THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 |A
T
he other day I found someone
citing Henry David Thoreau’s
advice from “Walden”: “Sim-
plify, simplify.” I began to think of
some seemingly simple yet unusual
statements I had encountered.
I once asked the late Las Vegas ty-
coon Kirk Kerkorian if he was trou-
bled by the enormous debt he ran up
to finance his corporate takeovers.
He was then trying to gain control of
Columbia Pictures Industries, where
I was CEO. His simple answer
stunned me. “Look, that money is the
bank’s money, not mine. They have to
worry about it—not me.”
In my lawyer days, a Texas oilman
client had a different attitude toward
bank debt. His drilling efforts had
sharp peaks and valleys, but he con-
tinued to patronize the finest restau-
rants. When I asked how he managed
to dine so well in bad times, he ex-
plained patiently: “I never let my in-
come affect my standard of living.”
I knew the violin maestro Isaac
Stern and once persuaded him to
visit with students at my alma mater,
Williams College, where he warmlyThe Joy and Wisdom of Simplicity
and gently conducted a “master
class” for string players in the stu-
dent orchestra. During one session he
commented: “Anyone can play the
notes. Music is what takes place in
between the notes.”
An older lawyer told me to re-
member the difference between a
fact and “a fact that can be proven to
a jury.” A client advised me it was
unwise to bring a young associate
from my firm to a meeting just to
demonstrate I could do so, as the cli-
ent was paying for my egotism.
Winston Churchill and my late
friend John Heyman, a lawyer, once
met for breakfast at Chartwell,
Churchill’s country home. John had
represented Churchill in negotiations
for a film, “Young Winston,” based
on his memoir, “My Early Life.”
Churchill wanted to thank Heyman
for the fee he’d generated. Churchill
begged John to have a proper British
breakfast. John repeatedly insisted
he wasn’t hungry and would be
happy to have whatever Churchill
was having. Finally, with a slight
smile, Churchill leaned back and bel-
lowed: “Bring Mr. Heyman a brandy
and a cigar.”In my film-business days, I sched-
uled a trip with Paul Newman to at-
tend the premiere of “Absence of
Malice,” his 1981 film with Sally
Field. We were to meet at the plane,
and when he arrived precisely on
time I told him how impressed I was.
“Punctuality is the courtesy of kings”
was his rejoinder, delivered with a
smile. I wanted to know whose line
he was citing, and he demurred. “If
you look it up you will remember it.”
The answer: Louis XVIII.
One of my favorite baseball players
was Alfred “Slick” Surratt, who played
for the Kansas City Monarchs of the
Negro Leagues. During our first meet-
ing I asked where he got his nick-
name. He smiled broadly, paused for
dramatic effect and said: “Commis-
sioner, I don’t know you well enough
to answer that question.” We became
dear friends, but he never told me.
When I teased him about his silence,
his friend Larry Doby, a Hall of Famer,
interjected to assure me I was smart
enough to figure it out. I think I un-
derstood completely.Mr. Vincent was commissioner of
baseball, 1989-92.By Fay VincentCarmel-by-the-Sea, Calif.‘M
any years ago,”
Clint Eastwood
says—drawing
closetomeasif
to share a se-
cret—“I was in Las Vegas.” The
Hollywood actor and director was
staying at a hotel owned by Steve
Wynn, the casino billionaire.
“Steve called me up in the room
and said, ‘Do you want to go play
golf? We’re going out with Trump.’
I said, ‘Who?’ and Steve said,
‘Trump. You know Trump?’ ”
So Messrs. Eastwood and Wynn
ventured out for a morning on the
course with Donald Trump. “It was
funny,” Mr. Eastwood says, “be-
cause every time I was together
with Steve”—with the future presi-
dent out of earshot—“he would
say, ‘You know, Trump is doing
those damn casinos. He’s going to
lose his ass.’ ” And when Mr. Wynn
couldn’t hear, “Trump would say,
‘You know, Steve is going to do
this big hotel. He’s going to land
right on his ass. There are too
many hotels now.’ ”
Back and forth the dissing went
for hours, Mr. Eastwood recalls:
“Together, they were great friends,
but separately they were giving
each other a hard time. I don’t
know how much tongue-in-cheek
was in all of that, but it was very
amusing for me, the lone guy.”
Mr. Eastwood relates this story
over a frugal lunch, in response to
my asking for his thoughts on Mr.
Trump. We’re seated outdoors at
the Tehama Golf Club, which he
owns, with views of Carmel Valley
and the Monterey Peninsula,
among the most expensive slivers
of real estate in America.
