LET it be told here and now that the rumour which once circulated, to the effect that Clint Eastwood is the illegitimate son of Stan Laurel, has no foundation in fact. Certainly, Richard Schickel makes no mention of it in his exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, biography, and he should know, shouldn't he?
It seems contradictory that such a big and verbose book should have been written about a man as laconic and monosyllabic as Eastwood. He has always acted by his silences, the strength of his usually non-garrulous presence and the heart-stopping suddenness of his actions. Perhaps if Mr Schickel and his publishers felt the market demanded a weighty volume, then they should have adopted the expedient of leaving every alternate chapter blank in order to signify our hero gazing slit-eyed, with cigarillo clamped in the corner of his mouth, at a distant prospect of hills, real or imaginary.
In the event, lengthy passages are devoted to analysing and explaining the films, with a desultory narrative line threaded through them giving us the biographical details of a rather secretive and private man who always seems to have gone his own way.
He was born in San Francisco in 1930 to a Dutch-Irish mother Ruth, and a Scots-English father Clinton Snr. The family moved around a lot, but this peripatetic lifestyle seems to have suited Clint and he had quite a happy childhood. As he went through his teenage years, he showed very little interest in formal education, his two main passions in life being motor cars and jazz.
Although tall and handsome, he suffered from a killing shyness - or perhaps it was that he didn't suffer fools gladly. Whatever: he got along with people, stayed on the periphery of things and only drew attention to himself when he lost his temper - which appears to have been ferocious.
Without making any great effort at it, he drifted into acting, got a contract with Universal Pictures, married nice, companionable. Maggie and made no waves either in his personal or working life. Later, he was to tell an interviewer that he "wouldn't make any impact until my thirties. I was twenty-four then, looked eighteen and still had a certain amount of living to do."
He got his first role in a B-picture called Revenge of the Creature as a lab assistant who has to account for a missing rat - "It's my considered opinion that rat number four is sitting inside that cat" - and his first billing in Francis in the Navy, in which he played third lead to Donald O'Connor and a talking mule. He made little impression and eventually his option at Universal was dropped.
It was the television show Rawhide - "Rollin', rollin', rollin',/ Keep those doggies movin" - that saved his career and the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, Fistful Of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly which made him a star.
Although Maggie and himself had decided not to have children for the foreseeable future, an affair that he had with a bit-player, called Roxanne Tunis on the set of Rawhide resulted in a daughter, Kimber. He saw very little of the child but is said to have supported her financially". Later he did have a son and a daughter with Maggie, but the marriage broke up in 1979.
He had a long-standing relationship with the actress Sondra Locke, but they never married. This also ended, and very bitterly, too. Then, in the middle Eighties, he had two further children with a woman named Jacelyn Reeves, who was his neighbour in Carmel; and just last year he married for the second time, to Dina Ruiz who is more than thirty years younger then he, and at the time of Mr Schickel's book going to press they were expecting their first child.
That more or less does it for his personal life; the remainder of the text is devoted to the movies. Each of them is examined minutely, with much commentary and exposition. I shall confine myself to picking out a few savoury bits, such as the fact that the original Dirty Harry screenplay was written by a team of Finks - Harry Julian and R.M.; that the film critic, Pauline Kael has waged a one-woman war on Clint from the moment his star appeared; and that Clint is so tender towards animals that he once rescued a bee from drowning in his swimming pool.
I also liked the story of how re-take after re-take had to be done on the scene in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in which George Kennedy, driving a chiming one-man ice cream van, tells a persistent little boy in search of a flavour that can't be got to "Go fuck a duck" and keeps breaking up over the line. It's one of the movie moments that I also treasure.
THE Gene Kelly book is exactly what it says, a celebration of a man who was the great heterosexual dancer, an all-round good egg, and a reasonably serious actor when he got the chance. Unfortunately, his career reached its apex at too early a stage - with the two films he will always be remembered for, An American in Paris and Singing in the Rain.
He went on to direct - Hello, Dolly! and its star almost broke him - and his television specials were always good to look at, but he never again reached the heights of the work he did in the early Fifties. The book is lavishly illustrated, but still photographs can never capture the magic of a man who thrived on his grace and energy of movement.