ALSO BY MARC ELIOT

Reagan: The Hollywood Years

Jimmy Stewart: A Biography

Cary Grant: A Biography

Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History of America’s Favorite Borough

Death of a Rebel: Starring Phil Ochs and a Small Circle of Friends

Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen

Roconomics: The Money Behind the Music

Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince

The Whole Truth

To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles

Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World

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amer THE LIFE OF CLINT EASTWOOD

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rebEl iCan

MARC ELIOT

Harmony Books • New York

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Copyright © 2009 by Rebel Road, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the CrownPublishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Harmony Books is a registered trademark and the Harmony Books colophon is atrademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-307-33688-0

Printed in the United States of America

DESIGN BY ELINA D. NUDELMAN

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

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To purchase a copy of 

American Rebel  

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CONTENTS

introduction 1

part i: FROM AIMLESS TO ACTOR 9

part ii: FROM ACTOR TO AUTEUR 185

part iii: FROM AUTEUR TO OSCAR 257

sources 333

notes 335

clint eastwood complete filmography,including television 349

author’s note and acknowledgments 363

index 369

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INTRODUCTION

I grew up watching movies in an era when there wasn’t even tele -vision, nothing else even to listen to. I was shaped by John Ford,Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, those were the guys, plus a tonof other people we don’t know the names of who made “B” movies.

—Clint Eastwood

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*The show ran eight seasons, with only twenty- two episodes in its debut year as a mid-season replacement. The show made thirteen episodes in its final season. Seasons twothrough seven had full- season commitments.

Clint Eastwood stands tall among the most popular and endur-ing stars Hollywood has ever produced. He has been making moviesfor more than fifty years, ranging from small, meaningless, and for-gettable parts as a Universal Studios contract player to acting in, aswell as producing and directing, many Oscar- caliber blockbusters thatwill one day, sooner rather than later, take their place among the best- loved American movies.

Early in his career, Clint spent seven and a half years costarring inTV’s Rawhide, and his Rowdy Yates became one of the most popularTV cowboys of the late 1950s and early 1960s.* By the time Rawhideended its eight- season run he had also become an international moviestar, following his appearance in three wildly popular spaghetti west-erns made and distributed throughout Europe; when they were finallyreleased in America, they made him a big- screen star in the States aswell. For the next quarter- century Clint appeared in dozens of enter-taining movies that made him a household name anywhere in theworld that films could be seen. He was undoubtedly a crowd- pleaser,but at the time the Hollywood elite considered his movies too genre- heavy to be Oscar- worthy.

Then in 1992 Clint produced, directed, and starred in Unforgiven,a western to (literally) end all westerns, made by his own productioncompany, Malpaso, that he had created to operate as a ministudio inthe service of its resident star. Unforgiven won four Academy Awards,including two for Clint (one for Best Director and one for Best Pic-ture), and the Midas-touch Oscar- style was suddenly his; nearly every-thing he made for the next fifteen years was deemed award- or

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nomination- worthy by the Academy, including Million Dollar Baby,Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Changeling.Throughout Hollywood’s post- studio era, the first rule of filmmakinghas been that youth equals box office—young people go out to themovies, older audiences stay home and watch them on cable andDVD. It is, therefore, even more remarkable that he made all of thesemovies past the age of sixty.

perhaps more than for any other Hollywood star, the double helixthat is Clint’s creative and real- life DNA is so intertwined it is nearlyimpossible to separate the off- screen person from the on- screen per-sona. The two feed off each other so thoroughly, it is often difficultto tell where the lives of the characters in his movies end and the lifeof the man playing them begins.

In the movies that he has thus far acted in, produced, or directed,in various combinations wearing one or more of these hats, threeessential Clint Eastwood screen personae continually reappear. Thefirst is the mysterious man without a past who is resolute in his lone-ness, the Man with No Name, who appeared in the three SergioLeone westerns—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good,the Bad and the Ugly—then reappeared slightly altered in Hang ’EmHigh and The Outlaw Josey Wales, and took several other guises andvariations all the way through to Unforgiven. The second persona is“Dirty” Harry Callahan, whose essentially nihilistic loner personalitycontinually reemerges up to and including Gran Torino. And finally,there is the good- natured redneck, who uses his fists the way a morethoughtful person uses words and who makes his first appearance asPhilo Beddoe in Every Which Way but Loose and returns again and againon the way to Pink Cadillac.