Mr. Eastwood, 89, has never
fought shy of politics himself. Like
Mr. Trump, he’s even held politi-
cal office, albeit on a local scale:
He won election as mayor of Car-
mel-by-the-Sea in 1986. He’s
known as a Hollywood conserva-
tive, but his appeal was biparti-
san. He chose to run, he says, be-
cause the incumbent mayor “had
gotten to be too distant” from the
townsfolk. “She used to knit dur-
ing public meetings.”
His campaign staff “measured
Carmel, and it was exactly 50/50,
Republican-Democrat,” Mr. East-
wood says. “I was a Republican,
but people never thought about
their parties except at the national
level.” The mayoral ballot didn’t
list the candidates’ party affilia-
tion. “I drank a lot of tea and chat-
ted with people,” he says. “I told
people ‘I’ll fix this, and I’ll fix
that.’ ” He trounced his opponent,
2,166 votes to 799, served a single
two-year term, and didn’t seek re-
election: “You can’t have the same
old people in office all the time.”
One of Mayor Eastwood’s first
acts—widely reported at the
time—was to reduce the onerous
municipal prohibitions on the pub-
lic sale of ice cream. More than
three decades later, he laments
that the Golden State is “like Regu-
lation City right now.” An excess of
rules is “making California a place
other than a democracy.”
Mr. Eastwood describes himself
as a libertarian—“somebody who
has respect for other people’s
ideas and is willing to learn con-
stantly.” He is, he says, always in
“a state of evolution,” and he
comes across in conversation as
much more nuanced than the hy-
permasculine roles he’s played in
films from “Dirty Harry” (1971) to
“Gran Torino” (2008).
Yet his voice is the same—that
unmistakable tenor that lends it-
self as easily on screen to flirtation
as to husky menace. He talks av-
idly about some of his films, in-
cluding “Gran Torino,” which he
produced and directed. His charac-
ter, Walt Kowalski, is a cantanker-
ous Korean War veteran who hates
his Hmong neighbors in a rundown
inner Detroit suburb. He agrees
that the film has a certain rele-
vance in Mr. Trump’s America,
where everyone is “pairing off for
adversity.”
The movie grossed $270 million
world-wide. “I’ll tell you why I
liked it, and I think that’s maybe
why Americans did, too,” he says.
“It’s about a guy who’s a racist, a
hard-ass. He didn’t like minorities
much, of any kind. But he learns to
appreciate people that he really
hated.” His agent, he says, didn’t
want him to make the movie—
“ ‘The guy is kind of a bigot. Why
would you want to do that?’ she
said”—but when co-producer Rob
Lorenz showed Mr. Eastwood the
script, he loved it, “because it’s got
a big transition of a person from
one extreme to another.”
“Gran Torino,” he says, was
made at a time when people were
“putting down masculinity.” He has
frequently played the archetypal
American male, particularly in eras
when manliness was unabashed. He
notes that times have changed for
men. In “The Mule” (2018), his
most recent lead role, he’s an 80-
year-old Army veteran who gets
duped into committing a crime. “He
wasn’t unmasculine,” Mr. Eastwoodsays of the character, “but he
wasn’t some of the pseudo-mascu-
line ones I’ve played before.”
What does he mean by pseudo-
masculine? “They were abrupt,” he
explains. “They didn’t have the
niceties of civilization. I’ve played
some masculine guys who were a
little bit dumb at times. They over-
looked society—the nice, genteel
part of society.” He cites “Dirty
Harry,” in which he plays a cop
who takes the law into his own
hands. It was the role that made
him a star. “Harry Callahan was
fun to play at that particular point
in life,” Mr. Eastwood says. “He’s a
man who’s been through a lot, but
he’s also kind of relentless.” People
were afraid of crime in those days,
“afraid to say anything.”
He likens that fear to the mood
in America now and cites the #Me-
Too movement. “The #MeToo gen-
eration has its points,” he acknowl-
edges. He appreciates that women
“are standing up against people
who are trying to shake you down
for sexual favors.” Sexual preda-
tion, he says, has been in the
movie business since the days he
started as a bit-part actor. “It was
very prolific back in the 1940s and
’50s.” He pauses then wryly adds,
“And the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.. .”B
ut Mr. Eastwood is concerned
that the policing of sexual re-
lations is getting out of hand.
He believes people are “on the de-
fensive because of Harvey”—Wein-
stein—“and all of these guys.” He
professes no sympathy for the
movie mogul, whose fate is cur-
rently being decided by a New
York jury. But he worries that the
“presumption of innocence, not
only in law, but in philosophy,” has
been lost in accusations of sexual
misbehavior.
