Paul Newman (15 page)

T
HEY WERE
a hot couple. The press and public had finally seen
The Three Faces of Eve
and were celebrating Joanne’s tour-de-force performance in the lead(s). At virtually the same time, despite the rather tepid one-two of
The Helen Morgan Story
and
Until They Sail
, Newman was a rising commodity, and he was connected in both trade and mainstream papers with a number of roles: the male lead in
Marjorie Morningstar;
an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s
A Time to Love and a Time to Die;
and an adaptation of Nelson Algren’s
A Walk on the Wild Side.
As it happened, none would pan out (the roles went to Gene Kelly, John Gavin, and Laurence Harvey, respectively), but the increasing frequency of his name in the press evinced his gathering stardom.

His next film would prove it. He won the role of Brick Pollitt, the alcoholic, bisexual scion of a powerful southern family in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, which writer-director Richard Brooks was adapting from the scandalous and successful Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’s play. Elizabeth Taylor would play the heroine, Brick’s wife, Maggie the Cat, with a far more cinematic brand of sensuality than Barbara Bel Geddes, the original stage Maggie, could bring to the screen. That was obvious recasting. But Brick was a tricky part. Ben Gazzara had created the role on Broadway, and he had tremendous theatrical credentials. But he had no value as a name; there was no way he’d get the movie role. A lengthy search for a screen Brick had ensued, and Newman was selected only when Brooks and Taylor’s husband, impresario Mike Todd, warned MGM that she would walk from the project if a Brick wasn’t found soon. “For Christ’s sake,” Todd told the studio brass, “we’re gonna blow this thing.” His threats worked: Newman, Brooks’s favorite for the role, was to be paid $17,000, his highest fee yet, for his work.

The shoot was scheduled for Hollywood in March, which would allow both Newman and Taylor to work on their southern accents with dialect coaches and generally to take the holidays for themselves.
For Taylor, this meant a Christmas with Todd, whom she’d married in February (at age twenty-four, it was her third wedding), and their baby daughter, Liza. For Newman, it meant arduously working out the terms of a divorce from Jackie, who had finally agreed to give up her claim on him.

The gossip press scented something in the air—the
New York Post
ran a photo of Newman and Joanne in December with a caption implying a wedding was impending. But nothing concrete was revealed. On January 16 they appeared on television together in “The 80 Yard Run,” a
Playhouse 90
production of Irwin Shaw’s story about a college football hero’s unlikely romance with a sophisticated rich girl and the troubled marriage that results. It was their first filmed work to appear anywhere, and it proved what all the directors and fellow actors and Actors Studio colleagues had always said about them: Newman had indelible star power, but Joanne was by a good measure the more accomplished actor. There’s a vivid naturalness to almost everything she does—tapping concert tickets on her chin anxiously as she waits for a date, nibbling her lower lip and grinning broadly as she picks up the star halfback, joking with her dad (she calls him “Sam”), giving the cold eye to her husband’s secretary. She’s alive in an indeterminate number of ways, all fresh and exciting. In comparison, Newman is game and ardent and a bit stiff; you sense him planning and staging his emotions and reactions. He’s stunning to look at—it’s one of the first times a job calls for him to take his shirt off simply for the beefcake effect, a trope that will appear regularly in his screen work—but he’s not her equal, not nearly.

Funnily enough, the differences between their levels of skill add credibility to the script. Joanne’s character is meant to be the sophisticate, and she winds up dumping her simple Adonis for a pipe-smoking New York magazine editor (a Hugh Hefner type played, ironically, by Richard Anderson, the mama’s boy from
Long, Hot Summer
). Newman’s character, on the other hand, needs to develop a sense of himself and discover, if not build, a reservoir of self-respect and self-reliance. Dramatically, he needs to be less effective than she; credit the producers and director Franklin Schaffner with recognizing this—and Newman too, for not letting ego get in the way of an effective collaboration. Which
isn’t to say he didn’t do a nice job: it would be his final appearance on live television and a thoroughly creditable one: lively and knowing and with a broad swath of blue-collar decency and plausible streaks of insecurity and shame.

