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The Clintessential Eastwood
by Judson Hammond
[From Instauration, April 1998]
Back in 1976 when reviewing movies was part of my regular -- albeit poorly
paid --
journalistic duties, I was invited to a press conference where John Wayne
was to plug
his latest (and, as it turned out, his last) movie, The Shootist.
The local media
folks gathered at a posh downtown hotel, where we were seated at round
tables in
one of the dining rooms (and fed a free lunch -- which I always appreciated
in those
lean days). The great man table-hopped, granting a few precious minutes to
the
reporters clustered at each table. Obviously, one could come up with droves
of
questions for someone who had been in the motion picture business for
almost 50
years and had been an icon of popular culture for at least 35, but the
circumstances
were not amenable to an in-depth interview.
After the luncheon broke up, I paid a visit to the men's room. As I parked
myself at the
urinal, I heard heavy footsteps behind me. I turned and discovered that my
temporary
next-door neighbor was the Duke himself. Well, here was a chance for a
question --
but which one? "I'm curious -- what do you think about Clint Eastwood?" I
asked.
Eastwood was then the box office champ, a leading actor/director in the
western
genre and the heir apparent to the Duke's throne.
Wayne zipped up and pondered the question for a couple of seconds. "That
guy's too
damn invulnerable," he said, shaking his head. then he turned and went
away.
<
br>
In terms of movie roles, Wayne was certainly right. At that point, the only
Clint
Eastwood star vehicle that had bombed was The Beguiled, a 1971
Southern
Gothic stew in which he played a wounded Union soldier who was done in by a
coven of finishing school girls. (The film was waggishly nicknamed A
Fistful of
Dollies during shooting.) In 1982, Eastwood starred in Honky Tonk
Man, a
movie about a Depression-era country and western singer who died of
tuberculosis at
the end of the film. Not a bad movie, but a box office dud. Clearly, this
is not what the
public wanted.[1] They wanted that flinty Mount Rushmore physiognomy (a
Norman
Mailer apotheosis of Eastwood referred to his "Presidential face") with
that almost
epicanthic squint:
Every role he's played -- cowboy, pilot, detective -- heightens his image
as a loner. He
is the supreme example of the man who has made his own rules and made them
work for him. He represents our most prized fantasy -- to be totally
independent and
self-sufficient.[2]
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has
never yet
melted.[3]
The on-screen Eastwood was invincible: a lean, mean killing machine. John
Wayne,
of course, could shoot straight, but if the script called for it, he could
die at the end of a
film without also killing off the box office receipts. "I do all the stuff
Wayne would never
do," remarked Eastwood. "I play bigger-than-life characters, but I'd shoot
the guy in
the back."[4]
In his private life, Eastwood was also invulnerable -- until recently. His
priapic private
life has now become public in two books: (1) Clint Eastwood: a
Biography, by
film critic Richard Schickel; (2)The Good, the Bad and the Very Ugly: a
Hollywood
Journey, by Eastwood's former longtime paramour, actress Sondra Locke.
Schickel's opus is admirably Teutonic in its thoroughness but a bit too
worshipful.
Locke's work, on the other hand, is more of a kiss-and-tell/woman-scorned
tale.
Elements in both books should be disturbing to Instaurationists who are
fans of the
"conservative" Eastwood.
The basic Eastwood bio has been delineated in countless magazine articles.
Born in
1930, he had an itinerant childhood, as his father moved up and down the
west coast
looking for work. Clint knocked around at odd jobs in his youth before he
developed
an interest in acting. He signed a contract at Universal, appearing in bit
parts in an
assortment of forgettable movies. He got his big break when a chance
encounter with
a network executive resulted in an audition for the TV show,
Rawhide.
Eastwood snared the part and the show ran from 1959 to 1966. During his
hiatus in
1964, he filmed an Italian western, A Fistful of Dollars, which
transformed him
from TV star to movie star -- as tricky a metamorphosis then as it is
today. Two more
Italian westerns followed, then American westerns, the Dirty Harry
series, and
various and sundry other features, some good, some bad, some indifferent --
a
number of which were directed by Eastwood himself. A few (Breezy,
Bird and the recent Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) feature
Eastwood
as director, not actor. Away from the screen, his foray into politics as
mayor of the
boutiquey, artsy-craftsy town of Carmel has been well chronicled.
