American Rebel Read online

  ALSO BY MARC ELIOT

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  The Whole Truth

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  For XIAOLEI

  You go to an Eastwood movie with definite expectations. From the comically crude … to the gentler epithets of his later films, you know what you’re going to get and, even more important, what you’re not going to get. You’re not going to get everything.

  —Molly Haskell

  Clint Eastwood is a tall, chiseled piece of lumber—a totem pole with feet … Eastwood seems to be chewing on bullet casings.

  —James Wolcott

  Eastwood has a particular grace, every inch that of a “star,” in the old sense … the taut, lean, powerfully built body, the sensitively chiseled unsmiling face, a voice surprisingly soft, the shock of tawny hair, the lithe walk (the most distinctive of any actor’s since Fonda’s), the famous squint and glacial eyes which … produce a certain inarticulate melancholy.

  —Robert Mazzocco

  People can know him for years and never be sure of what he’s thinking. He’s one of the warmest people in the world, but there’s a certain distance, a certain mystery to him.

  —Sondra Locke

  There is something intransigently irreducible in Eastwood, some corner of his soul that no shrink can penetrate … Clint Eastwood is an interesting screen personality because his essence is more interesting than his existence. The screen functions to freeze life styles into myth rather than to adjust life forces into art. The beauty of actors is that they are basically vain enough and stupid enough to allow themselves to be embalmed for the edification of their audience.

  —Andrew Sarris

  I’m an actor playing roles; all of them and none of them are me.

  —Clint Eastwood

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PART I: FROM AIMLESS TO ACTOR

  PART II: FROM ACTOR TO AUTEUR

  PART III: FROM AUTEUR TO OSCAR

  SOURCES

  NOTES

  CLINT EASTWOOD COMPLETE FILMOGRAPHY, INCLUDING TELEVISION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  I grew up watching movies in an era when there wasn’t even television, nothing else even to listen to. I was shaped by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, those were the guys, plus a ton of other people we don’t know the names of who made “B” movies.

  —Clint Eastwood

  Clint Eastwood stands tall among the most popular and enduring stars Hollywood has ever produced. He has been making movies for more than fifty years, ranging from small, meaningless, and forgettable parts as a Universal Studios contract player to acting in, as well as producing and directing, many Oscar-caliber blockbusters that will one day, sooner rather than later, take their place among the best-loved American movies.

  Early in his career, Clint spent seven and a half years costarring in TV’s Rawhide, and his Rowdy Yates became one of the most popular TV cowboys of the late 1950s and early 1960s.* By the time Rawhide ended its eight-season run he had also become an international movie star, following his appearance in three wildly popular spaghetti westerns made and distributed throughout Europe; when they were finally released in America, they made him a big-screen star in the States as well. For the next quarter-century Clint appeared in dozens of entertaining movies that made him a household name anywhere in the world that films could be seen. He was undoubtedly a crowd-pleaser, but at the time the Hollywood elite considered his movies too genre-heavy to be Oscar-worthy.

  Then in 1992 Clint produced, directed, and starred in Unforgiven, a western to (literally) end all westerns, made by his own production company, Malpaso, that he had created to operate as a ministudio in the service of its resident star. Unforgiven won four Academy Awards, including two for Clint (one for Best Director and one for Best Picture), and the Midas-touch Oscar-style was suddenly his; nearly everything he made for the next fifteen years was deemed award-or nomination-worthy by the Academy, including Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Changeling. Throughout Hollywood’s post-studio era, the first rule of filmmaking has been that youth equals box office—young people go out to the movies, older audiences stay home and watch them on cable and DVD. It is, therefore, even more remarkable that he made all of these movies past the age of sixty.

  Perhaps more than for any other Hollywood star, the double helix that is Clint’s creative and real-life DNA is so intertwined it is nearly impossible to separate the off-screen person from the on-screen persona. The two feed off each other so thoroughly, it is often difficult to tell where the lives of the characters in his movies end and the life of the man playing them begins.

  In the movies that he has thus far acted in, produced, or directed, in various combinations wearing one or more of these hats, three essential Clint Eastwood screen personae continually reappear. The first is the mysterious man without a past who is resolute in his loneness, the Man with No Name, who appeared in the three Sergio Leone westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—then reappeared slightly altered in Hang ’Em High and The Outlaw Josey Wales, and took several other guises and variations all the way through to Unforgiven. The second persona is “Dirty” Harry Callahan, whose essentially nihilistic loner personality continually reemerges up to and including Gran Torino. And finally, there is the good-natured redneck, who uses his fists the way a more thoughtful person uses words and who makes his first appearance as Philo Beddoe in Every Which Way but Loose and returns again and again on the way to Pink Cadillac.

