Paul Newman (17 page)

And he prepared to dabble in a new pursuit: film directing. As part of an initiative to have film and stage personalities make short movies to be shown at charitable fund-raisers in the New York area, Newman and a team of ten or twelve shot Anton Chekhov’s monologue “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco” as a one-man film starring Michael Strong, whom Newman had admired deeply in a performance of the same material at an Actors Studio session. He had real Hollywood pros on the set, including cinematographer Arthur Ornitz and production designer Richard Sylbert. But he harbored no great illusions about what he was doing. “We’ve had some distributional encouragement,” he told a reporter, “but we’ll talk distribution only if we find we’ve made
a good picture. Otherwise we’ll burn it. This picture is an emotional commitment, not a binding, legal one.”
*

No, for binding, legal ones he had other strategies and other plans. His contract for
Sweet Bird
stipulated that he would play Chance for less than a year, and he had to consider what to do when that period came to a close. This was just the opportunity Lew Wasserman had been looking for, to prize him free of Warner Bros. and turn him into a more valuable commodity. As Newman recalled, “He waited until Jack Warner was in a terrible humor about something, and Warner said, ‘Now this moron Newman is coming back, and he’s going to be a pain in the butt.’ And Wasserman said, ‘Why do you have to put up with that stuff? Let the guy buy his way out. He’s not going to amount to anything.’ Warner bought it, and that was the end of that.” At the end of August Newman paid Warner Bros. a flat half-million of blood money and bought his freedom.

For the son of Arthur Newman, this was a terrifying leap. He was supporting four children, a wife, an ex-wife, and, with his brother, a widowed mother, and now he was without guaranteed work. He acknowledged that parting from Warner Bros. was a risk that kept him “poor for several years”; he spoke of lying awake thinking about the possibility of everything’s caving in on him, of having to start from scratch without anything. “I have a recurring nightmare,” he admitted, “in which I always dream that the bottom is going to fall out of my career…I worry so much that I’m lucky if I get five hours of sleep.” But he knew too that the decision was justified on artistic grounds and even sheer principle: “I was free at last to make my own decisions. If I failed in anything it would be
my
failure, no one else’s.”

Still, the money worries dominated his thoughts sufficiently that he took the exceedingly rash step of shooting a movie while still onstage in
Sweet Bird.
In November 1959 he started appearing in the mornings on various soundstages and locations in New York for the shoot of
From the Terrace
, another potboiler about a young man on the make, this time from a John O’Hara novel. Joanne starred opposite him as the society girl he marries and can’t hold on to; Ina Balin played the sweet girl he meets too late and decides to love anyhow. Never missing a single one of the three-hundred-plus performances of
Sweet Bird
during his run with the play, he kept on schedule with the movie. Sol Jacobson, the press agent for
Sweet Bird
, recalled of this grueling routine, “Eight times a week he created the part as if it were opening night. And what is even more astonishing, by day he got up before dawn and commuted to the [film] set.”

Newman admitted to being shattered by the workload. “We’ve been under pressure from the start,” he told an interviewer. “I worked day and night …I guess I was greedy.” But having Joanne on the set with him was a balm against his worst impulses. “When I get home,” he explained, “I can’t bluster around growling that the director fouled me up on this or that scene, because Joanne was there.” And he joked too about her love scenes with Patrick O’Neal: “When she finished, I let her have it across her behind—just in case she got any romantic notions.”

Making time for silliness came naturally to them, such as the November afternoon when they appeared on the panel quiz show
What’s My Line
in the “mystery celebrity guest” slot. Before a blindfolded panel consisting of Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Art Linkletter, Newman grunted yesses and nos to questions and Joanne answered them in a variety of accents before they were recognized by Francis, who knew all about their work, including what they were up to next; she even asked about baby Nell. (“She ate a cigarette yesterday,” Joanne revealed, drawing a big laugh from the audience.)