He says his most recent film,
“Richard Jewell,” suffered because
it got sucked into a #MeToo-like
controversy over its portrayal of
Kathy Scruggs, a reporter at theAtlanta Journal-Constitution.
Scruggs, who died in 2001, broke
the false allegation that Jewell, a
security guard, had planted a
bomb that killed two people in At-
lanta during the 1996 Summer
Olympics. Jewell was exonerated
after “88 days of hell” (Mr. East-
wood’s phrase) in which he could
barely leave the apartment he
shared with his mother. The news-
paper, Mr. Eastwood says, was “ul-
timately responsible” for Jewell’s
death in 2007 at 44. (The proxi-
mate cause was heart failure from
complications of diabetes.)
The film, which Mr. Eastwood
directed and was released in De-
cember, depicts Scruggs (Olivia
Wilde) getting her scoop by sleep-
ing with a source from the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. A letter to
Warner Bros. from the newspa-
per’s lawyer called the portrayal
“entirely false and malicious, and
...extremelydefamatory and
damaging.” The studio replied that
the Journal-Constitution’s accusa-
tion was “baseless.”
Mr. Eastwood sidesteps the pa-
per’s accusation directly, prefer-
ring to invoke a director’s right to
cinematic license. “Well, she hung
out at a little bar in town, where
mostly police officers went,” he
says. “And she had a boyfriend
that was a police officer. Well, we
just changed it in the story. We
made it a federal police officer in-
stead of a local.”
Mr. Eastwood says the Journal-
Constitution is trying to obscure
its “guilt” for a “reckless story”
that led to the persecution of an
innocent man. He says he wishes
Warner Bros. had told the Journal-
Constitution “to go screw them-
selves.” (The studio did vow to
fight any lawsuit in the matter.)
Mr. Eastwood imagines himself
daring the newspaper to sue:
“Make my day!” He pronounces the
iconic line from “Dirty Harry” with
relish. “If you want to just go call
more attention to the fact that youhelped kill the guy, go ahead and
do it—if you’re dumb enough to do
that.”
I ask Mr. Eastwood which of the
movies he’s directed makes him
proudest. He cites the Japanese-
language “Letters From Iwo Jima,”
released in 2006. While working
on “Flags of Our Fathers”—which
tells the battle’s story from the
American point of view and made
its debut two months earlier—Mr.
Eastwood got to wondering what it
was like to be a man who was
“drafted into the Japanese mili-
tary, sent to Iwo Jima, and told,
‘By the way, you’re not coming
back.’ ” He thought to himself:
“You couldn’t tell a person that in
America. An American soldier
would go, ‘What do you mean I’m
not coming back?’ ”
The film tells the stories of a
Japanese private and Gen. Tadam-
ichi Kuribayashi, the commander
on the island, who’d served as a
military attaché in the U.S. before
the war. Mr. Eastwood was partic-
ularly attracted to the character of
the general, who “knew a lot about
America,” even as he fought its
soldiers to the death. “Letters
From Iwo Jima” was a critical suc-
cess, especially in Japan, where it
won that country’s equivalent of
the Academy Award for best for-
eign picture.
Would Mr. Eastwood make a
film about other enemies of Amer-
ica—say, “Postcards From Guan-
tanamo” or “Missives From Mo-
sul”? “It may be too fresh to do
that,” he says. He was drawn to
the Japanese “by the fact that
we’re on good terms now, and we
appreciate some of their history
and background.” He wanted to
understand what they went
through. “I don’t think we know
enough about al Qaeda and ISIS.”
But he also says it’s “too early in
history” for him to make a movie
about 9/11 from America’s point of
view.A
s for the domestic political
scene, Mr. Eastwood seems
disheartened. “The politics
hasgottensoornery,”hesays,
hunching his shoulders in resigna-
tion. He approves of “certain
things that Trump’s done” but
wishes the president would act “in
a more genteel way, without tweet-
ing and calling people names. I
would personally like for him to
not bring himself to that level.” As
he drives me back to my hotel, he
expresses an affinity for another
former mayor: “The best thing we
coulddoisjustgetMike
Bloomberg in there.”Mr. Varadarajan is executive ed-
itor of Stanford University’s Hoo-
ver Institution.A Hollywood Legend Talks Politics
AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN/FILMMAGICThe actor-director, 89,
weighs in on Bloomberg,
Trump, #MeToo and the
dispute over a reporter’s
depiction in his latest film.
