Читать книгу Clint Eastwood - The Biography of Cinema's Greatest Ever Star - Douglas Thompson - Страница 12

‘When he was four, we discovered he was allergic to dogs and cats, so he collected snakes. One time, he had 13 snakes. I guess he’s kind of a supernatural person.’

CLINT EASTWOOD’S MOTHER, RUTH, 2003

EVERYWHERE Clint goes people nod their recognition and mostly don’t bother him. He moves in his own space without fuss or the attention magnet of bodyguards and entourage.

He has never been known as one to chew the fat. He chews tobacco. Or gently barbecued swordfish without the lemon sauce. Or marinated chicken steamed with vegetables and washed down with a chilled, always nursed, glass of Anchor Steam beer. He’s not a big drinker and sticks to beer and wine. He’s smoked – but only on screen.

As an actor he shoots straight. As a director he has a formidable reputation for bringing projects in ahead of schedule and below budget. For many years his private life was his private life but in later years he has become considerably more open. Yet he rarely gives interviews and then almost always to help his films at the box office. Even when he does, his low-profile attitude makes his words soft, slow and lean. Remember, he didn’t make his name talking.

He accomplished that, and began a billion-dollar film dynasty, by forgetting to shave for a couple of days, mumbling if spoken to and shooting 42 people in 93 minutes. In 1964 he was paid a straight $15,000 for A Fistful of Dollars. By 2005 his films had earned close to $3 billion. His success over the years had been increased by his calculated underexposure; by making his every appearance a celebration for his worldwide audience. Less known is his remarkable second career as a Casanova. Possibly that explained why, for decades, he was intimidating in his reluctance to become involved in publicity unless he was controlling the format.

Yet he’s also affable. He certainly was to visitors to the restaurant, the Hog’s Breath Inn, he co-owned in Carmel. Even the menu and the entranceway were Eastwood-style. There are Dirty Harry (cheese) hamburgers, Magnum Force (hot pepper) omelettes and Eastwood’s favourite, Gauntlet (boysenberry) cheesecake. The alley was a gunmetal colour. Once I took a chance on meeting him there for an interview. He had not been pre-warned. Sixteen steps took me down into the restaurant’s patio with its crowd of customers and roaring fire. There was a redwood bar and above it one of those High Noon-style clocks which tick on and on with no sight of ‘the Man’.

Then, out of the shadows, he arrived, striding into view in his Nike running shoes, Levi jeans and shirt and shoulder jacket. When he glanced around, his eyes narrow like blinds being drawn on a private room. I suggested we might talk and suddenly his hand went to his side. He pulled out a fistful of dollars and said: ‘Well, I better buy you a beer.’

He sat and leaned back by the fire. At first he was reluctant: ‘I don’t usually talk business in any form here. I’m partners with two other guys and we modelled this like an English pub – a place for folks to have a drink and enjoy themselves. Look, you see me relaxing. But everybody has to have an edge and my edge is instinct. There are always people telling me what to do, but I’ve always done what I felt like doing.’

He was just another customer as far as the Hog’s Breath regulars were concerned. Tourists would pull out cameras and ask for autographs. He never seemed concerned. ‘I don’t have much respect for people who look down on the public as somebody who gets in the way. After all you’ve just asked for it, you fought to get where you are. You just don’t – you can’t look down. On the other hand you want privacy too, because otherwise your central nervous system goes berserk.’

It was a younger Eastwood. Not the happily married man you meet in 2005. Then he was very much on the lookout. Yes, he agreed we would talk. But in a moment. He had something to arrange first. Eastwood took his beer and his charm across the patio to join a small group. One of them is a tall, stunning-looking blonde in her early 30s. The other Eastwood – the sexual cowboy – went into action. When he returned to talk, a smile played on his lips and there was a twinkle in his eye. He has made his ‘arrangements’. He has always been a ladies’ man. In his early army days he would moonlight at other jobs to earn enough cash to take dates out to drive-in movies.

He could afford much, much more than that when his regular film editor, Ferris Webster, introduced him to a female colleague at a sound laboratory at Burbank Studios in 1978.

‘Clint, I want you to meet a girl who works with me. Sally meet Clint.’

Apparently, Eastwood soared to his feet with: ‘How do?’

‘I just wanted to say hello,’ said Sally, then: ‘Well, I have to get back.’

