Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel Read Free Book Online Page A

“And she never let anybody forget it.”

    As the decade turned, so did the Eastwood family’s fortunes. In 1940 Clinton Sr. found a job—“the happiest thing he ever did,” says his wife—with Shreve, Crump and Lowe, the well-known San Francisco jewelers, then controlled by the family of a young man with whom he had once played football. They were now back on native ground, living in a pleasant little house in Glenview in the East Bay, where Clint’s interest in nature focused briefly on herpetology; one day he came home from a nearby park with no less than thirteen small snakes in his lunch pail. They shared his room peaceably enough—until his mother found one curled up in one of her towels and she ordered them returned to their natural habitat.
    Around this time the family was favored by another stroke of good luck. Perusing the newspaper real estate section, the elder Eastwoods observed that one of Ruth’s aunts had placed her home in Piedmont on the market. “We knew the house very well,” Ruth recalls, “and so we went ripping up the next day and sure enough it was for sale and they would sell it to us for what we would give them. Houses weren’t selling in Piedmont at all, so we bought it for very little down and very little a month.” Ruth Eastwood was working, too, at this time, for IBM, and, at last, the family was able to settle down; the Eastwoods would remain in Piedmont for eight years, until Clint was in his last months of high school.
    It was a middle- and upper-class enclave. Some of California’s oldest money (the Crockers of the bank, the Hills of the coffee company, the Witters of the Dean Witter stock brokerage) was settled here. The Eastwoods did not travel in those circles. Indeed, their modest shingled house was close to the Oakland line, and it was that blue-collar port and industrial city, always invidiously compared to glamorous San Francisco across the bay, not conservative Piedmont, that would eventually claim his loyalty. In interviews he gives it, not the suburb, as his hometown.
    He attended Havens Elementary School, then Piedmont Junior High School. He made lifelong friends during his first years in Piedmont, among them a good-natured boy named Harry Pendleton, who spent much of his adult life on the fringe of lawlessness and died early; Jack McKnight, who in late adolescence would live with the Eastwoods for almost a year; Fritz Manes, who would eventually work for Clint as a line producer in his production company; Don Kincade, through whom Clint met his first wife, Maggie, and with whom he remains close. Indeed, as a youngster, Kincade was to Clint an exemplary figure, because he was the first in his crowd to articulate an ambition—hewanted to be a dentist—and the only one to follow through on it. Thinking back, Clint shakes his head at the miracle of coherence, confidently knowing what you want and going out and getting it. It was beyond him at the time.
    He was still dreaming away most of the school day, and staying pretty much aloof from its official extracurricular life. Sports, for example, were heavily emphasized, and most of his pals went out for them. But though he “teased around” with football and basketball in junior high, team sports didn’t really interest him. It was the same with school band. He loved music and, as we will see, was beginning to demonstrate his natural—and, given the musical gifts on both sides of his family, doubtless inherited—talent for it. Issued a flügelhorn, which is similar to a trumpet, but with a softer, warmer tone (some of his jazz idols, like Chuck Mangione and Red Rodney, often played it), Clint easily mastered its rudiments, practiced some with the band, but apparently never played it publicly—“you know, everybody looked down on the band when we were kids, and I was a big cat,” meaning he would be painfully visible marching along with his slightly exotic instrument.
    His largest interest, very simply, lay in not