All three characters in their various incarnations are viscerally con-nected to the real- life Clint. All three are quintessential loners, unlikeany other in the canon of American motion pictures. The other cin-ematic “men alone” who most immediately come to mind are not really loners at all—that is to say, they are loners Hollywood style,buffered with the idealized images of the actors who played them.Probably mainstream films’ greatest “loner” is Gary Cooper as theisolated sheriff in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Yes, Will Kane

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heroically stands alone to face his enemies, but in truth he is not aloneat all, as in the end he relies on the love of his wife, and her reluctantuse of a gun that saves his life; and when all the fighting has ended,the two of them ride off together into the sunset. Another who comesto mind is Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine, the neutral Americancaught in the crosswinds of World War II in Michael Curtiz’sCasablanca (1942). He proudly boasts that “I stick my neck out fornobody” and then does precisely that for the woman he loves, in thiscase Ingrid Bergman, in an act so unselfishly noble that the very ideathat he was ever a loner is so absurd it becomes laughable. James Bondappears to be the ultimate loner, but we now know that he lost his onetrue love early on and both seethes with revenge and longs with lust,no longer for any single woman but, apparently, all of womankind.On a nobler plane, Charlton Heston in Cecil B. DeMille’s The TenCommandments (1956) is isolated from his family, his people, his land,and his heritage. Yet he still needs someone to lean on, in this case theAlmighty himself, who provides the love, guidance, and moral suste-nance that establish quite profoundly that even Moses did not go italone.

Clint’s movie characters need nothing and no one more than orbeyond themselves. Whether he is surrounded by vicious killers orpredatory women (oftentimes one and the same), faceless adversaries(as opposed to the Man with No Name), by serial man- hunters pur-sued and ultimately defeated by someone dirtier (and thereforestronger) than they are, or even by buddy- buddy orangutans, the Manwith No Name, Dirty Harry, and Philo Beddoe all arrive alone at thestart and leave alone at the end. They rarely, if ever, win the heart ofany woman because they almost never pursue women. On the fewoccasions when a Clint character reluctantly finds himself to beinvolved with one, the relationship remains distant, cynical, unro-mantic, and for the most part nonintimate; the so- called love story isalways the least interesting part of any Clint Eastwood movie. Hisloners are unable, unwilling, and therefore unavailable to fulfill thewishes of those men or women who want to be with him, but not ofthose in the audience who dream of being like him. With this brandof character, Clint delivered something original and provocative toAmerican motion pictures.

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*Clint and Maggie Johnson, his first wife, were married in 1953, separated in 1978, anddivorced in 1984.

†One with Roxanne Tunis, one with Frances Fisher, and two with Jacelyn Reeves. Histotal of seven children are Kimber Eastwood (born June 17, 1964), Kyle Eastwood (bornMay 19, 1968), Alison Eastwood (born May 22, 1972), Scott Eastwood (born March 21,1986), Kathryn Eastwood (born February 2, 1988), Francesca Fisher- Eastwood (bornAugust 7, 1993), and Morgan Eastwood (born December 12, 1996).

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In real life, too, Clint has frequently been described as somethingof a loner, even in his early and undistinguished film appearances, evenwhen married and playing the role of the happy Hollywood husband.All through his first marriage’s thirty- one years,* there were loud whis-pers that he was not the family man he appeared to be but a lone- wolfwomanizer—a role certainly not unique in a town that sees woman-izing as something glamorous, even heroic, and where the locker- room lingo of beer- boosted braggadocio is often raised to the level ofbad poetry. Perhaps the label stuck harder to him because of howclosely his few on- screen romances overlapped with his many real- lifeones. Clint’s off-screen life has always been filled with women, somemight say too many, others might say none really at all. While mar-ried to Maggie Johnson, he fathered a child out of wedlock, the firstof four,† and took numerous lovers. Several of them were costars, inaffairs that often began when production on the film commenced andended after the final shot was completed. Relatively late in his game,at age sixty- six, he finally married, for only the second time, twelveyears after his divorce from Maggie became finalized, to a woman thirty- five years younger than himself, this time finding some mea -sure of peace and happiness.

