Parade : December 2008

Clint Eastwood at 78 : Reckless Again

Reckless Again : Clint Eastwood After 70 by Gail Sheehy

He’s sitting at home, stroking his pet rabbit. His wife is out. His latest picture is a wrap. He is content to have nothing to do.

“When you’re young, you’re very reckless,” says Clint Eastwood with his usual economy of words. “Then you get conservative. Then you get reckless again.” That is, if you live long enough.

Days before, I had seen Clint’s latest film, Gran Torino, in which he plays a bent and bitter old racist. In the film he lopes, with his trademark dynamic lassitude, into a hail of bullets. He does not look like a man who pets rabbits.

But that’s Clint—a coil of contradictions that go to the very soul of the American male. On film, Clint likes his characters gritty, dark, uncomfortable. In person, he looks younger, kinder, incredibly fit. He could be 50. He is, in fact, a year and a half from 80.

After the screening, I await him in the bungalow where he set down his production company 40 years ago. Clint always seems to appear out of the mist. He arrives generously. His voice is gentle.

“I just ran into a guy a little younger than me,” he tells me. “He says, I’m going to retire. I say, Wait for me. Keep going.” Everybody in my generation, once you get in the seventh decade, they go, ‘Well, what the hell. I’m on bonus time. Let me retire.’”

But making movies is your passion, I say. Would you ever want to give it up?

“No. Never. Never would.” He muses about his father, who was in and out of work during the Depression. “All he ever dreamed about was retiring. And so he did, around 60. He didn’t last very long.”

What we know about Clint Eastwood, this elusive American icon, is that he drifted through his youth: loner, self-taught jazz pianist, digger of swimming pools, star of spaghetti Westerns. In the 1970s, when he was in his early 40s, he asked to direct, did it for nothing, and invented characters who captured cultural moments: the victim of an obsessed stalker in Play Misty for Me, the vigilante cop “Dirty Harry” Callahan, the avenger on a horse for The Outlaw Josey Wales.

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Parade : December 2009

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