Paul Newman (14 page)

If that was hard work, the context in which she was doing it was certainly pleasurable. She and Newman had taken a house in Malibu with Gore Vidal and his longtime companion, Howard Austen—a particularly odd arrangement since it had once been hinted in the gossip pages that Joanne and Vidal were engaged. (“That was at her insistence,” Vidal later recollected, “and based entirely on her passion not for me but Paul”—that is, she thought that a fake engagement might force Newman to leave Jackie for once and for all.) Life on the beach was idyllic—“a marvelous time,” according to Vidal, “like a delayed adolescence for Paul and me.” He teased the couple, calling them “Miss Georgia and Mr. Shaker Heights,” nicknames he would use for them all their lives.

In the mornings Newman would drive off to Warner Bros., Joanne would take off for Fox, and Vidal would, if so moved, drive to MGM, where he was working on scripts, including
Ben-Hur.
On the weekends, parties. “The house was full of people that, often, none of us knew,” Vidal said. “I would think they were friends of Paul’s or
Joanne’s, and they thought that they were friends of mine.” (Among the guests they did know were Theresa Newman and Arthur Jr., who visited from Ohio and whose visit might also explain the fiction of a Woodward-Vidal engagement.)

By springtime, though, Vidal and Newman had developed a hiccup in their cheery relationship. One of their mutual interests had been turning
The Death of Billy the Kid
into a feature film. They’d talked Fred Coe, the producer of the TV version, into shepherding the project at Warner Bros., and he intended to make his film debut with it. In the fall of 1956 Vidal told the
New York Times
that he would be writing a new version of the script for Arthur Penn to direct, and he promised that his take on the western outlaw’s story wouldn’t “be like the others.” But when winter came and went, Coe and the studio still weren’t satisfied with what they had. “They’ve been stalling,” Newman said of Warner Bros. “They think it ought to end happily. That’s like filming the life of Lincoln and having it end happily; like having his wife come in and say, ‘Abe dear, I forgot the tickets for the theater tonight. We’ll have to stay home.’”

But the studio heads weren’t the only ones unhappy with Vidal’s work. “The Gore Vidal script didn’t sit particularly well with me,” Penn remembered. “It seemed too specialized and too narrow.” In the spring of 1957 Coe hired a new writer, Leslie Stevens, who had no previous film credits, and the studio gave the green light to his modified version of Vidal’s script—without Vidal’s knowledge or consent; they even changed the name, from
The Legend of Billy the Kid
, which had been the working title, to
The Left Handed Gun.
Vidal understood why Coe did it: “He sees what he thinks is a stupid movie star in Paul Newman and a scatterbrained playwright who’s all over the place in me, and he has an opening to get in and take it over and [he] did.” And Newman, who had gone off to a ranch in Tucson to absorb some atmosphere for the role, wasn’t able to lobby for his friend’s interests. “Maybe I should have pushed a little more,” he later admitted, “but I didn’t know much about the politics of Hollywood.” Too, he had fought hard with the studio just to shoot the material at all; unless he wanted to keep appearing in the likes of
The Helen Morgan Story
, he would have to give a little bit. Vidal understood Newman’s situation—
their friendship would thrive for decades—but he never forgave Coe and cut himself out of the film entirely. (“It was an
auteur film,”
Vidal sneered years later. “I say no more.”)

In Arizona Newman practiced his riding—a useless effort, he admitted: “The horse and I have been a continuing disaster. I had to learn to ride Western saddle when we started, and I had never ridden at all. I can still see that horse looking up at me and wondering what the hell was going on.” He was only slightly more successful at finding someone whose manner he could imitate as a basis for his performance. “I lived in a bunkhouse for about a week, chased cows,” he remembered. “There was a young kid there who I really wanted to get on tape. He was so shy, he wouldn’t do anything. Finally, after about a half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, he loosened up, and I set the tape recorder down in front of him. He started to say a sentence, but then stopped right in the middle and said, ‘I cain’t talk to nothin’ that don’t talk back.’ And that was the end of it. Those were the only words I ever got out of him.”

Back in Hollywood, where the film would be shot, he was appalled at what had happened to the script. “Somewhere along the line that whole thing fell apart,” he remembered. “I never saw a script until two weeks before we started shooting, at which time I flipped my wig.” Leslie, who he’d originally thought would simply smooth over some problems the studio had with Vidal’s script, had completely rewritten it. “There were good scenes in it,” Newman admitted, “but all of a sudden there would be a visual jar, or a story jar, and you’d sort of shake your head, and it would take you ten minutes to get with it again.”

Warner Bros. had stood firm against allowing Penn and the actors a rehearsal period, but they had managed to work around it. “My wife and I had rented a house,” Penn remembered, “and Paul and Hurd Hatfield and some others came by, and we rehearsed in the house. Paul began wearing his gun belt at those sessions, with the holster on the left side, and he kept drawing it and practicing and practicing. And Joanne came along to those rehearsals, too.”

At the same time he was gearing up to play his psychologically scarred Billy the Kid, Newman was seeing a psychiatrist—not for research
into his character but to address the genuine pain that was accompanying the dissolution of his marriage. “It helped me in some ways to have a more realistic appraisal of myself, to get in touch with my emotions. Some of it was effective and some of it was helpful,” he would reflect. But helpful only to a point: “He taught me to like myself better, which I don’t. He taught me to recognize the level of my achievements, which I don’t. He taught me not to ‘should’ myself, which I still do.” Inevitably, given his training and the sort of work that attracted him, he gleaned insights for acting: “I was very surprised at how little I knew about myself.”

