American Rebel by Marc Eliot - Excerpt

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ALSO BY MARC ELIOT
Reagan: The Hollywood Years
Jimmy Stewart: A Biography
Cary Grant: A Biography
Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History

of America’s Favorite Borough
Death of a Rebel: Starring Phil Ochs

and a Small Circle of Friends
Down Thunder Road: The Making

of Bruce Springsteen
Roconomics: The Money Behind the Music
Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince
The Whole Truth
To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles
Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture,

and Politics at the Crossroads of the World
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amer
THE LIFE OF CLINT EASTWOOD
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iCan
rebEl
MARC ELIOT
Harmony Books • New York

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Copyright © 2009 by Rebel Road, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-307-33688-0
Printed in the United States of America
DESIGN BY ELINA D . NUDELMAN
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
www.HarmonyBooks.com
To purchase a copy of
American Rebel

visit one of these online retailers:

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CONTENT S
introduction 1
part i: FROM AIMLESS TO ACTOR 9
part ii: FROM ACTOR TO AUTEUR 185
part iii: FROM AUTEUR TO OSCAR 257
sources 333
notes 335
clint eastwood complete filmography,

including television 349
author’s note and acknowledgments 363
index 369
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INTRODUCTION
I grew up watching movies in an era when there wasn’t even tele-

vision, nothing else even to listen to. I was shaped by John Ford,
Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, those were the guys, plus a ton
of other people we don’t know the names of who made “B” movies.
—Clint Eastwood
C lint Eastwood stands tall among the most popular and endur-
ing stars Hollywood has ever produced. He has been making movies
for more than fifty years, ranging from small, meaningless, and for-
gettable parts as a Universal Studios contract player to acting in, as
well as producing and directing, many Oscar-caliber blockbusters that
will one day, sooner rather than later, take their place among the best-
loved American movies.
Early in his career, Clint spent seven and a half years costarring in
TV’s Rawhide, and his Rowdy Yates became one of the most popular
TV cowboys of the late 1950s and early 1960s.* By the time Rawhide
ended its eight-season run he had also become an international movie
star, following his appearance in three wildly popular spaghetti west-
erns made and distributed throughout Europe; when they were finally
released in America, they made him a big-screen star in the States as
well. For the next quarter-century Clint appeared in dozens of enter-
taining movies that made him a household name anywhere in the
world that films could be seen. He was undoubtedly a crowd-pleaser,
but at the time the Hollywood elite considered his movies too genre-
heavy to be Oscar-worthy.
Then in 1992 Clint produced, directed, and starred in Unforgiven,
a western to (literally) end all westerns, made by his own production
company, Malpaso, that he had created to operate as a ministudio in
the service of its resident star. Unforgiven won four Academy Awards,
including two for Clint (one for Best Director and one for Best Pic-
ture), and the Midas-touch Oscar-style was suddenly his; nearly every-
thing he made for the next fifteen years was deemed award- or
*The show ran eight seasons, with only twenty-two episodes in its debut year as a mid-
season replacement. The show made thirteen episodes in its final season. Seasons two
through seven had full-season commitments.
marc eliot
nomination-worthy by the Academy, including Million Dollar Baby,

Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Changeling.
Throughout Hollywood’s post-studio era, the first rule of filmmaking
has been that youth equals box office—young people go out to the
movies, older audiences stay home and watch them on cable and
DVD. It is, therefore, even more remarkable that he made all of these
movies past the age of sixty.
p erhaps more than for any other Hollywood star, the double helix
that is Clint’s creative and real-life DNA is so intertwined it is nearly
impossible to separate the off-screen person from the on-screen per-
sona. The two feed off each other so thoroughly, it is often difficult
to tell where the lives of the characters in his movies end and the life
of the man playing them begins.
In the movies that he has thus far acted in, produced, or directed,
in various combinations wearing one or more of these hats, three
essential Clint Eastwood screen personae continually reappear. The
first is the mysterious man without a past who is resolute in his lone-
ness, the Man with No Name, who appeared in the three Sergio
Leone westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly—then reappeared slightly altered in Hang ’Em
High and The Outlaw Josey Wales, and took several other guises and
variations all the way through to Unforgiven. The second persona is
“Dirty” Harry Callahan, whose essentially nihilistic loner personality
continually reemerges up to and including Gran Torino. And finally,
there is the good-natured redneck, who uses his fists the way a more
thoughtful person uses words and who makes his first appearance as
Philo Beddoe in Every Which Way but Loose and returns again and again
on the way to Pink Cadillac.
All three characters in their various incarnations are viscerally con-
nected to the real-life Clint. All three are quintessential loners, unlike
any other in the canon of American motion pictures. The other cin-
ematic “men alone” who most immediately come to mind are not
really loners at all—that is to say, they are loners Hollywood style,
buffered with the idealized images of the actors who played them.
Probably mainstream films’ greatest “loner” is Gary Cooper as the
isolated sheriff in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Yes, Will Kane
American Rebel
heroically stands alone to face his enemies, but in truth he is not alone
at all, as in the end he relies on the love of his wife, and her reluctant
use of a gun that saves his life; and when all the fighting has ended,
the two of them ride off together into the sunset. Another who comes
to mind is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, the neutral American
caught in the crosswinds of World War II in Michael Curtiz’s
Casablanca (1942). He proudly boasts that “I stick my neck out for
nobody” and then does precisely that for the woman he loves, in this
case Ingrid Bergman, in an act so unselfishly noble that the very idea
that he was ever a loner is so absurd it becomes laughable. James Bond
appears to be the ultimate loner, but we now know that he lost his one
true love early on and both seethes with revenge and longs with lust,
no longer for any single woman but, apparently, all of womankind.
On a nobler plane, Charlton Heston in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten
Commandments (1956) is isolated from his family, his people, his land,
and his heritage. Yet he still needs someone to lean on, in this case the
Almighty himself, who provides the love, guidance, and moral suste-
nance that establish quite profoundly that even Moses did not go it
alone.
Clint’s movie characters need nothing and no one more than or
beyond themselves. Whether he is surrounded by vicious killers or
predatory women (oftentimes one and the same), faceless adversaries
(as opposed to the Man with No Name), by serial man-hunters pur-
sued and ultimately defeated by someone dirtier (and therefore
stronger) than they are, or even by buddy-buddy orangutans, the Man
with No Name, Dirty Harry, and Philo Beddoe all arrive alone at the
start and leave alone at the end. They rarely, if ever, win the heart of
any woman because they almost never pursue women. On the few
occasions when a Clint character reluctantly finds himself to be
involved with one, the relationship remains distant, cynical, unro-
mantic, and for the most part nonintimate; the so-called love story is
always the least interesting part of any Clint Eastwood movie. His
loners are unable, unwilling, and therefore unavailable to fulfill the
wishes of those men or women who want to be with him, but not of
those in the audience who dream of being like him. With this brand
of character, Clint delivered something original and provocative to
American motion pictures.
marc eliot
In real life, too, Clint has frequently been described as something

