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226 Do You Feel Lucky, Monk? Nick Tosches / 2008 Published online as “Web Exclusive,” Vanity Fair, December 12, 2008, . Reprinted by permission of the author. It’s one of those curiosities of human nature. No matter how much we achieve in this world, no matter how much life brings us, there are always regrets and pangs of failure. “If I’ve had any regret in life, it was not paying more attention to it and not practice, practice, practice.” That’s Clint Eastwood talking, and he’s talking about playing the piano . For him, before there were movies, there was the piano. He was born in San Francisco in 1930. His father was a steelworker and his mother was a factory worker. And there was a piano. “I started just playing it around the house when I was a little kid. My mother played a little bit. She could read music and stuff. So just bits and pieces. And then I started imitating records and stuff, ’cause she didn’t know how to play any jazz or blues particularly. So I just started getting interested in players who were good at it, and one thing led to another.” The players who struck him back then were “Fats Waller and Art Tatum and people like that. And then a lot of the blues pianists that later came along. And I listened to some Dixieland piano players, too. You know, James P. Johnson, the people that date back to that era. And then I listened to a lot of the boogie-woogie piano players of the thirties and forties. Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, stuff like that. And then Oscar Peterson came along. He was just a kid then, or just a very young man, and he started playing out of sight. George Shearing and Oscar Peterson and those guys became very popular in the forties and fifties, so everybody tried to imitate them.” It wasn’t until 1955 that Clint made his first film appearance, without nick tosches / 2008 227 credit, as a lab technician in Revenge of the Creature. But in the years before and after that inauspicious beginning, he never thought of turning to the piano for a living, though he probably could have done as well on a stage or in a bar with a piano as he did in that lab coat on a soundstage. “No, I didn’t. You know, I had a certain knack when I was very young, but I didn’t have very good discipline. I didn’t take any piano lessons or anything. We were just on a limited budget and everything. So most of the money I earned from caddying or bagging groceries and stuff was just to go to an occasional movie or something.” By the time of Clint’s screen debut, the first wave of rock ’n’ roll had come and all but gone. Clint, who was into Robert Johnson and other bygone bluesmen, was into the newer jive as well. “I did get into rhythm and blues. I love good rhythm and blues. Joe Hunter and Lowell Fulson. Joe Turner, and Wynonie Harris. But I never quite got over into rock ’n’ roll too much, it seems.” “You’re talking about the late fifties on, the white stuff?” “Yeah, the white stuff: never. It was sort of a steal from the black stuff, and the black stuff seemed like it had more of the origin.” His love for the flow and flux of this music is evinced in “Piano Blues,” the segment he directed for Martin Scorsese’s 2003 PBS series, The Blues. The piano masters here span those years from boogie-woogie to rhythm and blues, from Jimmy Yancey, born in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, to Fats Domino, born in New Orleans in the early twentieth. The uncredited lab technician in Revenge of the Creature rose, vanished , returned as the Man with No Name, and eventually became the Director with Final Cut. One of the most intriguing examples of Clint’s autonomy was Honkytonk Man, the 1982 film, directed by and starring him, that drew from elements of the lives of classic country singers such as Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. It was one of those acts of daring , like his recent Letters from Iwo Jima, a committed throw of the dice against all commercial odds, that have defined his career as much as his enduring success has. Six years after Honkytonk Man...

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