Chapter 1San Bernardino, January 1930

Foreword

He was thirteen, standing on the porch, and his father drove past and waved.

That was the whole of it. No argument that he witnessed, no goodbye, a hand out of a car window on a street in Danville, Illinois, in 1943. He told the story many times over sixty years and always in the same flat register, and he said once that he understood in that instant what the wave meant, and that everything he later did with his face on film began there.

I am wary of origin stories. They are the laziest instrument in the biography of performers, and the ones the subject supplies himself are the least reliable of all, because a man who has told a story on chat shows for four decades has been rehearsing rather than remembering. But this one has an unusual property. He did not use it for sympathy. He used it as a technical explanation, again and again, of how he learned to read what a face is doing a half-second before the person doing it knows.

Watch what he does in that interrogation scene in The Conversation and tell me it is not a man who has studied the underside of an expression.

The career is the least mysterious part. He enlisted in the Marines at sixteen on a forged birth date, served four and a half years, drifted, and arrived at the Pasadena Playhouse in his thirties, where he and a young Dustin Hoffman were reportedly rated by the staff as the two least likely to succeed. He got Bonnie and Clyde at thirty-seven. He won the Academy Award for The French Connection four years later, and a second one twenty-one years after that for Unforgiven, and between and around them made something like eighty films, a great many of which he has said openly he took for the money.

That last point is important and I have not hidden it. He was not a curator of his own filmography. He worked, constantly, in whatever was offered, and the consequence is a body of work in which several of the finest American screen performances of the century sit beside a great deal of ordinary studio product, all of it delivered with the same complete professional commitment. The mediocre films are not lapses. They are the same man doing the same job on a worse script, and the discipline is visible in them.

Then in 2004 he stopped, at seventy-four, after a modest comedy, and did not act again. He wrote novels. He painted. He lived on twelve acres outside Santa Fe with Betsy Arakawa, a classical pianist he met at a Los Angeles gym in 1986 and married in December 1991, and he gave almost no interviews for twenty years.

And on February 26, 2025, a maintenance worker found them both.

I want to say clearly how the last chapter is written, because it concerns the deaths of two people and it is the reason many readers will pick up this book.

Everything in it comes from three sets of records: the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office investigation, the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator autopsy findings released on March 7, 2025, and the reporting that followed. Arakawa died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome around February 11. Hackman, who had Alzheimer's disease, died of cardiovascular disease approximately a week later. No criminal involvement was found.

There is no witness to what happened inside that house during the week between. Hackman could not have told anyone afterward and did not survive to try. Where the record is silent, this book is silent. I have not reconstructed his state of mind, imagined what he understood, or written a scene. Several accounts have. It is the one thing about this story I feel strongly about.

On sources: the sheriff's file and the medical investigator's reports, the studio and production records, contemporary reviews, the published interviews across six decades, and his own four novels, which are more revealing about him than any of the interviews are. I conducted no interviews for this book.

A boy watched a car go by and understood what a wave meant. Eight decades later he was in a house at the end of an unmarked road, and for a week nobody came.

The work is what is left, and there is a great deal of it, and some of it is as good as American screen acting has ever been.

Chapter 1 · San Bernardino, January 1930

The hospital was the San Bernardino County Hospital on Magnolia Avenue. The date was January 30, 1930. Birth was around ten in the morning, by the family's later recollection. The mother was Anna Lyda Elizabeth Gray Hackman, twenty-eight, a homemaker by occupation and the household's organizational center by temperament. The father was Eugene Ezra Hackman, twenty-nine, a printer at the San Bernardino Sun. The infant was the second of two sons. The older brother, Richard, was four and was at home with an aunt that morning.

They named the infant Eugene Allen Hackman. The Eugene was for his father. The Allen was a name on his mother's side — her own father had been an Allen Gray, a midwesterner of mixed Scottish and English ancestry who had come to California in the 1890s for the citrus economy that, by the 1920s, had made San Bernardino County one of the wealthiest agricultural regions in the country. They called him Gene from the day they brought him home.

The home was a wood-framed bungalow in a working-class neighborhood on the southern edge of San Bernardino. Four rooms, a back porch, a small yard with a single jacaranda tree. Modest housing for the printers and the truck drivers and the small-shop owners who fed the labor into the citrus and rail economy that the broader Los Angeles basin was organizing itself around.

The Depression was four months old. The October 1929 crash had not yet substantially destabilized the southern California citrus economy. By spring 1930 it would. The Hackmans would spend the next decade in motion, chasing whatever printing work Eugene Ezra could find — California, Illinois, and finally Danville, Illinois, in the autumn of 1939, where Eugene Ezra would land a job at the Danville Commercial-News that would last four years.

The family was working-class itinerant. Household income across the 1930s rarely cleared twelve hundred dollars a year. Their possessions, by Gene's later recollection in the few interviews where he discussed any of it, fit into a single rented truck on each move. The children's schooling was disrupted by every relocation. Gene attended eight different elementary schools in his first nine years.