of a loner, even in his early and undistinguished film appearances, even
when married and playing the role of the happy Hollywood husband.
All through his first marriage’s thirty-one years,* there were loud whis-
pers that he was not the family man he appeared to be but a lone-wolf
womanizer—a role certainly not unique in a town that sees woman-
izing as something glamorous, even heroic, and where the locker-
room lingo of beer-boosted braggadocio is often raised to the level of
bad poetry. Perhaps the label stuck harder to him because of how
closely his few on-screen romances overlapped with his many real-life
ones. Clint’s off-screen life has always been filled with women, some
might say too many, others might say none really at all. While mar-
ried to Maggie Johnson, he fathered a child out of wedlock, the first
of four,† and took numerous lovers. Several of them were costars, in
affairs that often began when production on the film commenced and
ended after the final shot was completed. Relatively late in his game,
at age sixty-six, he finally married, for only the second time, twelve
years after his divorce from Maggie became finalized, to a woman
thirty-five years younger than himself, this time finding some mea-
sure of peace and happiness.
In his salad days he hung out in the seedy bars in and around San
Francisco, drinking, playing jazz on house pianos, and in the vernac-
ular of that time and those places, kicking ass in barroom brawls,
whose circumstances and resolutions would later be reprised in many
of his films. A tough guy in real life, Clint easily and realistically played
the tough guy on film, someone who usually settles disputes with a
knock-down, drag-out brawl or, as in A Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry,
and many others, with cinema’s classic metaphorical extension of the
fistfight, the final, decisive shoot-out.
Perhaps even more compelling than any of his movie roles (but
what also makes them so compelling) is how Clint the real-life loner
*Clint and Maggie Johnson, his first wife, were married in 1953, separated in 1978, and
divorced in 1984.
†One with Roxanne Tunis, one with Frances Fisher, and two with Jacelyn Reeves. His
total of seven children are Kimber Eastwood (born June 17, 1964), Kyle Eastwood (born
May 19, 1968), Alison Eastwood (born May 22, 1972), Scott Eastwood (born March 21,
1986), Kathryn Eastwood (born February 2, 1988), Francesca Fisher-Eastwood (born
August 7, 1993), and Morgan Eastwood (born December 12, 1996).
American Rebel
struggled to find his way out of his own emotional wilderness. He was
a child of the Depression, whose parents wandered from town to town
to try to make ends meet. Not long after he finished high school, he
was drafted into the army and fell in with a bunch of other tough
young would-be actors, all of whom grew up in or near Southern Cal-
ifornia and quickly discovered they had what it took—rugged good
looks—to make easier money as contract players, in the desperate
declining days of studio-dominated moviemaking, than they could
pumping gas.
After his discharge he followed their lead, but his emerging talent
quickly separated him from the two he became closest to—Martin
Milner and David Janssen—and the rest of the pack. Milner’s undis-
tinguished career in movies led to an even less distinguished, if steady,
one on television with Route 66 (1960–64) and Adam-12 (1968–75);
Janssen briefly hit pay dirt on TV as Dr. Richard Kimble in the mid-
1960s (1963–67), only to see his post-Fugitive career devolve into
increasingly mediocre work. But Clint used the time he spent on TV
as a film school. Amid tired and bored union men moving wagon trains
onto and off of Universal’s back lot, he studied everybody and every-
thing and learned not only how to make movies (Rawhide, a one-hour
TV western series, cranked out a minimovie every week, thirty-nine
weeks a year) but how to make them fast and cheap, telling a concise
and comprehensible story, often the same one over and over with
slight variations; these stories had a logical beginning, an action-filled
middle, and a morally uplifting, perfectly plot-resolved end.
Years later, after establishing himself as a bankable star on the big
screen, Clint finally got the chance to direct. Early on he had felt that
that was where the real action was in movies, that it was ultimately bet-
ter to play God than to play parts. Along the way to achieving that
goal, he met Don Siegel, who would direct him in five films, Coogan’s
Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), The Beguiled (1971),
Dirty Harry (1971), and Escape from Alcatraz (1979). These films
greatly influenced Clint’s own early directorial style, especially their
collective belief in human nobility as the ultimate redemptive force.
Clint would, however, eventually shrug off nobility and redemption
as his own style continued to develop and he realized these themes
were not just overly derivative, but the least interesting aspect of what
he wanted to put on film—less-plot-dependent movies that were, in
marc eliot
truth, feature-length, complex character studies of the leads he played,

