Read Online Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel - Free Book Online
Authors: Richard Schickel
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So he applied for work in a shipyard—not knowing “one end of a boat from the other,” Ruth laughs—and somehow got taken on as a pipe fitter.
The pay was excellent, but the hours were long and exhausting, as he pointed out to his son one day when Clint asked him why he did not join the rest of the family when they trekked off to church on Sunday. “It’s my only day off,” the elder Eastwood said simply. Clint thought that over and replied, “Well, it’s my only day off, too.” As a matter of fact, he didn’t even have that day entirely to himself, since he had to be up at dawn working his paper route. “Well, then don’t go,” said his dad. “There’s all kinds of ways to get a feeling of God, however [He] exists for you.”
This squared with Clint’s instincts. The Bible stories he had listened to in various Sunday schools had never appealed to him. They seemed terribly remote, and they struck him as distressingly violent, too—“the whole idea of religion based upon impaling somebody, the whole center, torture and torment.” Critics of Eastwood’s subsequent screen career, marked by so many bloody confrontations, may make what irony they care to out of this, but he says these views had begun to take shape even before this conversation, when he found himself contrasting the discomfort Christian myth stirred in him with the experience of visiting Yosemite National Park with his family.
“You looked down into that valley, without too many people around,” he says, “and, boy, that was to me a religious experience.” And not an uncommon one for a person of his birthright. “Born again,” the naturalist John Muir wrote in his diary upon seeing the same sight for the first time. This Pacific Rim Transcendentalism, a belief that nature in the several majestic aspects that California presents it, is the ultimate source of spiritual renewal widely shared by its citizens and has remained a major force in determining the way Clint has lived his adult life.
Clint remained as indifferent to formal education as he was to formal religion. “What he did, he did very well,” his mother says, thinking aboutthe time he lavished on his cars and his music, “but he was no scholar.” As he entered high school this became a serious issue. There is some dispute as to whether he voluntarily left Piedmont High or was asked to leave. It seems likely that, for a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with his indifference to his studies, he contrived to get himself removed from a place where he was not comfortable. His pals, of course, were happy to set a bad example for him. Naturally, the report cards with their observations about a kid not working to capacity flowed in. Naturally Clinton Eastwood Sr. sternly lectured his son on the need to apply himself.
Clint’s problems, however, were not entirely academic. They were social, too. He fit in happily enough with his own small crowd, and the guys loved hanging out at the Eastwood house, for as Manes puts it, “If a kid could ask to have dream parents it would have been Clint Sr. and Ruth.” She was always cooking meals for them, and Clinton Sr., boyish and expansive, was someone to whom they could express themselves freely, a nonjudgmental father figure who, in Manes’s account, at times seemed more like an older brother. When they were a little older beer was permitted, and so was smoking (though Clint, even then, avoided cigarettes). But he could not or would not try to expand beyond this circle. “He was off rebuilding a transmission in the afternoon, while we were at football practice, or tearing down an engine,” Manes would recall. He didn’t even like hanging out at Bud’s Bar, where the Piedmont jocks and those from the University of California often met. There was no live music there, only a jukebox stocked with mainstream pop.
He was beginning to gather a sense of Piedmont’s contempt for people who didn’t match its norm, a
The pay was excellent, but the hours were long and exhausting, as he pointed out to his son one day when Clint asked him why he did not join the rest of the family when they trekked off to church on Sunday. “It’s my only day off,” the elder Eastwood said simply. Clint thought that over and replied, “Well, it’s my only day off, too.” As a matter of fact, he didn’t even have that day entirely to himself, since he had to be up at dawn working his paper route. “Well, then don’t go,” said his dad. “There’s all kinds of ways to get a feeling of God, however [He] exists for you.”
This squared with Clint’s instincts. The Bible stories he had listened to in various Sunday schools had never appealed to him. They seemed terribly remote, and they struck him as distressingly violent, too—“the whole idea of religion based upon impaling somebody, the whole center, torture and torment.” Critics of Eastwood’s subsequent screen career, marked by so many bloody confrontations, may make what irony they care to out of this, but he says these views had begun to take shape even before this conversation, when he found himself contrasting the discomfort Christian myth stirred in him with the experience of visiting Yosemite National Park with his family.
“You looked down into that valley, without too many people around,” he says, “and, boy, that was to me a religious experience.” And not an uncommon one for a person of his birthright. “Born again,” the naturalist John Muir wrote in his diary upon seeing the same sight for the first time. This Pacific Rim Transcendentalism, a belief that nature in the several majestic aspects that California presents it, is the ultimate source of spiritual renewal widely shared by its citizens and has remained a major force in determining the way Clint has lived his adult life.
Clint remained as indifferent to formal education as he was to formal religion. “What he did, he did very well,” his mother says, thinking aboutthe time he lavished on his cars and his music, “but he was no scholar.” As he entered high school this became a serious issue. There is some dispute as to whether he voluntarily left Piedmont High or was asked to leave. It seems likely that, for a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with his indifference to his studies, he contrived to get himself removed from a place where he was not comfortable. His pals, of course, were happy to set a bad example for him. Naturally, the report cards with their observations about a kid not working to capacity flowed in. Naturally Clinton Eastwood Sr. sternly lectured his son on the need to apply himself.
Clint’s problems, however, were not entirely academic. They were social, too. He fit in happily enough with his own small crowd, and the guys loved hanging out at the Eastwood house, for as Manes puts it, “If a kid could ask to have dream parents it would have been Clint Sr. and Ruth.” She was always cooking meals for them, and Clinton Sr., boyish and expansive, was someone to whom they could express themselves freely, a nonjudgmental father figure who, in Manes’s account, at times seemed more like an older brother. When they were a little older beer was permitted, and so was smoking (though Clint, even then, avoided cigarettes). But he could not or would not try to expand beyond this circle. “He was off rebuilding a transmission in the afternoon, while we were at football practice, or tearing down an engine,” Manes would recall. He didn’t even like hanging out at Bud’s Bar, where the Piedmont jocks and those from the University of California often met. There was no live music there, only a jukebox stocked with mainstream pop.
He was beginning to gather a sense of Piedmont’s contempt for people who didn’t match its norm, a
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