Read Online Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel - Free Book Online Page A

contempt that included Clint. “The kids were driving better cars than my parents were,” he recalls, “and I learned very early on that I was at the low end of the social structure.” His mother confirms this assessment. “Particularly in his class there were an awful lot of wealthy kids, and I could see where Clint would have a funny-looking car and they would have Cadillacs or something.”
    The prejudices he encountered extended beyond the automotive. He vividly remembers some junior-high schoolmates asking him what his father did, and putting him down when he told them that he worked in a shipyard. Their dads, they proudly told him, were merchants and executives, and his argument that his father was at least engaged in vital war work made no impression on them. He was, as well, acutely conscious that there were no blacks in Piedmont, no Asians, only one or two Jewish families. And precisely because it was so “white bread” (Manes’s description) the place was rife with a kind of heedless bias.“That’s where I was first introduced to bigotry,” Clint recalls, and though he says he doesn’t know how or when the conviction came to him, “I never could stand intolerance. In my soul, I couldn’t buy into it.”
    His response was, as he gently puts it, “Fuck you and move on.” Which was quite all right with Piedmont High and, as it happened, with his mother. “That didn’t worry me at all, because I knew he was going to be different than the rest of the group.” She can’t say why, exactly. “Something told me. I never worried about what he was going to do.”
    When the inevitable call came to meet with an assistant principal to discuss other academic alternatives, she was serene. When she talked these over with her husband, Oakland Technical High School seemed to make the most sense. It offered a course in aircraft maintenance, and that interested Clint more than any of the shop courses at Piedmont. Wartime aviation movies had stirred in him a romantic feeling for flight, and he had even journeyed out a couple of times to Walnut Creek, where there was an airfield and five dollars would buy you a half-hour trip across the Bay Area skies in a light plane.
    The youngster (and helicopter-pilot-to-be) who loved tinkering with engines found aircraft maintenance a thoroughly satisfactory subject. But he was not encouraged to see it as his life’s work. The instructor constantly reminded his students that this was a poorly paid occupation. “The guy used to joke about it, the teacher: ‘Well, there’s no real dough in it. You make as much being an auto mechanic, and you don’t have the responsibility.’ ”
    In other respects, though, Tech worked out pretty much as Eastwood—and his parents—had hoped. “He was more relaxed at Tech,” his mother says simply. He was never a big man on campus. His high-school yearbook records only very few officially sanctioned extracurricular activities. But he liked its ethnic diversity—“it just seemed like it was more real”—and he continues to believe that if he had gone to school in Piedmont, “I would have been stuck in a groove.”
    There was no danger of that at Tech. To Fritz Manes, the Tech guys looked like tough guys. And there certainly were gangs in the school, though Clint avoided them. By his own (and Manes’s) account he bopped all over the Oakland area, drinking beer illegally, looking just a little bit delinquent (a photo from the period shows him wearing a duck’s-ass haircut and a leather jacket). He kept up his friendships with his Piedmont pals, but made no attempt to meld this group with the others he knew—it was part of the slightly mysterious air that he began cultivating then, and which he has never abandoned. It is based on nothing more than a natural disinclination to explain himself to anybody.
    He continued to work in his after-school hours, and during hishigh-school summers he worked strenuously. One year during school vacation