Paul Newman (13 page)

He was duly photographed by the bored press (as was Jackie a few hours later when she came to check on him) and then hustled into a jail cell, where he seemed to discover his contrition. “Don’t lock the door on me,” he asked. “I don’t like locked doors.” (They locked the door.)

The papers, including the
New York Times
, all ran stories about the incident in the next day’s editions. (Honors for best headline would go to the
New York Journal-American:
“Star of Film Rams Hydrant and Now Nobody Likes Him.”) The next day Newman paid the Jolly Fisherman for the damages and pleaded innocent to the charge of running a red light.

T
HIS UNINTENTIONALLY
comic arrest had deeper causes and repercussions. In part it was an instance of high spirits, yes, but in part too it
was symptomatic of an ambivalence that was welling up inside of him. In California, while making
Somebody Up There
, and now again in New York, he had spent a lot of time with Joanne Woodward. And the growing sense of pain, confusion, and guilt that he had brought upon himself for threatening his marriage was driving him toward an alcoholic release valve.

As his escapades at Ohio U and Kenyon indicated, Newman did like to take a drink—beer mostly. But he could slip into a bottle of whiskey quite comfortably too. “They say you can take the kid out of Shaker Heights, but you can’t take Shaker Heights out of the kid,” he confessed years later. “Well,
oh yes you can
! You can do that very simply with a fifth of good scotch. Because then you can never tell what the kid’s likely to do… hanging from chandeliers was not beyond the realm of possibility. A lot of bad stuff with cars. Generally boorish behavior.”

In this case, the outré behavior began before the heavy boozing. In the spring while in California making films, Newman and Joanne both stayed at the Chateau Marmont, the gothic folly on the Sunset Strip favored by slumming East Coast actors, jaded European bohemians, and anyone else looking to do something considered untoward in the relatively starchy moral arithmetic of a company town like Hollywood. Gore Vidal was also in residence, and the three spent a good deal of time together, lounging at the pool or in conversations, during which Newman and Vidal schemed about reviving
The Death of Billy the Kid
as a feature film. Nobody at the Chateau questioned their behavior; the whole point of the place was quiet, discretion, and worldliness. Newman and Joanne could be as open as they wished with each other, and their romance took deeper root.

Since he’d come back from Hollywood and moved the family out to Long Island, Newman had begun once again, inevitably, seeing a lot of Joanne in the course of his actor’s-days-out: in casting offices, at Actors Studio sessions, at coffee klatches at theater district drugstores and luncheonettes, at late-night drinking parties at hangouts like Downey’s on Eighth Avenue (“the poor actor’s Sardi’s,” as Newman called it), and in the homes of fellow performers. Their mutual attraction was common knowledge among their circle, and so too was the strain that it
created. A friend commented soon afterward that the romance was “more of an ordeal than a courtship. Paul was torn between his loyalty to his children and honesty with his feelings for Joanne. And Joanne, who was friendly with Jackie, suffered torments at finding herself in the role of a homewrecker. But being what they were, neither could help what was happening to them.”

The drunk-driving incident seemed to bring matters to a boil. Despite the genuine anguish it caused him to break up his home, Newman acknowledged first to friends and then to Jackie that he was in love with Joanne. All that was left of that surprise marriage in Wisconsin was the dissolution of it, and in the way these things could happen back then, Jackie wasn’t letting go easily. She had a right to her family, even if her husband was disloyal, and she had a right, too, to a fair portion of what seemed to be a blossoming career. She determined to hang on. But Newman wasn’t cheating so much as he was recognizing that he’d found his ideal partner. And so he made up his mind to leave, regardless of how Jackie took it, regardless even of what it meant to the kids.

“They were so young when they married,” a friend said of Newman and Jackie. “They just grew up to be two different people.” And now they would be separated into two different households. Before the end of the summer, Newman moved out of Lake Success and into a rented apartment in Manhattan.

O
N THE STRENGTH OF
S
OMEBODY
U
P
T
HERE
L
IKES
M
E
AND
T
HE
Rack
, Newman was a rising star. There was talk of an Academy Award nomination for his versatile work in
Somebody
, Warner Bros. was peppering him with scripts for his next picture, and he was doing some tremendous work on television.

