Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel Read Free Book Online

and common decency that ruled their lives, and it was those qualities that they passed on to their children. There were, one gathers, no hidden agendas in the Eastwood family, no dark, twisting pressures, just simple, straightforward expectations and affections, clearly expressed.
    Whatever insecurities their restless passage through the world in these years imposed upon their children, there was always, in the Eastwood home, a bed of feelings in which they could securely root themselves. And that, too, would become one source of Clint’s strength within his profession. There are no childish emotional needs for which he requires belated compensation from audiences, colleagues, studios. He long ago gathered all of that to him, and not alone from his mother and father. He has fond memories of visits to Grandpa Burr, who also upped stakes during the depression, surprising everyone by selling his Piedmont house and, with his second wife, buying a little farm devoted to apple trees and chicken raising near Sebastopol. It is, however, his maternal grandmother, Virginia Runner, who figures most powerfully in Clint’s reminiscences of these years. During their unsettled period it seems that the Eastwoodsfrequently circled back on her little house in Hayward, sixty years ago a semirural community where Mrs. Runner, then working as a bookkeeper for a food-processing company, could live in solitary contentment, a largehearted, sweetly eccentric woman, warm in her affections, setting for Clint a memorable, often-cited example of the independent life. Clint and his sister lived with her once for an entire school year during a particularly unsettled period, Clint happily sleeping in a tent he had pitched in the backyard. Afterward, he visited her as often as he could.
    Clint attributes his lifelong affection for animals to his grandmother, for there was always a shifting population of pets in and around her house. It may be that her move, a little later in Clint’s childhood, to seven acres of land, mostly given over to olive trees, near Sunol, was motivated by her desire to support a more extensive menagerie. There she kept chickens (a well-worn family story has Clint lying on the ground in the chicken yard and sprinkling corn across his body so the chickens would clamber up on him) and sold their eggs from a roadside stand. She had a swaybacked horse, raised a few pigs, even, for a time, kept a Nubian goat that was always trying to scale the walls of the garage. Her other daughter, Bernice, who was married to a dentist, lived in nearby Niles, and they, too, had a horse, a somewhat more spirited creature, the first one Clint remembers riding at a pace more exciting than a shamble. One time he spent a few days with them earning pocket money picking apricots on a nearby farm. He also remembers that on his visits to his grandmother he was able to range the nearby hills on long solitary walks, on which he acted out all kinds of imaginary adventures.
    Finally, though, the most important thing he took away from his visits with his grandmother was her uncomplicated faith that there was something special about him. He was, his mother says, her favorite grandchild—“anything he did was perfect”—and he knew it. She thought “I was terrific,” he told Barbara Walters in one of their television interviews. “I think she thought I was better than I really was.” Be that as it may, it was she, alone among this extended family, who predicted a future in some creative field for this seemingly unexceptional boy. He had, she firmly noted, “long hands,” which to her, in her grandmotherly wisdom, bespoke a natural gift for the arts. It is an interesting observation, because Clint’s use of his hands—graceful, precise and sometimes rather startling in the context of some of his roles—is one of the hallmarks of his acting manner. She did not live to see him become a movie star, but she did see him become a television star on
Rawhide
.