For someone who built a career as an anti-hero, Eastwood has become an
entrenched part of the establishment cultural scene. The Clint Eastwood
Cinema
Collection was established at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at
the
Wesleyan University Cinema Archives. He has received lifetime achievement
awards
from the American Film Institute, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and
American
Cinema Editors (the abbreviation A.C.E. often appears in movie credits
after the name
of member editors). He received the Irving Thalberg Award from the Motion
Picture
Academy of Arts & Sciences and the California Governor's Award for the
Arts. He has
lectured twice at the British Film Institute (where he is a fellow) and was
appointed to
the National Council on the arts by Richard Nixon. Retrospectives of his
work have
been mounted by the Paris Cinematheque and the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis.
The French awarded him the Chevalier of Arts and Letters Medal.
When not receiving awards, Clint could be found at awards ceremonies or
fundraisers in Washington with movers and shakers like the Reagans and
Caspar
Weinberger. He even tripped the light fantastic with the late Princess
Diana at an
official state function, hobnobbing with her again in London. He also
dutifully logged
time raising money for the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Written up
countless times in the mass media mush magazines, he has also been the
subject of
articles in serious film journals, as well as in the New York Review of
Books.<
br>
Biographer Schickel estimates that Eastwood's films have raked in more than
$3
billion, so his establishment status is warranted. But how did he manage to
have such
staying power? Is he that good an actor? Is he that good a director? Is he
as self-
sufficient as his screen persona? Or has he been overly promoted by the
powers that
be?
While the surface Eastwood is Nordic (Scotch, English, Dutch and Irish) and
politically
conservative (he supported both Nixon and Reagan), there are troubling
currents in
the underground man. During his adolescence he had the good fortune to live
in
Piedmont (Calif.), a town with "no blacks...no Asians, only one or two
Jewish
families,"[5] yet he chose to attend high school in Oakland, which "at that
time had the
largest black population of any city west of Detroit."[6] During those
years, Eastwood
developed his lifelong fascination with jazz and the musicians of color who
produced
it. He once revealed that during his adolescenct years, he thought of
himself as "really
a black guy in a white body."[7] Of his popularity with blacks, he muses,
"I suppose
they see me as an outcast."[8] Of film critic Pauline Kael, who never
acquired a taste
for his films, he opined, "When somebody is that dogmatic, I feel like I do
about
somebody who's prejudiced against Jews or blacks or whatever."[9]
Instaurationist moviegoers may recall with fondness Eastwood's famous
confrontation
with the black bank robber in Dirty Harry ("Do you feel lucky? Well,
do you,
punk?") Or his "Make my day" tag-line before blasting away at a group of
melanoid
miscreants in Sudden Impact.[10] his behind-the-scenes affinitites
are another
story. In more recent years, he received an award from the NAACP for
contributing to
the employment of black actors via the film, Bird, the story of
jazzman Charlie
Parker. For his efforts on behalf of jazz, Eastwood was inducted into the
American
Music Hall of Fame.
While the predictable assortment of Jewish agents, executives and business
managers are threaded throughout his life, one of his earliest Jewish
connections
was Arthur Lubin, a hack homosexual director who is today best known for
bringing <
i>Mr. Ed to the TV screens of America. This is not to say that Eastwood
had a
"relationship" with Lubin, but he might have strung him along in order to
advance his
career. Certainly, Clint Eastwood in his youth is the stuff gay dreams are
made of.
A more important Jewish relationship, artistically speaking, was with
director Don
Siegel. Though not a household word, Siegel was a solid director,
particularly of
action movies. His career in Hollywood ran the gamut from film librarian to
assistant
editor to director of montage (brief, often cleverly edited sequences put
together to
show the rapid passage of time in a film) to short a subject director to a
director of
highly regarded B movies and, finally, A movies.[11] As for his ethnicity,
Siegel once
made the following curious comment: "The question of being Jewish has never
really
been much of a problem with me, possibly because most of my enemies are
Jewish."[12]
Siegel directed Eastwood in Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister
Sara,
The Beguiled, Dirty Harry[13] and Escape from
Alcatraz. He co-
signed Eastwood's application to join the Directors Guild and made his one
and only
appearance as an actor in Play Misty for Me, Eastwood's directorial
debut.
