Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel Read Free Book Online Page B

calling attention to himself, not easy for a boy of his height to manage. There were well-intended attempts to “bring him out of his shell,” such as an infamous school play, often recounted in Clint Eastwood profiles and biographies. Their writers have enjoyed the irony of a man who has since become one of the world’s most famous actors forced by a teacher to perform in a skit in an all-school assembly, being deeply embarrassed by the experience and vowing never to repeat it. The story is true, but there is more to it than is usually reported. For anxious though the occasion made him in anticipation, Clint turned the event itself to reasonably good account, achieving a rare moment of recognition in his generally anonymous school career. And also learning, as he would later recognize, another little life lesson.
    He was in the eighth grade when his English teacher, Gertrude Falk (“I remember her name very well,” he says grimly), announced that the class would be doing a one-act play for public consumption and, without auditions, ordered Clint to play the lead. “It was the part of a backward youth, and I think my teacher thought I was perfect casting,” Clint once said. His friend Harry Pendleton and a girl named Shuggie Vincent were assigned to play his father and mother, and a couple of other classmates had walk-ons.
    He went to Miss Falk and tried to get out of the assignment, but she said, “Oh, you’ll be perfect for this,” adding that he and the otherswould be graded on their work. The small consolation she offered was that there would be a prompter off stage in case he forget his lines.
    Rehearsals were not reassuring to Clint, and the night before the performance he and Pendleton seriously discussed the possibility of feigning illness. But “I was too chicken to play sick,” and, besides, “by this time I’d memorized enough of the play so I thought, Well, we’ll go try it and it won’t be that bad.” Miss Falk, however, had one last surprise for her cast. She informed them, just before they reported to the auditorium, that this was to be a joint assembly with the high school; older kids, their contempt at the ready, would be looking on.
    “Jesus, we just about crapped. But there we were, and it was too late; we couldn’t cut or run or go home or whatever. We had to go on with it. So we got out there and started in on the play, and everything started going wrong, of course. Harry was reading a newspaper and he had his script inside, and it dropped out on the floor, and I was tripping over things. But it started getting laughs. Even some of the lines started getting laughs. And all of a sudden, I don’t know what came over me, I felt I’m into this thing and we’re rolling. So we finished it with a minimum amount of screwup.” Indeed, in retrospect, he admits “there were moments that I actually felt that spark for a second.” He also recalls “guys from the senior high school walking up later in the day, and saying, ‘Hey, that was good,’ and I was like, ‘It was?’ ” Miss Falk, too, professed herself satisfied. “That’s fine,” he replied, but “I don’t ever want to do that again, ever in my life.”
    That possibility seemed to him comfortingly remote. Acting was an unimaginably exotic profession, not to be spared another thought, though he liked going to the movies and remembers seeing such signature movies of the time as
Gone with the Wind
and
The Grapes of Wrath
. He has a particularly vivid memory of
Sergeant York
. The legend of the World War I hero, a simple mountaineer who set aside pacifist principles to join the army, and then, at the front, rescued his trapped unit, killing and capturing a vast number of German soldiers in the process, had an understandable appeal for Clint’s father. Here was a man who understood duty and loyalty—and making the best of a bad job—in the same way that Clinton Eastwood Sr. did. “He read everything that there was