In his salad days he hung out in the seedy bars in and around SanFrancisco, drinking, playing jazz on house pianos, and in the vernac-ular of that time and those places, kicking ass in barroom brawls,whose circumstances and resolutions would later be reprised in manyof his films. A tough guy in real life, Clint easily and realistically playedthe tough guy on film, someone who usually settles disputes with a knock- down, drag- out brawl or, as in A Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry,and many others, with cinema’s classic metaphorical extension of thefistfight, the final, decisive shoot- out.

Perhaps even more compelling than any of his movie roles (butwhat also makes them so compelling) is how Clint the real- life loner

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struggled to find his way out of his own emotional wilderness. He wasa child of the Depression, whose parents wandered from town to townto try to make ends meet. Not long after he finished high school, hewas drafted into the army and fell in with a bunch of other toughyoung would- be actors, all of whom grew up in or near Southern Cal-ifornia and quickly discovered they had what it took—rugged goodlooks—to make easier money as contract players, in the desperatedeclining days of studio- dominated moviemaking, than they couldpumping gas.

After his discharge he followed their lead, but his emerging talentquickly separated him from the two he became closest to—MartinMilner and David Janssen—and the rest of the pack. Milner’s undis-tinguished career in movies led to an even less distinguished, if steady,one on television with Route 66 (1960–64) and Adam- 12 (1968–75);Janssen briefly hit pay dirt on TV as Dr. Richard Kimble in the mid- 1960s (1963–67), only to see his post- Fugitive career devolve intoincreasingly mediocre work. But Clint used the time he spent on TVas a film school. Amid tired and bored union men moving wagon trainsonto and off of Universal’s back lot, he studied everybody and every-thing and learned not only how to make movies (Rawhide, a one- hourTV western series, cranked out a minimovie every week, thirty- nineweeks a year) but how to make them fast and cheap, telling a conciseand comprehensible story, often the same one over and over withslight variations; these stories had a logical beginning, an action- filledmiddle, and a morally uplifting, perfectly plot- resolved end.

Years later, after establishing himself as a bankable star on the bigscreen, Clint finally got the chance to direct. Early on he had felt thatthat was where the real action was in movies, that it was ultimately bet-ter to play God than to play parts. Along the way to achieving thatgoal, he met Don Siegel, who would direct him in five films, Coogan’sBluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), The Beguiled (1971),Dirty Harry (1971), and Escape from Alcatraz (1979). These filmsgreatly influenced Clint’s own early directorial style, especially theircollective belief in human nobility as the ultimate redemptive force.Clint would, however, eventually shrug off nobility and redemptionas his own style continued to develop and he realized these themeswere not just overly derivative, but the least interesting aspect of whathe wanted to put on film—less-plot- dependent movies that were, in

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truth, feature- length, complex character studies of the leads he played,men who were aloof, estranged (from women and from the largersocial order), detached, and embittered, up to and including Clint’sportrayal of Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, a dark and chilling filmwhere self- forgiveness and relief come in the form of self- sacrifice, ina single overwhelming (and shocking) attempt to connect in order toredeem another human being. As a showcase for his directorial styleand his maturation as an actor—he was seventy- eight when he madeit—Gran Torino, with no female romantic lead, no comic relief, anduntil the end, no obviously redemptive qualities in its leading charac-ter, perfectly caps the arc of Clint’s unique acting and directing styleand his auteur’s quest to celebrate the loner as the ultimate hero, even(or especially) into old age. By doing so Clint demonstrated, onceagain, how unlike any other contemporary filmmaker or film actor healways had been.

Always unwilling to talk about his films as anything but entertain-ments, and even less willing to discuss his private life beyond deliver-ing a certain set of rote answers to the press when promoting his latestfilm, the clues to who he is and what he does are, nevertheless, foundnot only in the content of the movies he makes but also within the con-text of the life he has led, beyond the PR pale, indeed in the symbi-otic relationship between the two. He is a man who makes his livingmaking the movies that in turn make the man. He is an Americanartist whose films are at once great entertainments and cautionarytales, and, as all great movies are, both windows and mirrors. Theyoffer glimpses into his private contemplations even as they reflect uni-versal truths to audiences everywhere.

What follows, then, is an examination of Clint Eastwood, the manhe is and the artist he became, seen through the window of his real lifeand reflected again in some of the most offbeat, disturbing, provoca-tive, and entertaining American films ever made.

