Read Clint Eastwood for Free Online Page A

bounce along behind their car. From the backseat the kids would sometimes see shantytowns sheltered under highway overpasses, where less fortunate itinerants found refuge. The shacks, Clint would later recall, were “made out of Prince Albert cans [tobacco tins and the like]—they’d take and mash all these cans and nail them up in some sort of way.” He still sometimes refers to the hoboes they occasionally encountered at rest stops as “knights of the road,” using the old phrase not entirely ironically.
    There were always surprises along the way, sometimes pleasant,sometimes not. On their way to Sacramento, for example, they encountered a stray dog—“half cocker spaniel, half whatever, but it was a terrific dog”—along the road and took it in. Like their cat it would attain great age in the Eastwood household. On the other hand, when they moved into their new home there (it was half of a duplex), they found it “was loaded with mice,” and Clint still remembers, with a slight shudder, “mousetraps going off all night” until the pests were disposed of. (His mother, it should be noted, has no such memory, insisting on the niceness of this little house a few miles out of town, and is a little cross with her son for implying that their digs were ever, even for a moment,
infra
.) Clint also remembers a sizable chicken coop out back and his father and their neighbor remodeling it into a rentable apartment, though they kept one of its former inhabitants, “Hennypen,” as a pet.
    A boy could learn a certain kind of realism from this kind of life, a cool ability to accept things and people, success and failure, as they came, and this lesson, especially valuable to actors in their up-and-down lives, Clint Eastwood, steady in adversity and in fame, thoroughly absorbed.
    In its way this acceptance of life’s changeability supports his habit of restlessness, and his latter-day glamorization of it. How many of his screen characters come from nowhere, heading nowhere? How many of them are men on the loose, questing along open American roads, open American
back
roads? He has homes in Los Angeles and Carmel, a ranch in northern California, a ski lodge in Sun Valley, and when he is not working he is constantly on the move among them. Or he is traveling to promote one of his movies or, in recent years, to accept some award for, or tribute to, his life’s achievements. Or he is trying some golf course he has not played, testing some powder he has not skied.
    In years past, before he settled more confidently into his celebrity, he would often put on a false mustache and glasses, pull a hat down low on his forehead, in order to attend some faraway sneak preview of one of his pictures or enjoy some other public occasion in anonymity. Disguise freed him from the encumbrance of an entourage, and as he told an interviewer in the early seventies, “I come and go like The Whistler on the old radio program,” that is to say, quickly, quietly, anonymously.
    Now that he has his own helicopter and his pilot’s license, it’s even easier to keep moving, and he sometimes feels something like the old pleasures of the road when he’s flying: “You get in and just declare your freedom.… All of a sudden you’re just a number in the sky. Nobody knows who you are unless you happen to be flying by an airport that’s familiar with you and they recognize your call number. But by and largeyou’re out there, going where you want to go, and landing where you want to land.”
    At the time, though, his family’s wayfaring made him miserable. Children are natural conservatives. There is comfort in a circumscribed life—it narrows the wide, strange world down to manageable proportions—and that comfort was denied him. He was always the new kid in class, the new kid in the neighborhood, and it made him angry: “I kept wondering why we were moving all the time. But [my parents would] say, ‘Well, you know, not for you to question why,’