Free Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel Page A

by far the most obvious quality of his work, his powerful desire—amounting almost to a morality—not to woo the audience, his apparent indifference to their rejections, must be traced to the modern-jazz manner. So must his profound desire not to make what he does look costly to him, emotionally or intellectually. He says: “Good acting, like good anything, doesn’t look like there’s a lot of effort with it, you know. If a person believes, ‘Hey, Icould do that, ’cause I’ve felt that emotion,’ then that’s good. I’m sure a lot of people sat there years ago and watched Nat King Cole [and] said, ‘Hey, I can sing like that—he’s not really doing anything.’ Or great musicians, you say, ‘What the hell, they’re not really doing anything.’ ” One could argue, as well, that some of his hallmarks as a director—his preference for letting actors riff on a theme, for example, or his characteristic lighting, which is often like that of a jazz club, general darkness with a few pinpricks of light illuminating the scene’s principals—have their roots in jazz.
    All of that, of course, was far ahead in a future entirely unimaginable to him in 1946. What he did know without doubt, as he listened to Parker for the first time, was that this music spoke to him with an intensity that nothing else ever had: “I left there thinking, I gotta know more about that. So I started buying records, and listening to them and following him. I caught him at a couple of clubs in later years and we even drove down and saw him when he was playing in southern California.”
    The richer and more various Los Angeles jazz scene was something Clint and his crowd regularly sampled in their high-school years, and after graduation, too. Typically, a bunch of kids would pile into a car and make the long drive south for weekends of music. They might catch Kid Ory one night at the Beverly Cavern, just to get in touch with the classic New Orleans manner, then hit the Oasis to hear something newer, or the Haig, near the Ambassador Hotel downtown, or the string of clubs lining Central Avenue, in those days the principal thoroughfare of Los Angeles’s principal black neighborhood. It was the heart of a jazz scene that began flourishing during World War II when the booming defense industry, working around the clock, had turned L.A. into an all-night town, with workers—a larger percentage than ever before being blacks—looking for off-hour entertainment.
    By the time Clint and his buddies were hitting Los Angeles, you might have heard the new music all over town, though not without difficulties. The Los Angeles police, many of its officers unregenerate rednecks from the South, would often stop cars bearing racially mixed groups heading for a jazz club in Hollywood, and it is said that their hatred of the integrated audiences for music in the Central Avenue clubs played a key role in the avenue’s precipitate decline in the 1950s. It simply became too inaccessible for a significant segment of the audience.
    Still, if you were lucky, there were great musicians to be heard here, and on one of these trips south Clint had his first direct contact with haute Hollywood. He and some of his pals were tooling along SepulvedaBoulevard, skirting the western boundary of Bel-Air, when they were confronted by a small herd of horses, “right on the street, bopping all over the place.” The kids stopped, jumped out of the car and shooed them up a little canyon where they found an open gate. They got the animals into the corral and secured it, by which time their owner appeared—“very appreciative, very friendly.” They chatted awhile, and then the kids took off. One of them was excited—“You know who that was? That was Howard Hawks, the famous moviemaker!” Clint was impressed: “I was no cineast, but I knew who Howard Hawks was”—the director of
Sergeant York
and countless other action movies treasured by young men of his generation because