men who were aloof, estranged (from women and from the larger
social order), detached, and embittered, up to and including Clint’s
portrayal of Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, a dark and chilling film
where self-forgiveness and relief come in the form of self-sacrifice, in
a single overwhelming (and shocking) attempt to connect in order to
redeem another human being. As a showcase for his directorial style
and his maturation as an actor—he was seventy-eight when he made
it—Gran Torino, with no female romantic lead, no comic relief, and
until the end, no obviously redemptive qualities in its leading charac-
ter, perfectly caps the arc of Clint’s unique acting and directing style
and his auteur’s quest to celebrate the loner as the ultimate hero, even
(or especially) into old age. By doing so Clint demonstrated, once
again, how unlike any other contemporary filmmaker or film actor he
always had been.
Always unwilling to talk about his films as anything but entertain-
ments, and even less willing to discuss his private life beyond deliver-
ing a certain set of rote answers to the press when promoting his latest
film, the clues to who he is and what he does are, nevertheless, found
not only in the content of the movies he makes but also within the con-
text of the life he has led, beyond the PR pale, indeed in the symbi-
otic relationship between the two. He is a man who makes his living
making the movies that in turn make the man. He is an American
artist whose films are at once great entertainments and cautionary
tales, and, as all great movies are, both windows and mirrors. They
offer glimpses into his private contemplations even as they reflect uni-
versal truths to audiences everywhere.
What follows, then, is an examination of Clint Eastwood, the man
he is and the artist he became, seen through the window of his real life
and reflected again in some of the most offbeat, disturbing, provoca-
tive, and entertaining American films ever made.
PA RT I
From Aimless
to Actor
one
My father always told me you don’t get anything for nothing, and
although I was always rebelling, I never rebelled against that.
—Clint Eastwood
PREVIOUS PAGE: A young Clint Eastwood © Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis
T he boy who would one day become famous for playing the Man
with No Name did not have a well-defined self-image or a strong role
model to follow growing up. In his formative years his father, forever
in search of a steady job during the Great Depression, developed a
deceptive California suntan, the mark of a hardworking outdoor
laborer trying to avoid poverty rather than a man of sun-worshipping
leisure and privilege.
Clinton and Francesca Ruth (sometimes recorded as Margaret
Ruth, although she only used Ruth as her given name) were two
good-looking California kids who met while attending Piedmont
High School in Oakland. They dated each other and married young,
before the market crashed, and took with it their romantic dream of
the good life. Ruth’s family was Dutch-Irish and Mormon with a
long line of physical laborers, including pickup fighters, lumberjacks,
sawmill operators, and an occasional local politician. She graduated
from Anna Head School in Berkeley, where she had been transferred
to from Piedmont just before her senior year—a move that may have
been prompted by her parents’ concern over an intense relationship
she had begun with her high school sweetheart, Clinton Eastwood.
Clinton was a popular, well-liked boy with strong American roots;
his ancestors were pre–Revolutionary War Presbyterian farmers and
men who sold goods by traveling from town to town, their carts
bearing inventory samples such as women’s underwear and soap used
to elicit orders from their customers. In the days before mail-order
catalogs, most goods were sold this way outside the big American
cities.
Despite Ruth’s parents’ attempts to put some distance between
her and the economically deficient Clinton, upon graduating from
high school they were married, on June 5, 1927, in a ceremony held
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marc eliot
at Piedmont’s interdenominational church. Both newlyweds were

lucky enough to find enough work to keep them going during the
first years of their marriage. Ruth eventually landed a job as an
accountant for an insurance company, and Clinton found one as a
cashier. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, they clung
to these jobs tenaciously.
Almost three years after their marriage, on May 31, 1930, Clin-
ton Jr. was born. The boy weighed a whopping eleven pounds, six
ounces, and was nicknamed “Samson” by all the nurses at San Fran-
cisco’s St. Francis Hospital.
At about this time Clinton Sr. managed to land a job selling stocks
and bonds. At a time when stocks and bonds had been rendered all but
worthless, Clinton was following the family tradition; he was now a
glorified cart-man, weaving from town to town looking for those few
elusive customers with enough cash to invest in their own future and
therefore in his. That he got by at all was likely due to his natural
charm and good looks.
But even those could only get him so far, and soon Clinton was
selling refrigeration products for the East Bay Company, a position
whose long-range prospects were little better than those of a seller
of stocks and bonds. People had to have enough money to buy food
before they could invest in ways to keep it cold. So in 1934, after the
birth of their second child, a girl they named Jeanne, Clinton took to
a more itinerant life, moving the family by car to wherever he could
find pickup work. In a couple of his earliest recollections, Clint later
said of those times:
Well, those were the thirties and jobs were hard to come by. My par-
ents and my sister and myself just had to move around to get jobs. I
remember we moved from Sacramento to Pacific Palisades just [so my
father could work] as a gas station attendant. It was the only job open.
Everybody was in a trailer, one with a single wheel on one end, and the
car, and we were living in a real old place out in the sticks . . .
My father was big on basic courtesies toward women. The one time I
ever got snotty with my mother when he was around, he left me a lit-
tle battered.
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American Rebel
The attendant job was at a Standard Oil station on Sunset Boule-

