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At Los Angeles Community College (LACC) George Shdanoff was on the teaching staff. Shdanoff was a practitioner of the methods of Michael Chekhov, who in turn was a disciple of the Stanislavsky “Method” school of acting, and his was the class that Clint and Hill sat in on. Unfortunately, muchof what Shdanoff offered was wasted on Clint, who at the time was not all that introspective, an aspect crucial to the Method. Most of the time he just sat there among the more serious acting students who tried to absorb the daily theoretical lectures.
    Meanwhile Clint reconnected with Maggie Johnson, who had relocated to Altadena, about ten miles out of L.A. in the San Bernardino mountains, with a spectacular view. There she had found a job as a manufacturer’s representative for Industria Americana. They started seeing each other on a regular basis, and soon the subject of marriage came up. In early 1950s America “nice” girls only dated “good” men with an implied promise of a ring for their finger. With her solid upper-middle-class background, Maggie’s choice of Clint as the one to fulfill her dreams might seem a bit odd, even more so because, by every account, she was the aggressor. Maggie was pretty, from a good family, and nothing like the easy women he had been with during his army stint. Marriage to the right girl was what he thought he was supposed to do. So he did it.
    On December 19, 1953, Clinton Eastwood Jr. married Maggie Johnson in South Pasadena before a Congregational minister, the Reverend Henry David Grey. After a brief honeymoon in Carmel, Clint resumed his studies and his part-time gig at the filling station and Maggie went back to work. The only difference was that now she could properly move into Clint’s small house on South Oakhurst.
    Soon enough, though, Clint’s new and quite normal life would take a dramatic and unexpected turn that had very little to do with married life but a whole lot to do with, of all things, making movies.
    * A story keeps popping up that has Clint staying a bit longer, getting a Seattle girl pregnant, and borrowing money from his parents to pay for an abortion, all of which hastened his decision to get out of town, but no hard and detailed evidence of it can be found.

THREE

    With Carol Channing in
The First Traveling Saleslady,
1956
    I had a premonition that acting might be a good thing for me. I had done some of it in school and little theaters in Oakland, but I never did take it seriously then. I got serious after a director talked to me about my chances
.
    —Clint Eastwood
     
    N ineteen fifty-four was a pivotal year in American movies. Without question the explosive Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s
On the Waterfront
made a huge mark on the popular mores of American male youth. Brando would win the Best Actor Oscar for his indelible performance and change forever the notion of what a movie leading man could look like, sound like, behave like, and be. The role as written may not have been earth-shattering—it had classic Hollywood plot devices of attempting to change the world while managing to win the heart of the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. But the way Brando brought it to life on the screen surely was.
    In the aftermath of Brando’s performance, Hollywood saw a policy shift in the casting departments of the major studios. Now they all wanted their leading men to be beautiful but rebellious American youths. At first this policy would work against Clint, who was cool and laid back more than burning and restless. But Brando’s youth and brooding appeal would nevertheless lay the foundation for Clint’s unique brand of hero, even as the young, handsome gas station attendant with only the slightest interest in acting and even less in the movies was about to be discovered by the men who made the movies.
    The details surrounding Clint’s signing with Universal Pictures have always been murky, in numerous slightly differing (and at times