Paul Newman (11 page)

The performance caught the eye of a young screenwriter named Stewart Stern who was finishing a similar script, “Thunder of Silence,” for the same TV series. He wound up convincing the producers to cast Newman in the role of a soldier who comes home from World War II to the family farm to find a pair of displaced European immigrants who’ve been sent by the U.S. government to live and work alongside his parents. Until his arrival, the arrangement is going poorly, but the young man, despite being haunted by his wartime experiences, is able to help the immigrants adapt to their surroundings and turn the situation around.

Both productions were well received, within the business and by audiences. And it would just be a matter of weeks between their airing and the start of rehearsals on
The Desperate Hours.
But in that time, during the week before Christmas,
The Silver Chalice
was released, and Newman reaped just the whirlwind he had feared.

T
HE PICTURE
was ponderous, wooden, static, contrived, and unintentionally funny—and not often enough to transform it into campy fun. Saville and his producers had decided to make a kind of experimental film set on stark, expressionistic stages with hints of modernism in the design and color; nothing was realistic and all the decor was geared for an effect that was more puzzling than dramatic. It begins with a prologue set in
A.D.
20, when the gifted boy silversmith Basil (played by Peter Reynolds) and the slave girl Helena (a sixteen-year-old Natalie Wood) share their dreams before having them dashed by the death of their kindly master. Helena becomes a courtesan (and Virginia Mayo); Basil (now Newman), who had been promised both liberty and an inheritance by the kindly master, finds himself enslaved to the man who stole his fortune.

Eventually he runs off and is taken in by a group of Christians, who ask him to fashion a chalice commemorating their lord, Jesus, and his disciples. Basil actually meets Jesus and has a religious awakening, and so he agrees to craft the cup, which becomes the most wanted object in all the world: the Roman government feels that capturing and melting it would help them quell the Christian fervor sweeping the provinces, while the Christians venerate it as an object bearing the exact likeness of their god. Basil, who is presumed to know where the chalice is hidden, becomes a hunted man. At the same time, he is caught in a love triangle between the wanton Helena and Deborra (Pier Angeli), the Christian girl he has married and whose faith he has adopted.

It’s awful. One scene, one calculated effect, is worse than the next—or maybe they’re equally bad; it’s hard to say. As a sexpot, Mayo is absolutely curdling: matronly at thirty-four despite her garish seraglio costumes and floozy’s makeup. (“Be neither slave nor Christian but an artist …and my love,” she implores Basil as she peers up from beneath silver-painted eyelids, and never has slavery held such visceral appeal.) Angeli is a pleasingly waiflike presence, and Jack Palance has meaty, eye-rolling fun as a charlatan named Simon the Magician who proposes to perform miracles even more astonishing than those attributed to Jesus. Newman, wearing a short costume that barely reaches his lower thighs (he castigated it as a “cocktail dress”), often bears a pained, puzzled look in his eyes; he’s handsome enough, and he seems earnest, but
he’s also hopelessly out of place, and to be fair, there would have been no apparent advantage in harmonizing with such a garish, stilted, and vacuous film. Words dribble from him in agonizing rote. Your heart goes out.

Alas, critics don’t work from the heart, and the reviews were more or less savage.
Variety
called the picture “episodic and overblown”; “cumbersome and sometimes creaking” hissed the
New York Times.
And Newman himself came in for the worst of it: the
New York Daily News
called his “static performance …disappointing”; the
New York World
called him “Jack Newman” and found him “excessively sullen”; and
The New Yorker
, in a comment that he would commit to memory and recite back to interviewers for years, declared, “[He] delivers his lines with the emotional fervor of a Putnam Division conductor announcing local stops.”