All this activity seemed to be taking a toll on Newman’s stage work, at least in the eyes of Sidney Blackmer, the veteran stage and screen actor who played the tyrannical town boss in
Sweet Bird.
“Paul hasn’t had a great deal of experience,” he told an interviewer near the end of the year. “He needs great coaching in timing; his instinct is off in timing …I think he’s getting things that he has added—as a Method actor, or even not as a Method actor you try to improve the performance—but he’s changing his reactions. He’s putting in an interpretation.” And Newman admitted that the hard work of appearing in the
play and making a film had gotten to him; Joanne attended a performance late in the run and chastised him for putting in a half-effort. “That hurt,” Newman admitted, “but Joanne was right. I had been doing the part so long that I was rushing through it. After her chewing out, my last ten performances were just great.”

He finally let it go. In February, Newman was replaced in
Sweet Bird
by Rip Torn, who had played the sadistic son of the town boss, and he and Joanne decamped to Hollywood to finish
From the Terrace.
He admitted that he missed the play. “It’s hard to describe the sense of loss,” he said. “It was like watching a wonderful barrel of brandy being thrown over the side of a ship…I’ve been in two New York plays, but I never felt the same way about them. On closing night, after the final curtain came down, we had a champagne party backstage. I told Rip Torn that I wished him all success and a long run. Then I added that I hoped he would never be better than I was in the role.”

But truly, how competitive could he have been feeling? Wasserman was shopping him around at $200,000 a picture—more than ten times what he would expect to earn as a Warner Bros. contract player—and his first job under these rich new terms would be
Exodus
, Otto Preminger’s epic adaptation of Leon Uris’s novel about the Israeli struggle for independence. When Oscar nominations came out for the previous year’s films, he was cited for his performance as leading actor in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, rectifying the slight he’d felt when he was overlooked for
Somebody Up There.

He was thirty-four years old, and he had a new wife, a new baby, new confidence in his abilities as an actor, and a new and potentially very lucrative lease on his own career. He had made eleven movies, several of which had been well received, and had premiered three memorable roles on Broadway. His picture was on magazine covers, and he was featured in newsreels just for showing up at restaurant openings or theatrical premieres.

It was 1960, and he could justifiably feel that he had a hell of a future ahead of him.

“I
’
M TWO PEOPLE
,” H
E WOULD TELL THE PRESS
. “
I’M ME
, P
AUL
Newman. And I’m Paul Newman the actor. The first one is not for sale. When they hire the second one, I do the best job I can, but nobody has the right to tell me how to live, how to dress, or how to think.”

Of course he was right: there was a public Newman and a private one. But each was, in fact, a mosaic of other, smaller identities, some potent and patent, some obscure and oblique.

He was an actor and a husband and a father—each for at least a, decade. He had directed a short film and had begun to take an active interest in the operations of the Actors Studio. As a performer, he had created a persona of his own—neither the new Marlon Brando nor the guy who got lucky when Jimmy Dean cracked up, but a man whose talent, commitment, and, yes, looks, set him apart even in the company of his Hollywood peers. He was a sex symbol whose allure spanned generations, possessed of a kind of relaxed, intelligent manliness with an ageless style. And he was half of an enormously famous show biz couple, a modernish pair whose frank and footloose manner made them an emblem of a new all-American domestic cool.

He was a burgeoning superstar, a trouper of stage and screen, a stud who could act, dishy, inquisitive, romantic, a blue-blooded shapeshifter who could project chilly and hot and broken and cruel and chatty and tetchy and decent and shameless and stifled and unsheathed, quite
often in combinations and quite often very well—a real talent of shades and depths and taste.

And he was well liked, and by a variety of people and audiences. Like Brando and Dean and Steve McQueen, he was a rebel who dressed like a slob (but with taste), hung out in déclassé joints, got around on motor scooters or in sports cars, stayed out of L.A. as much as he could, played brassy scoundrels and real heels and the occasionally arty part, and seemed the whole while to be having a blast. Young audiences loved all that about him, even though he was in his thirties. At the same time, he was a pragmatic businessman’s son and a war veteran, he’d attended two prestigious colleges, and he had children to support, and he took all that seriously enough to win the approval of a generation who’d grown up with Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and Clark Gable. He was easy on the eyes and a man’s man. He was charming, if never exactly comic, and determined, if never quite heroic. He always got the girl (hell, every leading man always got the girl), but you sensed that he might have been just as content not to. His victories were satisfying, but sometimes only he and the audience knew the truth of them. And oddly, even his defeats somehow pleased; in failing in their quests, his characters seemed to find greater personal victories than those they’d intentionally pursued—the very archetype of the modern antihero.

