Clint Eastwood Read Online Free PDF

first one at a party and the last one to leave,” in Ruth’s fond description. Their son remembers his mother saying, more than once, “It’s a shame he wasn’t born rich, because he could have had so much fun.”
    Ruth was herself tall and attractive—too tall, as it happened, to realize her girlhood dream, which was to become a ballet dancer. She enrolled in a ballet class, taught by one of her grammar-school teachers, when she was eight or nine and from then until she was sixteen dance “was my main purpose,” she says. Like her father, who was a talented amateur clarinetist, she had a natural gift for musical expression; when her older sister, Bernice, started taking piano lessons, Ruth would study the exercise book she brought home, teaching herself to play without benefit of formal instruction.
    Both Clinton and Ruth endured tragedies in midadolescence, his by far the more poignant. Jesse, his pretty and spirited mother, was stricken with cancer when she was in her forties and struggled against the disease for several years. A graduate of the University of California, where she had been active in dramatics, she, too, had a natural gift for music. Her mother had taught voice and piano in San Francisco, supporting four daughters through this work, after her husband had deserted them.
    When his mother fell ill Clinton was obliged to rush home after athletic practices to tend to her until his father arrived home from work. She died when the boy was sixteen. Ruth says her husband almost neverdiscussed Jesse’s illness or death and that she cannot remember ever meeting her. Jesse Eastwood did, however, pass on an important legacy, her mother’s German-made upright piano—always referred to as “Grandma Andy’s piano” (for Anderson, her maiden name)—which would follow Clinton and Ruth on their many travels through depression America and remains in the family, in excellent working condition, to this day.
    Ruth’s world was sundered when she was sixteen and her parents separated, though apparently with very little bitterness (they never formally divorced). Indeed, if Clint Eastwood is any judge, his maternal grandmother, Virginia McLanahan Runner, preferred the single life. She was a strong-minded, independent woman, who, after her children were grown, lived in a succession of rural retreats, each of them a little more distant from the Bay Area—Hayward, Sunol and finally Arnold, a sometime-goldmining community in Calaveras County.
    Clinton Eastwood tried college for a short time—at the University of California—but received virtually no support from his father and did not like school well enough to work his way through it. He was not yet what he would become, a hardworking man successfully struggling against his basic aversion to hard work. It was easier for him, now, at the height of 1920s prosperity, to rely on his charm. He became a bond salesman.
    He married pretty, sensible Ruth Runner in 1928. He was twenty-one; she was nineteen. They took an apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland and were managing well enough until October 1929, when the stock market crashed. Ruth was pregnant at the time, but her account of what must have been for her an anxious period is remarkably calm—“Well, everyone was in the same boat on that one; none of us had anything and we hadn’t had time enough to save very much”—perhaps because her husband had not immediately lost his job and perhaps because she was so happily preoccupied with the impending birth.
    It occurred on May 31, 1930, at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco. “I always said he was famous from the day he was born,” she says, “because he weighed eleven pounds, six ounces, and he was the biggest baby in St. Francis … so the nurses carried him all around and showed him to everyone.” One of the local newspapers even ran an item about the birth of this strapping lad. As for Ruth, “I fell in love with him immediately, and stayed that way ever