Newman caught up with the film in January, when he was in Philadelphia for the trial run of
The Desperate Hours.
At the time—and for some years yet to come—it was his habit to sneak cans of beer and bags of homemade popcorn into theaters to enjoy during the show. As he recalled, on this particular night

In fact, his actual reaction to the film and its reception was deeper and more disturbing. “I was horrified and traumatized when I saw the film,” he confessed. “I was sure my acting career had begun and ended in the same picture.” For years he would groan at the mention of the
thing. “It was god-awful,” he said in a typical assessment. “It’s kind of a distinction to say I was in the worst film to be made in the entirety of the 1950s.”

In 1963, when
The Silver Chalice
was scheduled to play several nights on a local Los Angeles television station, Newman spent $1,200 on ads in the city’s two daily newspapers attempting to dissuade people from watching it: Bordered in black like funeral announcements, they read “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week—Channel 9.” (The ads backfired: people tuned in to see what sort of train wreck had occasioned this gesture, and the ratings were strong. Newman laughed off the stunt as “a classic example of the arrogance of the affluent.”)

Eventually, he saw some good, not in the film itself, but in having made it at all and, in time, in transcending it: “Everyone thinks it was a disaster just because it was terrible, but I say it wasn’t. It’s like juvenile delinquency: if you can be the worst kid on your block, you can make a name for yourself.” But he never quite forgot the sting. When it was proposed to him a few years later that he read the script for
Ben-Hur
with an eye toward starring in it, he declared, “I wore a cocktail dress once. Never again!” And more than four decades later, when he costarred with the rising young actor Liev Schreiber, he offered this advice: “When they ask you to do
The Silver Chalice 2
, don’t do it!”

T
HERE WAS
one bit of fallout from
The Silver Chalice
that lingered in a way that stung as badly as the negative reviews—virtually everybody who wrote about it parroted the strange claim that Newman looked like somebody else: “a tall, blue-eyed young man named Paul Newman who will inevitably be compared to Marlon Brando because of his striking resemblance to the actor”
(Los Angeles Examiner);
“bears an astonishing resemblance to Marlon Brando”
(New York World);
“looks like Marlon Brando”
(Hollywood Reporter);
“a lad who resembles Marlon Brando”
(The New Yorker);
“a poor man’s Marlon Brando”
(The Saturday Review);
and on and on.

It was a damning and, frankly, dunderheaded claim. The two looked almost nothing alike: Brando, even the fit and youthful Brando, was
wide-faced, with a bigger nose, thicker lips, and heavily lidded eyes; his vaguely simian air looked sensual and subversive even when, as in his debut film,
The Men
, he was playing an ordinary fellow. Newman’s features were always more angular and delicate, and Warner Bros. had gone to some lengths to soften his appearance for the role of Basil, even experimenting with dying his hair a lighter shade. He was pretty, preppy, and decent: Alan Seymour, the rich boy who didn’t win the girl. The two did share a similar brow line—dark and strong and often furrowed to connote emotion—but for the most part it was an absurd comparison.

And that wasn’t what was worst. What embarrassed Newman most, as can be imagined, was the comparison of their acting. Brando, the colossal Method actor of the moment, had already amassed a body of screen work that would be the envy of any actor of any school:
A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, The Wild One
, and, most recently,
On the Waterfront.
As a regular at the Actors Studio, Newman knew exactly where he stood in relation to Brando as a talent; at his most self-satisfied, which wasn’t often, he wouldn’t ever have dreamed of putting himself in the same league. To be fair, in a couple of his television roles he played punks and drifters and confused kids who had more than a bit of a Brandoish vibe about them. But there was nothing of that in
Chalice.

If anybody knew what the real gap was between the two—in looks and actorly skill—it would have been Newman, and he writhed when he read these dismissive comparisons. “First they said I looked like Brando,” he complained to a reporter. “Then it was agreed that we had the same ‘quality.’ All I want to know is what quality? I have yet to have anyone come up with the answer to that.”

In fact, he himself had the answer, as he revealed some years later: “I like to nail those guys, and it’s very simple to do. You ask them, ‘What is Marlon’s basic quality? What does he carry within himself?’ Well, they’re absolutely stumped, and they flop around a lot, and I ask, ‘Well, what do you think
my
basic quality is?’ And they wouldn’t know that either. They didn’t have the vaguest idea of what Marlon’s focus is, which is eruptability. Eruptability is always in the potential of
the masses-type hero. And the quality that I carry is Ivy League—Shaker Heights and like that.”