‘Come back anytime,’ said Eastwood. ‘You an editor?’

‘No. Accounting.’

‘No. I was just about to say you had a job editing…’

Webster showed his colleague out and when he returned to the room he complimented her figure. Eastwood acted upset with him: ‘I didn’t even notice her body. I was just looking … straight into her eyes.’

Another film editor made a remark and Eastwood responded: ‘A nice girl for those of you who like girls. Me, I’m just a poor, unfortunate … asexual.’

‘Sure,’ said a soundman. ‘He just likes fast cars.’

Eastwood got a moony grin on his face at that moment and said casually: ‘Fast cars and fast women.’

Paul Lippman, a former partner of his at the Hog’s Breath, has talked of his charm and style with women – girls he calls Eastwood’s ‘hip-pocket-rockets’. Some of them took off as remarkably as Clint’s career. He was an original Hollywood ‘hunk’, a contract player who posed bare-chested for publicity pictures. Usually not with one, but two girls.

For many years, it seemed we knew all about him, but we didn’t know anything about him. Eastwood is a charmer.

When he was elected mayor of Carmel in 1986, a gift shop there cashed in on the name ‘Clintville’ and the business that having an international movie star as the civic leader led to. They sold Eastwood T-shirts and hats and all manner of bric-a-brac and paraphernalia that could remotely be linked to the celebrity mayor. Anything, really, they could stick his name or image on. One big seller was ‘Make My Night’ panties. It seemed the locals knew more about their mayor and local resident than his movie fans.

He fell in love with Carmel the first time he saw it. It has been the pivotal place in his life. It looks like a film set – the impossibly sweeping ocean views, the ice plant and the Monterey cypresses. Eastwood was an army private stationed close to the town at Fort Ord in 1951. It was a Saturday night when he and some friends finished too late to make the trip to the bright lights of San Francisco. ‘One guy had a car and we drove to Monterey, hit a few pubs, then came over the hill to Carmel. I said to myself: if I ever have any dough, I’d like to live in this place. I fell for it in a big way: beautiful green mountains, well-timbered, coming right down to the shoreline and some clean white beaches. If I ever made a few bucks…’

He’s always been passionate about what he wants. But he always seems to be calm and in control of his emotions, sending the message that the screen image is also reality; he admits there is a price to pay for that: ‘You do pay – sometimes it’s better to get things off your chest because people get relief from that. It’s like going out and yelling obscenities in the middle of the highway. You come back and say “Aaah.” I’m not afraid of showing emotions, but there are certain things I just don’t enjoy sharing with everybody else.

‘There are certain thoughts – I don’t feel compelled to tell every thought that is in my mind. I know a lot of people get a catharsis, they get a release, from that and that’s why psychiatrists make so much money. They can sit down and really unload, but to me I’ve never felt that. I don’t particularly want to unload on anybody else. I always felt I could go out and walk through a field and look at the flowers and just unload to myself.’

The field and the flowers are on the outskirts of Carmel. If you live there, you must die to get out of town. There is no cemetery. There is also no mail delivery, for the residents refuse to put up house numbers. The post office is where they meet for a gossip.

Originally, around a century ago, artists boosted the population of the modern Carmel, which was discovered in 1602 by a Carmelite friar, Sebastian Vizcaino, and named for his patron saint, Our Lady of Carmel. In the 1920s city ordinances were introduced banning street lights, pavements and traffic lights, and today it’s still against the law to wear high heels without a licence. The artists of the past frowned on business but there are now 67 art galleries, 31 real-estate brokerages and restaurants and bars lining every street of the tiny village, which sits on a slope above Monterey Bay 120 miles south of San Francisco. This is Eastwood’s ‘Heaven can wait’ place.

In 1930 Carmel might have been 120 light years away for Clinton Eastwood, his wife Ruth, daughter Jeanne and newborn son Clinton Junior. The boy had been born on 31 May that year and there wasn’t much in the bank – certainly not for trips to quaint seaside communities. ‘It was my parents, my sister and me,’ Clint recalls. And any trips that were made were out of necessity. There were many as he was growing up – another job for his father, another school for him. ‘Once we moved from Sacramento to Pacific Palisades [450 miles, from central California to the outskirts of Los Angeles] so that my dad could start work as a gas station attendant. It was the only job open.’