The mother held it together. Anna Lyda was, by every account, the determined center of the household — the parent who saw to it that the boys had clothes that fit, food on the table, basic Catholic religious instruction (the family was nominally Methodist but Anna Lyda's mother had been Catholic and the influence persisted), and the discipline of nightly homework no matter which schoolhouse the boys had attended that day. She was a quiet woman. The quiet of organized determination, not of resignation.

The father was a different kind of man.

Eugene Ezra had been born in 1900 in central Illinois to a family that had been printers for two generations. His own father ran a small commercial print shop in Springfield. Eugene Ezra learned the trade as a teenager and in 1920 went west for the better wages the booming southern California economy was paying for skilled trades. He met Anna Lyda Gray in San Bernardino in 1923 at a church social. They married in 1925.

By the time Gene was old enough to register his father as a distinct person — by 1934, say, when Gene was four — Eugene Ezra had developed the habits that would define his adult life. He drank. He gambled. He was given to long silences punctuated by sudden harshness, particularly toward Richard, with whom he had an early and continuing antagonism. He was not, by any later account, deliberately cruel; he was a man who had not been adequately prepared for fatherhood and who treated its obligations as a burden the Depression was making harder to carry every year.

Gene, the younger son, was largely spared the worst of it. The household's emotional triangulation produced a configuration in which Richard absorbed the disapproval and Gene was permitted to occupy the favored-son position. The position was, Gene would later acknowledge, comfortable in the immediate sense and corrosive in the long sense. He learned very early that paternal affection was conditional on his maintaining the favored-son register and that the cost of the affection was watching his brother absorb the harshness he himself was being spared.

The brothers became close anyway. Richard, four years older, was Gene's first protector and his first teacher in the basic skills of working-class childhood — how to throw a punch, how to ride a bicycle, how to stretch a quarter into a meal at the corner soda fountain. Gene, in the few interviews where he discussed his brother across the subsequent decades, consistently characterized Richard as the foundational male presence of his early life and characterized himself as having loved his brother in a way that he had not, in his ninety-five years, loved any other male relative.

The moves were the real curriculum of his childhood education.

Within California — from San Bernardino to Riverside in 1931, Riverside to a brief Sacramento stop in 1933, Sacramento back south to Long Beach in 1934. Out of California — to Denver in 1935 (Eugene Ezra had heard of a printing position; the position did not materialize as expected), to Omaha in 1936 (similar story), to Chicago in 1937 (six months during which Gene attended the second grade at three different schools), to Springfield, Illinois, in 1938 (back near Eugene Ezra's family of origin, though those relationships had deteriorated to the point that the family received minimal support).

Each move taught Gene the same lesson: that the social environment was provisional, that the school you attended on Monday might not be the school you attended on Friday, that the friends you made would be left behind within months of being made, that the only constant was the family itself — and even within the family, the constants were the mother and the brother, not the father.

The father was, increasingly, not a constant.

By 1939, Eugene Ezra's drinking had progressed to the point that his employability was compromised. The Springfield printing position had been lost in the autumn of 1938 over what the employer recorded as "absenteeism and unreliability." The family moved to Danville — a hundred and fifty miles south of Chicago in the central Illinois farming region — in late 1939, on the strength of a possible job at the Danville Commercial-News that a friend of Eugene Ezra's had identified.

The Danville job materialized. The family settled into a rented house on West Main Street.

Gene was nine. Richard was thirteen. Anna Lyda was thirty-seven. Eugene Ezra was thirty-nine.

The four years the family spent in Danville from late 1939 through the summer of 1943 would be, in retrospect, the only sustained stretch of geographic stability the Hackman boys had in their childhood. They would also be, for Gene, the years in which the foundational events of his emotional life would occur.

He would meet his first significant friends in Danville. He would join his first sports team. He would attend the same school for more than one consecutive academic year. He would develop, for the first time, the basic social architecture the prior decade of moves had not let him build.

And in the summer of 1943, as he was about to begin high school, his father would drive past the house, would wave at him from the open window of the family car, and would not return.

That moment is the subject of the next chapter.

This chapter ends with a family that has, after a decade of motion, briefly stopped moving. The father at the Commercial-News. The mother in the small house on West Main. Richard at the high school. Gene at the elementary school. Two boys in a rented bedroom at the back of a house in central Illinois, in the summer of 1942, with no knowledge that the constancy of the family-of-four — Anna, Eugene Ezra, Richard, and Gene — was, within twelve months, going to end.

The boy who would become Gene Hackman was twelve years old. He was reading Treasure Island in the bedroom he shared with his brother. He was practicing throwing a baseball in the backyard with Richard in the late evenings. He was eating his mother's casseroles at the dinner table with both parents present. He was, in the only sustained way he ever would be in his childhood, a member of an intact American working-class family in a stable midwestern town.

It would not last.

The next chapter takes up the day his father drove away.