In the book’s broad outlines, Eastwood’s story—starting with his Depression-era childhood in California through his stint as an Army lifeguard and his success in Hollywood and as an unrepentant ladies’ man—is that of a handsome cipher growing, slowly and gradually, into his talent, which initially had to do with embracing certain limitations. The old joke about Eastwood’s drama teacher—who told him, “Don’t just do something, stand there”—compresses plenty about his on-screen persona, with its steely mask of impassivity, but also his patience. (“I worked half my life to be an overnight success,” Eastwood has joked.)
Levy does well in the sections detailing Eastwood’s two crucial breakthroughs—first by landing Rawhide and then by leaving it, decamping to Italy to shoot an unheralded little western with the working title Il Magnifico Straniero, better known today as A Fistful of Dollars. By so vividly embodying Sergio Leone’s version of a western hero, Eastwood cultivated a mystique adjacent to (but different from) that of John Wayne. For all his rough edges, Wayne was noble, and also knowable; Eastwood, by contrast, was cold, remote, and in his way deeply seductive, clutching that fistful of dollars with a mercenary’s resolve.
It is around this point in Clint’s chronology—after the migration toward spaghetti westerns but before genuine superstardom—that we get the first whispers of Eastwood’s ambivalence toward his own celebrity, and the tight grip he kept on his image. Such tetchiness is a logical complement to the methodology he would later adopt during his career as a director, whose longevity is largely a byproduct of keeping his head (and his budgets) down: Having earned the right to have the final cut on his movies, Eastwood did his best to achieve a similar control over the public narrative of his own life.
He did not always succeed. In 1997, in the midst of a pitched legal battle centered on a much-publicized palimony suit, Eastwood’s ex-wife (and regular costar) Sondra Locke published a memoir called The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly: A Hollywood Journey, in which she characterized Eastwood as “a completely evil, manipulating, lying excuse for a man.” (Locke received a warning letter from Eastwood’s lawyer, though no slander charges were filed.) Levy has evident sympathy for Locke’s position—he’s critical of the way that Eastwood maneuvered behind the scenes to undermine her career—and he has no illusions in general about the ways that A-listers cultivate and wield power. (One of his other recent projects is a podcast on the Hollywood power broker Lew Wasserman, who greenlighted Eastwood’s directorial debut on Play Misty for Me.)