His father sold stocks and bonds, but there wasn’t much business in the early 1930s. Eastwood is particularly proud of his parents and especially his father’s work ethic. It’s reflected in his life today, for although one of the world’s richest movie stars, he never stops work for more than a short break. He admits to being a workaholic and at one time was averaging a new film every ten months; in one 30-month period he made six films, two of which he directed.

And if you look with hindsight at his work, it is easy to recognise the Depression-era hardship and humour in films like 1982’s Honkytonk Man. But he and his sister did better than many during the bad days.

‘I can’t remember us being poor or suffering as children. Maybe my father did have his worries but neither Jeanne nor I ever knew about them. When I look back I know Dad had to think pretty fast at times because there were a lot of people out of work in America around the time I was born. He often moved from one stocks and bonds company to another to try and better himself. That’s why although I was born in San Francisco, my earliest memories are of living in Oakland. But it seems to me now we didn’t live much in houses at all – we lived in cars. I can remember only a few of the places like Oakland and San Francisco and Sacramento – twice – and Seattle. The frustrating thing about moving around like this as a kid is that you’re constantly having to make adjustments. My grandmother had a small farm where I stayed as a boy. Sometimes when you move a lot as a little kid, animals are your best friends. Animals just like you for you.

‘Just as soon as I’d get to make friends in a place and start making progress at my studies, we’d be on the move again. I was alone a good portion of the time. I lived in my imagination. It gave me a taste for living all right, but I never got those feelings of security a kid most probably needs. I was always feeling left out of things. I’d walk into a fresh school and find the standards were different or they were on different phases of a subject. So although it wasn’t that I wasn’t bright I was never out front. I always seemed to be running to catch up.

‘The traumas of childhood? I was raised in the height of he Depression but I didn’t know the difference; you only know what you know. As long as somebody fed you, your toys could be a stick or a rock or something and that seemed to suit at the time.

‘I was kind of an introverted kid. I was born left-handed but because of inkwells you couldn’t write, you’d smear the ink; this was before ballpoint pens, so you smeared the ink, so they changed you to right-handed, so consequently my writing today still stinks. I blame it on that.

‘I could have sat down and probably worked it out and studied and become a little better at penmanship and things like that. All of a sudden, instead of using the right side of my brain to work the left, I was using the left side to work the right and it made me ambidextrous as far as throwing a ball but did nothing for anything else.

‘I’ve always felt maybe I was slightly dyslexic or one of those things they have so many names for now. We didn’t have any of that. It was just: “He’s a dummy.” Or: “He’s a smart guy.” One or the other.

‘I was a mediocre student and because of all that I think I grew more interested in things in life. Edward Teller, the famous physicist, says a genius is someone who does well at things he hates, so I was no genius. If I didn’t like a subject I had a tough time passing it.

‘I became interested in music only because when I sat down at the piano at a party the girls at the party would come around. I could play a few numbers. I learned a few off listening to records and things that were popular at that era. I thought this was all right, so I went home and practised when my mother couldn’t get me to practise.

‘So it sort of dovetails. You sort of become the sum of what your whole existence is and finally you find a subject you’re interested in. Mine was films and I got into films thinking: This may last a couple of weeks.

‘I got that wrong.

‘The feeling that I was always trying to catch up has sort of stuck with me and maybe it has something to do with making me a loner – why I like driving fast and riding motorcycles fast. Since I was always the new boy on the block, I often played alone and in that situation your imagination becomes very active. You create little mythologies in your own mind. I suppose it was the best thing that happened in my youth.

‘I was a constant daydreamer. When I wasn’t going crazy trying to catch up on the lessons I’d missed, I’d sit there dreamy-eyed looking out of the window. I dreamed of being a great air pilot. I rescued a lot of people from drowning. I was the world’s greatest surfer. And I guess I saved more people on the operating table than any surgeon who ever lived.

‘You name it, I thought of it. I was pretty much bottled up in those days.

‘I suppose my parents guessed the way I felt at times. My father was a big man physically and had been good at [American] football and track. He was fond of the outdoors and he took me hunting and fishing. He also taught me to swim well.

‘I remember when my father died I went through a terrible guilt period where I wished I’d asked him to play golf more often.

