Paul Newman (18 page)

His determination led him to habits that affected the sort of father he was. When he was working on a script, he would disappear into an out-building on the Connecticut property; then he’d go off by himself to research his roles in other cities and countries; and then he would go off to shoot the film. So he didn’t see the kids as much as he might have (which must have especially irked Joanne, seeing as she often had to look after a brood of six, half of whom weren’t even hers); and then he could be overly bossy upon returning home—inevitably resuming his proper place, however, and contritely, when his woman told him to do so. Like a lot of dads who are frequently away from home, he could overindulge his kids and then suddenly take a stern tack with them. But he seemed genuinely to share their curiosities and enthusiasms, especially when they tended toward physical pursuits like swimming, riding, earth sciences, and motor sports. He wasn’t as remote a father as his own had been; he had learned some kindness from Uncle Joe.

His sense of humor—well, that was a constant work in progress. His practical jokes got more elaborate, expensive, and thoroughgoing over the years. And he only hurt the ones he loved. His brother, Art, who became a working colleague on his films, was a favorite target for hustles and stunts. During one shoot Newman decided that he could no longer stand the sight of Art’s ugly leather hat; he ripped it off his brother’s head and tossed it into the air, where a stuntman he’d paid to do so blasted it with a shotgun. Art coolly picked up his mutilated headgear, put it back on his bald dome, and wore it every day until filming was through. Another time Newman was having trouble with his voice and walked around wearing a T-shirt that read “I have laryngitis. Joanne is fine. No autographs please.” Yet another time he had 150 cartons of toilet paper made, each little square bearing the likeness of a famous actor and the motto “Greetings from Robert Redford.” He loved bawdy jokes—just shy of dirty—and told them in mixed company, as it was known then, including his daughters, a tendency that was made even worse because the jokes he liked best were so often bad—and he told them poorly.

But somehow it was boyish, this enthusiasm for dopey humor and crude wit. And in truth in many ways he
was
boyish and always would be. He didn’t like being looked at or talked about; he hated formal
clothes; he bit his nails; he feasted on popcorn and burgers; he spit on the sidewalk; he couldn’t remember people’s names; he brought his own firecrackers to light off surreptitiously at Fourth of July barbecues; and he tried new sports all the time—tennis, scuba, go-karting. When he had to talk with an IRS man to work out a problem with his tax records, he pleaded immaturity: “In order to be an actor, you really have to be a child. And if that theory is correct, then it follows that the more childish you are, the better actor you are. If I’m a really good actor and I make a tremendous amount of money—from which I have to pay the federal government—then what you want me to be is an accountant. And if I’m an accountant, I’m a responsible human being. I’m mature. If I’m mature, I can’t be a very good actor, which means I can’t make any money!” The tax guy bought it; the matter died.

Despite the evidence of his film work, he played pool and poker passingly to badly; chess too. Bridge was his game, and he would often fight off boredom on movie sets or over dull dinners by working out bridge hands silently in his head. Probably he drank too much, although he never again made the papers for it; certainly he smoked too much, and he tried giving it up by substituting carrots and celery sticks when the urge struck. But he ate wisely and well, and he was a nut for physical exercise and being outdoors, so he balanced it out. And he knew that he was lucky—his original bit of luck, really: “In the business I’m in, I seem to have the right physical appearance. It’s not just a question of attractiveness or unattractiveness. It means I have a metabolism that keeps me thin.”

And there were those eyes, those uncanny lapis lazuli-cornflower-cobalt-summer-sky eyes that shot out and pierced and hooked people and were all you ever heard about him. They were a terrific asset but a terrific embarrassment too. He hadn’t worked for them or chosen them, and the whole world seemed to have an opinion about them and to want to possess them, if only for a moment. Strangers would literally walk up to him and stare right into them, and when he took to wearing dark glasses, they would insist that he take them off. “There’s nothing that makes you feel more like a piece of meat,” he complained. “It’s like saying to a woman, ‘Open your blouse, I want to see your tits.’”

This was sticking his neck out, complaining about the studios and
the publicity machine and the intrusiveness of fans. But he insisted that by choosing acting as a profession, he hadn’t signed away his rights as a citizen. He felt that he owed the public a good performance but nothing of his personal life. He could get positively angry on the subject: “I’ve seen fan-magazine articles about Joanne and me that have made me want to puke. The most banal language—and the fucking nerve to put it in quotes attributed to me …I’m not your typical movie star. I can’t even stand going to premieres.” In time he turned down requests for autographs altogether. He saw himself strictly as a professional, a man who did a job with integrity and then went home. That his job happened to make him famous, that strangers felt a connection to him because of what he did for a living—well, that wasn’t anything he had asked for or signed off on or thought up. He pissed off a lot of people in the business and the occasional pushy fan, but as he was fond of saying, “A man without enemies is a man without character.”

S
O THIS
was the man and the artist he became in the years between
Exodus
and
Cool Hand Luke.
And in many important ways it was who he would be for the rest of his life.