Throughout the summer, as he made
Left Handed
in the great outdoors of Burbank and learned about himself in a more intimate setting with his therapist, Newman and Joanne became more honest about their relationship; photos of them dining and attending premieres in Hollywood had been published, and writers were openly asking him if they were a couple. (“There’s been too much talk,” he told one, bringing that particular set of questions to an end.) Newman worked up the gumption to ask Jackie for a divorce, but despite the ongoing humiliation, which wasn’t always subtle, she wasn’t willing to just give in. She had three children under seven years of age; they didn’t own their own home; Newman hadn’t yet started to make significant money; they had been married in church less than eight years earlier; and it was
he
who was cheating on
her:
why should she budge? They had, in effect, reached a miserable standoff.

T
HEN ANOTHER
movie role forced all their hands. Newman had been loaned out once again, this time to 20th Century–Fox, for a film called
The Long, Hot Summer
, which had been loosely adapted by the screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. from William Faulkner’s novel
The Hamlet
as well as a couple of his short stories. Martin Ritt, who worked in New York theater and taught at the Actors Studio and had recently begun making films in Hollywood, would direct. Anthony Franciosa, another Actors Studio member, would costar, as would Orson Welles. Newman was cast as Ben Quick, a sharp and scheming ne’er-do-well who wanders into a small southern town
presided over by a rich, domineering man (Welles) and ingratiates himself to the patriarch at the expense of the man’s son (Franciosa); at the same time, and with her father’s blessing, he courts the rich man’s daughter, Clara, who is calcifying into a spinster while waiting on a proposal from a childhood sweetheart, who everyone but she can see is an inveterate mama’s boy.

Ritt had originally wanted Eva Marie Saint for Clara, but he knew that Joanne, whom he had worked with at the Actors Studio and had just directed in
No Down Payment
, a drama about the intertwined lives of four suburban couples, was capable of the role too. At first he faced some resistance from the studio: “She was tougher to cast [than Newman] because she was just a very good actress,” he later said. But word about
The Three Faces of Eve
, which hadn’t yet been released, was very strong around the Fox lot. And so Joanne got the part—and a chance to spend a couple of months working with Newman on location in Louisiana, where the entire film would be shot.

Newman went down south first, hanging around the film’s projected locations in Baton Rouge and nearby Clinton for a few weeks. “The newspaper editor of Clinton knew what I was down there for,” Newman remembered. “He got me with a bunch of guys.” As Newman described it, “[I] sort of latched on to a guy who was working on an oil pipeline—a big guy, six four. We sat around drinking beer and playing pool. He name was Brother Fochee. I got a tremendous sense of physical solidity from him. He’d walk into a room and talk, and his feet would stay in exactly the same position, no shuffling. He had a tremendous kind of physical presence.” And he wasn’t the only one. There were lots of fellas in Clinton who would be handy to have around if you were a married man working with your girlfriend and trying to keep that fact out of the papers. When a big-city journalist visited the set later on to pry into the Newman-Woodward romance, it was made clear to him that it wasn’t a healthful line of inquiry; the reporter presently left town.

Had he stayed, he would have seen the two stars behaving quite openly in front of everyone like a couple in love with each other. “We thought they were already married,” Tony Franciosa joked years later. “They were so obviously together, so beautifully close.” They even allowed
the set photographer to take candid photos of them hanging around Clinton’s town center, reading the newspaper and eating picnic lunches between takes.

Ritt and his cast (which also included Lee Remick as Franciosa’s randy young wife and Richard Anderson as Clara’s prim almost-suitor) were given what they felt was a proper amount of rehearsal time, which is to say more than most films allowed for, and they seemed truly to enjoy working together. “We understood each other,” Ritt said. “That was the advantage—like the orchestra players knowing the taste of a conductor.” The odd man out, though, was also the biggest fish in the pond: Welles. The one-time wunderkind who had conquered Hollywood with his first film and then been systematically rebuffed and broken by the town, he had come into the project with the promise of turning in one of his patented scenery-chewing turns as a mean old lusty drunk who used his power to crush everyone around him. He found, instead, that he was expected to take part in the sort of collaborative exploration that the Actors Studio members around him thrived upon. He understood theater, of course, but he couldn’t catch on with the techniques, and he would become easily irritated during rehearsals and even during takes.

Ritt would later admit that he had considered Lee J. Cobb, another Actors Studio vet, for the role, but that Welles had the stronger persona. Ritt had to fight the studio to get the notoriously difficult Welles onto the film, and then he had to fight Welles himself, who challenged his directorial skills and, among other discourtesies, chose not to reveal until they were on location that he couldn’t drive a car as the script called for him to do.

“I took a lot of crap from him,” Ritt admitted, “because I knew that that extraordinary figure would be there on the screen.” And he knew too that Welles was exceedingly anxious about the state of his own most recent project as a director,
Touch of Evil
, which was being taken away from him and recut by the studio. So he tolerated the great man’s out-bursts—although he did warn him away from certain others in the cast who mightn’t have been so indulgent. As Ritt recalled, “I said to him one day, ‘Don’t fuck around like that with Tony Franciosa, because he doesn’t understand you, and he’s going to knock you on your ass.’”

Newman admitted that he didn’t especially care for Welles until he realized that something painful was at the root of his behavior:

Despite Welles’s obstreperousness, the shoot wrapped before winter. And aside from their work on it, Newman and Joanne took from Louisiana a most unusual memento: a gigantic brass bed that they’d discovered while antique shopping in New Orleans. Newman loved to speculate as to its origins. “Three could sleep in it very comfortably,” he told a reporter. “We figure it must once have stood in a cat-house; there’d be no other reason to make a bed that big.” Tennessee Williams, he once bragged, had tried to buy the bed from them: “He considers it the most perfect example of Southern decadence he has ever seen.” But he couldn’t have it. Pretty soon Newman and Joanne
would be able to sleep together in their big brazen folly for the rest of their lives.