Paul Newman (16 page)

Hyams made light of these complaints, but they were genuine, and they were part of a plan that Newman had begun to discuss with his agent, Lew Wasserman, to separate himself from his contract. Wasserman, another Jewish son of Cleveland, was a cutthroat operator who had risen from selling candy in burlesque houses to doing promotions for big bands to running MCA, the largest talent agency in the business, by the time he was in his mid-thirties. He was an absolute shark who prided himself on impeccable manners and ruthless partisanship. Acquiring Wasserman as his agent certified Newman as a top talent; it was just a matter of prying him loose from Jack Warner’s greasy-thumbed clutches for his career to truly take off. “Wasserman was a master charlatan,” Newman recalled, “and I say that in the best sense. And he had a better idea of what I was worth on the open market than I did. He said, ‘What if you could buy your way out of your contract for half a million dollars?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’ll be working for twenty years to pay that off!’ He said, ‘Let me do it.’”

There was another thing Wasserman had to convince him of. Above all else in his work, Newman relished the challenge of playing men very different from himself: Rocky Graziano, Ben Quick, Brick Pollitt, Billy the Kid, Glenn Griffin. Even though those were leading roles, Newman saw them as character parts, as chances to build personae from the raw materials of a script and his own analytic process and present them in wholly realized performances. But for Wasserman’s plan to work, Newman would have to assent to being restyled as a movie star, to submit himself more frequently to leading man roles that would, in the prevailing sense of the term in Hollywood, lack the subtle definition he enjoyed teasing out of roles. He would be cast as a function of his looks and his ability to sell tickets more than on the strength of his craft. If he was to become the sort of moneymaker that Wasserman assured him he could be, he would have to allow himself to be refashioned as a traditional matinee-idol. It was a devil’s bargain for an actor of his temperament and preferences, but
he could see the practicality of it and agreed to let Wasserman explore the chance further.

First, though, he would have to be patient and compliant as Warner Bros. put him out on loan yet again for
Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!
, a comedy about the opposition of suburban Connecticut housewives to military plans to build a nuclear missile base in their town. Newman was cast as a low-level corporate executive whose marriage is failing because his wife ignores him in favor of community work. Joanne would play his missus, who can’t say no to any worthy cause but constantly puts off her husband and his manly urges; Joan Collins was to appear as a local femme fatale intent on making time with Newman’s character so as to make her
own
husband jealous enough to take interest in her.

The film shot through the summer in Hollywood, with some location work in Connecticut, and Newman and Joanne found themselves immediately disenchanted. Leo McCarey, the old-timer who had directed the likes of
Duck Soup, The Awful Truth
, and
Going My Way
, had taken much of the darkest cynicism out of the script and ladled on some corny gags such as a drunken Newman swinging from a chandelier. “This was my first crack at comedy,” Newman remembered. “I wasn’t comfortable enough so that I could relax in it. As a result, I overplayed a lot of things.”

And prospects for his next picture weren’t much better. Warner Bros. was angling to get him into an adaptation of a novel by Richard Powell called
The Philadelphian
, a melodrama about a young man from an ordinary background who callously works his way up in Philadelphia society and the legal profession. “It’s just a glorified cosmopolitan soap opera,” Newman complained even as he was making it. Prior to that, he had met with the director Vincent Sherman, a veteran Warner Bros. hand whose career was just recovering from a spell on the anti-Communist blacklist, and expressed the gravest reservations. “The property was just not worth doing,” he insisted. “It got to the point where in talking with him I said, ‘Don’t do the movie. Forget about whether I do it or not. Just don’t do the movie.’” But Sherman was going to proceed and so, in pain and chagrin, would Newman.

First, though, he would treat himself to another project in compensation. He had angled for an opportunity to star in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s latest play,
Sweet Bird of Youth
, which would start rehearsals as early as the fall under the direction of Elia Kazan. This was a truly plum role, and Newman wanted it badly enough that he agreed to make
The Philadelphian
just so he could be given leave by the studio to appear onstage. The play’s producers, for their part, were so keen on having Newman in the lead that they agreed to push the show into the winter of 1959, when he would finally become available.

