Free Clint Eastwood by Richard Schickel Page B

they were about fractious but good-natured males bonding and working together toward some common goal.
    The incident took on significance for Clint in the light of his subsequent career. Aside from a few weeks’ work in William A. Wellman’s last movie, it would remain his only direct early contact with a legendary figure from Hollywood’s Classic Age, a fact he would often publicly regret.
    Movies, of course, were then a dream too absurd to countenance. What’s odd, all things considered, was that music was too. “I felt that I’d never be able to work doing that. To be a professional musician was awesome.” He was, of course, measuring himself against geniuses—Bird and Dizzy and the rest—and it did not occur to him that there might be another level of musical life where, possibly, he could find a comfortable niche. Nevertheless, around the time he first heard Charlie Parker, he began to play in public on a more or less regular basis.
    The Omar Club was a long, narrow bar and restaurant on Broadway in downtown Oakland, across from the Paramount Theater. “It was a kinda crazy place,” as Clint recalls it, with “a bunch of nice guys that ran it.” He and his pals took to hanging out there because management had no objection to minors drinking beer “as long as you had the money to put on the bar. That’s the way it was in Oakland in those days—it wasn’t too strict.” One day Clint started fooling around at the piano, and the owners, liking what they heard, proposed that he play for whatever tips he could make. “So I kinda came down there and played, and then all of a sudden somebody was bringing me in pizzas, and all the guys, all my buddies, we’d be sitting around eating and drinking.”
    He makes it sound cool and casual, just a bunch of kids kicking back, goofing off. And it may have been no more than that for his pals, but not for Clint. For he also admits that “you could channel yourself into an instrument,” let it say for you all the things you couldn’t bring yourself to say out loud. “It was almost like a wall you could hide behind.”Manes, perhaps exaggerating, remembers him playing eight, ten, twelve hours at a stretch, sometimes until three or four in the morning.
    Music became a defining element in his relationships with young women: “I don’t think I was ever attracted to a girl who didn’t like music, who didn’t have some interest in it. We’d spend a lot of time talking about it, listening to the radio and stuff.” Some of them, he admits, may have been faking their passion for jazz. And why not? He was a good-looking kid, combining his slightly dangerous air with an agreeably uninsistent manner. “He’s always been catnip to the women,” his mother says equably, adding that he was never secretive about his relationships; he always brought his serious girlfriends home to meet his parents. Manes, who is a talkative man (Clint used to call him “the Long Goodbye”), says, “The not joining—what it did was create a suction, people wanting to know what made this guy work, what made him tick, what is he all about?”
    It worked for him then, as it would later work for him on-screen. And as it generally is in his movies, so it was with his high-school romances—not many heavy commitments. According to Manes, “There were a bunch of romances, until they got to the point of getting really serious and then he’d be off and running.”
    It is a reasonably accurate description. But Clint was possibly in a little more conflict than he permitted himself to show. Wartime Oakland, with its transient population, had been barraged with propaganda about the dangers of casual sex, and he had absorbed all the official strictures. On the other hand, he was beginning to have some idea of how attractive he was, and an even more urgent sense of how attractive certain members of the opposite sex were to him. In the end, he resolved the issue straightforwardly: “You could sit there