Playboy Interview: Clint Eastwood

About ten years ago, rumors started drifting back to Hollywood that a new movie, directed by an Italian, shot in Spain and starring an American actor hitherto known only for his labors as the second lead in the moderately popular television series "Rawhide," was packing moviehouses from Rome to Frankfurt. Studio heads shrugged. Flash in the pan, they said, scornfully dubbing "A Fistful of Dollars" a spaghetti Western. When "Fistful" was followed by the equally profitable "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," skeptics were forced to take a more serious look at the lanky, laconic star of these runaway hits: Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood's films have grossed some $150,000,000 world-wide to date, and nothing is more indicative of his rapid upward mobility than the rise in what the studios have been willing to pay for his services. From $75 a week as a contract player to a flat $15,000 for "A Fistful of Dollars," Eastwood's price went to $400,000 for his first American-based feature, "Hang 'em High"--and to participate in its production he formed his own company, The Malpaso Company, which promptly made a $1,000,000 deal with Universal Pictures for "Coogan's Bluff." To help finance Malpaso projects, Eastwood began renting his increasingly costly services to other studios--to Paramount for the musical "Paint Your Wagon" ($750,000 and a piece of the profits, including those made by the record album from the film, in which surprised Eastwood aficionados discovered that the previously semi-inarticulate lone stranger could sing creditably, if not operatically); and to MGM for "Kelly's Heroes" ($1,000,000) and "Where Eagles Dare" ($1,000,000). All plus percentages, of course. Since then, he and Malpaso have virtually been able to write their own ticket--a ticket that has often specified, of late, that Eastwood tactile directorial as well as acting chores.

Malpaso is a small, highly mobile operation, consisting essentially of Eastwood himself; Robert Daley, who acts as the company's producer; Sonia Chernus, the story editor; and a tall blonde secretary an trouble shooter named Carol Rydall. Eastwood likes to keep things simple. His personal tastes are equally unpretentious. Invariably dressed in jeans, hatless and tieless, he's the antithesis of everything that once stood for Hollywood glamor. He and his wife, the former Margaret Johnson--to whom he's been married for 20 years--live quietly with their two children, Kyle, five, and Alison, one, in Carmel, not far from Eastwood's native San Francisco and a six-hour drive up the coast from the smog of Los Angeles and the demands of Hollywood society. An evening with the Eastwoods is likely to consist of dinner with two or three couples as guests; the only full-scale social event with which they're involved is the annual Clint Eastwood Invitational Celebrity Tennis Tournament at Pebble Beach, the proceeds of which--nearly $50,000 last year--go to local charities.

Another Eastwood quality is intense loyalty to his friends. Before he would sign on for "Fistful," he insisted that the Italian producer agree to bring over his old Army buddy Bill Tompkins (now deceased) to act as stunt coordinator. He promoted Ted Post, a television director who had worked with him on a number of "Rawhide" episodes, to feature films with "Hang 'em High"--and chose him once more to direct his most recently released starring "vehicle, "Magnum Force," for which Warner Bros. executives are already confidently predicting a $40,000,000 gross. Another close friend is Don Siegel, who directed Eastwood in "Coogan's Bluff," a contemporary melodrama about an Arizona sheriff sent to New York to extradite a local hood; "Two Mules for Sister Sara," which featured Eastwood as the protector of a whore in nun's clothing played by Shirley Mac-Laine; "The Beguiled," a Gothic horror tale with Eastwood as a wounded soldier who falls into the none-too-gentle hands of the students at a girls' school during the Civil War; and "Dirty Harry," the saga of a tough San Francisco cop (to which "Magnum Force" is a sequel). Characteristically, when Eastwood set out on his maiden effort as a director, with "Play Misty for Me" (in which he also starred), he cozened Siegel into playing a small role as a bartender.

To learn more about Eastwood, Playboy asked longtime contributor, film critic and University of Southern California cinema professor Arthur Knight to interview him. Here's his report:

"Though Eastwood is the world's hottest star, it's hard to believe he believes it. And it's difficult to reconcile the real Clint Eastwood--gentle, soft-spoken, self-effacing--with the violent men he's played onscreen, men who were ready to shoot first and talk later, if at all. There are other contradictions; he's a physical-fitness buff but a chain beer drinker; he enjoys shooting but refuses to hunt; hates giving out autographs, but the fans who besiege him whenever he makes a rare personal appearance are unlikely to discover this unless they become unbearably persistent. You won't find Eastwood in the 'with-it' spots of Hollywoood; a big night out, for him, might be spent with a few friends in a bar. One with a good jukebox: he's a former musician who once played piano and jazz trumpet.

"Playboy's interview with Eastwood took place in three separate sessions, variously fueled with peach kefir, herb tea, beer, macadamia nuts, sun-dried apricots and saucer-sized oatmeal cookies from the nearest organic-food store. The first session came precariously close to not coming off at all. We had arranged to meet at my hotel in Sausalito at four P.M. (after a day's shooting on "Magnum Force") to start the interview. But when Eastwood arrived, very much on time, the tape recorder wouldn't work. Eastwood said he thought he could borrow one from a friend, ducked out the back, way and returned in about ten minutes bearing a cassette recorder--but with only one cassette, good for a single hour's worth of conversation. Frantic telephone calls turned up a shop that promised to remain open for us--in a town about ten miles away. Seeing that I was without wheels, Eastwood drove me over.

"The second session took place in the suite of offices Eastwood maintains over the startlingly named Hog's Breath Inn, a restaurant of which he's part owner in Carmel; and the third--for which I was joined by Playboy Associate Editor Gretchen McNeese--in the Malpaso company's offices in a five-room bungalow in Universal City. The walls are decorated with posters; looming in one corner is a life-sized cardboard cutout of Eastwood--which, like his best-known screen characterizations, is curiously one-dimensional and strangely ominous. The most bizarre object in his private office, though, is a three-foot-high, balloon-shaped, shocking-pink, papier-mâché rabbit piggy bank. Definitely not a Playboy Rabbit, the creature wears a sheriff's badge; from his mouth dangles the stub of a cigarette; and protruding from the hat he holds in his hand is the muzzle of a gun. It was, he explained, the gift of a fan--a schoolteacher in New Jersey who described it as her idea of the real Clint Eastwood. It would never have occurred to me to visualize Eastwood as a paunchy pink rabbit. But then, not many people do know the real Clint Eastwood, as I noted when I began this interview."

[Q] Playboy: You're the world's number-one box-office star, yet to the public you're almost as much of an enigma as the characters you portrayed in your first screen hits, the laconic loner of the spaghetti Westerns. Why is that?

[A] Eastwood: Oh, I guess I'm something of a recluse; when I'm not working, I like to just hide out. And I was never particularly in with the press.

[Q] Playboy: You have the reputation of being difficult to interview.

[A] Eastwood: Do I? Well, it's not easy for me. I'm not too thrilled with the idea of talking about myself. I have no idea what Playboy wants, how I should reply to Playboy-type question.

[Q] Playboy: What's a Playboy-type question?

[A] Eastwood: The kind you answer with something like. "No, I didn't fuck her in 1941." I can't make up anything exciting to jar the readership; it's a talent I distinctly lack.

[Q] Playboy: Have you done any interviews you regret?

[A] Eastwood: Yes, because of the sheer boredom of it all. I've done talk shows where you get on and it doesn't go right--whether it's because of the mood you're in or the moderator's in, or both, it doesn't jell--and you kind of sit there and think, "Let's cut to the film clip, quick, before you fall asleep. Or the audience falls asleep." But I find myself kind of on the defensive about interviews, because the thing everybody seems to like is shock. I've always admired guys who can do that. Bang-bang. Whoosh. I've read your interviews with people who really work at giving the shock treatment, and they do it well. Like Lee Marvin, Raquel Welch. If I could talk like Lee, my interviews might be more exciting to read. I don't have that capability.

[Q] Playboy: Your name doesn't surface often as a participant in those night-club brawls that are always making the columns. Yet Clint Eastwood onscreen is a guy who's always using his fists. Can you take care of yourself in a real fight?

[A] Eastwood: I get by.

[Q] Playboy: Do you get in many?

[A] Eastwood: No, not too many. I don't provoke a lot of them. You know, there's a lot of actors who claim they're always being harassed. But I'm never harassed. People leave me alone.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe that's because you're six, four and weigh 198 pounds.

[A] Eastwood: I don't know whether that has anything to do with it. Probably it's because I don't carry a big entourage. When I go someplace, it's usually just for a quiet beer, and then I'm gone before the action starts. I come and go like The Whistler on the old radio program, you know. And I don't do much night-club crawling. I can't hack that. I don't go to too many functions around here at all. I guess the last big one I attended was the Academy Awards show, and I'm still shaking my head over that one.

[Q] Playboy: That was last year, when Charlton Heston got stuck on the freeway ramp and you filled in. Were you nervous?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I didn't have time to think about it. Which was probably fortunate. First of all, I thought the guy--Howard Koch, the producer of the show--was joking when he asked me to do it. He came up to me and told me, "Charlton Heston isn't here!" And I said, "So what?" Then he started telling me about filling in for him, and I couldn't believe he was asking me. I said, "Where's Gregory Peck?" You know, some of the more distinguished members of the Academy. "There must be somebody around who could come out here and lend a little class to the thing," I said. But Koch's eyes were kind of twitching: sweat was running down his forehead and the TV guys up there were doing their countdowns: "Ten ... nine ... eight ... seven," and I'm standing there listening to him, and all of a sudden he's whisking me backstage. My wife, Mag, was really kind of responsible for the whole thing. She said. "Go ahead! Help him out!" And then, of course, she was laughing hysterically in the audience. All I could hear out there was her and Burt Reynolds. They both have very distinctive laughs, the kind you can distinguish out of several thousand people, and there they were in the front row, cracking up.