So he could explain it: Brando was volatility, explosiveness, danger, excitement, sex, risk, passion; he, on the other hand, was a nice-looking young man from a respectable family and good schools. If he was going to get anywhere as an actor, he knew, he would have to find a way to break out of himself.

T
AUT AND ITCHY, WITH HIS COARSE DENIM CLOTHING AND
brush-cut hair, he roams about the room spilling unfocused energy, somehow imparting at once a sense of ownership and the appearance of having never been in so fine a place before: a wild beast brought in from the outdoors without being housebroken. He waves a pistol around with a frightening lack of caution and speaks from behind the mean slits of his eyes in an insinuating, guttural tone: “You don’t gotta do nothin’ but keep your trap shut,” he tells the people around him, and, “I could kill you just for kicks.”

His name is Glenn Griffin, and he’s famous—or, more correctly, infamous: not even twenty-five years old and on the front pages of all the newspapers. (“They always gotta use the same lousy picture,” he whines.) With his kid brother, Hank, and a muscle-bound goon named Robish, Griffin has busted out of prison and found a suburban Indianapolis house in which to hide and wait for money and a ride to freedom. Gun in hand, oozing with angry contempt for a typical household run by a dad with a white-collar pedigree, he’s the nightmare lurking just beyond the hedgerows protecting the postwar American dream from the interlopers who would shatter it.

The situation—three fugitives taking a random family hostage—had actually occurred in Pennsylvania in 1952, and it had inspired the author and playwright Joseph Hayes to fictionalize the scenario as a novel entitled
The Desperate Hours.
The book was a best seller, and Hayes was called upon, uniquely, to develop it as a play and a film at
nearly the same time. While Robert Montgomery was working in New York rehearsal spaces with a cast that included Newman as Griffin, newcomer George Grizzard as his brother, and Karl Malden as the man of the house, William Wyler was doing the same in Hollywood with Humphrey Bogart, Dewey Martin, and Fredric March, respectively. The play would debut in Philadelphia in January 1955, move to Broadway in February, and run through August; two months later the film, rewritten to recast Griffin as a man of Bogart’s age, would have its own premiere.

The success of
The Desperate Hours
was hardly guaranteed. Montgomery hadn’t wanted Newman, who turned thirty before the show came to New York, but rather someone older; only when he went down to a police station and saw how many hardened juvenile offenders came through the doors did he see the sense of casting someone with a youthful air. (Montgomery was quite fond of authority; an outspoken proponent of the anti-Communist blacklists in the entertainment business, he had the FBI vet every member of the play’s cast for subversive affiliations.) As he had with Victor Saville, Newman peppered Montgomery with inquiries about his character’s motivations; questioning the logic of a stage direction to move around a table, he was told testily, “Damn it! Because there’s no place else to go!”

“Mr. Montgomery and I never saw eye to eye on any particular thing,” Newman confessed. “He’s a very bright guy, but we had personality clashes.” More deeply, he declared that he never had a handle on the character of Glenn Griffin and that the entire enterprise was melodramatic. “We got it up on its feet too fast,” he opined. “There was no foundation underneath it—we blocked the first three acts the first three days of rehearsal—I never had any exploratory period.” Later he added, “I had played the whole thing at a terrible pitch of panic.” There was some truth to this: the scene that the original Broadway cast played for a March salute-to-Broadway show on NBC certainly bore traces of a potboiler. But
The Desperate Hours
was a sensation wherever it played, and Newman was especially lauded, even by those critics who agreed with him that his performance was too wound up from the start.