Through the fall Newman reported doggedly to the set of
The Young Philadelphians
, as the film had been retitled, often after staying up late working with a writer whom he’d insisted be recruited to punch up the script. He was wretched. “The mistake that you make is, it’s bad, and then you work on it like hell, and you walk in, and this scene maybe plays,” he explained. “And because things get better, so much better, you almost mistakenly feel that it’s good—until, of course, you see it, and then it comes back on you with terrible force.”

But he did acknowledge a certain sympathy for his scruple-free character. He was, he said, “much closer to me as a human being” than most roles he’d played, and he went so far as to buy his wardrobe from the studio, keeping three of the six suits he obtained in a closet on each coast. He didn’t take out his frustrations on the director or his costars. Robert Vaughn, who was counting on it as his first big picture (he would be nominated for an Oscar in the part), knew that Newman “just wasn’t crazy about doing it” but added, “he was very conscientious …I had to test for it, and Paul was there to read lines opposite me. It’s very unusual for someone to do that, and I think it helped put me over.” Vaughn took part in many of the rewrite sessions, during which the two would stay up, rehearse new lines, and “put away a bottle of scotch.”

A
S
N
EWMAN
slogged through this dreary nightmare—his third film in five years for his home studio, each as bad as the last—he was given
the treat of the dazzling and far more rewarding process of preparing for
Sweet Bird.
Kazan was a director after his very heart, given to talking at great length about motivations, contradictions, and nuances of character, providing copious notes, taking plenty of time to rehearse and to analyze each scene and exchange and line and pause. “I was so amazed with the amount of preparation he put into this play,” Newman enthused. “There would be long pads of paper, on which he had gone into the exploration of certain character dualities and certain other concerns and attitudes, in writing. It just involved a tremendous amount of work—the dramatic development of the play.”

Newman hadn’t been Tennessee Williams’s first choice for the role. The writer had, naturally, hoped for Marlon Brando; moreover his preferred leading lady, Anna Magnani, had looked at pictures of Newman and declared that his face lacked “poetry.” But it turned out that neither of those stars would be available; Geraldine Page would ultimately land the lead, and Kazan shrewdly recognized in casting Newman that he had on his hands an actor whom he could manipulate into the various contradictory colors required to play the role of Chance Wayne, a gigolo who has attached himself to an aging movie star and hopes to use her influence to launch a movie career for himself and return in glory to the southern hometown he fled a few years before.

Chance is an enormous heel—a social-climbing charmer who has won the heart of the daughter of the town’s big boss and given her a venereal disease, rendering her barren, then gone on to bed rich ladies at a Florida resort using an arsenal of seductive techniques including drugs: a noteworthy creep even amid the gallery of Williams’s malignant characters. Kazan’s task, as he saw it, was to take the gorgeous rising star Paul Newman and turn him into a believably desperate and sweaty schemer, and he had some tricks to help him pull it off. One was to force Newman to cut his hair close and dye it red, giving him an unappealing and slightly Luciferian sheen. Then he made sure that the cast didn’t get too friendly with Newman but rather treated him as a pariah, much as the townspeople would treat Chance upon his homecoming. “From now on, until the play opens,” he told the rest of the players in secrecy when they were engaged in rehearsals for the Philadelphia tryout run, “I don’t want any of you to socialize with Paul.
Let him feel that you don’t like him and that he’s alienated from you. Right now you’re too chummy with him, and it shows up in the play.”