In August 1956 he appeared in a psychological drama that had echoes of
The Rack.
“The Army Game,” the inaugural episode of TV’s
Kaiser Aluminum Hour
, was written by Loring Mandel and Mayo Simon and directed by Franklin Schaffner. It focused on Danny Scott (Newman), a wealthy, athletic army recruit of superior intelligence who, with the encouragement of his overbearing widowed mother, tries to obtain a medical discharge by feigning cowardice and madness. He is ostracized, berated, and even beaten by his peers, he is imprisoned and punished, and yet he continues his ruse. (We know he’s faking because he speaks his thoughts in a voice-over.) Eventually he’s forced to visit a psychiatrist, who’s clever enough to figure out the scheme but who detects genuine instability in the very fact of the soldier’s determined efforts to be perceived as unstable: Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
in reverse. In an effort to crack the fellow’s facade—or perhaps to determine if he really is unwell—the psychiatrist calls in the soldier’s mother. A ghastly moment of oedipal anger ensues, and the soldier breaks down in a heap, truly psychologically damaged by his efforts only to seem that way.

The role gave Newman a lot to play in a brief time, and he handled
it very well, from the cocksureness of the opening sequences, in which he finesses people with cool preppy aplomb, to the defiant selfishness with which he brings trouble down on his barracks mates, to the tango with the psychiatrist, to the very convincing scenes of mental breakdown and fierce anger. His “sound and sensitive portrayal” was singled out for praise by the
New York Times.

In his next major TV role he fared equally well.
Bang the Drum Slowly
was a successful novel by Mark Harris, the second of four books centered on Henry Wiggen, a talented pitcher who narrates baseball stories in a homespun vernacular that wins him the nickname “Author” from his teammates.
Drum
traces two narratives: Wiggen’s tussles with management over his contracts, and his friendship with Bruce Pearson, a simple minded, countrified second-string catcher who’s been assigned to Wiggen as a roommate. Wiggen is part of the crowd that teases Pearson and hopes for a more talented player to take his place, but Pearson is dog-loyal to Wiggen, which dampens the pitcher’s enthusiasm for the hazing. The turn comes when Pearson reveals to Wiggen that he is dying of Hodgkin’s disease and wishes to hide it from management and the rest of the team so that he can play in the majors as long as possible. Wiggen keeps the secret, and when Pearson finally dies, he declares that he is through, both as a player and as a man, with belittling others: “From here on in,” he declares in the novel’s famous last line, “I rag nobody.”

Arnold Schulman adapted the book, and Daniel Petrie directed a cast that included Newman as Wiggen, Albert Salmi (another Actors Studio member) as Pearson, and Clu Galager, Bert Remsen, and George Peppard (making his professional debut) as various teammates and associates. Schulman handled the book’s first-person narrative by having Wiggen speak directly to the camera. (“We don’t have too much room in the studio here,” he apologizes, “so once in a while you’re going to have to use your imagination.”) Newman looks the role of the star athlete, of course, and is quite convincing as a guy who (wrongly) thinks he can bamboozle the big bosses out of some extra money. But he’s especially affecting as someone who has to give up his love of horseplay for a more earnest aspect when he learns of his friend’s illness—the news hits him and takes over his whole
being. There are a couple of little live-TV glitches, but it’s genuinely mesmerizing: a truly original and heartfelt sports story executed with polish and sincere emotion.
*

Just one week later Newman was on TV in another baseball-related role—of a sort. He appeared as the Special Guest on the popular quiz show
I’ve Got a Secret
, where he stumped a panel consisting of Bill Cullen, Ann Sheridan, Jayne Meadows, and Henry Morgan with the revelation that he’d posed as a hot dog vendor earlier in the day during the first game of the World Series at Ebbets Field and sold a hot dog to Morgan. Animated and clearly enjoying himself, he went offstage to don his vendor’s gear and returned with this tale:

H
IS SENSE
of humor and delight in pranks would have to sustain him professionally, for a while, at least. Warner Bros. kept throwing him scripts and he kept refusing them, deeming the material substandard. It was an awful relationship: not only could the studio demand his services for films of its own, no matter what he thought of the projects, but it had the final authority to decree which pictures he could do for other studios when they loaned him out. And if he refused a certain number of the opportunities they presented him, they could put him on suspension and keep him from working anywhere in any medium at all. He was playing with fire, and he knew it. “One time I remembered they reneged on an outside film they had promised me,” Newman recalled, “so I told Jack Warner to go fuck himself—and this was very early in the game, when I really couldn’t afford to tell him to go fuck himself. But I didn’t give a damn.”