[Q] Playboy: What did you say to her afterward?

[A] Eastwood: By that time, I didn't care. After I walked off, I went backstage, into a pressroom, and I saw a little ice chest on the floor. I looked in the chest and there was a six-pack of Olympia. It was like, you know, some angel had put it there. So I ripped open about four of them and some page was running back and forth, looking in as I drank them. Finally I went out and sat down in front with Mag, and she said, "A page was just down here asking me how many beers you could drink before you'd get drunk."

[Q] Playboy: How many can you?

[A] Eastwood: Quite a few, but at that point I needed about ten.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about your wife. How long have you been married?

[A] Eastwood: Twenty years last December.

[Q] Playboy: With marriages, even those of long standing, breaking up at a rapid rate, why do you think yours has lasted so long?

[A] Eastwood: Gee, I don't know. I'd better not say too much; I'm liable to jinx it. I guess people grow away from each other, whether it takes 20 years or one. I don't think that's happened in our case.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Eastwood: I'd say I'd have to give Mag a lot of the credit. She's a bright girl, and she's interested in a lot of the things I'm interested in. You know, we were married very young; I don't really recommend getting married that young. But you can't say exactly; the right age for one person isn't the right age for another. The luck, I guess, is in getting the right partner. There are so many things that can go wrong, it has to be somewhat of a crap shoot. I just think when you're older, sometimes, you know a little more about what you like in a woman.

[Q] Playboy: What do you like in a woman?

[A] Eastwood: Well, many things. What I mean is, when you're older, you appreciate things other than physical attraction, which is the basis of so many young relationships. Though I don't think it was in ours. I mean, we were physically attracted, but we also had everything in common. We both liked the same kind of music--jazz and classical, like Bach--and we'd go to the same kind of places.

[Q] Playboy: Your wife's a blonde, but far from a dumb blonde. Have you ever been turned on by that type?

[A] Eastwood: For marriage, no.

[Q] Playboy: For fooling around, but not for marriage?

[A] Eastwood: Sure, fooling around a little, hanky-panky, you know, sitting in the saloon with that old patter: "Do you come here often? Are you new in town?" No, seriously, I'm not turned on by dumb chick--for anything. What's that old joke: "What do you talk about afterward?" There's an awful lot of afterward, very little during. Before and after, there have to be many other things. And I think friendship is important. Everybody talks about love in marriage, but it's just as important to be friends.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet Mag?

[A] Eastwood: On a blind date up at Berkeley. When we got married, I was going to L.A. City College, and she helped support us. She worked for an export firm called Industria Americana--a little company that exported auto parts here in Los Angeles. And she worked for Caltex and Catalina, a couple of those swimsuit manufacturers, as a model. She was a good bathing-suit type.

[Q] Playboy: Is she still a good bathing-suit type?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, she is. She worked for a while, and then she got hepatitis very badly--about as badly as you can get it without ceasing to exist. She had to quit, not do anything for a year. By that time, I was steadily employed. Fortunately.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any connection between Eastwood the family man and the character you play on the screen--the fanatic cop from Dirty Harry, the Man with No Name from A Fistful of Dollars, the disc jockey from Play Misty for Me, the mysterious avenger from High Plains Drifter?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I think I'm a little bit of all of those. Everybody has certain elements of himself in every role he plays. Maybe the thing that makes me work in the type of roles I'm more famous for, like the lone Westerner or the rebel police officer, is that I'm an individual in real life.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I've been lucky enough in life to head up my own company at a young age, make my own decisions, shape my own career. With a lot of help, of course. I guess I'm pretty self-sufficient, and I think that's appealing from the audience's point of view, because there are so many things to feel unself-sufficient about in life. Everybody likes to look at a moving picture and say, "That's the way I'd like to be when I grow up," "Unit's the way I would have handled it if I had lived in 1840" or "If I could just be that self-sufficient, I could dump the shrink and put all the payments in the bank." I think there's a dream in every man's mind of being an individual, but it's harder every year to be one. The tendency is to join something--join the left, join the right, join the Phi Beta this, the Kappa Kappa Gamma that. Everything is joining.

[Q] Playboy: Do you join anything?

[A] Eastwood: No, it's not my thing. But I've had to join a lot of unions at one time or another, because I had many different jobs before I got into pictures.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of jobs?

[A] Eastwood: Well, as a kid I had summer jobs all over Northern California--hay baling around Yreka, cutting timber for the Forest Service near Paradise. The forestry job was mostly fire fighting; we'd cut timber when we weren't fighting fires. Then, after I got out of high school, my family moved from Oakland up to Seattle, and I went to Springfield, Oregon, just outside Eugene, to work for the Weyerhaeuser Company.

[Q] Playboy: As a lumberjack?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, up in the hills, and in the pulp mill at Springfield.

[Q] Playboy: How long were you there?

[A] Eastwood: Between the lumberjacking and the millwork, maybe about a year, year and a quarter. The dampness finally got to me and I moved on. Around Eugene, in the Willamette Valley, it's beautiful, but in the winter it socks in. You go six, seven months without seeing blue.

[Q] Playboy: What else did you do?

[A] Eastwood: I bummed around three, four different jobs around Seattle. I worked for Bethlehem Steel on the graveyard shift, in front of a furnace.

[Q] Playboy: Like Peter Boyle in Joe?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, I felt like Joe. I wasn't there very long. After that, I went to work for King County as a lifeguard and swimming instructor. That was in Renton, near Seattle.

[Q] Playboy: Where the Boeing plant is?

[A] Eastwood: I worked there, too, at Boeing, in the parts department. People would call for parts, and you'd get them stuff out of the inventory, fill out the forms. And I drove a truck--short-trip stuff, loaded and unloaded--for the Color Shake organization in Seattle.

[Q] Playboy: What's that?

[A] Eastwood: It's an outfit that dyes shakes.

[Q] Playboy: Shakes?

[A] Eastwood: For siding.

[Q] Playboy: Not milk shakes.

[A] Eastwood: No, no; I would have gotten acne at a very early age. Anyway, just about the time I made up my mind to go back to school--I was going to be a music major--I got this notice from the Government: "Greetings horn the President."

[Q] Playboy: This was during the Korean War?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, but except for the 16 weeks of basic training, I spent all my military career in the swimming pool at Fort Ord.

[Q] Playboy: How did you manage that?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I'd taught swimming before going into the Army, and they needed a couple of guys to help out at the pool there. So I got up and went into my act as a Johnny Weissmuller type. This was before Mark Spitz and Don Schollander. Anyway, I told them I was absolutely the greatest swimmer going, things like that, and I ended up getting the job. When we started out, there were this buddy of mine and I, and a master sergeant and four sergeants over us, and a lieutenant over them. Everybody got shipped to Korea except me; my name just didn't come up. So I figured I'd make the best of it and went up and talked to the captain. I said, "Look, I'm only a private, but I think I can handle this swimming-pool thing," and he said, "Well, I don't even know how to swim, so go ahead and run it. You're wearing a sweat shirt; nobody will know you're just a private." So I stayed there and hired four other guys to work for me. We had a pretty good swimming-instruction program going, got quite a few excellent ratings--like four-star movie reviews. I even lived down at the pool; it was a terrific deal for being in the Service. And then, after I got out, while I was going to school, trying to break into pictures, I worked at a Signal Oil station, right across from the unemployment office on Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A., and for a while I dug swimming pools.

[Q] Playboy: Did the physical build-up you got from all these jobs help later in your action-movie roles?

[A] Eastwood: Well, they kept me in shape. But I wasn't trying to keep in shape; it was just a matter of survival. Digging swimming pools certainly wasn't mentally stimulating. I'd put down my shovel and sneak off in the middle of the day, get to a public phone and call my agent: "Anything? Anything?" Actually, though, what was important about those jobs was that they provided me with great places to observe the workingman. On those kinds of jobs, you run into some wild characters. I'd like to make a movie about some of them.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think your bumming around gave you a greater insight into people and their motivations than you might have gained if you'd gone straight through school as a drama major?

[A] Eastwood: Definitely. I think it's helped me judge what audiences like in the way of entertainment: escape from that kind of existence. I believe that's probably the secret to my whole career. The choice of material--and the judgment of whether an audience will buy the material--is what makes an actor or a director a success.

[Q] Playboy: When did you realize you were going to be a success?

[A] Eastwood: Not for a long time. The number of people who had faith that I'd make it in show business I could name easily on one hand--and have a few fingers left over.

[Q] Playboy: How did you happen to go into showbiz? Had you wanted to be an actor since childhood?

[A] Eastwood: No, not really. I remember in junior high school, in Oakland, I had a teacher decide we were going to put on a one-act play, and she made up her mind I was going to be the lead. It was really disastrous. I wanted to go out for athletics; doing plays was not considered the thing to do at that stage in life--especially not presenting them before the entire senior high school, which is what she made us do. We muffed a lot of lines. I swore that was the end of my acting career.

[Q] Playboy: What changed your mind?

