R. Schickel – Clint Eastwood. A Biography

Автор: R. Schickel
Название книги: Clint Eastwood. A Biography
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Театр и Кино
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

From the moment The Man With No Name first fixed the screen with his murderous squint, from the first time audiences heard Dirty Harry Callahan growl “Make my day,” Clint Eastwood has been an icon of American manhood in all its coolness and ferocity. But that icon is also an actor of surprising subtlety, a filmmaker of vast intelligence and originality–and an intensely private man who eludes the stereotypes with which his fans and critics try to label him.

In this in-depth biography, the distinguished film critic Richard Schickel talks with Eastwood’s family, friends, and colleagues–and, above all, with his notoriously reticent subject–to produce a portrait more astute and revealing than any we have ever had.

Following Eastwood from his unstable childhood through his turbulent love affairs, assessing films from A Fistful of Dollars to the Oscar-winning The Unforgiven, and locating the subversive streak of rage and solitude that runs through all his work, Clint Eastwood is candid and endlessly fascinating, an unerring closeup of one of our brightest stars

One 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
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kept in touch in just this casual way—the random meal, the casual note or phone call—our 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 sixshooter
being fired.
Clint did not catch Eban’s name or recognize him (foreign affairs are not his strongest suit), thus did not see
this gesture for what it was in part—an 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 guy—casual in manner, tolerant of other people’s lifestyles and opinions, sensible in the
management of his career, unassertive in the conduct of a celebrity’s 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 Clint’s 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 irony—and a certain
surprising volubility. But he did not have the star’s typical need to dominate the occasion. More important, he
was without that anxious pretense, that desperate desire to be understood as a serious—even an
intellectual—fellow, 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 Dirty Harry’s alleged “fascism” had made
him seem a dangerous character, a subject for much cheap moralizing in what were then regarded as the better
critical circles.
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As a reviewer I had been as wary of him initially as any of my colleagues (though not as hostile as some of
them), but by the time we met I had started to come around. I had not written about Dirty Harry, but I had liked
the movie and liked his work in it—that arresting combination of coolness, ferocity and isolation. Thunderbolt and
Lightfoot reinforced the conviction that he was a more supple and humorous actor than he was generally credited
with being; The Outlaw Josey Wales demonstrated that he was a director of more power, range and ambition
than most people had so far noticed. You could sense in these movies an intelligence and a restlessness, a desire
to test the limits of star expectations and genre conventions that suggested he was not going to be trapped
forever within the limits other people set for him.
A decade later, Richard T. Jameson, the editor and critic, caught some of Clint’s qualities in words of a kind I
couldn’t quite find earlier: the nice guy, he wrote, was not “an uncomplicatedly nice guy, nor a warm and cuddly
one. No movie star of his magnitude has ever been so private at the center of celebrity, or played so openly and
artfully with the mysteriousness, the essential unknowability, of his personality.”
But I no more than Abba Eban or virtually anyone else wanted to embrace such complexities just then. So
during the next few years, I settled comfortably for the knowable Clint. That was particularly easy for me, since
we are of the same generation and we come from similar backgrounds—Wasp and the striving edge of the middle
class. Growing up, we had gone to the same movies, listened to the same radio shows, devoted more of our
reveries than we ideally should have to the likes of Linda Darnell and, of course, to those masculine exemplars
with whom they shared screen time in our inner lives.
David Thomson, the film historian, has specifically linked Clint’s screen character to those boyhood
paradigms of masculinity—his “ease and authority” now “the last demonstration of what star glamor used to
mean.” And, one must add, what star silence used to mean, too. For as another Wasp, middle-class
contemporary, John Updike, observes in his novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, where he tries to link America’s loss
of traditional religious faith with its rising worship of images graven on celluloid, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and
their ilk were also “beasts of burden, all but a few of them … unable to explain themselves and unapologetic
about the lack; sons of an America where the Bible still ruled, they were justified in all their limitations by the
Protestant blessing bestowed upon hardship and hardness.” Or, to put it another way, what we knew—Clint and I
and others of our kind and time—about that most vexed of topics, being male, had been shaped by forces always
cautioning us that real men don’t talk about real manhood
Clint, however, was doing just that—in his way, in his movies. It was almost two decades later that Janet
Maslin, The New York Times critic, caught him out, suggesting that “America’s daunting ideas about manhood”
were the prime topics of his movies. I think she’s right, and, for that matter, so does Clint. His manner of
representing maleness—with a sort of conscious unself-consciousness—is the largest source of his strength. A
connection is made with our movie past and its traditional male modelings, but with a certain ironic distance
maintained, no descent into nostalgia permitted. At the same time, certain connections with contemporary
reality are established. He says he can’t play a role unless he finds something in it that mirrors some feelings he
has experienced in life, and though he has certainly done movies where it is hard to imagine what those might be,
that is true of all the work that has best defined our feelings for him.
But in this early period of our acquaintanceship, when he was making The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but
Loose, Escape from Alcatraz, Bronco Billy and the movie that he was in New York promoting the day we had lunch,
Honkytonk Man, I didn’t get, or perhaps chose not to get, that point. I liked all these movies to one degree or
another, but it did not occur to me at the time that each in its way offered a portrait of—yes—a nice (or at least
not bad) guy arrested for a moment on his fall toward the bottom of the standings and offered a last stark choice
between two scary alternatives, redemption and annihilation.
When we met in Los Angeles in those days we did not automatically (or ever) head for Ma Maison. That was
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for Orson Welles. One time we ended up at a near-deserted lunch counter deep in the San Fernando Valley,
where a friend of ours had told us the chili was extraordinary. It was, and so was the response of the proprietor as
we settled on our stools. He recognized Clint, of course—with a silent nod. And got one in return. And that was it.
We were served our food like any other customers and eventually took our leave in the same way: “Thanks.”
“Come again.”
Another time, Clint had heard of a superior hamburger joint (in those days he could still occasionally be
lured from his lean and leafy dietary path) somewhere near Western Avenue in one of the city’s less
prepossessing districts. We piled into an old heap of a Cadillac that had escaped demolition in some movie car
chase and that Clint occasionally used as a kind of vehicular alias and headed for what turned out to be an eatery
heavily patronized by working-class blacks and Hispanics. Their response to Clint’s presence was the same as it
had been in the Valley—nods, smiles, no exchange of words after we had placed our orders.
There was in these expeditions an assertion of his right if not to good-guy status then to ordinary-guy status.
He has never wanted his stardom to interfere with his ability to go where he wants to go, when he wants to, on
his own recognizance. In this age of violently gaga fandom, there is something attractive and refreshing in Clint’s
determination to go it alone, though it surely helps that he is so tall, in such obviously good shape (so many movie
stars are disappointingly short, fragile and vulnerable looking when you encounter them). It helps, too, that
people confuse his screen character and his actual one; they vaguely suspect that he might carry a .44 Magnum in
real life.
But pleasing as it is when we witness a celebrity claiming common humanity in commonplace venues, these
encounters offer something more curious to consider. They put a witness in touch with the salient quality of
Clint’s screen character, which we might identify, oxymoronically, as a kind of infectious self-containment; that is
to say, with the kind of self-possession that encourages its observers to answer in kind