Finally Kazan used Newman’s obvious deference to him to put doubts into the actor’s mind about whether he understood anything about his performance or Page’s or indeed acting or drama at all. As Newman recalled

Newman wasn’t entirely isolated during the early phases of the play. Bruce Dern, playing an old friend of Chance’s, became a pal. When they had a break from rehearsals in Philadelphia, the two took the train up to New York together, one time sharing the club car with comedian Jonathan Winters (a Kenyon College dropout), with whom they drank and laughed heartily. Later Kazan too softened, taking the opportunity of the Broadway opening to reveal to Newman what he had done behind the scenes to help craft his performance. The director soon came to regard the confession as a mistake. “Kazan said that from that point on, the play was never the same,” Dern remembered. “After that all the electricity was gone.”

Philadelphia had certainly been an unusual choice for the debut of such risqué material. On opening night Joanne quietly seethed as a Main Line society family tsked and tutted at each of Williams’s outlandish ideas. “It’s the dirtiest thing I ever saw,” one of them finally pronounced. “If you don’t like it, why the hell don’t you leave?” Joanne hissed back. “And they did!” Newman boasted. But New York
wasn’t nearly so easily shocked, and when the play premiered on Broadway on March 10, 1959, the critics were impressed. In the
New York Times
Brooks Atkinson called it one of Williams’s “finest dramas” and declared that it was “brilliantly acted.” Walter Kerr in the
New York Herald-Tribune
called it “a succession of fuses deliberately—and for the most part magnificently—lighted.” The
New York Daily News
said, “It cannot be ignored,” and the
New York Mirror
took special notice of Newman’s intensity when it noted, “His disintegration, when he finally faces up to reality, has genuine emotional impact. Newman, as well as the audience, was moved by the concluding passages of the play. There were tears in his eyes as well as in those of the audience.”

They might have been tears of exhaustion as much as genuine emotion. “I wanted to come back to Broadway,” he told a columnist, “and I’m glad I did. But it’s a lot of work, boy. I forgot.” And to another he confided, “It takes at least three hours to unwind after each performance.” But he may have been especially skittish because he and Joanne were expecting once again, and this time things were going well. It had been a little over a year since her miscarriage in London, and in the interim she had worked on a film, Martin Ritt’s awkwardly realized version of Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
(in which a bewigged Yul Brynner played the lead). But now she was ensconced at their New York apartment on West Eleventh Street waiting for the baby to come.

The apartment was the first one they shared that wasn’t a temporary rental or a vestige of their unmarried lives. As Newman told Hedda Hopper, “It was remodeled by a young man for his bride, but the marriage broke up almost immediately and it was thrown on the market. There’s a small garden with a fish pond and trees, a room we’ll convert into a nursery—we’ll need that by April. All the furniture from Joanne’s old apartment is already there. We’ve shipped our books, paintings, four lamps, and most of our clothes by express.” Joanne seemed perfectly happy spending her days with her two Chihuahua dogs and her books and a baby on the way. “I’m into a correspondence course in algebra, anthropology, and the history of philosophy,” she said. “I think I’ll enroll in Columbia when the play is on its Broadway run. I’ve always regretted not having a college degree.”

She seemed deliberately to be avoiding capitalizing on her Oscar and was inclined to express her dismissive attitude toward her own career with jokes. “A baby was always a possibility,” she said, “but it wasn’t as scheduled time-wise as other details of our life… I cleverly arranged to be pregnant when Paul was starring in
Sweet Bird of Youth.
I wanted Paul to be close when the baby was born, and I kept praying I would have it during the day or after midnight when Paul wouldn’t be on stage.” On the morning of Wednesday, April 8, she was fortunate enough to get her wish. Elinor Theresa Newman—named for her grandmothers—was born in time for her dad to welcome her into the world and then race over to the Martin Beck Theatre to play the matinee.
*

In the summer he let off steam by playing first base for the
Sweet Bird
team in the Central Park softball league. “I’m pretty good,” he boasted to a columnist, and Bruce Dern concurred: “He could hit.” He took care to make his visits with his three older kids meaningful. “One of my dad’s favorite pastimes,” Scott remembered years later, “was to take me and my two sisters out in a little wobbly rowboat and fish off Long Island Sound. He’d sit at one end with his hat pushed back on his head and swig a bottle of Budweiser.”