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Clint Eastwood| By Tunku Varadarajan
OPINION
Virginia Is for Public-Sector Union Lovers
Virginia Democrats
are poised to legal-
ize collective bar-
gaining for govern-
ment employees. In
November Demo-
crats brought Rich-
mond under their
total control for the
first time in more
than a quarter-cen-
tury. The new legis-
lative majorities seem intent on ig-
noring the painful lessons of New
York state’s half-century experiment
with government unions.
In 1967 Albany adopted a public-
sector collective-bargaining law, os-
tensibly to end a wave of destructive
strikes and “promote harmonious
and cooperative relationships be-
tween government and its employ-
ees.” Named for the professor who
helped craft it, the Taylor Law gave
unions special privileges like the
power to draw dues from an em-
ployee’s paycheck, and set strict
rules requiring public employers to
sit down at the negotiating table.
Virginia’s House of Delegates ap-
proved a similar framework earlier
this month. But while New York in
the late 1960s was struggling with
idled subways, closed schools and
uncollected trash, Virginia lawmak-
ers face no such crisis now. The
move appears to be little more than
payback for labor’s political support
of the Democrats. The ruling class in
Richmond looks ready to subject
taxpayers to higher employee costs
in return for a permanent stream of
union dues nourishing their re-elec-
tion campaigns.
The Old Dominion, one of a hand-
ful of states where public-sector
bargaining is forbidden, benefited
during the 2007-09 recession from
the ability of state and local officials
to control costs as tax revenue
dipped. Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine
saved $198 million in fiscal 2010
alone by postponing scheduled pay
raises for state employees. Mean-
while in New York, officials had no
choice but to pay 3% raises to the
state’s largest public union in spring
2009, even as income-tax receipts
dipped almost 6%. The contract
forced the state to shell out 4%
raises to the same union only a year
later.
Virginia’s experience during the
financial crisis also compares favor-
ably with that of neighboring Mary-
land, where local officials struggled
to address fiscal realities because of
union opposition. The Washington
Post editorial page noted Virginia’s
advantage and floated the possibility
of abolishing public-sector collective
bargaining in Maryland as a solu-
tion: “Fairfax County [Va.] has man-
aged well without it.”
There’s more at stake than em-
ployee pay. Labor contracts in New
York’s heavily unionized schools and
local governments dictate nearly ev-
ery facet of public-service delivery.
These managerial glue traps block
the people’s representatives from
making meaningful changes without
first getting labor’s blessing. New
York’s transit officials, for instance,
had to get union permission before
they could have subway stations
cleaned properly by a private con-
tractor. Captive to New York’s bar-
gaining law, efforts to lengthen
school days, trim overtime costs and
even thwart crimes against disabled
people under state care have all
been stymied. Mayors and other of-
ficials are routinely saddled with
deals negotiated in secret by their
predecessors. Nothing in the Vir-
ginia legislation would spare its lo-
cal governments from an identicalplight once the ink dried on the first
agreements.
While even the worst labor deals
eventually expire, New York has a
“contract continuity” statute that
keeps terms in place until a new
agreement has been negotiated—
giving unions a much stronger
hand at the bargaining table. Em-
ployers must keep paying experi-
ence-based raises while they nego-
tiate. Other state governments—
even the most union-friendly ones
—have painstakingly avoided this
mistake. Rhode Island Gov. Gina
Raimondo vetoed similar legislation
in 2017 and said New York “pro-
vides an important lesson” forother states. But Richmond isn’t
hearing it: Virginia’s proposed leg-
islation has contract-continuity lan-
guage mirroring New York’s.
The damage done by the Taylor
Law is arguably most pronounced in
New York’s public schools. Census
data recently revealed that annual
per pupil spending on K-12 education
in the Empire State is $23,091—the
highest in the country. The biggest
cost is “instructional salaries and
benefits,” which are controlled pri-
marily by teachers union contracts.
New York, all told, spends almost
43% more on each student than does
Massachusetts, where teachers are
also unionized but under terms lesshostile to school management—and
taxpayers.
Virginia students meanwhile ei-
ther matched or outperformed their
New York peers by every major met-
ric on recent National Assessment of
Educational Progress tests, even as
the Old Dominion’s per pupil spend-
ing was less than $12,000.
If Virginia lawmakers are dead
set on making their government em-
ulate New York’s, they shouldn’t be
surprised when costs, and outcomes,
do the same.Mr. Girardin is an analyst at the
Albany-based Empire Center for
Public Policy.Richmond Democrats are
about to give public
employees the ability to
hold government hostage.
CROSS
COUNTRY
By Ken
Girardin