[A] Eastwood: Well, while I was at Fort Ord, I met a lot of actors--Martin Milner, Dave Janssen, Norman Bartold. After discharge, they went back to acting, and I was curious about it, wondered what it would be like. There was also a still photographer named Irving Lasper--he's dead now--who was a friend of mine, and he tried to encourage me to become an actor. So I signed a contract with Universal. They paid me $75 a week, I think; that was an enormous amount, it seemed to me then. I'd been going to school on the GI Bill at $110 a month, plus working in the afternoons at a gas station and nights managing the apartment house I lived in; so $75 a week sounded great.

[Q] Playboy: How did you get the contract at Universal? Through a screen test?

[A] Eastwood: In those days, they'd make interview tests, not acting tests. They'd sit you in front of the camera and talk--just as we're talking now. I thought I was an absolute clod. It looked pretty good; it was photographed well, but I thought, "If that's acting, I'm in trouble." But they signed me up as a contract player--which was a little lower than working in the mail room.

[Q] Playboy: What movies did you appear in at Universal?

[A] Eastwood: Oh, all the biggies. I think I played in about 13 or 14 films over the year and a half I was there. My parts ranged from one-liners to four-liners--though to look at some of the billings in TV Guide these days, you'd think I co-starred in those films.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember your first part?

[A] Eastwood: I think it was called Revenge of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. No, just Revenge of the Creature. Then I was in Never Say Goodbye, Francis in the Navy and Tarantula. None of them were what you'd call top-rank movies. But I learned a lot. There were classes every day, and I went to them, and I'd hang out on sets, behind the scenery somewhere--trying to be very unobtrusive--and watch people operate.

[Q] Playboy: What can you learn from watching a second-rate movie being made?

[A] Eastwood: I think you learn from seeing a bad movie as much as you do from seeing a good movie. I once went to a film festival where the audience was made up of students--or I gathered they were--and I forget what the film was, but it wasn't very good. And all these kids were yelling, making noises at the film, sort of as if it were a Sunday matinee of five-year-olds. And that seemed kind of stupid to me. I thought to myself, "Don't they realize this piece of crap on the screen can tell them a lot?" It's just like acting in a picture with a bad director; it gives you some point of reference, some comparison, so that when you meet someone who is halfway adequate, you see what makes the difference.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you leave Universal at the end of a year and a half?

[A] Eastwood: They 86'd me. My salary had gone up to $100 a week after six months, and then it was supposed to go up to $125. They called me in and said they didn't feel I was of any value to them at $125, but I could stay on at $100 if I wanted to. At first I was mad, of course, and I said, "What the hell, if they can't give me a raise, I'll take a hike." Then I decided I'd better hang in there another six months and get a little more experience. So I did, and after that, they dropped me. Still wasn't worth $125.

[Q] Playboy: Then what did you do?

[A] Eastwood: Television was going pretty good then, so I figured there'd be some opportunities for me. I got out and tried the cold world.

[Q] Playboy: At that time, wasn't the attitude toward television pretty low among movie people?

[A] Eastwood: I guess it was; TV was like a younger brother, or a second-class citizen. But to me, television was a logical place to go to really learn the business. Most of the people in television were doing the newest things, and in TV you had to work twice as fast, twice as hard to get half the credits. I learned a heck of a lot.

[Q] Playboy: What shows did you do?

[A] Eastwood: Oh, I did the circuit of the series that guys my age did then: Navy Log, Men of Annapolis, Highway Patrol. Didn't mean to get you overexcited there. I didn't play any giant parts, but they were improvements over what I'd been doing in those B movies--those three-or four-line bits.

[Q] Playboy: On television you got five or six lines?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, well, I'd get a supporting role, or a semilead, because I could ride a motorcycle, jump off a building or some crazy thing. They didn't have to pay for a stunt man.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still do your own stunts?

[A] Eastwood: Some, but I used to do much more. When you start out, you think. "Aw, I'm gonna do that myself." Just for fun. Authenticity, you know.

[Q] Playboy: Were you also trying to prove something?

[A] Eastwood: Probably, yeah. But I enjoy doing stuntwork. As you become more important to the film, though, you have problems with the insurance company. In Magnum Force, my latest film, we had to use some doubles, because this guy I play drives a motorcycle 60 feet into San Francisco Bay. I wasn't about to do that.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever had any mishaps with a stunt?

[A] Eastwood: Oh, I've been punched around a little bit, kicked around, but nothing much. I've done a lot of things--driven over explosions and stuff like that--but I've been pretty lucky.

[Q] Playboy: What's it like to drive over an explosion?

[A] Eastwood: Well, in Kelly's Heroes, which we made on location in Yugoslavia, it was rough, because the special-effects man used dynamite--real explosives--rather than just cork and black powder. He was an excellent special-effects guy--a German, Karli Baumgartner. But those explosions are quite dangerous, if you're ever on top of one.

[Q] Playboy: And that's where he put you?

[A] Eastwood: Well, he put me close. He's good about setting them off; does it right after you get past. In those situations, they're always careful not to have shrapnel involved.

[Q] Playboy: Very considerate.

[A] Eastwood: But there's still rocks and things that always get blown loose. Most of the American guys don't use the high explosive that Karli used.

[Q] Playboy: Why did he use it?

[A] Eastwood: Maybe he was getting even for World War Two. I don't know; he just liked big explosions. We had one scene in Kelly's Heroes where we were supposed to run out and lie down and a barn was supposed to explode behind us. And Telly Savalas, he didn't want to do it. Brian Hutton, the director, said to me, "What do you think?" And I said, "Well, I'll do it, but first we ought to ask Karli what he thinks." So I went to Karli and said, "What's your opinion of this explosion?" He said. "I don't recommend your being in this stunts because I just don't know." Which I thought was nice. I mean, a lot of guys would have said, "Go ahead, it's not me out there." So a couple of stunt guys did it; Baumgartner set it off and, sure enough, the building disintegrated right behind them. They were walking around talking to themselves, having trouble hearing for a few days. I do my own stunts whenever they're reasonable ones, but, like I said, not as many as in the old days back in television.

[Q] Playboy: Were you working pretty regularly when you started out in TV?

[A] Eastwood: They'd be two-, three-, four-day jobs, and then I'd be off for a while, collecting unemployment, digging more swimming pools. There were periods when I didn't work for four, five, six months at a time, and I got pretty depressed about it. Along about 1958, I had a sort of supporting role in a small film--it may have been the worst Western ever made--and it didn't do well, and I really thought about giving up.

[Q] Playboy: What was the film?

[A] Eastwood:Ambush at Cimarron Pass. That was sort of the low point of my movie career.

[Q] Playboy: What brought you out of that slump?

[A] Eastwood: I went down and visited a friend, Sonia Chernus, who was in the story department at CBS-TV. She works for me now, as my story editor. Anyway, we were sitting there talking by this coffee wagon in the basement at CBS and this guy came up to me and said, "Are you an actor?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "What have you done?" So I listed a line of credits, always increasing the importance of the roles by about 50 percent, praying to God the guy would never ask to see Ambush at Cimarron Pass. Which, of course, he did. I was taking the whole thing kind of lightly, because, although I knew CBS was casting an hour television show, my agent had told me the lead had to be older than me--about 39 or 40. So the man--I didn't know who the hell he was--called me into an office and another guy came in wearing old clothes. Looked like he'd just been pushing a broom in the back room. I didn't know whether he was going to sweep under the chair or what.

[Q] Playboy: Who was he?

[A] Eastwood: Charles Marquis Warren, the producer of Rawhide. I can hardly wait until he reads his description in this interview. So, anyway, I was being very cool, and I just casually asked him, "What's the lead like?" And he says, "Well, there's two leads, and one is a young guy in his early 20s." My agent wasn't bright enough to find that out. So I started perking up, straightening out the wrinkles in my T-shirt, you know--I was just wearing Levis--and finally the guy said, "Well, we'll get in contact with you." I kind of halfway wrote it off, because I figured once they'd seen Ambush at Cimarron Pass, that'd be the end of it.

[Q] Playboy: That wasn't one of your better hunches.

[A] Eastwood: No; well, they called me about four o'clock that afternoon and said, "Come on down and make a film test," and I did that, and another one the next morning. The big wheels at CBS liked it, and I was picked, and Eric Fleming was picked as the other lead. That was a great day in my life; the money looked to me as if I'd be in a league with Howard Hughes.

[Q] Playboy: End of depression?

[A] Eastwood: Not yet, because after we made ten of the 13 episodes we were supposed to do, the network pulled it off and shelved it. Here my career was, lying in the basement of CBS, because the word was that hourlong shows were out. So I decided to go up and visit my parents--they had moved from Seattle back to Oakland by then--and Mag and I got on a train. On the way from Los Angeles to Oakland, I got a telegram saying that the series had sold, after all, and to be ready to work on such and such a day. So Mag and I did a little champagne trick and yelled a lot; I stuck my head out the window and shouted a lot of profane things.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Eastwood: I can't remember. As you get older, you know, you learn other forms of relieving tension. But at a certain age, standing in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and yelling "Shit!" at the top of your lungs does provide a certain release. I can use as big obscenities as the next guy when I'm bugged. I can go on for 15 minutes without a repeat. But don't ask me what they are.

[Q] Playboy: Then you do get bugged? You're described as being unflappable.