‘I was a young guy trying to make it as an actor and doing pretty well and busy with my life, so I never took enough time. I wish I could have said: “Let’s hang out” or “I love you” or whatever.

‘When we lived in Redding and Sacramento the Sierra Nevada Mountains were nearby and Jeanne and I were pretty good at skiing while we were still kids.

‘At school I was never the one in the class to make things go – in the first place I was about a foot taller than the rest of the kids. There were occasions when I’d have lopped myself off at the knees if that had been possible. Then I had to go through this male thing of handing it out as well as taking it. They weren’t tough guys or anything like that: I was just the odd man out – the big, silent guy.’ But, as many a young lady and co-star were to find out, still waters really do run deep. And often dark and secretive.

Eastwood’s career was taking off in 1970 when he was interviewed in Las Vegas by a lady reporter who had been in town for several days. She was introduced and he leaned forward with a handshake but no hello, just: ‘Yeah, I’ve been watching her legs for two days.’ When a blonde woman sitting across from him made a comment he told her: ‘Cool it!’ This other woman was Maggie Johnson Eastwood, his now former wife. In 1970 they had been married for 17 years. It didn’t seem to cramp Eastwood’s style. Over the years, not much has.

‘I became hooked on girls at an early age. American kids seem to start dating a lot earlier than European kids, even now. I got my first crush when I was at Glenview [at 14 in Oakland, California] grammar school. Her name was Joan and she was a redhead, a little teeny-bopper. What attracted me, I think, was that she was the most popular girl in class. It was actually very much a one-way situation. She never showed any signs of being intrigued with me. But for a time I stopped staring out the window and began dreaming up to the front where she was sitting. Not once did I have the courage to ask her out with me.’

He overcame his early introspection; the loner became a lone wolf, prowling alone. What helped him was something that, even in all his daydreaming, he had never imagined – acting.

An English teacher who he reckons was a pretty fair amateur psychologist chose him to play a rebel teenager in that year’s school play. He didn’t want to. Miss Jones told him he would enjoy it. He suffered hell. He wanted to run away from school. Another pupil, his friend Harry Pendleton, was also in the play. The young Clint tried to talk his pal into ‘vanishing’, saying: ‘They’ll laugh at us.’ Harry agreed: ‘They sure will.’ They planned to miss the play but next day had second thoughts. It would be easier all round if they tried to work their way through it.

‘I realised at some point that all the kids in the audience were laughing with me and not at me. I suppose it was the first time I realised you could act extroverted without really being so and also that being self-confident didn’t mean that people took an instant dislike to you or laughed at you. I was 15, but it was the day I grew up.’

And, by then, girls had taken second place in his life. For a little time, anyway.

‘I still wasn’t 15 when my dad bought me my first car – an old rattletrap he’d picked up for $25. I’ve never exactly led what you’d call a monastic sheltered life. The car took my mind off girls for a bit. For the next couple of years it was cars first and girls second. I wasn’t actually supposed to drive on my learner’s permit except in an emergency. But even at that age I was within one inch of my present height and the cops never stopped me. That summer when I was 15 I left home for the first time. It was just an impulse thing.’

It was his gut talking. An instinct. He drove south towards California’s ranch country and got a summer job baling hay. ‘At night I could scarcely crawl into my bunk – absolutely dead to the world. But it sure toughened me up. It was about the happiest time of my life up till then. I had a couple of buddies at the time and we all set out to raise a little hell. It began with the cars.’

In a different era Clint Eastwood might have been a real cowboy and an adventurer. He was just a teenager when he started making money delivering newspapers and groceries. He might not have been a social whiz, but he was independent. It’s the same today. He’s more content casually eating cheese quesadillas and a platter of rice and beans in the kitchen at home, or having a drink or dinner with friends in Carmel, than he is at the White House, chatting with presidents or meeting Prince Charles and Princess Diana, as he did at a 1986 dinner where they all danced until 1.30am to an impromptu Neil Diamond ‘concert’.

‘I’ve worked ever since I was 13 years old. My parents had a hard life when they were raising us. My father drilled into me that nobody does anything for you but yourself. Today we live in a welfare-orientated society and people expect more from Big Daddy government, more from Big Daddy charity. In my young days, that kind of society never existed. That philosophy never got you anywhere.

