The Outlaw Josey Wales played by Clint Eastwood 1976
The Sunday Times review by Bee Wilson
You might not know it to look at him, but Clint Eastwood likes ice cream. It was the great ice-cream issue that drove him into politics in 1985 when his hometown of Carmel in California passed a law forbidding the storefront sale of ice-cream cones. Eastwood successfully ran for mayor and duly reversed the anti-ice-cream law.
In this uninspired biography, Marc Eliot argues that Eastwood’s time as mayor of Carmel, from 1986 to 1988, is proof of the blurring of “the lines between his roles and his real life”. Eliot’s thesis is that both in real life and on screen this Hollywood veteran has been “an American rebel”. “Perhaps more than for any other Hollywood star,” he writes, in a typical piece of overwrought prose, “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 persona.”
Really? Almost all the details of Eastwood’s life that emerge from this book suggest the opposite: that Eastwood’s brutally rebellious screen persona was in contrast to his rather grumpy and conventional character in real life. The films make us believe that his magnificent squinting frown is a sign of his manly nihilism: we are meant to think he is frowning because he is staring into the abyss. This is the scowl of the Man with No Name from his early spaghetti westerns; or of the rule-breaking cop, Dirty Harry, pointing a gun in a man’s face and asking him if he feels lucky — “Well, do ya, punk?” In real life, however, the things that made Eastwood frown were rather less dramatic: palimony suits, illegitimate children, petty planning disputes, annoying film critics and a man’s right to eat ice cream in public.
Eastwood, writes Eliot, was the child of “two good-looking California kids”. He was born in 1930 during the depression, and his father, Clinton Sr, travelled around taking whatever dead-end jobs he could find: selling fridges, working in a gas station. Eastwood inherited his looks and drifting temperament. After a stint in the army (where he was a swimming instructor, fond of wearing tiny trunks to attract girls), he, too, became a gas-station attendant. But in 1954, he discovered acting and was signed by Universal Studios. A big television part came in 1958 with the serial Rawhide, where, Eliot says, Eastwood played a “mostly silent” but ridiculously handsome cowboy, with “a fast gun and faster fists”. He has been playing variants of the same part ever since.
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For more than 50 years, Eastwood has managed to parlay a career of astonishing longevity and success, both as an actor and a director. With a terrific run of films over the past decade, including Gran Torino, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima and Mystic River, his cachet is probably higher now than it ever has been. The film critic David Thomson has described Eastwood as “modern royalty” among the “few Americans admired and respected at home and abroad, without qualification or irony”.
Eliot gives a sense of just how hard Eastwood has fought to keep this pre-eminence. He has never been averse to the trappings of stardom, despite his carefully cultivated image as a down-home kinda guy who drives to work in a pickup. For a couple of his early films, he asked to be part paid in Ferraris. He was “never a big sharer of anything — money, credits, stardom”. He has usually been careful to ensure that his films were cast with “lesser names than himself”. In 1977, Warner studios wanted to put Barbra Streisand opposite him in the latest Dirty Harry film. He objected, on the absurd grounds that she was too old (at 35 to his 47). As usual, Eastwood got his way and the studio cast Sondra Locke, his then girlfriend. Locke, who later sued Eastwood for palimony when the relationship soured, was the latest in a dizzying number of women in his life (although he is now happily married to his second wife, Dina Ruiz, who shares his love of pets, apparently). When he was with his first wife he described himself as a “married bachelor”, which essentially meant he could sleep with anyone he felt like, whenever he wanted. His affairs resulted in at least four children (in addition to the three he had in wedlock), including two born to flight attendant Jacklyn Reeves, during the same period that he was seeing Locke.
His 1971 film Play Misty for Me depicts his character, a DJ, as the victim of an obsessive female fan. In order to stay heroic on screen, he had to present himself as the pursued rather than the pursuer. But the jilted Locke painted him as a far less attractive figure: a philanderer obsessed with his figure, snacking on boiled potatoes and taking vast doses of vitamins, including “so much carotene that his hands turned orange”.
None of this can detract, though, from Eastwood’s glorious presence on screen. When you see him ride into town, squinting into the sunlight, you forget about the girlfriends and the ice cream. Eliot’s attempt to portray the life and the roles as of a piece is futile and misconceived. This is cinema, the world of make-believe, where Eastwood rules supreme.
Hi, Interesting, did you plan to continue this article?
BernieR
I will:)