F
OR A
fact he was acting. In real life he was surely caught up in drama and emotion that had little to do with what he played in the film. Chief was the knowledge that Joanne was carrying his baby. Sometime during the shoot of
Long, Hot Summer
, perhaps on that voluptuous brass bed, they had conceived a child—the reality of which may have been the final straw in Jackie’s agreeing to let him go. And now that there was to be an end to his marriage, he and Joanne could make wedding plans of their own: she’d take the train (she hated flying) to Las Vegas, and he’d meet her there after a side trip to Mexico to obtain his divorce.

Divorce. It was one of the strangest things about his entire life: he would come to be celebrated for decades for his long and lasting marriage, yet it had been built on the foundation of a previous—and fecund—marriage that had failed. At first he would dance gingerly around questions about his time with Jackie: “It wouldn’t be fair either to Jackie or to Joanne. But I was probably too immature to make a success of my first marriage.” But in time he became bolder in his refusal. “What happened to us during that period is not gonna help anybody live a happy life,” he said to a reporter. “It’s not going to help people’s marriages, it’s not going to destroy their marriages. And it’s simply nobody’s business.” He did, however, confess to one emotion: “Guilty as hell” was how he described himself, adding “And I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.”

On January 29, 1958, Joanne arrived on the Las Vegas Strip with a small coterie of friends, including her manager, Ina Bernstein, who was to serve as maid of honor, and Judy Balaban, the wife of Joanne’s agent, Jay Kantor (and not two years earlier a bridesmaid in Grace Kelly’s fabled royal wedding). At around suppertime Newman arrived from Mexico via plane along with his best man, Stewart Stern. A marriage license was acquired, and then a vital ritual was performed: the couple rang Hedda Hopper with the news that they would be wed. (In
Hollywood in the 1950s this was a mandatory rite disguised as a courtesy, like a young Sicilian couple seeking the matrimonial blessing of the local Mafia don before heading to the altar. Joanne actually apologized to Hopper for keeping her in the dark until the last minute, explaining that she didn’t know when Newman would arrive: “I didn’t want it to appear that I was left waiting at the church.”)

In a bungalow at the El Rancho Vegas casino resort, owner Beldon Katleman, who regularly made his private quarters available for just these sorts of occasions, stood by as District Judge Frank McNamee united the couple. Among the celebrants were singers Eydie Gorme and Steve Lawrence, who were next in line to be married, and the members of their own wedding party, including Sophie Tucker and Joe E. Lewis. Katleman gave Newman a pair of gold cuff links in the form of roulette wheels, and Newman gave Joanne a sherry glass (she collected them) inscribed
So you wound up with Apollo / If he’s sometimes hard to swallow / Use this.
The following morning they flew to New York and, after a few quiet days, flew off once again for a honeymoon in England.

T
HEY MADE PLANS TO VISIT
P
ARIS, AS HONEYMOONERS WOULD
, but London, in that moderately mild winter of 1958, would stand as the real starting point of their marriage. “There were no tourists to speak of,” Newman remembered later, “and we would get a car and head off into the country till we were literally lost. Hundreds of miles from London and checking into country inns at nightfall—there’s a lot to be said for a winter honeymoon.” After all the anxiety and secrecy surrounding the romance and the divorce, the ability to walk around freely as man and wife was intoxicating, he said: “It felt good, being married.”

On their first days in London they stayed in quiet luxury at the Connaught; after side trips around England and a little bit of time in France and Switzerland, they returned and bunked with Gore Vidal and Howard Austen at their dark and drafty flat on Chesham Place. They went to the theater and toured historical sites. Newman, who had never been to Europe, was especially dazzled, as Austen remembered. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he repeatedly blurted out with enthusiasm on a visit to Hampton Court. They socialized with Vidal’s London friends and with luminaries from the theater—Claire Bloom, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Kenneth Tynan.

It was a dream, but it ended with a sting. Newman had to be back in Hollywood by early March to begin work on
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof;
Joanne would, of course, join him there in his tiny rented home—“a glorified shanty,” as Hedda Hopper described it—so that she could take
part in the Oscar campaign for
The Three Faces of Eve.
But he left without her when, without warning, she had a miscarrage. She was admitted to St. George’s Hospital, where Claire Bloom visited her, as Joanne recalled, daily. And then she returned to the States on her own. “That very nice doctor then put me on a plane and sent me home,” she said. “It was a terrible end to a lovely honeymoon.”

I
N
H
OLLYWOOD
,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, which was teeming with even more drama than Newman’s own life, was proving difficult to translate to the screen. The homosexual themes had to be washed out of the film; Brooks had attempted to rewrite the play so that the gist of the original remained beguilingly close beneath the surface but never explicit.