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From Aimlessto Actor

PART I

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one

My father always told me you don’t get anything for nothing, andalthough I was always rebelling, I never rebelled against that.

—Clint Eastwood

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PREVIOUS PAGE: A young Clint Eastwood © Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

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The boy who would one day become famous for playing the Manwith No Name did not have a well-defined self- image or a strong rolemodel to follow growing up. In his formative years his father, foreverin search of a steady job during the Great Depression, developed adeceptive California suntan, the mark of a hardworking outdoorlaborer trying to avoid poverty rather than a man of sun- worshippingleisure and privilege.

Clinton and Francesca Ruth (sometimes recorded as MargaretRuth, although she only used Ruth as her given name) were two good- looking California kids who met while attending PiedmontHigh School in Oakland. They dated each other and married young,before the market crashed, and took with it their romantic dream ofthe good life. Ruth’s family was Dutch- Irish and Mormon with along line of physical laborers, including pickup fighters, lumberjacks,sawmill operators, and an occasional local politician. She graduatedfrom Anna Head School in Berkeley, where she had been transferredto from Piedmont just before her senior year—a move that may havebeen prompted by her parents’ concern over an intense relationshipshe had begun with her high school sweetheart, Clinton Eastwood.Clinton was a popular, well- liked boy with strong American roots;his ancestors were pre–Revolutionary War Presbyterian farmers andmen who sold goods by traveling from town to town, their cartsbearing inventory samples such as women’s underwear and soap usedto elicit orders from their customers. In the days before mail- ordercatalogs, most goods were sold this way outside the big Americancities.

Despite Ruth’s parents’ attempts to put some distance betweenher and the economically deficient Clinton, upon graduating fromhigh school they were married, on June 5, 1927, in a ceremony held

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at Piedmont’s interdenominational church. Both newlyweds werelucky enough to find enough work to keep them going during thefirst years of their marriage. Ruth eventually landed a job as anaccountant for an insurance company, and Clinton found one as acashier. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, they clungto these jobs tenaciously.

Almost three years after their marriage, on May 31, 1930, Clin-ton Jr. was born. The boy weighed a whopping eleven pounds, sixounces, and was nicknamed “Samson” by all the nurses at San Fran-cisco’s St. Francis Hospital.

At about this time Clinton Sr. managed to land a job selling stocksand bonds. At a time when stocks and bonds had been rendered all butworthless, Clinton was following the family tradition; he was now aglorified cart- man, weaving from town to town looking for those fewelusive customers with enough cash to invest in their own future andtherefore in his. That he got by at all was likely due to his naturalcharm and good looks.

But even those could only get him so far, and soon Clinton wasselling refrigeration products for the East Bay Company, a positionwhose long- range prospects were little better than those of a sellerof stocks and bonds. People had to have enough money to buy foodbefore they could invest in ways to keep it cold. So in 1934, after thebirth of their second child, a girl they named Jeanne, Clinton took toa more itinerant life, moving the family by car to wherever he couldfind pickup work. In a couple of his earliest recollections, Clint latersaid of those times:

Well, those were the thirties and jobs were hard to come by. My par-ents and my sister and myself just had to move around to get jobs. Iremember we moved from Sacramento to Pacific Palisades just [so myfather could work] as a gas station attendant. It was the only job open.Everybody was in a trailer, one with a single wheel on one end, and thecar, and we were living in a real old place out in the sticks . . .

My father was big on basic courtesies toward women. The one time Iever got snotty with my mother when he was around, he left me a lit-tle battered.

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The attendant job was at a Standard Oil station on Sunset Boule-vard and Pacific Coast Highway, near a stretch of Malibu beach thatwas rapidly becoming the suburb of choice for the nouveau riche ofthe Hollywood film industry—one of the few businesses that actuallybenefited from the Depression. Films were both cheap and fanciful,the ultimate escape for those who could not afford to live out theAmerican dream themselves but loved watching others do it for themon-screen. Those who lived in this part of town drove big cars thatused a lot of gas, so Clinton had plenty of work. For the time beingit was a good enough living if not exactly a great life. From the moneyhe made he was able to rent a small house in the lush, hilly PacificPalisades.