[A] Eastwood: Well, I may not be as cool as my exterior. Or maybe I'm the type who doesn't show it. I can't really be objective about it. But sure, some things bug me. Yesterday some guy, making a TV series, called and asked to use my dressing room as a set. So, being an economically minded person, I said, "Fine. Why build a whole set? Just move in and shoot." Then I go back and find the dressing room looks like a public toilet. I mean the place is an absolute shambles. I'm going to tell that producer just what I think of his group, as soon as my secretary nails him down.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get back to Rawhide. That was one of the longest-running series on television. Didn't there come a time when you got sick of it?

[A] Eastwood: Oh, sure, everybody gets sick of it. But I kind of hesitated bitching about it because before you get into a series, you hear actors complaining and you think, "Wow, what's this guy bitching about? He's making $50,000 a year!" So I didn't have any real beefs. Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experiment with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, "Well, I won't do that again," and you're still on the air next week. It was kind of like being in a stock company on film. You might get three or four scripts in a row that are turkeys, and that can put you in the doldrums if you let it; but you can take those scripts and try to do more with them, rewrite them, upgrade them a little, and if you can take crap and make it adequate, make it palatable to the public, then you feel you've accomplished something. And I learned a lot about crews, too. You do 250 hours of television, you learn what makes one prop man good and another fair and another lousy, and what makes one cameraman better than another one. You learn about leadership, how one week a crew can move very fast and efficiently and the next week drag. About 90 percent of the time, it's the fault of the director. And you just store those things up in your head.

[Q] Playboy: But didn't you really want to get back into feature films?

[A] Eastwood: Oh, sure; there isn't any television-series performer who would ever say he wouldn't rather be doing a feature film. It's the difference between writing a single story once or twice a year and having to fill a column every day. Some-days there's just nothing to put in the damn column and you're having to wring it out, fill the space with something. During the last season of Rawhide, I had taken over the sole lead. Eric was having some kind of an argument with CBS over something, so they decided to try it with me alone. But that didn't exactly save the show, and it just kind of quietly died in 1966, as most series do when they go. At their height they give you a vast exposure--immediate recognition of some sort--and then they lose about 30 percent as they go along. So at the end, when it dies quietly, everybody says, "Oh, yeah, him."

[Q] Playboy: You made your first Italian Western, A Fistful of Dollars, while you were still a regular on Rawhide. How did that happen?

[A] Eastwood: Well, we had a break in shooting the series, from February or March to late May, early June. And about that time--this was in 1964--my agent called me and asked if I'd be interested in going to Spain to do a very low-budget Western, an Italian/German/Spanish coproduction. I laughed. I told him, "For six years I've been doing a Western every week. Hell, no, I'm not interested in it, especially not a European Western. It would probably be a joke." "Well," he said, "do me a favor. I promised the Rome office that I'd get you to read the script." So I read it, and about the tenth page I recognized it as a Western version of Yojimbo, the samurai film by Akira Kurosawa.

[Q] Playboy: Had you seen Yojimbo?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah. The funny thing was that this buddy and I had seen it together, and at the time we were both impressed by what a good Western it would make--the way The Magnificent Seven was made from Seven Samurai. But we thought it wouldn't sell; it would be too rough. Anyway, I read the script and, although the dialog was atrocious, I could see that it was very intelligently laid out. I said to Mag, who hadn't seen Yojimbo, "Read this and tell me what you think of it." And she read it and said, "Wow, it's really interesting. It's wild." So I told the agent, "OK, go ahead. I've really got nothing to lose on this deal, because if the picture turns out to be a bomb, it won't go anywhere." And I had a hunch that if it was handled well, it'd work.

[Q] Playboy: Your hunches were improving.

[A] Eastwood: Besides, it was a chance to go to Europe. I'd never been to Europe. So I signed on, even though it wasn't as much pay as I had made on TV.

[Q] Playboy: What was the fee?

[A] Eastwood: It was $15,000 for the total project.

[Q] Playboy: No percentages?

[A] Eastwood: No percentages, no nothing. The $15,000 was all I ever made from that one.

[Q] Playboy: What was it about the Dollars character that appealed to you?

[A] Eastwood: I was tired of playing the nice clean-cut cowboy in Rawhide; I wanted something earthier. Something different from the old-fashioned Western. You know: Hero rides in, very stalwart, with white hat, man's beating a horse, hero jumps off, punches man, schoolmarm walks down the street, sees this situation going on, slight conflict with schoolmarm, but not too much. You know schoolmarm and hero will be together in exactly ten more reels, if you care to sit around and wait, and you know man who beats horse will eventually get comeuppance from hero when this guy bushwhacks him in reel nine. But this film was different; it definitely had satiric overtones. The hero was an enigmatic figure, and that worked within the context of this picture. In some films, he would be ludicrous. You can't have a cartoon in the middle of a Renoir.

[Q] Playboy: Was the character of the Man with No Name defined in the script, or was he somewhat of your devising?

[A] Eastwood: I kind of devised it. I even picked out the costumes. I went into Mattsons', a sport shop up on Hollywood Boulevard here, and bought some black Levis and bleached them out, roughed them up. The boots, spurs and gun belts I had from Rawhide; the hat I got at a wardrobe place in Santa Monica. The little black cigars I bought in Beverly Hills.

[Q] Playboy: You don't smoke, do you?

[A] Eastwood: No, I don't. I smoked the cigars only for those films. I didn't really like them, but they kept me in the right kind of humor. Kind of a fog.

[Q] Playboy: Did they make you sick?

[A] Eastwood: No, they just put you in a sour frame of mind. Those were pretty edgy cigars.

[Q] Playboy: What about the poncho?

[A] Eastwood: The poncho I got in Spain. Never had any doubles for that. Most of the time, in films you have everything in duplicate or triplicate, just in case you lose things in stunts. But I never had any doubles for the poncho.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't it get a little ripe?

[A] Eastwood: Well, if you must ask! Yeah, the poncho got a little dirty. I never washed it in three films, I'll tell you that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you still have it?

[A] Eastwood: It's hanging on the wall of a Mexican restaurant that belongs to a friend of mine in Carmel.

[Q] Playboy: With a plaque underneath it?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, he's got a plaque with it. He wanted to put it on his wall, so I let him have it.

[Q] Playboy: Would you take the poncho off the wall to make another Dollars film?

[A] Eastwood: You mean if the same director, Sergio Leone, came back and said, "We've got a new place to take you"? I'd make any kind of film if I liked the script. But I'd have to see the thing. I don't know; I doubt it at the moment.

[Q] Playboy: What was working with Leone like?

[A] Eastwood: Sergio and I got along fine. Of course, at first we couldn't converse much; he spoke absolutely no English, and my Italian was just ciao and arrivederci, and that was about it. So I did my own thing and he did his.

[Q] Playboy: How long did it take before you could communicate with each other?

[A] Eastwood: Well, it took three pictures. A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He speaks better English now and I speak a little better Italian. I suppose we met somewhere in the middle.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a faculty for languages?

[A] Eastwood: No, I don't. If I majored in language, I wouldn't exactly be at the top of the class. I was speaking Spanish to somebody the other day, though, and I wasn't doing too bad. I wasn't just ripping along; this person, a Mexican, was speaking very fast, and I was doing my usual "Repite despacio, por favor," but we got along. In the present tense. Not conjugating any verbs. But I think Mexican Spanish is easier to understand than what they speak in Spain. Where we were in Spain, making the Dollars films, was in Andalusia--Andaluthia. They thpoke exthremely fatht in that Andaluthian dialect. Somebody who doesn't even speak rapid English, like myself, really gets lost.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have any misunderstandings with Leone, or with the crew, because of the language problem?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, but I couldn't possibly give you an example. After a while, of course, you do it purposely. Like in Italy, they have cornettas--you know what those are? A little sweet roll that you have in the morning with coffee. And I used to go into a store and put on a typical American accent--a kind of Texas-cowboy drawl--and say, "Ah'll have one a them there core-noodos. Raht."

[Q] Playboy: Cornutos? You mean cuckolds?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah. You can have a lot of fun with that--with the looks on their faces.

[Q] Playboy: Did you realize at the time you were making Fistful that it would be such a runaway success?

[A] Eastwood: I had more faith in it than the producers did. They thought it was going to be an absolute disaster when they saw the dailies. They wanted me to play a more expressive character.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you feel the Man with No Name should be played in so deadpan a style?

[A] Eastwood: My feeling was that the strength of this character was in his economy of movement and what the audience anticipates he's going to do. This builds up a constant suspense. If you can keep the audience's interest in what he's going to do next, you've really got it. The worst thing you can do is just impress the critics.

[Q] Playboy: Is that a dig at critics who have described your performances as deriving from the "Mount Rushmore school of acting"?

[A] Eastwood: No, actually, I've been treated well--flatteringly so--by the better, more experienced reviewers, people like Andrew Sarris, Jay Cocks, Vincent Canby and Bosley Crowther. Judith Crist, for some reason, hasn't been knocked out over everything I've done--or anything I've done, as a matter of fact. I think she liked The Devil in Miss Jones, but she thought Beguiled was obscene.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about negative reviews?

