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his gas station job and began taking full-time classes at UTS. To his surprise, these lessons—essentially teaching how to look good in front of a camera without tripping over your own feet (or your lines)—were infinitely more valuable to him than had been the internal agonies of his Michael Chekhov–based acting-class theoreticals. All of it meant nothing to him.
    Besides taking classes, Clint worked out at the studio gym and kept his eye on the gorgeous young starlets all over the place. All the young female students of the UTS, he quickly found out, were single, hot, and available. According to one of them, wannabe sex kitten and B-movie starlet Mamie Van Doren, a demi-Monroe whose career never fully blossomed (she would appear with Clint in Charles Haas’s 1956
Star in the Dust
, in which she was the costar, he a walk-on), sex was rampant among the students, and she and Clint had spent more than one afternoon in her dressing room contributing to the count.
    Clint, who had thus far refused to get his teeth fixed or darken his brown hair (to match Hudson’s and Curtis’s blue-black), had no problem attracting and sleeping with many starlets besides Van Doren. As far as he was concerned, he had no reason not to, least of all his marriage. Now in this new world of plenty, his marriage was, to him, like being on a diet in the biggest candy store in the world. Years later Clint would tell one writer that “the first year of marriage was terrible. IfI had to go through it again, I think I’d be a bachelor for the rest of my life. I liked doing things when I wanted to do them. I did not want any interference … One thing Meg [Maggie] had to learn about me was that I was going to do as I pleased. She had to accept that, because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t be married.”
    In a rare interview in 1971 Maggie seemed to confirm Clint’s continuing independence when she described his behavior this way: “He is very much a twentieth-century cowboy. We’re not advocates of the total togetherness theory. I happen to like women with their own thing. I admire individuality and am not of the theory that ‘I’ll be an individual and you stay home.’” Whether out of choice or necessity, she had found a way to rationalize what both of them instinctively knew; that for Clint the notion of marital fidelity never held much sway. That he came home at all was what mattered to Maggie, and sooner or later he always did. Still, the unspoken-of friction it caused between them was palpable. Maggie, raised to be a traditional wife, understandably did not take easily to her husband spending his days among young and beautiful and (she suspected) easy girls in the glamorous world of sexy movie make-believe, with nothing to show for it—at least nothing she could see.
    When he wasn’t sneaking off with one starlet or another, Clint passed the time on the lot walking among the soundstages, where he’d often run into other recently signed actors, like John Saxon, Marty Milner, and David Janssen, his buddies from Fort Ord. The four would-be actors enjoyed hanging out at the studio in the daytime and in local bars at night; and occasionally on weekends, when the gas station called, he went back and filled in for a day or two, as he was always in need of extra cash.
    In class, Clint’s teacher Katherine Warren was joined by Jack Kosslyn, who brought in a parade of famous actors, including the great Brando himself, whose mere presence was a thrill and whose message to the students was not to try to “act,” but just to get on the sound-stage and let “it” happen (whatever “it” was supposed to be). Something and someone had, at last, made sense to Clint, and he concentrated on his acting with a seriousness and intensity he had not shown before.
    By May 1954 he was considered good enough to try for a real film, at an increased salary of $100 a week. At the same time he signed witha manager-agent, none other than Arthur Lubin, who was