American Rebel The Life of Clint Eastwood

by Eliot, Marc

• ISBN13: 9780307336897
• ISBN10: 0307336891
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-07
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

Spanning decades, "American Rebel" covers the best of Eastwood's oeuvre, films that have fast become American classics: "Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby," and "Gran Torino."

Author Biography

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 sixties, his Phil Ochs biography, 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 Penthouse, L.A. Weekly, and California Magazine. He divides his time among New York City, Woodstock, Los Angeles, and the Far East.

Excerpts

The 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 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, Clinton Jr. was born. The boy weighed a whopping eleven pounds, six ounces, and was nicknamed "Samson" by all the nurses at San Francisco' 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 parents 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 little batter