[A] Eastwood: I'm not overly affected by them; I figure everybody's entitled to his opinion, and reviewers are employed by publications to express those opinions. I've even seen unfavorable reviews of my pictures that I agreed with. I've always felt, though, that it's easier to write an unfavorable review than a favorable one. Because it takes more knowledge to write a good review. Anybody can do a pan, but to say what really works--that's tough. To take another area, jazz reviewers like Ralph Gleason and Leonard Feather can play musical instruments themselves. They know music. Consequently, if they do or don't like something, they're very specific about it in their reviews. They never make a general statement, like "This musician is the worst player I've ever heard." Movie criticism is an art, too, but I'm often surprised at how much is left out of reviews. Once in a while, one will mention the music or the photography, but they don't point out the ways in which these blend into the total style of the film, the reasons it does or doesn't work.

[Q] Playboy: How much influence have the critics had on your career?

[A] Eastwood: Not too much. To me, what's really important is whether the public likes what I do.

[Q] Playboy: The public certainly liked A Fistful of Dollars. Was the picture an immediate success?

[A] Eastwood: Not exactly. What happened was that they had a sneak-preview engagement somewhere outside Naples, and the first night I guess the house was about a quarter full. They had some expert come up from Rome and he said, "It's a well-made film, but it will never make a lira." But the next night the house was full, and the night after that, people were lined up down the street, and pretty soon the major downtown theater men from Naples were asking, "Why can't we have this film? What's it doing out here in the sticks?" So they were forced to release it nationwide and renegotiate all their contracts.

[Q] Playboy: Were you back in the States by then?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, making Rawhide again, and I kept looking in the trades for news about the movie. One day I saw an item in Variety, quoting an Italian from Rome: "Westerns have finally died out here." And I said to myself, "Wouldn't you know it?" But two weeks later, I read another article that said the big deal in Italy was that everybody was enthusiastic about making Westerns after the success of this fantastic new film, A Fistful of Dollars. That meant nothing to me, because the title we'd used during the shooting was Magnificent Stranger. Then about two days after that, there was another item from Rome, and it said, "A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood, is going through the roof here." And I said, "Clint Eastwood? Jesus Christ!" Then, I got a letter from the producer--who hadn't bothered to write me since I left, saying thank you or go screw yourself, or whatever--asking about making another picture.

[Q] Playboy: That would be For a Few Dollars More, which was followed by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When did you finally start getting a percentage of the receipts?

[A] Eastwood: With the third one. But even then, with three films that were successful overseas, I had a rough time cracking the Hollywood scene. Not only was there a movie prejudice against television actors but there was a feeling that an American actor making an Italian movie was sort of taking a step backward. But the film exchanges in France, Italy, Germany, Spain--all these countries--were asking the Hollywood producers when they were going to make a film starring Clint Eastwood. So finally I was offered a very modest film for United Artists--Hang 'em High. It was a good film, analyzed capital punishment within a good story. I formed my own company, The Malpaso Company, and we got a piece of it and did the film for $1,600,000. It broke even almost immediately, and then went into the black and was a very healthy film. That's kind of when things started picking up.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you form your own company?

[A] Eastwood: My theory was that I could foul my career up just as well as somebody else could fold it up for me, so why not try it? And I had this great urge to show the industry that it needs to be streamlined so it can make more films with smaller crews. The crews will be employed more, so there'll be just as much work. What's the point of spending so much money producing a movie that you can't break even on it? So at Malpaso, we don't have a staff of 26 and a fancy office. I've got a six-pack of beer under my arm, and a few pieces of paper, and a couple of pencils, and I'm in business. What the hell, I can work in a closet.

[Q] Playboy: What does Malpaso mean?

[A] Eastwood: In Spanish, it can mean bad pass or bad step. In this case, it means bad pass. I own some property on a creek in the Big Sur country called Malpaso Creek; I guess it runs down a bad pass in the mountains.

[Q] Playboy: But you've continued to do films for other companies, as well as for Malpaso.

[A] Eastwood: Sure. It depends on the story.

[Q] Playboy: What's been your favorite role?

[A] Eastwood: It would probably be Dirty Harry. That's the type of thing I like to think I can do as well as, or maybe better than, the next guy. He's very good at his job, and his individualism pays off to some degree. What I liked about playing that character was that he becomes obsessed; he's got to take this killer off the street. I think that appealed to the public. They say, "Yeah, this guy has to be put out of circulation, even if some police chief says, 'Lay off.' " The general public isn't worried about the rights of the killer; they're just saying get him off the street, don't let him kidnap my child, don't let him kill my daughter.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you concerned about the rights of the killer--or those accused of killing?

[A] Eastwood: There's a reason for the rights of the accused, and I think it's very important and one of the things that make our system great. But there are also the rights of the victim. Most people who talk about the rights of the accused have never been victimized; most of them probably never got accosted in an alley. The symbol of justice is the scale, and yet the scale is never balanced; it falls to the left and then it swings too far back to the right. That's the whole basis of Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry. These guys on the police force form their own elite, a tough inner group to combat what they see as opposition to law and order. It's remotely based on a true case, that Brazilian police death squad. It's frightening.

[Q] Playboy: When Dirty Harry came out, it was accused of being "a fascist masterpiece." Did you expect the same thing to happen with Magnum Force?

[A] Eastwood: No, I expected some people might call it a left-wing fantasy. Which I don't think it is. I don't think Dirty Harry was a fascist picture at all. It's just the story of one frustrated police officer in a frustrating situation on one particular case. I think that's why police officers were attracted to the film. Most of the films that were coming out at that time, in 1972, were extremely anti-cop. They were about the cop on the take, you know. And this was a film that showed the frustrations of the job, but at the same time, it wasn't a glorification of police work. Although some police department in the Philippines, I understand, asked for a 16-millimeter print of Dirty Harry to use as a training film.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get many letters from policemen after Harry?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah, I got letters. Still do. I'm asked to speak before police groups, women-police-officers' organizations. But I haven't accepted any of those requests, because I don't claim to be an expert on law enforcement.

[Q] Playboy: At the end of the film, when Harry throws away his badge, is that a statement of contempt for his superiors? Something like what happened in High Noon, when Gary Cooper tossed his badge into the dust as a symbol of his disgust with the townspeople who didn't support him?

[A] Eastwood: Cooper asked for support from the town that he had served so well, and they ended up crapping on him. But Harry wasn't saying the community as a whole had crapped on him, just the political elements of the city. The situation in another of my pictures, High Plains Drifter, is more like that in High Noon. That community didn't want to get involved, either. They weren't totally evil, they were just complacent, and they just sat back and let their marshal get whipped to death. It's a sort of comment on the thing that's very current today, of not wanting to get involved. Like the Kitty Genovese case a few years back, when something like 38 people witnessed this girl being murdered and not one of them so much as called the police.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if you saw a woman being beaten up in the street?

[A] Eastwood: I don't know. I would hope that I would, at a minimum, raise the telephone and notify the police. At a maximum, wipe the guy out. I mean, people are capable of heroic action in life, but nobody knows what he'd do before the occasion arises. I'm sure that prior to World War Two, Audie Murphy never thought of himself as a war hero.

[Q] Playboy: Take another example: What if you were in a liquor store, picking up a six-pack, when a holdup took place. Would you act as Harry would?

[A] Eastwood: I probably wouldn't do a thing. I'm sure that if somebody were pointing a gun at me and I were standing there with a six-pack, I'd say, "Care for one?"

[Q] Playboy: In other words, you'd be realistic, like the character in the Dollars films. Not get mixed up in something you didn't have to. Would you call that character basically an antihero?

[A] Eastwood: Yes, he operates on strictly selfish motivations at all times. But he was never the total antagonist of the film; everyone else was so evil that he looked better by comparison.

[Q] Playboy: Have you been disappointed in any of the films you've made--not the B-movie bits but the major ones?

[A] Eastwood: I was disappointed in Kelly's Heroes. That film could have been one of the best war movies ever. And it should have been; it had the best script, a good cast, a subtle antiwar message. But somehow everything got lost, the picture got bogged down shooting in Yugoslavia and it just ended up as the story of a bunch of American screw-offs in World War Two. Some of the key scenes got cut out. I even called up Jim Aubrey, who was then the head of MGM, and said, "For God's sake, don't run that picture for the critics until Brian, the director, has had a chance to do some more work on it. You're going to cut off maybe millions of dollars in box-office receipts." Aubrey said he'd think it over, but I'm sure when he hung up the phone, he said to himself, "What does this frigging actor know about millions of dollars? Forget it." It was released without further work, and it did badly.

[Q] Playboy:Beguiled didn't pack 'em in, either, did it?

[A] Eastwood: That probably would have been a more successful film if I hadn't been in it.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Eastwood: It was advertised to appeal to the kind of people who were my fans from the action pictures, and they didn't like seeing me play a character who gets his leg cut off, gets emasculated. They wanted a character who could control everything around him. The other people, those who might have liked the film, never came to see it. But it was good for me in a career sense, because it did give the few people who saw it a different look at me as a performer.

[Q] Playboy: Since then, do you think you've developed a sense of what's right for you?

[A] Eastwood: Yes. You have to cast yourself in things you do well. John Wayne has been the success he has been over the years because he does what he does better than anybody else can. A lot of people have said he doesn't really act. Just let them try to act like he does and they'll find they can't do it. You'll never go to any acting school in the world where people stand around trying to be the lone, enigmatic stranger, either. But at the same time, a lot of actors who play Henry the Fifth can't play my characters. They'd be ludicrous. To me, an actor's success comes not only from the magnetism of his personality but more from his ability to select material that would be commercial with him in it.