vard and Pacific Coast Highway, near a stretch of Malibu beach that
was rapidly becoming the suburb of choice for the nouveau riche of
the Hollywood film industry—one of the few businesses that actually
benefited from the Depression. Films were both cheap and fanciful,
the ultimate escape for those who could not afford to live out the
American dream themselves but loved watching others do it for them
on-screen. Those who lived in this part of town drove big cars that
used a lot of gas, so Clinton had plenty of work. For the time being
it was a good enough living if not exactly a great life. From the money
he made he was able to rent a small house in the lush, hilly Pacific
Palisades.
On his off days Clinton and Ruth took their children to one of the
public beaches adjacent to Malibu for an afternoon of sun and swim-
ming. One day Clinton, who was an excellent swimmer, dove into a
wave with Clint sitting in the saddle of his shoulders. Big Clint came
back up but little Clint didn’t. After a few heart-stopping moments
Ruth saw her boy’s foot sticking up and bobbing in the water. She
screamed. With some help from alert nearby swimmers, Clinton was
able to pull him up. Afterward Ruth sat in the cool muddy turf with
her little Clint and splashed him playfully to make sure he wouldn’t
become afraid of the surf.
A year later, in 1935, the gas station job dried up, and the East-
woods were once more on the move. They gave up the house in Pacific
Palisades and took a smaller one for less rent in Hollywood, a few
miles farther inland. Soon afterward they swung back north to Red-
ding, then to Sacramento, then to the Glenview section of the East
Bay of San Francisco. Finally they settled back down in the Oakland-
Piedmont area, where Clinton worked a series of dead-end jobs. Clint,
by now, had attended several schools, necessitated by the family’s con-
tinual relocations. “I can’t remember how many schools I went to,” he
later recalled. “I do remember we moved so much that I made very few
friends.” In 1939, after their long loop through the tough times of
California, the family settled long enough for young Clint, now nine,
to enroll in Piedmont Junior High School.
Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
America’s entry into World War II brought new defense-driven work.
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marc eliot
Clinton managed to secure a draft-exempt job in the shipyards with

Bethlehem Steel, and Ruth found day work at the nearby IBM center.
On the brink of adolescence, six-foot Clint was the tallest boy in
his class; he would reach his full height, six four, by the time he
graduated from high school. He was also, by all accounts, one of the
best-looking students. He had inherited his father’s strong, broad
shoulders, rugged good looks, and seductive half-closed eyes. He had
a finely shaped, aristocratically turned-up nose and a thick bush of
brown hair that fell in a curly dip over his forehead. The look was
tough, but he was shy, likely the product of his family’s vagabond
journey through the Depression years. Being left-handed also made
him feel like an outsider, as his teachers forced him to use his right
hand.
He enjoyed playing high school sports—his height made it easy
for him to excel at basketball—but that did little for his social skills.
His teachers warned his parents that he had to be brought out of his
shell if he was to make something of himself. One of them, Gertrude
Falk, who taught English, had the class put on a one-act play and cast
a reluctant young Clint in the lead. He was less than thrilled.
I remember Gertrude Falk very well. It was the part of a backward

