Richard Schickel - Clint Eastwood: A Biography

Richard Schickel has been reviewing moviesfirst for Life, then for Timefor 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 actressesUnited StatesBiography. 3. Motion-picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN2287.E37S35 1996
791.43028092dc20 [B] 96-32836

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com

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For
Helen Schickel
and
Frances Grace Freeman

O ne 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 waythe random meal, the casual note or phone callour 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 Ebans name or recognize him (foreign affairs are not his strongest suit), thus did not see this gesture for what it was in partan 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 guycasual in manner, tolerant of other peoples lifestyles and opinions, sensible in the management of his career, unassertive in the conduct of a celebritys 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 Clints 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 ironyand a certain surprising volubility. But he did not have the stars typical need to dominate the occasion. More important, he was without that anxious pretense, that desperate desire to be understood as a seriouseven an intellectualfellow, 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