[Q] Playboy: Which is what you didn't do in Beguiled?

[A] Eastwood: Yes, although my role in Beguiled was easier to play than the lone Westerner was. In those Leone films, I had to establish an image for the audience while saying very little, showing very little. In Beguiled, I was dealing with straight, normal emotions.

[Q] Playboy: What was so normal about Beguiled? It had incest, jealousy, sadism, hints of lesbianism, gore....

[A] Eastwood: I was talking about the emotions from my own standpoint, which were simply those of survival.

[Q] Playboy: In Beguiled, as in several of your movies--most obviously Play Misty for Me--it's noteworthy that the moment you appear on the scene, all the girls make a play for you. There seems to be an attitude that women are not only available but eagerly available.

[A] Eastwood: Women are eagerly available. And so are men. People are eager to be with other people, eager to establish some kind of relationship. Everybody in the world wants to meet somebody. Play Misty for Me was strictly a comment on an available guy, a single guy who's somewhat of a celebrity--a disc jockey--in a small town. And this kookie girl becomes intrigued by his show, intrigued by him; she sees herself in a romantic situation and they have an affair. To him, it's just an affair; he's in love with somebody else and he tries to level with her, telling her he's involved elsewhere. Misty was a suspense sort of psychodrama, with an added element; it looked at that whole problem of commitment, that misinterpretation of commitment between a man and a woman. The girl who wrote it based it on a real-life story, on a girl she once knew. It appealed to me, too, because I've had this situation happen to me in my own life, this thing of having somebody clinging and clutching at you, not allowing you to breathe.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't the Misty type of situation a problem for you today? Don't you have groupies pursuing you?

[A] Eastwood: Well, you know, women do make plays sometimes, but I guess I'm at an age where I don't allow myself to be vulnerable. The Misty sort of thing happened to me when I was very young, 21 years old, before I was married. Sick jealousy isn't confined to any particular age, but most people I know, male or female, who have gone through that Misty type of insane jealousy had it happen at a very young age.

[Q] Playboy: At what point does jealousy become insane?

[A] Eastwood: When people start threatening to kill themselves and do all kinds of silly things. I've never been a real jealous person myself. I don't know why; never even went through it too bad as a kid.

[Q] Playboy: Was that something you got from your parents?

[A] Eastwood: Maybe, yeah, because of the security of their relationship.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a fairly open relationship yourself, with Mag?

[A] Eastwood: Sure. Oh, yeah, we've always had--I'd hate to say I'm a pioneer with women's lib or whatever, but we've always had an agreement that she could enter into any kind of business she wanted to. We never had that thing about staying home and taking care of the house. There's always a certain respect for the individual in our relationship; we're not one person. She's an individual, I'm an individual, and we're friends. We're a lot of things--lovers, friends, the whole conglomerate--but at the same time, I'm not shooting orders to her on where she's supposed to be every five minutes, and I don't expect her to shoot them at me.

[Q] Playboy: Does she?

[A] Eastwood: No. That's why the relationship has lasted as long as it has.

[Q] Playboy: You say you can't claim to be a pioneer in women's lib. But what do you think of the movement?

[A] Eastwood: I think it's justifiable; it's probably been too long in coming. So many articles you read on it are absolutely boring and silly, but the basis for it is all there. I think women tend to be smarter than men in a lot of areas, and I don't know what took them so long to get into things like equal pay for equal jobs. There's no reason in the world they shouldn't have it.

[Q] Playboy: In what areas do you think women are smarter than men?

[A] Eastwood: Well, you see a lot of terribly intelligent men with dumb women, but you never see terribly intelligent women with dumb guys. I can't really articulate it; it's just a feeling I have. I hate to break things down to their smallest parts. I work on more of an animal level, on a feeling level. I don't do a lot of philosophizing and intellectualizing.

[Q] Playboy: Yet we've heard you do a great deal of reading.

[A] Eastwood: I do a tremendous amount of reading, but a good portion of it, these days especially, is taken up by potential properties--potential films. That's almost 90 percent of my reading. It takes an awful lot of reading to find the right material; you have to wade through miles to get one inch. I've been easing up, though; Sonia and Bob are doing some of the reading and I'm taking their word on more things. I used to have to say, "Well, I'll give it a look myself." Never could take advantage of that old saying "You don't have to drink the ocean to find out it's salty." I'd read scripts from beginning to end, even if the first 50 pages were just awful.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Eastwood: I'd say, "Well, this is so bad, I've got to see how it turns out." And I'd sit up late at night, reading away on these properties. And finally throw them out, saying, "What the hell have I wasted the last two hours on that for?" I could have been sleeping, or walking the dog. Something really creative.

[Q] Playboy: When you're selecting scripts, do you play by the conventional Hollywood wisdom--that it's safe to follow trends?

[A] Eastwood: No. Why in hell do I have to follow some trend? Like the way I read that Westerns were out just before A Fistful of Dollars was released. There's always somebody who's going to say Westerns are out. They said police films were out when we made Dirty Harry. All you can do is just do your own thing, follow your instincts. If the project is right, people will go for all kinds of pictures.

[Q] Playboy: The trend about which many observers have expressed concern lately is a continuing escalation of violence onscreen. Some critics have traced this to the blood baths in your own spaghetti Westerns. When you were making them, were you concerned about their violence?

[A] Eastwood: No, I wasn't. I knew they were tough films, but there was a certain satire involved in the violence that I felt was a catharsis. I'm not a person who advocates violence in real life, and if I thought I'd made a film in which the violence inspired people to go out and commit more violence, I wouldn't make those films. But I don't believe that.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Eastwood: I believe they're a total-escape type of entertainment. There was an article in the Los Angeles Times several years ago; a journalist had been interviewing inmates at San Quentin, and they said their favorite pictures were Clint Eastwood Westerns--their reason being that any pent-up emotions they had were released when they saw those films. After they'd see one, everything would be very calm in the prison for the next few weeks. The basis for drama is conflict, you know, and physical conflict is certainly a very important part of it. You can't have movies and television with people just sitting around having arguments; no physical action, nothing to look at. You might as well tell the story on radio.

[Q] Playboy: But is there a point at which the violence becomes excessive?

[A] Eastwood: Certainly. Everything can get overdone. I'm sure that since the Dollars pictures first came out, the Italians--and the Americans, for that matter--have made 200-and-some-odd Westerns, each of them probably more violent than those were. And with the Kung Fu films, you get one big hit and then the next guy says, "We'll do it twice as bloody." So it gets superviolent. A lot of critics interpreted Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch as a statement against violence; it was so violent they saw it as antiviolence. I don't think that's true at all. I think Peckinpah just wanted to make a superviolent flick. I don't think he showed how bad violence is; I think he showed how beautiful it is, with slow-motion cameras and everything. I liked the picture, but when you have that many shootings, you lose the horror aspect of it and it just becomes comedic.

[Q] Playboy: Can't that have a brutalizing effect on an audience?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah: after a while, you just sit there and say, "Oh, another guy getting blown to bits in slow motion." But I don't think it has a permanently brutalizing effect. I just think the audience gets tired of it. It's like--you see one person getting stabbed by a guy, and then the killer has to get stabbed by a bigger guy, and then the big guy has to get run over by a steam roller or something. What extremes can you carry this to? It's the same thing with sex in films. You start out with a scene of two people in bed, and then you have a scene intimating sexual relations, and pretty soon you have Deep Throat and people doing all kinds of kinky stuff.

[Q] Playboy: Have you seen Deep Throat?

[A] Eastwood: Yes, and I saw that other one, The Devil in Miss Jones.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of them?

[A] Eastwood: Not much. The old stag films, with the guys in masks and black socks and garters, they were more fun. They were so bad they were good. The plumber with the bony knees looking through the window, watching the girl undress, and all of a sudden he comes in and sets the pipes down--those were the old smoker movies of the Forties. These new ones aren't any better; they're just done in color.

[Q] Playboy: You don't think the new porno films are more artistic?

[A] Eastwood: I don't see that ejaculating in a girl's face is more artistic. If that's beautiful sex, if that's socially relevant, you can keep it. What you want to do in your own bedroom is great, but that's not necessarily what I want to look at. I'd like to see a good one, though; I've often wondered what would happen if somebody made a really good porno film.

[Q] Playboy: What would make a porno film really good?

[A] Eastwood: One that showed tenderness, that had a real, honest love developing, something that was well photographed, well presented, well acted. It would be interesting to see how an audience would respond to explicit sex within a moving story rather than just a gymnastic thing or a gag. You know, I'm surprised some women's group hasn't gone after Deep Throat. I mean, it's making a joke out of a woman's anatomy; that's the whole theme of the picture. Personally, I was turned off by sex after watching Deep Throat. That kind of stuff--people pouring Cokes into people--turns me off.

[Q] Playboy: What turns you on?

[A] Eastwood: I'm sure Playboy would like to know what turns me on very specifically. But I've never been one to discuss that kind of crap in print. I keep a lot of stuff to myself.

[Q] Playboy: We give up. Would you be in favor of censoring hard-core films?

[A] Eastwood: No, I'm against censorship. I think it can be dangerous. If the press had been censored, we'd never have found out about Watergate, which needed to be exposed. As far as films are concerned, I think adult human beings ought to be able to see what they want to. I'm too much of an individual to think otherwise.

[Q] Playboy: Have you run into censorship problems with your own films?