In Philadelphia the reviews from the local papers and the show biz
trades were uniformly positive, and Newman—still on-screen in
The Silver Chalice—
was cited as a standout. In New York the notices were even better: “Paul Newman plays the boss thug with a wildness that one is inclined to respect,” wrote Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times;
“an effective performance on a fairly splashy level,” said Walter Kerr in the
New York Herald-Tribune;
and John Chapman in the
New York Daily News
called the performance “evil, neurotic and vibrant—a first-class piece of work.” Most gratifying, perhaps, was an item from the Louisville
Courier-Journal
, of all places: “Newman is so thoroughly contemptible as Griffin that it is hard to believe he is playing a part. One knows he is after seeing him in
The Chalice
[
sic
] in which he in no way resembled the role he has in
The Desperate Hours”
—precisely what he had hoped for when he sought the role. The play was almost unanimously cited as a crackerjack bit of tension, several critics compared it to
The Petrified Forest
, and it wound up winning Tony Awards for best play and best direction.
*

It wasn’t a complete triumph. Newman was paid $700 a week for the show—$300 less than he would have earned in a film at Warner Bros. And by the end of the run audiences had dwindled despite the rave reviews; the cast, who took pay cuts as a result of the poor financial condition of the production, blamed the producers for not sustaining the advertising campaign; investors, who included Stephen Sondheim, Dominick Dunne, John Forsythe, and Montgomery himself, didn’t make nearly what they should have. The show was finally forced to close in August after 212 performances when Malden, its biggest star, left.
*

Despite that disappointment, Newman had to be happy: twice he’d been on Broadway, and twice he’d come away with his professional
standing and personal confidence enhanced. Warner Bros. still held his leash, but he had demonstrated a flexibility that surely they would notice. He had also demonstrated a collegiality uncommon in the profession. George Grizzard was even less known than Newman when he auditioned for
The Desperate Hours
, and he was so out of his element in New York that he showed up to read for the role of a juvenile criminal in a jacket and tie. Newman felt comfortable with him in the role, though, and lobbied Montgomery to give him the part. Through the run of the show, the two palled around a bit. “He treated me like a little brother,” Grizzard recalled. “He introduced me to movie stars.”

At home things were peaceful. Newman had rented a large apartment in the Fresh Meadows section of Queens, a former golf course that had been transformed into a postwar suburban paradise—a place even more like Shaker Heights than Queens Village. Theresa Newman had come to New York for the opening night of
Desperate Hours
and stayed on to help after Jackie gave birth to another daughter, Stephanie, that spring. Newman’s neighbors recognized him as a celebrity, but they also appreciated him as a down-to-earth sort. Recalled Bob Lardine, later a writer at the
New York Daily News
, “It didn’t annoy him in the least when fellow residents called out, ‘Hi, Paul’ as he walked around outside his duplex with his shirt off, taking in the sun. He was always cheerful, always ready to talk with anyone.” In August the growing Newman family was photographed, along with other members of
The Desperate Hours
cast, cavorting at a newly opened amusement park. Happy times.

While the play was still running, Newman took television engagements. In July he appeared in
The Death of Billy the Kid
, a teleplay by Gore Vidal, to whom Newman had recently been introduced by Tennessee Williams. The script that Vidal had produced at once celebrated the independence and individuality of the famed western outlaw, revealed the violence and possible madness at his heart, and critiqued the culture that turned a troubled young man with such cruel tendencies into a folk hero. Robert Mulligan was selected to direct, and the cast included Jason Robards and Harold J. Stone. The intense psychological nature of the depiction was something of a novelty, and Newman’s performance was received well—better, generally, than the
film itself. He tried to interest Warner Bros. in a feature film version as a follow-up to
The Silver Chalice
, and they nibbled, but they felt the property needed to be altered for the screen.
*

In fact, Newman and the studio couldn’t agree on much of anything, even though his contract called for him to get back to work. Absent a firm assignment, he stayed on in New York. His next TV job was his strangest yet: the role of teenage George Gibbs in a musical production of
Our Town.
The show was an odd mix of talent. Frank Sinatra, still surging after having his career and personal life bottom out in the early 1950s, would play the role of the Stage Manager and have songs written especially for the production by his in-house composing team of Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. (One bona fide standard, “Love and Marriage,” would come out of their work.) Sinatra’s favorite arranger, Nelson Riddle, would lead the orchestra. Emily Webb, George’s neighbor, classmate, and eventual wife, would be played by Eva Marie Saint, fresh off her Oscar-nominated performance in
On the Waterfront.
And Delbert Mann, whose film
Marty
was currently in release and would dominate the next round of Oscars, would direct.

