Free Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel

the system. It was just amazing to see somebody do anything with that kind of confidence. He wasn’t arrogant or anything, he was just a guy standing there in a pinstripe suit, and when he started playing it was like, I guess, some sort of free painter, who’d just jump right in there and start slapping paint up there, a totally unplanned deal.” It was, perhaps, the sheer cool of Bird’s manner that got to him. “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.” More important, he went away thinking, It would be wonderful to have that kind of confidence doing something—anything—in life.
    In his superb essay on Charlie Parker, Ralph Ellison makes a couple of apposite points. One is that when he was creating his legend, Parker meant more to young white jazz aficionados than he did to blacks. “They never heard of him,” Art Blakey, the drummer, said of the black audience. Ellison writes: “Parker operated in the underworld of American culture … where contemporary civilized values and hypocrisies are challenged by the Dionysian urges of a between-wars youth born to prosperity, conditioned by the threat of world destruction, and inspired—when not seeking total anarchy—by a need to bring social reality and our social pretensions into a more meaningful balance.”
    “Dionysian” is obviously too large a term to apply to the activities and interests of the young Clint Eastwood, and it is difficult to see himas prosperous or much concerned about the threat of the atomic bomb, either. But his interest in modern jazz generally, Parker specifically, does coincide with his parents’ return to middle-class status and with his rejection of a middle-class high school in favor of a working-class institution, certainly an attempt on his part to rebalance “social reality” and “social pretensions” as he experienced them. One can read into his passionate interest in the new music a kind of rebellion—or at least a determination to go his own way—that, though masked and politely stated, was quite determined, if narrowly focused. There is no evidence that the other interests that would soon define the fifties hipster—action painting, for example, or coffeehouse poetry—ever caught his eye. Even Stanislavskian acting, though he would eventually embrace some of its techniques, does not seem to have excited the kind of enthusiasm in him that it did in others of his generation. When he talks about actors he admired, figures like Brando and Clift do not figure heavily in his conversation.
    Whether or not the modern jazzmen he idolized—instinctive postmodernists that they were—helped shape his own comparable instincts is hard to say. But they certainly had something to do with the way he would eventually present himself as an actor. Ellison observes that this younger generation of musicians consciously and angrily rejected the jubilant showmanship of Louis Armstrong and the other “hot” jazzmen. To them, this was Uncle Tomming, and it also led them to reject—wrongly, as Ellison says—the genius of Armstrong’s playing, and downgrade his historical significance. On the bandstands, the result was, as he puts it, “a grim comedy of racial manners; with the musicians employing a calculated surliness and rudeness, treating the audience very much as many white merchants in poor Negro neighborhoods treat their customers and the white audiences were shocked at first, but learned quickly to accept such treatment as evidence of ‘artistic’ temperament.… Today [Ellison was writing in 1962] the white audience expects the rudeness as part of the entertainment.” Or, if not that, then certainly an air of effortlessness, a feeling that the players are just casually knocking off their sometimes-astonishing effects.
    Clint is not surly or rude as an actor, but his cool,