[A] Eastwood: Well, we have a film. Breezy, that's R-rated, and I don't think it deserves to be R-rated at all. But it is, because 20-some states in the Union have statutes that say showing the nipple on a woman's breast to children is obscene. That's the first thing we come into contact with when we arrive on this planet: a woman's breast. Why should that be considered obscene? And I understand that someplace in Texas, there was a move to give Paper Moon an R instead of a PG, because an underaged girl is swearing and kind of pimping for a hotel clerk in one scene. I don't know. You could argue that the local community has the right to set standards, but if you accept that, you could argue that the community has the right to impose segregation. That's the long-range implication of something like the Supreme Court decisions on obscenity. But I can see how the extremes of a Deep Throat have led to the public demand for censorship that put the Court under so much pressure. Sex is a very important topic; it's important to be able to show it artistically. But where do you go from Deep Throat? To chickens? It's that old cliché about the pendulum swinging back and forth. You remember, quite a (continued on page 170)Playboy Interview(continued from page 72) few years ago, there was a period when movies couldn't show a husband and wife in bed together, even if they were just reading magazines. Now you can see that on any TV show. There's a much more honest approach. But what happens--and it's the same thing with politics--is that the pendulum swings too far, the scale tips over and falls back with a crash.

[Q] Playboy: How would you characterize yourself politically?

[A] Eastwood: I'm a political nothing. I mean, I hate to be categorized. I'm certainly not an extremist; the best thing you can say about extremists, either right or left, is that they're boring people. Not very flexible people. I suppose I'm a moderate, but I could be called a lot of things. On certain things I could be called very liberal; on others, very conservative.

[Q] Playboy: Which things?

[A] Eastwood: I'm liberal on civil rights, conservative on Government spending.

[Q] Playboy: What areas of Government spending?

[A] Eastwood: I think the attitude that Big Daddy's going to take over has become a kind of mental sickness. I don't think Government programs should be designed to encourage freeloading. The Government has to help people, to some degree, but it should be encouraging people to make something of themselves.

[Q] Playboy: You're not against unemployment insurance, are you?

[A] Eastwood: No, I've collected it often enough. Though when I see what it is today--something like $85 a week--I wonder what the hell I'm doing working. But I don't know, I suppose with inflation it's not worth much more than the 20-something a week I used to get.

[Q] Playboy: You say you're a liberal on civil rights; what about civil liberties? How do you feel about wire tapping, electronic surveillance?

[A] Eastwood: Whatever the reasons are, whatever the hell the law finally states. I just don't think it's morally right. Same as I think the morality of President Nixon's making those tapes in the Oval Office was bad. Innocent people were in there talking to him--like the prime minister of some country--very frankly stating their points of view with no idea that their conversations were being taped. President Nixon knew. They didn't. If I knew I was bugging a room and I was going to keep the tapes for history, I sure as hell wouldn't say anything on tape that might convict me. If everything I said in Lew Wasserman's office here at M.C.A., or in the offices of whatever studio I'm dealing with, was taped, I certainly would talk a little more carefully than I usually do. But I don't want to find out all my conversations are going straight to the M.C.A. Tower.

[Q] Playboy: Are they?

[A] Eastwood: Probably. No, they aren't. I checked it out.

[Q] Playboy: Really?

[A] Eastwood: No, but that's the way things have gotten these days. Everybody bugging everybody.

[Q] Playboy: Or investigating everybody. What's your opinion of the attitude John Ehrlichman expressed during the Watergate hearings--that more character investigations should be conducted to unearth such things as politicians' drinking habits? Would you run such a check on somebody who came to work for you?

[A] Eastwood: Every company checks on a person's references. You call his former boss and ask why this guy left, if he was dismissed, and for what reason. If I found out a guy was an absolute lush, I wouldn't hire him. I'm sure that right now a lot of people are asking why President Nixon didn't check further into former Vice-President Agnew's background, or why there are so many people around him who seem to be of questionable honor. You'd have to say that he's a very poor judge of character. And, on the other side, a lot of people wondered why Senator McGovern didn't check out Senator Eagleton. But to go back to hiring somebody myself, well, I'm not going to scrutinize the type of women he goes out with and all that, because I don't care. And I wouldn't want him scrutinizing me the same way.

[Q] Playboy: How would you react if somebody did run a check like that on you, complete with private detectives?

[A] Eastwood: I wouldn't like it, but basically I wouldn't give a damn. I'm an actor, and actors are expected to be screwballs. People would say, you know, "What else?" But with politicians, people expect--or at least hope for--the best. They're concerned if their Senator is out getting five-o-twos or out boozing.

[Q] Playboy: Five-o-twos?

[A] Eastwood: Drunk-driving citations. That kind of thing would probably make me vote for the guy, though. When Senator McGovern told that jerk who was harassing him to "Kiss my ass." I started thinking, "This guy is all of a sudden sounding good to me." Not because he used profanity but because he had a human reaction; he was tired of being bugged. When Harry Truman told off that critic who said his daughter couldn't sing, called him a stupid son of a bitch--or whatever the hell he called him--it was the natural reaction of a father expressing resentment at somebody attacking his daughter. I think that appealed to a lot of people. Politics is a tough business and you have to be tough to stay in it. I mean, nobody came ever more virtuous than Senator McGovern, but I'm sure that he's a tough guy. I'm sure he isn't quite as Percy Kilbride as his image was presented; to be where he is today, as a Senator of the United States, he must have been in on some good infighting.

[Q] Playboy: Whatever your opinion of McGovern, are you suspicious of most politicians?

[A] Eastwood: No, I don't think I'm a total negativist on that, but I do think this Watergate thing is making people cynical. I hate to see the public get so callous about it, not care anymore, because they should care. So that things like Watergate won't happen again. Same as if maybe the Bobby Baker thing had been pursued as vigorously as the Watergate thing has, to find the connections between Baker and the hierarchy, it might have set an example. If nothing else, Watergate, right through the Ellsberg thing, was the dumbest-handled thing in the world. I'm glad it was exposed, for the sake of turning off what might have been a dangerous trend, but I'd hate to think that our intelligence forces around the world were operating as clumsily as that group. Leaving money in telephone booths. It was like a poor man's James Bond movie.

[Q] Playboy: If you were going to do Watergate as an adventure movie---

[A] Eastwood: I wouldn't do it. I think Peter Sellers would.

[Q] Playboy: Another opinion expressed by Ehrlichman during the Watergate hearings was that virtually any action--such as burglarizing Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office--was justifiable if it was being done in the name of national security, for the President of the United States. How do you feel about that?

[A] Eastwood: I don't think that's at all justifiable. I think he was just trying to rationalize his way out of a very difficult situation. Where does this kind of thing end? My latest picture, Magnum Force, is all about that: about what happens when the law decides it's above the law. Pretty soon everybody's burglarizing. If breaking and entering are considered legal under any circumstances, I think pretty soon we'll all just go breaking into a neighbor's house and lift whatever we happen to want or need. Maybe information, maybe his wallet.

[Q] Playboy: What would you do if somebody broke into your house?

[A] Eastwood: He'd risk getting shot.

[Q] Playboy: Do you keep a loaded gun in your house?

[A] Eastwood: Yes, I have guns; but with kids, one has to be very intelligent about where one places them. My kids play with toy guns, or my boy does, but I've taken him out to the range where I fire pistols and I've always instilled in his mind that one kind of gun is a plaything and another is the real thing. There's no use trying to tell him not to have anything to do with guns. You can be an idealist and not buy war toys, but a boy will still pick up a stick and play shoot-'em-up.

[Q] Playboy: You had your children rather late in your marriage, in comparison with some couples. How did it feel to become a father after 15 years?

[A] Eastwood: I think it felt better for me at this age than it would have when I was 21, trying to start a career. I wasn't broke, like my father was when he had me. I suppose that's the reason we had them late in life. But I think I appreciate kids more now, much more.

[Q] Playboy: Your work has required you to be gone from home a great deal, sometimes on long locations---

[A] Eastwood: I wasn't even in this country when Kyle was born. I was in Europe on location for Where Eagles Dare. I hope that sort of thing won't have to happen again.

[Q] Playboy: In any case, your wife has had to be both father and mother to the kids at times. How does she feel about that?

[A] Eastwood: Well, she prefers it when I'm around. Naturally, At least I hope so. I think she does.

[Q] Playboy: Of all the films you've acted in or directed, what was your favorite location?

[A] Eastwood: Working in Carmel for Misty Was great, being near home. I also liked the location for High Plains Drifter at June Lake, east of Yosemite. And Thunderbolt and Lightfoot--the new film I'm in with Jeff Bridges, George Kennedy and Geoffrey Lewis--was shot near Great Falls, Montana. Beautiful country. I've enjoyed all the locations. What I don't like is long locations. I hate long movies.

[Q] Playboy: What do you consider a long movie?

[A] Eastwood: One that takes more than three months. Kelly's Heroes, in Yugoslavia, was about five and a half or six months; Paint Your Wagon was five months, in Baker, Oregon. There wasn't anything very exciting there--especially for five months.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do for kicks?

[A] Eastwood: They had a nine-hole golf course, so I played golf. I rented a farm outside town, about 40 acres, had ducks in a pond. Slopped the hogs for the guy who owned the farm.

[Q] Playboy: And in the evening you'd sit around the campfire, singing Lerner and Loewe songs?

[A] Eastwood: Right. "Tenting on the old campground."