From a business point of view, Eastwood's most important Jewish connection
was
with the late Steve Ross, head of the Warner Communications, now Time
Warner,
imperium. Eastwood's production company, Malpaso, has released all of its
films
through Warner Brothers since 1976. As Schickel notes:
No one gets the kind of acclaim that has accrued to Clint over the last
decade and a
half without institutional support. If nothing else, the logistics of
celebration have to be
attended to, and in this respect Warner Bros. has been wonderfully
attentive.[14]
After Ross's death in late 1992, Eastwood remembered him the following year
in his
Oscar acceptance speech for Unforgiven.
One cannot help but wonder if Time Warner influence didn't play a part in
covering up
Eastwood's sexual escapades. More than likely they were protecting their
cash cow
(or bull), just as studios of old did when their stars departed from the
straight and
narrow. In today's tabloid climate, it is almost inconceivable that a
public figure of
Eastwood's magnitude could indulge in such sexual athletics unnoticed. His
private
life was very private until Sondra Locke's palimony suit forced it into the
public record.
While feminist critics have long complained about Eastwood's on-screen
treatment of
females, even more illuminating is his off-screen treatment of the opposite
sex. He
skirts close to the status of cad. A cursory examination of photos taken
during his
youth (at age 15, he had already reached his full height of 6'4") readily
explain why
he was as attractive to women as he was to Arthur Lubin. In 1953 Eastwood
decided
to marry one Maggie Johnson, a tall, tan Berkeley grad who did swimsuit
modeling.
As classic an Instaurationist coupling as one could ask for, this
relationship was not
good enough for Eastwood. He was understandably reluctant to have children
during
his lean years as a contract player, but even after he achieved some
measure of
success in Rawhide, he rebuffed his wife's desire to bear children.
This,
however, did not stop him from fathering a child out of wedlock. In 1964
one Roxane
Tunis, who worked on the Rawhide set, gave birth to his daughter,
Kimber,
who has since made him a grandfather. After wife Maggie recovered from a
serious
illness, Eastwood relented on parenthood within wedlock. His two children,
Kyle and
Allison, born in 1968 and 1970, respectively, are picture-perfect Nordics
and both
have appeared in some of his movies.[15]
In 1975, while filming The Outlaw Josey Wales,[16] in which he
co-starred with
Sondra Locke, the two became an item. Locke, something of an odd duck, grew
up in
a small town in Tennessee. Her childhood sounds like something out of a
Truman
Capote story. She married a high school chum, one Gordon Anderson, an
acknowledged homosexual, and remains married to him to this day. She became
pregnant by Eastwood twice, though there is some debate as to whether her
two
abortions and her tubal ligation were her idea or his. Her revelations that
Eastwood
has a temper, is a health and fitness buff, and had a hair transplant are
hardly
shocking. At any rate, Eastwood eventually tired of her (and may have used
his
influence with Warner Brothers to sabotage her career). It cost him almost
as much to
get rid of her ($20 million) as it did to divorce his wife ($28 million).
Despite the high
cost of such activities, he sired two illegitimate children by one Jacelyn
Reeves, a
former stewardess who lives in his hometown of Carmel. He later moved on to
one
Frances Fisher, a small-time actress, who bore him a child in 1993.
Such behavior is hardly admirable, but it is pointless to get on a moral
high horse.
How many men have had women throw themselves at them from youth to old age?
When a physically attractive man attains wealth, fame and power, he has
sexual
options that surpass the average man's fantasies. For the most part,
however, the
women Eastwood consorted with were all good-looking Nordics,[17] with the
notable
exception of Barbra Streisand.
Eastwood met TV reporter Dina Ruiz in 1993 when she was doing a series on
prominent people in the Carmel area. She was barely 30 when she married
Eastwood in March 1996. Now we are not talking about a daughter of the old
California dons but a mestiza, as a glance at her picture reveals.