Shooting began in March with several members of the original stage cast—including Burl Ives, who’d originated the role of Big Daddy, and Madeleine Sherwood—joined by the likes of Judith Anderson and Jack Carson. At first Newman had trouble with Taylor because their styles of acting were so different. “He needed to rehearse and explore,” remembered Stewart Stern, who heard all of Newman’s complaints. “She would just be doing nothing in rehearsals except saying the lines and walking along. He’d go to Richard Brooks and say, ‘What’s going to happen when we get to a shot? She’s not doing anything.’ Brooks said, ‘Just wait a minute.’ He’d say ‘Action,’ and Paul’s eyes fell out because she’d be there with a full performance, and he never knew where she found it.”

A couple of weeks passed with good progress made amid an atmosphere of great seriousness—as Newman learned when a joke he pulled on the set backfired. He was playing a scene in which the drunken Brick, who has been filled with guilt at the apparent suicide of his schoolmate (and, it is implied, lover) Skipper, brushes up against one of Maggie’s nightgowns. “I’m in my pajamas,” Newman remembered, “and I’m supposed to slam out of a door, and when I do, my wife’s nightgown, hanging on the door, brushes against my face. So anyway, during the rehearsal, when we got to that point, I suddenly tore off my pajama top and started trying to climb into my wife’s nightgown crying,
‘Skipper! Skipper!’ There were twenty people on that set, and do you know, not one of them laughed. To them, this was the Method in action, and they stood in respectful silence.”

If Newman’s penchant for awkward jokes didn’t impair the flow of work, the events of March 22 did, awfully. That day Mike Todd was killed in the crash of his private plane, the
Lucky Liz;
Taylor herself was to have been on the flight with him but had a cold and chose not to travel. She was, naturally, hysterical, and Brooks went to her house to see if she could continue making the picture. Unfortunately, he had been preceded by various agents and producers asking the same thing. “You son of a bitch,” she greeted him. “I guess you’re here like all the rest of those bastards who’ve been here all day long!” Brooks tried to assure her that she, and not the film, was his chief concern. “It’s a movie, that’s all it is,” he said. “If you never want to come back, that’s fine.” “Well, I’m not,” she replied. “I’m never coming back. Fuck you and the movie and everyone else.”

The studio was, indeed, ready to pull the plug, but Brooks was able to mollify them temporarily by changing his shooting schedule and rewriting some scenes so that he could shoot without her for a couple of weeks. And then he got a call from Taylor’s secretary saying that the actress wanted to visit the set. “I think I’d like to come back to work,” she told him. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to work. Maybe I’ll start and something will happen.” Brooks eased her back into the production with short bursts—an hour, then two. “By the end of the week,” he remembered, “she was working four or five hours. Never missed a day and was never late.” As impressed as he was with the transformation in Taylor between rehearsals and the actual shoot, Newman was even more awestruck by her work in completing the film. “She was extraordinary,” he recalled. “Her determination was stunning.”

C
URIOUSLY, THE
same could not be said for Joanne. As award season dawned, she was frequently cited as a contender for an Academy Award for
The Three Faces of Eve.
She won a couple of prizes in the run-up to the Oscar season, including a Golden Globe. But she was
reluctant to get all goggle-eyed about any of it. “If I had an infinite amount of respect for the people who think I gave the greatest performance, then it would matter,” she said when asked about her prospects for the big prize. When the nominations were announced, she had in fact made the final cut, along with the formidable quartet of Deborah Kerr
(Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison)
, Anna Magnani
(Wild Is the Wind)
, Elizabeth Taylor
(Raintree County)
, and Lana Turner
(Peyton Place).

Whether out of nerves, perversity, or hardheaded independence, Joanne did all she could to talk down her chances. “Deborah Kerr will win,” she announced on the red carpet of the Pantages Theater on Oscar night. And that wasn’t her most self-deprecating gesture. She revealed that the green taffeta gown she was wearing at the big show had been made not by a famed designer but rather by
her:
“I spent a hundred dollars on the material, designed the dress, and worked on it for two weeks.” The gesture stunned the old movieland cohort, no one more than Joan Crawford, for whom Joanne had been named. “Joanne Woodward is setting the cause of Hollywood glamour back twenty years by making her own clothes,” she fumed.
*

It was Joanne’s night, though, despite her crimes against fashion. John Wayne opened the envelope and called out her name, and she stood at the podium breathlessly, saying, “I’ve been daydreaming about this since I was nine years old. I’d like to thank my parents for having more faith in me than anyone could.”