[Q] Playboy: Where's your next location?

[A] Eastwood: Our next project--we don't even have the title yet, but I'll be directing it, not acting in it--will be on location close by, near Los Angeles. It's a suspense film.

[Q] Playboy: Do you plan to go on alternating between acting and directing?

[A] Eastwood: Eventually, I would love to give up acting and just direct. I think every actor should direct at least once. It gives you a tolerance, an understanding of the problems involved in making a film. In fact, I also think every director should act.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you cast Don Siegel, your director from Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry and other films, in a role in Play Misty for Me?

[A] Eastwood: Yeah. On my first day as a director, on the set of Misty, the actor in the scene was Don. He kept saying, "You're making a big mistake; you shouldn't be doing this. You should get a good character actor." I said, "Don't worry about it. If I screw up as a director. I've got a good director on the set." And it worked out.

[Q] Playboy: Can you distinguish between the qualities that make a good actor and those that make a good director?

[A] Eastwood: It's an instinctive thing. Just as acting isn't an intellectual medium, I don't think directing is, either: the instinct to hire the right person--the right cameraman to go with the right director, and the right actors to go with the other actors, and so on, so that the ensemble fits.

[Q] Playboy: If you were to win an Academy Award---

[A] Eastwood: I don't really expect to. I'm not going to sit here and say I'd hate to win one. But I'm not terribly politically oriented. I don't know if I'd be able to campaign properly, even if I had the vehicle.

[Q] Playboy: You mean it's not possible to win one without campaigning?

[A] Eastwood: I guess it is, but there's definitely a public-relations aspect to it. You have to keep people aware of whatever it is you're doing.

[Q] Playboy: If you did win one, would you rather it be as best actor or as best director?

[A] Eastwood: I suppose as director. I don,t know. Directing, to me, is somewhat more satisfying.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you said you'd love to give up acting someday?

[A] Eastwood: Did I say that? I really wouldn't.

[Q] Playboy: You just said it.

[A] Eastwood: Well, I was lying. What I meant, I'm sure, is that someday I may just get to the point where I feel I don't come across right on the screen anymore, that I ought to be playing character roles. Then maybe I'd better stick to directing.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever considered investing the money you've made from films in some sort of commercial enterprise?

[A] Eastwood: Not really. I do have a few ventures, like the Hog's Breath Inn, a restaurant I own part of in Carmel. It has the atmosphere of an English countryside restaurant and serves some very good organic food.

[Q] Playboy: Why that appetizing name?

[A] Eastwood: I have to take credit for that. When I was drifting around Great Britain with Fistful of Dollars, I went to Wales and Scotland and stopped in all the small towns. Naturally, I stopped at an awful lot of pubs. They all had crazy names, and Hog's Breath Inn was the craziest one I could think up. Somebody raised the objection that that's a bad name for a restaurant, but I said it a customer doesn't have a sense of humor, we don't want him anyway.

[Q] Playboy: And why organic food?

[A] Eastwood: I like it. Years ago, I walked into a health-food store with a friend; he was looking for some kind of bread. And there was a little old lady in there talking about pesticides and things, in the way that's fashionable today. And I thought, "Gee, what she says makes sense." Although I'm not against all pesticides. But most of the stuff from the health-food stores is quite good. It's also more expensive, but people who like to save money on marketing will turn around and buy four or five bottles of booze and take it home in the same armload. So I just buy two or three bottles of booze and spend the rest on organic food.

[Q] Playboy: Do you suppose Olympia, your favorite beer, is made from organically grown hops?

[A] Eastwood: I don't know how organically brewed Olympia or any other beer is, but there are certain things you just can't sacrifice.

[Q] Playboy: Is the fact that you don't hunt attributable to the same sort of concern for the environment that drew you to natural foods?

[A] Eastwood: I guess I have too much of a reverence for living creatures. There's so much beauty in them.

[Q] Playboy: There's a story that you once refused to kill a rattlesnake on the set of Two Mules for Sister Sara. Is that true?

[A] Eastwood: I didn't refuse. I ended up killing the rattlesnake, but I didn't want to. We were in Mexico, and the authorities didn't want a rattlesnake let loose after the filming.

[Q] Playboy: How did you kill it?

[A] Eastwood: Cut its head off with a knife. It wasn't the happiest thing I ever did. I cut the snake's head off and handed the body to Shirley MacLaine.

[Q] Playboy: Of all the actresses you've worked with, who has been your favorite leading lady?

[A] Eastwood: Shirley was fun, but in Beguiled, I worked with eight leading actresses, and they were all fun, too. Inger Stevens--God rest her soul--was a great gal. In Rawhide, we had some sensational people--Julie Harris, Geraldine Page.

[Q] Playboy: Who are your close friends? Are they in the movie colony, neighbors in Carmel, business associates?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I work with Bob Daley, and we're close friends. We used to live next door to each other when I was a contract player and he was in cost analysis. Bob and Cissy Donner are friends; he's an actor, and I talked him into starting, going into a drama group. Fritz Manes, he's a friend of mine who works for channel two in Oakland. A kid I knew in school, Don Kincade, is still a friend; he's a dentist who lives in Davis. Those are guys I've known for many years. And I've known Don Siegel for about seven years. And I have three or four close friends around Carmel.

[Q] Playboy: Are any of them movie people?

[A] Eastwood: Not really. But Merv Griffin owns a house there, and Merv I know quite well. He played in the celebrity tennis tournament with me.

[Q] Playboy: The Clint Eastwood Invitational Celebrity Tennis Tournament has become quite a bash, hasn't it? How did you get involved?

[A] Eastwood: Don Hamilton, who was the pro at the Pebble Beach Beach and Tennis Club, approached me about three years ago. They had had a celebrity tennis tournament, but it was a very small thing, mostly within the Del Monte company. And they wanted to have a big thing for charity. I told him they ought to get a better tennis player, but he talked me into sponsoring it. And it's gone over quite well.

[Q] Playboy: How good a player are you?

[A] Eastwood:Cosi, cosi. Mag is a good tennis player.

[Q] Playboy: What are some of your other pastimes?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I work out; have a little gym at home with racks of weights around the walls, a punching bag, sandbag. You may not believe it, as I'm sitting here eating macadamia nuts and drinking my 27th beer, but I like to keep in shape. Let's see, what else? I go to an awful lot of movies. I like to see them at regular theaters, along with the general public, and get a feeling of the audience.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't you recognized and besieged for autographs?

[A] Eastwood: Well, I disguise myself when I go into a theater. I put on a mustache and glasses, and it makes me look quite different. I managed to go to a rodeo at Salinas the other day and not one person recognized me. By the time I get a hat on, and the mustache and glasses, it drops my I.Q. by about 50 points, which makes it about five.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a rodeo fan?

[A] Eastwood: I used to go to a lot of them. I did weekend stints when I was on Rawhide; all the TV guys do, I think. They'd pay you to come out and do an appearance, in Casper, Wyoming, or someplace like that.

[Q] Playboy: Have you always done a lot of riding?

[A] Eastwood: Most of my life. My cousins had horses, at my grandmother's place, so I rode a lot as a kid.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned wanting to study music when you were younger. Do you play any instruments?

[A] Eastwood: No. I used to play the piano. When I was 17, I played in Oakland at the Omar club.

[Q] Playboy: For money?

[A] Eastwood: I got all the beer I could handle and all my meals. And I used to play the trumpet. I still have it.

[Q] Playboy: But you don't play it?

[A] Eastwood: No muscles.

[Q] Playboy: That's what comes of making those early films in which you barely moved your lips. Recently, though, you've had more varied roles. In the past 12 months, you've acted in Magnum Force and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and directed Breezy. Besides the new picture you're planning, what's next on the agenda?

[A] Eastwood: I'd like to take it easy for about six months, slow down my pace a little, spend some time with my family. I still don't get to do as much of that as I'd like, but I don't think anybody does. It's the nature of the business--this business, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Was your own family closely knit when you were a child?

[A] Eastwood: Yes, but not in the conventional sense. That was during the Depression, you know, and my dad traveled around a lot looking for work. Jobs were hard to come by in those days. So there were times when we had to be separated; when times weren't good, I had to live with my grandmother, on her farm up near Sunol, near Livermore. We moved around so much--I must have gone to eight different grammar schools--that the family was about all you had. I didn't have a lot of friends; our family--my parents and my younger sister and I--was a unit. I think my parents and my grandmother--she was quite a person, very self-sufficient, lived by herself on a mountain--probably had more to do with my turning out the way I have than any educational process I may have gone through. They were very young parents--quite the antithesis of my own situation with my children. They were great parents. I was lucky to have them. But I've been lucky with a lot of things: lucky with my acting career, lucky with my directing efforts.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to ascribe a great deal to luck. Are you saying that your career has been something of a fluke?

[A] Eastwood: Maybe, in the sense that I believe everything in life's kind of a fluke. Luck has played a great part in my whole existence, particularly my existence as an actor. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. And for the kind of guy I am, this is the right era to be in the motion-picture business.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Eastwood: Today the actor is much more in control of his own fate than he used to be. I'd find it very frustrating to be under one of those old contracts, at the mercy of one of those studio regimes. It's a funny thing; I was never the guy the press agents figured should be on the cover of this or that magazine, never the recipient of the big, glamorous studio push they used to give upcoming actors in the old days. I've never been the darling of any particular group, but somehow--somehow I got there, anyway.