Dynamite on Horseback
On a late summer day an amiable pleasant-looking young man stood hip-deep in the mustard weed which overruns Albertson’s Ranch, a TV location some 50 miles northwest of Hollywood, and explained why people don’t really know who Clint Eastwood is. “Because,” said Clint Eastwood, digging a scuffed boot toe deep into the yellow dust of Albertson’s, “I don’t really know who I am myself.”
The Great Who-Am-I-and-What-Am-I-Doing-Here Syndrome is hardly new to the acting profession, let alone to comparatively inexperienced actors who learned to star before they learned to act. But in the case of 32-year-old Eastwood, the co-star of a successful and dusty Western called Rawhide, the symptoms are particularly acute. He does not just idly wonder who he is and where he is going; he plunges headlong with a grinding singleness of purpose roughly tantamount to the forward motion of a Sherman tank. The cloak of boyish amiability — he has all too often been characterized as “mild,” “nonrebellious,” even “apologetic” — is just that: a cloak, and a thin one. Underneath there lies not so much a man as an explosion.
The Eastwood urge to explode is on its way to becoming legend in Hollywood. “Clint,” observes Charles Gray, the new scout on the show, “has a short fuse.” It serves several useful purposes for him. For one thing, it has helped preserve what otherwise might be a highly inflammable relationship with his co-star, Eric Fleming. Fleming, a man with a reputation as a loner, is a rather complex piece of machinery himself. On the first day of shooting in Arizona in 1958, the two men collided head-on in the noisy clash of strong personalities. When the noise became intolerable, they retired behind the wagons and had at it. Asked about it four years later, Eastwood smiles and replies, “It was that Arizona heat.” But he denies what some others say, that they actually came to blows.
Whether they did or not seems almost beside the point. The two men became friends and there has been very little trouble since. Yet there are times when physical combat seems prerequisite to friendship with Clint Eastwood, all 6-feet-4 of him. One of his closest friends, for example, is his stand-in and sometime stuntman, Bill Thompkins, who accompanied him to Hollywood in 1952. Thompkins, a rugged customer himself, recalls that when they first met 10 years ago they fought. “Clint backs off from nobody,” he says. “I can’t remember what we fought about. Only that it was the longest fight I ever had. We were rolling around in the dirt when I said, ‘Geez, Clint, let’s cool it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, let’s.’ I was black and blue for weeks.”
Like any yeasty young top gun, Eastwood is frequently the target for off-the-hip insults fired by lesser guns. Last Memorial Day Eastwood was sitting with his friend Thompkins in an Indianapolis night club when a strange girl, in an apparent bid for attention, calmly walked up and poured a drink on Eastwood’s head.
“Well,” says Thompkins, “Clint turned several shades of purple. He pursued her out of the club, picking up drinks from tables and flinging them at her as he went. She just made it to the car.”
Lest this mayhem seem merely senseless, it must be said that Clint to a large degree keeps it under close rein. Also it is just one side of the coin. There is the urge to be a good actor and a gentleman. There is even a great gentleness.
He says: “There is a lot of the wayward bum in me. I’m the kind who heads for the worst place in town. Yet part of me wants to climb out of this cowboy suit and into a tuxedo.
“Sometimes I yearn to just do something where I don’t have to think. I don’t have many material needs. I only have this hunger.”
The hunger began in childhood in Oakland, Cal. Eastwood’s father, Clinton Sr., was a quiet, soft-spoken man who was also one of the finest athletes Piedmont High School ever turned out. But in Clint’s youth his father “had to scrounge around for a buck” in a wartime shipyard. Later he became a successful container-corporation executive. One of Clint’s earliest hungers was “to be someone,” perhaps a star athlete like his father. But, he says, he had to fight “shyness, an introverted nature and a reputation for nonconformity.”
At 17 he began to wander. He was a lumberjack in the Northwest for a while, a lifeguard and just plain bum. He did a stint at Fort Ord, Cal., where he was the swimming instructor. In 1952 he wandered down to Los Angeles, mainly because Maggie Johnson, a coed, now a bathing-suit model, whom he was to marry, lived there. First thing he knew he was out of Los Angeles City College and, on the urging of a friend with “connections,” into Universal-International studios.
“I had never even been in a Sunday school pageant,” Clint explains. “But I wanted to see a studio. It never occurred to me I could be an actor — you had to be an extrovert, or the suave type with all the answers. Later I began to see that it is good to hold on to what you are. If you involve yourself in a performance, it doesn’t matter what you are, extrovert or not.”
For four frustrating years virtually nothing happened. He did bits, including one in a monster picture.
Charles Marquis Warren, Rawhide’s creator, rescued him by casting him as Rowdy Yates, the easygoing, slightly naive trail hand in Rawhide. “Because,” says Warren, “that’s what he appeared to be.” When the show, after a slow start, became successful, he developed what can only be described as a compelling sense of the rightness of his position in regard to it.
Says one close to Rawhide since the outset: “They [Eastwood and Fleming] tended more and more to take over the show.” Says a friend from the old days, Fritz Manes: “Clint has a philosophy about this. He feels he and Eric are the intrinsic force behind Rawhide, not an outsider.”
A fight to the finish
So goes the familiar battle for identity — except Eastwood’s is clearly a fight to the finish, and it is a good bet that nothing will stand in his way.
Otherwise, almost everything seems in some strange way expendable. This might almost be said to include his family. Clint’s long-time press agent — a woman — explains: “His wife, Maggie, is crazy about him. And he about her. But Clint is the kind who does what he wants to do when he wants to do it. She does the adjusting.” The modest house — which Clint tends to view even now as an alarming responsibility — is bereft of all the usual untidy impedimenta of everyday living — stripped to bare essentials as one would strip a race car.
“I like women,” Eastwood says. “Always have. Maggie? She’s got a few marbles. Kids? We keep putting them off. I don’t feel I have a duty and — well, I am not so egotistical as to think I have to have something in my image.”
— Dwight Whitney