  All three characters in their various incarnations are viscerally connected to the real-life Clint. All three are quintessential loners, unlike any other in the canon of American motion pictures. The other cinematic “men alone” who most immediately come to mind are not really loners at all—that is to say, they are loners Hollywood style, buffered with the idealized images of the actors who played them. Probably mainstream films’ greatest “loner” is Gary Cooper as the isolated sheriff in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Yes, Will Kane heroically stands alone to face his enemies, but in truth he is not alone at all, as in the end he relies on the love of his wife, and her reluctant use of a gun that saves his life; and when all the fighting has ended, the two of them ride off together into the sunset. Another who comes to mind is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, the neutral American caught in the crosswinds of World War II in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). He proudly boasts that “I stick my neck out for nobody” and then does precisely that for the woman he loves, in this case Ingrid Bergman, in an act so unselfishly noble that the very idea that he was ever a loner is so absurd it becomes laughable. James Bond appears to be the ultimate loner, but we now know that he lost his one true love early on and both seethes with revenge and longs with lust, no longer for any single woman but, apparently, all of womankind. On a nobler plane, Charlton Heston in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) is isolated from his family, his people, his land, and his heritage. Yet he still needs someone to lean on, in this case the Almighty himself, who provides the love, guidance, and moral sustenance that establish quite profoundly that even Moses did not go it alone.
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  Clint’s movie characters need nothing and no one more than or beyond themselves. Whether he is surrounded by vicious killers or predatory women (oftentimes one and the same), faceless adversaries (as opposed to the Man with No Name), by serial man-hunters pursued and ultimately defeated by someone dirtier (and therefore stronger) than they are, or even by buddy-buddy orangutans, the Man with No Name, Dirty Harry, and Philo Beddoe all arrive alone at the start and leave alone at the end. They rarely, if ever, win the heart of any woman because they almost never pursue women. On the few occasions when a Clint character reluctantly finds himself to be involved with one, the relationship remains distant, cynical, unromantic, and for the most part nonintimate; the so-called love story is always the least interesting part of any Clint Eastwood movie. His loners are unable, unwilling, and therefore unavailable to fulfill the wishes of those men or women who want to be with him, but not of those in the audience who dream of being like him. With this brand of character, Clint delivered something original and provocative to American motion pictures.

  In real life, too, Clint has frequently been described as something of a loner, even in his early and undistinguished film appearances, even when married and playing the role of the happy Hollywood husband. All through his first marriage’s thirty-one years,* there were loud whispers that he was not the family man he appeared to be but a lone-wolf womanizer—a role certainly not unique in a town that sees womanizing as something glamorous, even heroic, and where the locker-room lingo of beer-boosted braggadocio is often raised to the level of bad poetry. Perhaps the label stuck harder to him because of how closely his few on-screen romances overlapped with his many real-life ones. Clint’s off-screen life has always been filled with women, some might say too many, others might say none really at all. While married to Maggie Johnson, he fathered a child out of wedlock, the first of four, † and took numerous lovers. Several of them were costars, in affairs that often began when production on the film commenced and ended after the final shot was completed. Relatively late in his game, at age sixty-six, he finally married, for only the second time, twelve years after his divorce from Maggie became finalized, to a woman thirty-five years younger than himself, this time finding some measure of peace and happiness.

  In his salad days he hung out in the seedy bars in and around San Francisco, drinking, playing jazz on house pianos, and in the vernacular of that time and those places, kicking ass in barroom brawls, whose circumstances and resolutions would later be reprised in many of his films. A tough guy in real life, Clint easily and realistically played the tough guy on film, someone who usually settles disputes with a knock-down, drag-out brawl or, as in A Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry, and many others, with cinema’s classic metaphorical extension of the fistfight, the final, decisive shoot-out.

  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.

  *The show ran eight seasons, with only twenty-two episodes in its debut year as a mid-season replacement. The show made thirteen episodes in its final season. Seasons two through seven had full-season commitments.

  *Clint and Maggie Johnson, his first wife, were married in 1953, separated in 1978, and divorced in 1984.

  †One with Roxanne Tunis, one with Frances Fisher, and two with Jacelyn Reeves. His total of seven children are Kimber Eastwood (born June 17, 1964), Kyle Eastwood (born May 19, 1968), Alison Eastwood (born May 22, 1972), Scott Eastwood (born March 21, 1986), Kathryn Eastwood (born February 2, 1988), Francesca Fisher-Eastwood (born August 7, 1993), and Morgan Eastwood (born December 12, 1996).

  PART I

  FROM AIMLESS TO ACTOR

  ONE

  A young Clint Eastwood © Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

  My father always told me you don’t get anything for nothing, and althoug
h I was always rebelling, I never rebelled against that.

  —Clint Eastwood

  The 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.