He signed on to make
Exodus
in September 1959, and in the span of the next decade he would become the biggest movie star in the world and tailor a public image for himself that would suit him the rest of his life. He would make some very good films
(The Hustler, Paris Blues, Hud, Harper, Hombre, Cool Hand Luke)
and some absolutely awful ones
(The Prize, Lady L, Torn Curtain, The Secret War of Harry Frigg).
He had as representatives Hollywood’s most powerful agent (first Lew Wasserman, then, after Wasserman left the agenting business, Freddie Fields) and its most respected publicist, Warren Cowan. He formed a production company with Martin Ritt (at first it was named Jodell, as if by a pair of Jewish partners in the garment district paying homage to their wives, Joanne and Adele; eventually they called it Salem Pictures) and then another with a powerful agent, John Foreman. He would be written
and spoken about, inaccurately, as being on the verge of taking parts in dozens of films, some of which would never be made, and he often, with no fanfare, passed on films that became career-making hits for other actors. By 1968 he would be nominated for four best actor Oscars; he would top the likes of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery in annual polls naming Hollywood’s most popular star; he would command more than $1 million a film (and more still for those he produced); and he would direct a theatrical feature.

In virtually every picture he made as an actor, he took the effort to create a credible personality out of his role, extending his art the way his schooling and his work at the Actors Studio had taught him: hard application, thorough analysis, emotional exploration, and the exact construction of a character so that it seemed organic and spontaneous when presented. He was one of those rare Hollywood icons who cared about the actual craft of acting: he distracted directors and probed screenwriters and bored interviewers with his discussions of motivation, structure, and technique. And although he could be caught out working his machinery deliberately in a number of films—stiffness and calculation somewhat limited even the best performances of his first decade or so in movies—he always managed to seem normal or matter-of-fact or familiar in a way that made it easy to forgive his occasionally misguided forays, such as playing a Mexican bandit
(The Outrage)
, or a French anarchist
(Lady L)
, or a goofball GI with a knack for going AWOL
(Harry Frigg).
He was hardworking enough to put the bad ones behind him and had sufficient taste and talent to turn out good ones regularly, enabling audiences to forget his fumbles as well. And he was good enough from the start that watching him evolve into a real master was not an ordeal.

He was expert in a lot of things but never really figured out how to play a romantic lead. That may have been because he was so well and publicly married. His life with Joanne was the stuff of Hollywood legend: two talented and brassy and attractive people with an admirably collegial style of working and living together. They were independent-minded, which made them something of a scourge to Hollywood’s stuffier commentators, but they were down-to-earth and inoffensively
offbeat, which made them an enviable example to ordinary American couples with kids of their own and a yen for a little spice in their own lives.

Everyone said that
he
was the pretty one and
she
the real talent. And, in ways, they were famously mismatched: jumpy, go-go Paul who loved fast cars and boozy parties and bad bawdy jokes badly told, and low-burning Joanne, with her theater and ballet and books and dry wit and refined southern way with domestic and social matters. But everyone also recognized that it was a happy marriage, and if nothing else it was a growing concern: a second daughter, Melissa Stewart (Lissy), was born in September 1961, and a third, Claire Olivia (Clea), followed in April 1965. Throw in his children with Jackie, and you now had an even half-dozen, and their homes—various rented places around Los Angeles, a series of New York apartments, and a property they acquired in Westport, Connecticut, in 1963 and would remodel and expand over time—were big, merry ménages of casual comfort, home-cooked meals, rambunctious kids, and pet after pet after pet. For people who did their kind of work—and at their level of achievement—they were pretty mom-and-pop.

Perhaps because he found himself so invested in the future through the lives of this brood, he took an active interest in politics. He was, in general, a serious fellow who chummed around with writers rather than movie people—he counted among his friends Gore Vidal, A. E. Hotchner, Stewart Stern, and Mort Sahl. But his political concerns took him into places where none of them could follow: discussing nuclear disarmament with Hedda Hopper; agitating for civil rights in the company of Marlon Brando in Sacramento, California, and Gadsden, Alabama; funding a liberal think tank and attending its seminars and conferences whenever possible; appearing at Democratic National Conventions as a party host and a fund-raiser and, in 1968, as a voting delegate. He took his role as a public citizen seriously in ways that could raise eyebrows, if not hackles, in Hollywood. But he was precise and modest enough in his words and deeds that he never found himself alienated from the business. By the time he fully committed himself to having a voice in the affairs of his country, he was so big a star that he was given the platform of the cover of
Life
magazine from which to say so.

