his off days Clinton and Ruth took their children to one of the public beaches adjacent to Malibu for an afternoon of sun and swimming. One day Clinton, who was an excellent swimmer, dove into a wave with Clint sitting in the saddle of his shoulders. Big Clint came back up but little Clint didn’t. After a few heart-stopping moments Ruth saw her boy’s foot sticking up and bobbing in the water. She screamed. With some help from alert nearby swimmers, Clinton was able to pull him up. Afterward Ruth sat in the cool muddy turf with her little Clint and splashed him playfully to make sure he wouldn’t become afraid of the surf.

A year later, in 1935, the gas station job dried up, and the Eastwoods were once more on the move. They gave up the house in Pacific Palisades and took a smaller one for less rent in Hollywood, a few miles farther inland. Soon afterward they swung back north to Redding, then to Sacramento, then to the Glenview section of the East Bay of San Francisco. Finally they settled back down in the Oakland-Piedmont area, where Clinton worked a series of dead-end jobs. Clint, by now, had attended several schools, necessitated by the family’s continual relocations. “I can’t remember how many schools I went to,” he later recalled. “I do remember we moved so much that I made very few friends.” In 1939, after their long loop through the tough times of California, the family settled long enough for young Clint, now nine, to enroll in Piedmont Junior High School.

Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America’s entry into World War II brought new defense-driven work.
Clinton managed to secure a draft-exempt job in the shipyards with Bethlehem Steel, and Ruth found day work at the nearby IBM center.

On the brink of adolescence, six-foot Clint was the tallest boy in his class; he would reach his full height, six four, by the time he graduated from high school. He was also, by all accounts, one of the best-looking students. He had inherited his father’s strong, broad shoulders, rugged good looks, and seductive half-closed eyes. He had a finely shaped, aristocratically turned-up nose and a thick bush of brown hair that fell in a curly dip over his forehead. The look was tough, but he was shy, likely the product of his family’s vagabond journey through the Depression years. Being left-handed also made him feel like an outsider, as his teachers forced him to use his right hand.

He enjoyed playing high school sports—his height made it easy for him to excel at basketball—but that did little for his social skills. His teachers warned his parents that he had to be brought out of his shell if he was to make something of himself. One of them, Gertrude Falk, who taught English, had the class put on a one-act play and cast a reluctant young Clint in the lead. He was less than thrilled.