youth, and I think she thought it was perfect casting . . . she made up
her mind that I was going to play the lead and it was disastrous. I wanted
to go out for athletics; doing plays was not considered the thing to do
at that stage of life—especially not presenting them before the entire
senior high school, which is what she made us do. We muffed a lot of
lines. I swore [at the time] that that was the end of my acting career.
Clint also didn’t do well academically, and his schoolmates and

teachers considered him something of a “dummy.” Besides sports, the
only other subject that held any interest for him was music—not the
kind of big-band sound that was popular with the older kids, but jazz.
He liked to play it on the piano, something that he correctly believed
enhanced his attractiveness to girls. He even learned the current pop
tunes that he had no use for but that made them flock around him.
When I sat down at the piano at a party, the girls would come around.
I could play a few numbers. I learned a few off listening to records
16
American Rebel
and things that were popular at that era. I thought this was all right,
so I went home and practiced . . . I would lie about my age and go to
Hambone Kelly’s. I’d stand in the back and listen to Lu Watters and
Turk Murphy play New Orleans jazz . . . I grew up listening to Ella
Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole . . . Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Thelonious
Monk, Erroll Garner.
And he loved cars. For $25 Clint’s father bought him a beat-up
1932 Chevy to help him keep his paper route job. Clint nicknamed it
“the Bathtub” because of its missing top. Its best accessory was, of
course, the girls. The Chevy, which didn’t last very long, was only
the first of a long line of his beat-up cars. To pay for them all and the
gas and repairs, Clint took extra after-school jobs on top of his paper
route. He worked at the local grocery and as a caddy at the golf course;
he baled hay on a farm in nearby Yreka, cut timber near Paradise, and
was a seasonal forest firefighter. All these jobs were purely physical,
the type of work he could forget about as soon as he punched out. But
they were time consuming and exhausting, even for a young and
strong teenage boy. They left him even less time for his studies at
Piedmont High, and when his parents and school authorities realized
he wasn’t going to graduate with a regular academic degree, he trans-
ferred to the Oakland Technical High School, a vocational training
institute where he would specialize in aircraft maintenance. This
would give him his best chance, upon graduation, to attend the Uni-
versity of California, which had an affiliated program with the high
school, or to land a well-paying job.
After school Clint hung with a crowd of tough-looking teens decked
out in leather and T-shirts, with greased-back long hair. All strong,
tall, and lean, they tucked cigarettes behind their ears and held bottles
of beer in one hand while they drove, usually to the local dives where
the hottest girls hung out. And they were all into jazz. Most often they
found themselves at the Omar, a pizza and beer dive in downtown Oak-
land where Clint liked to play jazz on a beat-up old piano in the cor-
ner. Whenever he could, he would go to hear Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman
Hawkins, Flip Phillips, Lester Young, or Charlie Parker. Sometimes
they played alone in the small dark clubs that dotted the streets of Oak-
land; sometimes they performed together at the Shrine Auditorium,
17
marc eliot
where the heavily mixed crowd regularly gathered to see and hear
them.
It was Parker, more than all the others, who opened his eyes to the
new music’s emotional power. As Clint later told Richard Schickel,
“I’d never seen a musician play with such confidence. There was no
show business to it in those days, and this guy just stood and played,
and I thought, God, what an amazing, expressive thing.” His cool,
aloof sound held great appeal for Clint.
He was nineteen when he finally graduated from Oakland Tech in
the spring of 1949. By then, he had grown tired of school and often
cut classes to hang out with boys, among whom he was the only one
still in school.
Meanwhile the war’s end had brought new prosperity, especially