On his off days Clinton and Ruth took their children to one of thepublic beaches adjacent to Malibu for an afternoon of sun and swim-ming. One day Clinton, who was an excellent swimmer, dove into awave with Clint sitting in the saddle of his shoulders. Big Clint cameback up but little Clint didn’t. After a few heart- stopping momentsRuth saw her boy’s foot sticking up and bobbing in the water. Shescreamed. With some help from alert nearby swimmers, Clinton wasable to pull him up. Afterward Ruth sat in the cool muddy turf withher little Clint and splashed him playfully to make sure he wouldn’tbecome afraid of the surf.

A year later, in 1935, the gas station job dried up, and the East-woods were once more on the move. They gave up the house in PacificPalisades and took a smaller one for less rent in Hollywood, a fewmiles farther inland. Soon afterward they swung back north to Red-ding, then to Sacramento, then to the Glenview section of the EastBay of San Francisco. Finally they settled back down in the Oakland- Piedmont area, where Clinton worked a series of dead- end jobs. Clint,by now, had attended several schools, necessitated by the family’s con-tinual relocations. “I can’t remember how many schools I went to,” helater recalled. “I do remember we moved so much that I made very fewfriends.” In 1939, after their long loop through the tough times ofCalifornia, the family settled long enough for young Clint, now nine,to enroll in Piedmont Junior High School.

Following the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,America’s entry into World War II brought new defense- driven work.

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Clinton managed to secure a draft- exempt job in the shipyards withBethlehem Steel, and Ruth found day work at the nearby IBM center.

On the brink of adolescence, six- foot Clint was the tallest boy inhis class; he would reach his full height, six four, by the time hegraduated from high school. He was also, by all accounts, one of the best- looking students. He had inherited his father’s strong, broadshoulders, rugged good looks, and seductive half- closed eyes. He hada finely shaped, aristocratically turned- up nose and a thick bush ofbrown hair that fell in a curly dip over his forehead. The look wastough, but he was shy, likely the product of his family’s vagabondjourney through the Depression years. Being left- handed also madehim feel like an outsider, as his teachers forced him to use his righthand.

He enjoyed playing high school sports—his height made it easyfor him to excel at basketball—but that did little for his social skills.His teachers warned his parents that he had to be brought out of hisshell if he was to make something of himself. One of them, GertrudeFalk, who taught English, had the class put on a one- act play and casta reluctant young Clint in the lead. He was less than thrilled.

I remember Gertrude Falk very well. It was the part of a backwardyouth, and I think she thought it was perfect casting . . . she made upher mind that I was going to play the lead and it was disastrous. I wantedto go out for athletics; doing plays was not considered the thing to doat that stage of life—especially not presenting them before the entiresenior high school, which is what she made us do. We muffed a lot oflines. I swore [at the time] that that was the end of my acting career.

Clint also didn’t do well academically, and his schoolmates andteachers considered him something of a “dummy.” Besides sports, theonly other subject that held any interest for him was music—not thekind of big- band sound that was popular with the older kids, but jazz.He liked to play it on the piano, something that he correctly believedenhanced his attractiveness to girls. He even learned the current poptunes that he had no use for but that made them flock around him.

When I sat down at the piano at a party, the girls would come around.I could play a few numbers. I learned a few off listening to records

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and things that were popular at that era. I thought this was all right,so I went home and practiced . . . I would lie about my age and go toHambone Kelly’s. I’d stand in the back and listen to Lu Watters andTurk Murphy play New Orleans jazz . . . I grew up listening to EllaFitzgerald and Nat King Cole . . . Lester Young, Charlie Parker, DizzyGillespie, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, TheloniousMonk, Erroll Garner.

And he loved cars. For $25 Clint’s father bought him a beat- up1932 Chevy to help him keep his paper route job. Clint nicknamed it“the Bathtub” because of its missing top. Its best accessory was, ofcourse, the girls. The Chevy, which didn’t last very long, was only the first of a long line of his beat- up cars. To pay for them all and thegas and repairs, Clint took extra after- school jobs on top of his paperroute. He worked at the local grocery and as a caddy at the golf course;he baled hay on a farm in nearby Yreka, cut timber near Paradise, andwas a seasonal forest firefighter. All these jobs were purely physical,the type of work he could forget about as soon as he punched out. Butthey were time consuming and exhausting, even for a young andstrong teenage boy. They left him even less time for his studies atPiedmont High, and when his parents and school authorities realizedhe wasn’t going to graduate with a regular academic degree, he trans-ferred to the Oakland Technical High School, a vocational traininginstitute where he would specialize in aircraft maintenance. Thiswould give him his best chance, upon graduation, to attend the Uni-versity of California, which had an affiliated program with the highschool, or to land a well- paying job.