Finally, just after the New Year, he was assigned a role in
The Helen Morgan Story
, a biopic of the popular Prohibition-era torch singer who died of alcoholism in 1941 and had more or less slipped into obscurity. Morgan’s sad life, with such highs as appearing in
The Ziegfeld Follies
and the original Broadway cast of
Showboat
(she introduced the song “Bill”), was the stuff of a gritty tearjerker, and Warner Bros. had been eager to shoot it for more than a decade.
*
No fewer than four writers contrived a script, the veteran Michael Curtiz (
Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy
, and dozens more) was assigned to direct, and Ann Blyth, most famous for her role as the daughter in Curtiz’s
Mildred Pierce
, was cast in the lead. Among the supporting players, in an essentially straight role, was Alan King—to give an idea of the quality of the thing.

Newman was to play bootlegger and conman Larry Maddux, a fictionalized composite of all the opportunistic heels who sucked blood
from Morgan while the sucking was good. And he hated every minute of it. “That was a painful experience,” he said a couple of years later. “But there comes a time, after you’ve turned down fifteen or twenty scripts, when you suddenly feel, you know, you have to work.”

He amused himself with pranks. At the start of production, he had a photograph taken of himself emerging from a restaurant freezer and sent it to Jack Warner with the caption “Paul Newman, who was kept in the deep freeze for two years because of
The Silver Chalice
, has at last been thawed out by Warner Bros. to play the coldhearted gangster in
The Helen Morgan Story.”
He presented Curtiz with a bullwhip and a gift card reading “To be used on me—in case I get difficult.” He didn’t exactly bond with Curtiz, complaining that the director would tell him “Go faster” rather than give specific counsel as to the emotions that were required in a scene. But he admired Blyth’s work ethic (she had just had a baby), and he got out of the picture more or less unscathed.

And he would have to: he was granted but a single day off before the start of his next picture,
Until They Sail
, a wartime romance based on a James Michener story. Newman was cast as an American officer stationed in New Zealand during World War II and assigned to assure that marriages between the local girls and the U.S. troops were on the up-and-up; that he has received a Dear John letter from his wife and developed a cynical hide makes him especially effective in his work. But then he meets a character played by Jean Simmons, one of four local sisters looking for love in a country with virtually no men left in it (her siblings were played by Joan Fontaine, Piper Laurie, and Sandra Dee—go figure), and some of his toughness is scraped away.

“I had grave misgivings about the script and about the character and about my usefulness in it,” he admitted. But he took the role because the film’s director, Robert Wise, and the producer, Charles Schnee, had taken a gamble with him on
Somebody Up There Likes Me:
“[They] went out on a limb to allow a newcomer to do something as important as Graziano. I felt that the least I could do would be to return the favor…I’m not sorry I did the picture for that one reason, a very personal reason.”

M
AKING BACK-TO-BACK
Hollywood pictures meant that he would be away from New York for months. And as when he was shooting
Somebody Up There
, that meant spending an extended period of time with Joanne Woodward, who was in California working on her third film, a psychologically daring work written, directed, and produced by veteran screenwriter Nunnally Johnson. Taking its name from the book that was its source,
The Three Faces of Eve
was a reality-based drama about an ordinary housewife who suffered from dizzy spells and blackouts and sought help from a psychiatrist, who diagnosed her as having what is now termed dissociative identity disorder—more commonly, multiple personalities. Johnson had hoped to cast Judy Garland in the role, and June Allyson was also said to have been in the running for the part. But when Garland failed to follow through on the overtures he made, Johnson opted for a controversial but compelling choice in Joanne, who conveniently was already under contract to 20th Century–Fox, where the film was being made. The bosses wanted to reach for a bigger name, but Johnson got his way. And Joanne spent the spring under his direction working at portraying three distinct women connected tenuously by a single psyche.