along the rapidly growing Pacific coast, where jobs were plentiful,
wages generous, and mobility upward. Clinton Sr. found work with
the California Container Corporation, was quickly caught up in the
flow of automatic promotions, and soon was offered a major mana-
gerial post in the company’s main plant, in Seattle. Together he and
Ruth and fourteen-year-old Jeanne packed up the house and loaded
the car for the drive to Seattle.
Clint didn’t want to go, and because he had graduated, he said he
didn’t have to. Harry Pendleton’s parents agreed to let him stay with
them for a while. Harry and Clint had been friends since junior high
school and long hung with the same crowd. With his family in Seat-
tle, his education finished, and no clear plan for the future, Clint was,
in his own words, “really adrift.” He found a job on the night shift at
Bethlehem Steel, tending the blast furnaces, then moved to the day
shift at Boeing Aircraft. For the next two years these hard and charm-
less jobs kept him in cars, girls, and music, allowing him to roam aim-
lessly through his early twenties unfocused and unconcerned, the
perfect West Coast rebel without a care.
Then, in 1950, border hostilities broke out in Korea, and the
United States began a massive buildup of forces in Seoul. Knowing his
A1 military status made him a prime target for the draft, Clint’s
unlikely next goal was to go back to college, to get a student exemp-
tion. He moved up to Seattle and in with his parents to enroll at Seat-
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American Rebel
tle University. He figured he might major in music, since nothing else

held any appeal. But his grades weren’t good enough, and he was told
he’d have to attend junior college as a nonmatriculated, part-time stu-
dent, which would not be enough to earn him the draft exemption. He
then moved back to Oakland and made a last-ditch personal appeal to
his local draft board, to convince them he had every intention of
attending college full time.
The board took him the following month.
In the spring of 1951, he spent his last free nights getting drunk and
listening to music at the local dives, before reporting, hung over and
hell-bent, for basic training at Fort Ord, near the Monterey Peninsula.
As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need any training. What could
the army teach him that at the age of twenty he didn’t already know?
Plenty, as it turned out, although not at all in the ways he might
have expected.
19
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARC ELIOT is the New York Times bestselling author of

more than a dozen books on popular culture, among them the
highly acclaimed biographies Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart;
the award-winning Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince; Down
42nd Street; what many consider the best book about the six-
ties, his biography of Phil Ochs, Death of a Rebel; Take It from
Me (with Erin Brockovich); Down Thunder Road: The Making
of Bruce Springsteen; To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles;
and Reagan: The Hollywood Years. He has written on the media
and pop culture for numerous publications, including Pent-
house, L.A. Weekly, and California Magazine. He divides his time
among New York City; Woodstock, New York; Los Angeles;
and the Far East.
Visit the author at www.MarcEliot.net.
To purchase a copy of
American Rebel

visit one of these online retailers:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Borders

IndieBound

Powell’s Books

Random House

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qxp 8/18/09 10:50 AM Page iii

ALSO BY MARC ELIOT

Reagan: The Hollywood Years

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography

Cary Grant: A Biography

Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History

Death of a Rebel: Starring Phil Ochs

Down Thunder Road: The Making

Roconomics: The Money Behind the Music

Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince

The Whole Truth

To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles

Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture,

Harmony Books • New York

Copyright © 2009 by Rebel Road, Inc.

part i: FROM AIMLESS TO ACTOR 9

part ii: FROM ACTOR TO AUTEUR 185

part iii: FROM AUTEUR TO OSCAR 257

clint eastwood complete filmography,

author’s note and acknowledgments 363

I grew up watching movies in an era when there wasn’t even tele-

nomination-worthy by the Academy, including Million Dollar Baby,

In real life, too, Clint has frequently been described as something

truth, feature-length, complex character studies of the leads he played,

PREVIOUS PAGE: A young Clint Eastwood © Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

at Piedmont’s interdenominational church. Both newlyweds were

The attendant job was at a Standard Oil station on Sunset Boule-

Clinton managed to secure a draft-exempt job in the shipyards with

I remember Gertrude Falk very well. It was the part of a backward

Clint also didn’t do well academically, and his schoolmates and

Meanwhile the war’s end had brought new prosperity, especially

tle University. He ﬁgured he might major in music, since nothing else

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARC ELIOT is the New York Times bestselling author of

Visit the author at www.MarcEliot.net.

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