After school Clint hung with a crowd of tough- looking teens deckedout in leather and T- shirts, with greased- back long hair. All strong,tall, and lean, they tucked cigarettes behind their ears and held bottlesof beer in one hand while they drove, usually to the local dives wherethe hottest girls hung out. And they were all into jazz. Most often theyfound themselves at the Omar, a pizza and beer dive in downtown Oak-land where Clint liked to play jazz on a beat- up old piano in the cor-ner. Whenever he could, he would go to hear Dizzy Gillespie, ColemanHawkins, Flip Phillips, Lester Young, or Charlie Parker. Sometimesthey played alone in the small dark clubs that dotted the streets of Oak-land; sometimes they performed together at the Shrine Auditorium,

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where the heavily mixed crowd regularly gathered to see and hearthem.

It was Parker, more than all the others, who opened his eyes to thenew music’s emotional power. As Clint later told Richard Schickel,“I’d never seen a musician play with such confidence. There was noshow business to it in those days, and this guy just stood and played,and I thought, God, what an amazing, expressive thing.” His cool,aloof sound held great appeal for Clint.

He was nineteen when he finally graduated from Oakland Tech inthe spring of 1949. By then, he had grown tired of school and oftencut classes to hang out with boys, among whom he was the only onestill in school.

Meanwhile the war’s end had brought new prosperity, especiallyalong the rapidly growing Pacific coast, where jobs were plentiful,wages generous, and mobility upward. Clinton Sr. found work withthe California Container Corporation, was quickly caught up in theflow of automatic promotions, and soon was offered a major mana-gerial post in the company’s main plant, in Seattle. Together he andRuth and fourteen- year-old Jeanne packed up the house and loadedthe car for the drive to Seattle.

Clint didn’t want to go, and because he had graduated, he said he didn’t have to. Harry Pendleton’s parents agreed to let him stay withthem for a while. Harry and Clint had been friends since junior highschool and long hung with the same crowd. With his family in Seat-tle, his education finished, and no clear plan for the future, Clint was,in his own words, “ really adrift.” He found a job on the night shift atBethlehem Steel, tending the blast furnaces, then moved to the dayshift at Boeing Aircraft. For the next two years these hard and charm-less jobs kept him in cars, girls, and music, allowing him to roam aim-lessly through his early twenties unfocused and unconcerned, theperfect West Coast rebel without a care.

Then, in 1950, border hostilities broke out in Korea, and theUnited States began a massive buildup of forces in Seoul. Knowing hisA1 military status made him a prime target for the draft, Clint’sunlikely next goal was to go back to college, to get a student exemp-tion. He moved up to Seattle and in with his parents to enroll at Seat-

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tle University. He figured he might major in music, since nothing elseheld any appeal. But his grades weren’t good enough, and he was toldhe’d have to attend junior college as a nonmatriculated, part- time stu-dent, which would not be enough to earn him the draft exemption. Hethen moved back to Oakland and made a last- ditch personal appeal tohis local draft board, to convince them he had every intention ofattending college full time.

The board took him the following month.In the spring of 1951, he spent his last free nights getting drunk and

listening to music at the local dives, before reporting, hung over and hell- bent, for basic training at Fort Ord, near the Monterey Peninsula.As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need any training. What couldthe army teach him that at the age of twenty he didn’t already know?

Plenty, as it turned out, although not at all in the ways he mighthave expected.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARC ELIOT is the New York Times bestselling author ofmore than a dozen books on popular culture, among them thehighly acclaimed biographies Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart;the award- winning Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince; Down42nd Street; what many consider the best book about the six-ties, his biography of Phil Ochs, Death of a Rebel; Take It fromMe (with Erin Brockovich); Down Thunder Road: The Makingof Bruce Springsteen; To the Limit: The Untold Story of the Eagles;and Reagan: The Hollywood Years. He has written on the mediaand pop culture for numerous publications, including Pent-house, L.A. Weekly, and California Magazine. He divides his timeamong New York City; Woodstock, New York; Los Angeles;and the Far East.

Visit the author at www.MarcEliot.net.

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American Rebel  

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