Sinatra was the big dog at the party, and he didn’t do a lot of television, and he hadn’t much enjoyed working with Method actors. (He’d just completed
Guys and Dolls
with Marlon Brando, and had made his famous comeback in
From Here to Eternity
alongside Montgomery Clift, and he had bonded with neither.) So there was ample opportunity for friction when Newman, with his love of rehearsal and breaking things down and his habit of asking about motives, turned up for not one or two or three but
four
weeks of rehearsals. Newman, of course, loved all the tinkering and speculation this allowed, and he used the time to ease his way into the skin of the young George Gibbs. “Every day he comes in for rehearsal he’s a year younger,” said a witness on the set. Sinatra, an infamous one-take-and-I’m-outta-here
actor, griped predictably about the very same process: “It takes only four weeks to do some good
movies.”
But then, the two were very different talents. As Newman admitted to a reporter, “I’m not much of a singer… They wanted me to harmonize, and somewhere I lost the harmony and never found it again.”

But the production wound up a success. Sinatra is cool and jaunty, and yet with his pipe and his knowing air, he seems curiously at home in Thornton Wilder’s bit of old-time New Hampshire. Newman is filled with coltish energy, breathy awkwardness, and when George needs to get serious, an applied sobriety that feels genuinely adolescent. He does, indeed, struggle with the one song he’s asked to perform—a duet with Saint. He recovers nicely, though, in a wedding dance, where his physical coordination shines through. The play isn’t George’s, though, and Newman’s being billed third is entirely appropriate since Emily and the Stage Manager dominate the final act. Anyone associated with the production could have been pleased; of all the many versions of
Our Town
that Americans would see, this experimental musical adaptation, aired live, could still charm and entertain a half-century later.

O
UR
T
OWN
aired on September 19, 1955, and yet another nice TV gig lay ahead of Newman the following month: he would play Nick Adams, Ernest Hemingway’s picaresque autobiographical hero, in
The Battler
, an account of Adams’s encounter with a broken-down prizefighter named Ad Francis. As scripted by A. E. Hotchner, who had befriended Hemingway during World War II and would write a memoir of him entitled
Papa Hemingway
, the film would tell Francis’s story in reverse and involve a series of dramatic makeup changes that turned the character from an old, cauliflower-eared pug into, finally, a handsome young champion of the ring; the actor in the title role would be required to begin the live broadcast in heavy old-man makeup and then have it removed in stages until he finally appeared as, more or less, himself. Newman didn’t have to worry about any of that, though: he would be playing Adams, the passive observer and chronicler; playing Francis would be his old screen-test buddy, James Dean.

Or rather that was the plan. On September 30, a little more than two weeks before
The Battler
was to air, Dean was killed in his Porsche near San Luis Obispo, California. That should have scuttled the show, but its creators—Fred Coe, who had produced
Our Town
, and Arthur Penn, who had directed “Guilty Is the Stranger”—both believed Newman capable of playing the title role and implored him to save the project by stepping into it. “I was rocked by Dean’s death,” Penn remembered, “but Paul was a very interesting young actor, and he was already involved. He knew the project.” Offered the role, though, Newman hesitated. “I can’t do that, emotionally,” he said flatly. But he was ultimately convinced that it was appropriate, literally, for the show to go on; in another bit of rush casting, Dewey Martin, who had just appeared as Glenn Griffin’s kid brother in the film version of
The Desperate Hours
, filled in as Nick Adams.