T
HAT WAS
the public Paul Newman.

The private one was another fellow—related to the famous one, but quieter, cagier, more suspicious. He had a rascally streak to him and a need to explode—Peck’s Bad Boy even as he neared forty. But he had a strong moral center and was quick to stand up when he believed in something and to learn from his mistakes. He did what he wanted to and didn’t mind explaining himself, but he much preferred just being left alone to do it. If he wanted to grill steaks while living on location in Montmartre (Joanne held the umbrella above him against the Parisian rain), or wear shorts into a fancy hotel restaurant, or zip around Manhattan on a Lambretta scooter, or sneak homemade popcorn into movie theaters, or drive a Volkswagen Bug fitted out with a Porsche engine and a racing suspension, or drink so many beers in a day that he had to wear a bottle opener around his neck to keep up with himself, or go for a run every morning followed by an hour in the sauna with some fruit and the
New York Times—
why then, he would. He talked about his bosses and his pet peeves and his wishes that things were otherwise freely in the press, and he didn’t seem to care how it came off. And he managed to do all of it in such a way that nobody could find serious fault with him or a weakness through which to bring him down to size.

If he had a taste for appearing idiosyncratic or flaky, he backed up his quirks with a lunch-pail work ethic. He went at the job of acting the way another man might physical labor; he was famous for poring over his scripts and making detailed notes about all aspects of them; for demanding extra rehearsal time, even unpaid; and for questioning the logic—particularly the emotional logic—of his scenes even as they were being shot. Joanne, who in comparison seemed born to act, would complain, not entirely facetiously, “I think he’s crazy. When he’s working, he breaks the whole script down… he’s awful.” In fact, she said, the more unhappy he was with the material, the more likely he was to become a bear about it: “If he doesn’t like something he has agreed to do, he can be an absolute pain in the neck. He’ll work much harder on a script he hates, and at the same time he’ll drink too much beer.”

He understood his own process and disposition at least as well as
she. “For me,” he explained, “acting is simply a matter of getting out there on stage—or in front of a camera—and getting the motor running and keeping it going. One trait I’ve always had is a kind of tenacity in whatever I set out to do.” Indeed, his ability to dive wholly into his work, or indeed his play, was a point of pride. “I always go all out,” he said. “When I drink, I drink, and no nonsense about it. When I study, I study.”

He had a personal role model in his work, and it wasn’t Art Newman Sr. “If I were a dog, I would be a terrier,” he said. “I always see them as dogs that are trying to handle bones that are much too big for them, trying to dig up bones under fences when the fences are too deeply embedded. I am lucky to a fault, but I am also very determined. I will somehow get that bone.” And he would guard his prize doggedly once he got his paws on it. “John Foreman, the producer, once gave a description of me that I love and cherish,” he revealed. “He said, ‘Paul Newman gets up every morning, walks to the window, and scans the horizon for enemies.’”

He recognized his limits—indeed, he had been surmounting them since the start—and he worked hard to smash through them to go further. But he knew too that his talent and application could take him only so far. “I know that I can function better in the American vernacular than I can in any other,” he would say. “In fact, I cannot seem to function in any other.” He feared being trapped in work that would bore him with repetition, and he was frankly jealous of artists with more malleable gifts. “I am beginning to get sick of acting,” he told a friend, “not because it’s a fraud, but because I am no longer able to find anything that I haven’t done before. I have
had
me on screen in all my facets, and there’s nothing unexposed of me. All I can do now is dig into the makeup kit and put on a false nose or add a regional dialect. Some actors of our generation, Guinness maybe or Olivier, never seem to exhaust themselves. Their inventions are always original.” But when he strove to be original, the work suffered, and he knew it. “It isn’t that I’m afraid to stretch,” he’d admit. “It’s simply that I’ve tried it and it’s been a disaster.” And he could hate what he did. “I’m glad you liked the show,” he wrote to a friend who had written to praise a performance, “because I’m going to give up acting.”