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whose associations with him soured—who see in him a deeper darkness than I perceive. There are also strangers who continue to resent and reject his message. This distrust, so widespread and so full of outrage in the early days of Clint’s career, is now greatly diminished, but it is there, especially in some of the odder corners of academia, and it is not without its murmuring influence.
    I, however, trust the many tales told on the screen over this long career, and I trust the honesty of their teller. I trust the authenticity of his conflicting rages, and even as I have tried to penetrate them, I trust the enigmatic silences of the man caught between those emotions. I see them as signs of honest, inarticulable puzzlement by a man acting cool and ironic, feeling much of the time otherwise.

ONE
NOTHING FOR NOTHING
    W hat an American was Clint Eastwood,” Norman Mailer wrote as he worked his way toward the peroration of a 1983 Sunday supplement article on him—as usual for Mailer on these occasions, a blend of interview and meditation on his own and his subject’s celebrity. “Maybe there was no one more American than he.” Maybe that is true, defining the term traditionally, as it was still possible to do in those days, before multiculturalism became one of our reigning pieties.
    Talking to the writer, Clint stressed the lack of grandeur in his background. “My dad was Scots-English; my mother’s Dutch-Irish. Strange combination. All the pirates and people who were kicked out of every place else.” In other words, there are no Eastwoods in the Society of Mayflower Descendants. It is sometimes Clint’s pleasure to slightly overemphasize his lack of early promise, not so much to stress the pluck that underlay his rise in the world, but the luck involved. For example, at the Cinémathèque in Paris in 1985 this exchange between Clint and a questioner from the floor occurred:
    “Did you once describe yourself as a bum and a drifter?”
    “No.”
    “Then what are you?”
    “A bum and a drifter.”
    Actually, he had once been so quoted, and there is at least a half-truth in the wisecrack. He was never a bum, but there was a time, during his late adolescence, when he was definitely a drifter. And before that, when Clint was a child, the entire Eastwood family could perhaps have been described as drifters—though scarcely purposeless ones—as Clint’s father, Clinton Eastwood Sr., pursued job opportunities up and down the West Coast during the depths of the depression. His son’s most basic characteristics—his physical restlessness and his low tolerance for boring routine, his loyalty to the people he works with, his pleasurein, and loyalty to, the little filmmaking community he created around him—can probably be traced to these years. The former qualities he learned by experience; the latter ones he understood as ideals to be strived for.
    Still, Clint’s heritage is far from piratical. It is essentially middle class, marked by the kind of modest strivings, setbacks and successes common to that class. His father and mother, Clinton Sr. and Margaret Ruth Runner—always known by her middle name—were sweethearts from a very tender age. He was fifteen, she thirteen, when they met in Piedmont, California, not long after her family moved from San Francisco to this prosperous Bay Area suburb, which lies due east of Oakland, due south of Berkeley. His father, Burr, built a house there soon after Clinton Sr. was born and worked as a manager in a wholesale hardware concern. Ruth’s father, Waldo, had been a railroad executive—she moved back and forth across the country several times as a child because of his work—and then founded, with a partner, the Graybar Company, which manufactured automobile bumpers and luggage racks.
    Clinton was tall and good-looking, star and ultimately captain of the high-school football team, a mainstay of the swimming team and an outgoing, popular young man—then as always, “the