‘I worked for every crust of bread I ever ate. Yet I always had a sense of future. I always had the feeling that, discouraged as I was many times, there was a place waiting for me at the top of the heap. I knew I had something to give. I don’t think I had a colossal ego. Just the stupidity, perversity, premonition or whatever it is that gives a person a feeling of hope. That feeling of hanging in there.’

Eastwood had to hang in many times. He chanced death, courted disaster and became a real-life hero before ever a camera rolled to the shout of ‘Action!’ But many times he felt a lost soul, just a man drifting along. His parents had continued to move around a lot and so, after leaving school, in an attempt to find some fixed point, he went to live with his grandmother for a time and raised chickens – ‘I talked to chickens a lot’ – in Hayward County on the outskirts of Oakland. He never didn’t work but he couldn’t settle. America was beginning to boom after the Second World War. The American Dream was the goal. What was happening to the schoolboy dreamer after he graduated from Oakland Technical School in 1948, where he had been a more proficient basketball player than a scholar?

He was breaking his back digging ditches and swimming pools. Or working the midnight-to-7am shift in front of a furnace at the Bethlehem Steelworks near Oakland. The sparks flew in the furnace. Afterwards Eastwood and company would go on the town. Roy Sturges, who once worked alongside him at the furnace, recalled: ‘He was a man who worked real hard and paid himself by enjoying himself. We all believed we deserved a few beers and a good time after the hours we put in. And Clint wasn’t one to hang back. He was a nice kid. Loyal. Always willing to help out if you had to go someplace early or had a problem at home. He’d be the one to stand in for you. Always there.’

Loyal. It’s a word you hear much about Eastwood. He plays that role in the most extreme circumstances – and he expects loyalty in return. It is part of the camaraderie he learned mucking in at the furnace or digging ditches or waiting for the cry, ‘Timber!’ in the Oregon logging fields, when he was a tall, strapping lad and, like most teenagers, felt immortal. He soon learned that he wasn’t.

Eastwood had always been fascinated by the logging business and managed to get hired in a mill operating on the Willamette River, near Eugene, Oregon. After only a few days on the job he was nearly killed: ‘I heard a shout and looked up and saw the crane driver and I hadn’t quite got it organised. A nasty load of giant logs hung suspended over my head. I don’t think I’ve reacted faster in my life. Yet even as I started to run, down came the logs. Any one of them could have crushed the life out of me. I just barely jumped clear – as the logs hit the ground they jammed against the crane, which was a lucky break for me.

‘The whole thing was: the money was good in the logging business and so was the food. The guys you met there were like wild characters out of a novel. It was pretty hard living but working outdoors in this fabulous country – rugged mountains, tall pine and fir forests – made it worthwhile. I never stayed long enough to work up into one of the really skilled jobs: if a man doesn’t know what he’s doing he can really pay for it. Some of the Douglas firs grew 250–300 feet tall and a man who goes up to the top of one of those to lop off the high branches has to be experienced. Log-rolling – that’s riding the logs in mid-river – is another job where you either know what you’re doing or you don’t live long enough to have grandchildren. I earned good money felling trees. I’d pick where I wanted a tree to fall, take my axe and cut a “V” so it would fall in that direction. Then another man and myself would work a two-man double saw. It took two of us because some of these trees were six feet in diameter. Some of the time was spent in the sawmill, which was better pay, but I preferred being outdoors.’

Today Eugene hasn’t changed much since Eastwood’s logging days except that it’s a little quieter. He remembers: ‘On weekends we all descended on Eugene and more or less turned the place inside out. Our manners weren’t quite Ritz Hotel but the people in town were used to such behaviour from loggers. They were usually glad to see us. We were a lively bunch just out to whoop it up a bit. Most of the action was at a little place out of town where you could get a couple of beers and listen to some music. I’ve always preferred jazz, but I had fun listening to the badly played country-and-western stuff. It was so corny.

‘Occasionally I’d talk to a girl. I can’t say there was anything serious, though. It was the wrong time for me. It wasn’t that I was consciously steering clear of involvement, but I have this attitude towards responsibility – you don’t undertake responsibilities until you are ready to handle them.

‘I was earning good bachelor money but mentally I was still drifting. I had an idea I wasn’t going to settle for tree-felling or sawmilling as my life’s work, but the way wasn’t too clear…’