But she was still chary of the whole thing. “Acclaim is the false aspect of the job, which screws you up,” she later said. “You start to need it, like a drug, and in the final analysis, what does it all mean? I won my Academy Award when I was very young. Sitting in bed afterward and drinking my Ovaltine, I said to Paul, ‘Is that it?’”

In fact, she wasn’t very persistent in stoking her career. She followed
Eve
with two films without her husband—adaptations of works
by William Faulkner
(The Sound and the Fury)
and Tennessee Williams
(The Fugitive Kind)—
and then settled into a pattern of working only with him for the next several years as their family grew and his career rocketed. In the wake of her Oscar win, she soured on the movie business. “In Hollywood the big producers, big directors, big stars band together, the lesser ones band together, and the strugglers band together,” she reflected. By dint of her New York connections, she explained, she was always relegated to a lower tier. But when she won her Academy Award, that changed: “Suddenly I became ‘acceptable,’ and I felt that I was being ‘acceptable’ on a very false level which had nothing to do with me per se, or whether someone liked me, but only because I became an asset, in a certain respect, that I hadn’t been previously. A property.”

Her ambivalence about her career was entangled with her feelings about her marriage, she revealed: “I was raised forties style to believe that a woman should be both wife and mistress to her husband, and only in that could she find her true fulfillment. I bought into that philosophy, and it caused me grief…Although I loved being wife and mistress to my husband, I was bothered. I had always acted and had always wanted to be a star, but because of my upbringing, I thought there must be something wrong with me for wanting to be more than a wife and mistress.”

Still, she had advantages over him: that Oscar, for instance, which he posed with in a gag photo, eyeing it enviously,
*
and in February 1960 the very first star on the newly established Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Newman would have to wait until 1980, unbelievably, to get his.) In certain respects, even as she shunned the sort of stardom that was falling to him, she would always have his respect as the superior—and more acclaimed—actor.

I
N THE
spring of 1958, both
The Left Handed Gun
and
The Long, Hot Summer
were released. Arthur Penn claimed he never saw
Left Handed
between the day he finished shooting it and the day the studio dumped it as a second-tier feature into the sorts of grindhouses that specialized in B westerns. “Warner Bros. brought in an editor,” he recalled. “In television we were essentially editing our shows on the air. I thought that’s what I would be doing.” Those critics who did manage to catch it in its limited release, like Howard Thompson of the
New York Times
, weren’t impressed: “Poor Mr. Newman seems to be auditioning alternately for the Moscow Art Players and the Grand Ole Opry,” he hissed. And given the mishmash of the script and the jerky structural rhythm, it was a fair, if cutting, comment. But the film would go on to find appreciative audiences overseas, especially in France, where, Newman bragged later, it was almost always playing in some small Parisian theater.

The Long, Hot Summer
was treated with far more care by the studio and got more respect from critics. It wasn’t universally admired:
Variety
summed up the consensus by declaring “It may be preposterous but it is never dull.” And Newman, blossoming into a sexual confidence and a willingness to dance with, if not marry himself to, immoral behavior, was particularly cited, even in dismissive reviews, as a highlight. In the spring his performance won the first important award of his career—a best actor prize from the Cannes Film Festival.

With so much new product on-screen and a marriage to an actress with an Oscar, he seemed on the verge of becoming a major star himself. But he was at constant loggerheads with Warner Bros., which was determined to work him in what he considered substandard material and at a salary that was, given his rising profile, ridiculously low. He griped about his situation in the press, courting the wrath of the studio. “Major studios have a way of taking care of their contract players in even the most minute respects,” he told columnist Joe Hyams. “For example, Warner Bros. has done everything possible to keep me from getting into a high income tax bracket.” He complained that the studio was making money by loaning him out—they’d used him only on three films in five years, compared to the five that he’d done for MGM and Fox combined. And he even called them out for boorish manners:
“When Joanne and I went on our honeymoon to Europe, Warner’s was so tactful. The studios I did pictures for on loan-out—Fox and MGM—sent flowers, arranged a car for us, took care of theater tickets. But Warner’s left us completely alone, ignored us.”