Eastwood,
who was once so reluctant to father children by white women, has already
fathered a
child (born in January of 1997) by his dusky young esposa.
Ironically, in this
respect, he has followed in the footsteps of John Wayne, who favored
Latinas as
wives.[18]
I think the Duke was right about Eastwood being "too damn invulnerable" in
his early
screen appearances. In his professional life, however, Eastwood was hardly
the
independent, self-sufficient man he frequently portrayed. He obviously knew
how to
play ball with the Chosen to get what he wanted. They enriched him; he
enriched
them. Perhaps it would be forgivable if his movies were better. But a
complete
overview of the Eastwood canon shows a few winners, a few stinkers, and a
lot of
mediocrities.
Is it really all about money and power? When a man with the power and
influence of
Eastwood does so little to help his race and so much to undermine it, one
can only
wonder. Can we theorize that the greatest physical exponents of Nordicism
are not
necessarily those who are most committed to it?
So often in these pages the question arises as to why Nordic women act
against the
best interests of their race? In light of the behavior of Clint Eastwood,
perhaps the
question should be asked in relation to Nordic men.
JUDSON HAMMOND
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Endnotes
1. Though the ending of Escape From Alcatraz (1979) is ambiguous, a
case
could be made that the Eastwood protagonist could not have survived the
treacherous currents and icy water surrounding the famed federal prison.
2. Stanley Platman, University of Maryland psychiatrist, quoted in Clint
Eastwood:
Riding High by Douglas Thompson (Contemporary Books, Chicago, 1992), p.
121.
3. D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (The Viking
Press,
New York, 1970), p. 62.
4. Iain Johnstone, The Biography of Clint Eastwood: the Man With No
Name
(Morrow Quill, New York, 1981), P. 51.
5. Richard Schickel, Clint Eastwood: a Biography (Knopf, New York,
1996), p.
37.
6. Ibid, p. 39.
7. Ibid, p. 427.
8. Ibid, p. 323.
9. Ibid, p. 281.
10. As if to counterbalance these scenes, Eastwood also features a fair
amount of
interracial hanky-panky in his films (e.g., Magnum Force, The
Eiger
Sanction, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Bird).
Unforgiven and
the Dirty Harry films pair him with minority or female partners, and
it probably
didn't hurt that he portrayed Russian Jews as heroic freedom fighters in
Firefox
.
11. Siegel also directed The Shootist, the John Wayne swan song
mentioned
at the beginning of this article.
12. Stuart M. Kaminsky, Don Siegel: Director (Curtis Books, New
York, 1974),
p. 20.
13. Of Dirty Harry, Eastwood offered the following observation:
"After World
War II we went to Nuremberg and we tried members of the [Nazi] party in
Germany at
that time. We tried them and convicted them for not adhering to a higher
morality.
Well, that's the way Dirty Harry is. He listens to a higher morality above
the law."
Quoted by Johnstone, p. 84.
14. Schickel, p. 372.
15. Maggie Eastwood's second husband was a "Dutchman" by the name of Henry
Wynberg, a former used car salesman who gained some notoriety by consorting
with
Elizabeth Taylor between her two marriages to Richard Burton. Wynberg's
brushes
with the law include a conviction for statutory rape and a fine for turning
back the
odometers on his cars. Wynberg provided his underage sex partners with
alcohol and
drugs and took pictures of their escapades. His 1985 marriage to the former
Mrs.
Eastwood ended after four years due to his verbal abuse, boozing,
free-spending and
philandering. In 1992 he married a 19-year-old Costa Rican woman.
16. It was something of an embarrassment for Eastwood when it was revealed
that
Forrest Carter, author of the novel, The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales,
was a
member in good standing of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
17. During the filming of Paint Your Wagon, Eastwood had an affair
with Jean
Seberg, the white renegade actress profiled in Instauration (Dec. 1980, p.
27).
18. Another irony is that Eastwood's least macho film, The Bridges of
Madison
County, was largely filmed in John Wayne's hometown, Winterset,
Iowa.
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