He had buried someplace behind him virtually all ethnic traces of the Newman family’s religion while retaining its creative curiosity and intelligence and dogged work ethic and unimpeachable integrity. Of Theresa Fetzer’s family, he held on to a kind of earthy realism and, perhaps, physical fearlessness. Cleveland and Kenyon and the navy still informed his sense of decency and hominess and fair play and humility and simple honor; Yale and the Actors Studio fed the side of him that aspired to art and to work for the elevation not only of himself but of his craft and his fellow man. He had married once in haste and accepted the responsibility for leaving that marriage, providing financially for his children and making sure that his home would always be open and welcoming to them. He had married a second time, for love, and again he had become a father, and he made sure that these children too were comfortable and happy. He was smart enough to respect his wife and her talent and to give her the freedom to do the things that pleased her, just as she allowed him the same license.

To this persona he would, in the coming decades, add dimensions, some quite vast and profound. And some of the more awful things of life would strike at him—not as often as they did others, perhaps, but inevitably, and at the cost of real pain.

It had taken him more than thirty years to become this Paul Newman, the one whom everyone would recognize for the remaining decades of his life. And this Paul Newman, in his fullness, contra dictions, failings, talents, predilections, leanings, associations, habits, quirks, and humanity, was who he would be from then on.

E
XODUS WAS SHAPING UP TO BE A MASSIVE PICTURE. L
EON
U
RIS’S
novel about the struggles to found the Jewish state of Israel and to populate it in part with refugees from Europe had been a national best seller for more than a year. And even though Hollywood’s moguls traditionally didn’t like to draw attention to Jewish themes for fear of reminding the world that they themselves were Jews, any book that sold that well was always destined for the screen. Otto Preminger, just starting to fade from his standing as one of the most reliable of American directors, was planning to shoot in Israel and Cyprus for seventeen weeks, and the Newmans, complete with baby Nell (as infant Elinor was known), would be on location about half that time.

Newman was cast as Ari Ben Canaan, a composite of a number of paramilitary commandos who fought against both the British colonial rule of Palestine and the native Arab forces determined to hold on to it. Among the figures Uris based the character on was Yossi Harel, who led a series of ships filled with refugees from Cyprus to Israel, all strictly against British dictates. The most famous of these vessels, the
Exodus
, was physically repelled by the British, and global headlines about the incident resulted in a publicity coup for the Zionists. In Uris’s doorstopping potboiler, Ari went on from this triumph to free Zionist prisoners from a British prison and then to protect a children’s village from invasion by hostile Arab forces.

Lee J. Cobb would play Ari’s politically moderate father, and David Opatoshu would play his radical uncle; John Derek was cast as his
childhood best friend, an Arab prince; and Eva Marie Saint was his love interest, an American whose journalist husband had been killed in Palestine the year before. The British bad guys would include Ralph Richardson and Peter Lawford, and Sal Mineo played a Holocaust survivor intent on drawing enemy blood. Newman would be filling a big, heroic part in a big, epic film for the first time in his career, and Lew Wasserman had every reason to believe that it would make him a star of the first order.

The book wasn’t exactly beloved by Arabs, and the filmmakers were under heavy security from the time they arrived in Israel. But the anonymous threats weren’t nearly so hurtful, Newman found, as the way Preminger ran his film. “He’s got the reputation of being such a fascist asshole,” he told a reporter, “and he
is
, on the set. I mean, he can pick out the most vulnerable person and then walk all over him, you know. He could walk down a line of 200 people at a fast pace and pick somebody out and make lunch of him.” (Preminger famously hectored a group of child actors on the
Exodus
set with the immortal imprecation, “Cry, you little monsters!”) Their personal relationship, however, was cordial. “I found him articulate, informed, funny, absolutely lovable,” Newman confessed.

Maybe he cut Preminger some slack because he knew the director was trying to film a genuine epic on a fraction of the budget he required; for all the time the production spent abroad, the footage had a rushed feeling. (Famously, Preminger left a shot in the finished film in which the shadow of the camera clearly passed over the trysting bodies of Newman and Saint.) Nevertheless, Newman felt he had a right to share his opinions on the material. He thought the script was “too cold and expository,” and he couldn’t find a way to turn the flatly heroic Ari into a living man. So he went to work on his own, re-writing the part, and then approached Preminger with the results. Newman “came to me one morning, after he’d been up most of the night writing his changes, with this stuff in his hand,” Preminger recalled. “I told him I wouldn’t even read what he had written. ‘Why not?’ he asked me. ‘Because, I told him, what you have done may be good and I might be tempted to use some of it. And then tomorrow you would
be back with more changes.’ He studied me for a few seconds, and he twisted his mouth around a little, and then he said, ‘Okay, I think you’re right.’”

Tension governed their interactions from then on, and according to Preminger’s widow, who worked on the film as a costume coordinator under her professional name, Hope Bryce, Newman did only what was required of him and no more. His final scene, a funeral speech over the bodies of principal characters who died defending the children’s village, was meant to be an aria of mourning and hope. But despite Preminger’s instructions, Newman played it more or less straight. And on the plane as the crew left Israel, Bryce claimed, he turned to Preminger and told him flat out, “I could have directed this picture better than you.”

If the film was destined to be a thing of hits and misses, the Newmans’ vacation in the Holy Land was also something of a mixed success. Joanne spent her days touring historic sights and taking Hebrew lessons. Or rather, she did those things until walking around became impossible. “The Israelis are movie mad,” she explained. “We could not walk down the street because we would be followed by fifteen hundred people, and that used to terrify me. One morning, I was sitting having breakfast on the terrace enjoying the lovely spring day…I glanced over the side, and sure enough there must have been fifty people… standing… staring.” Newman described the intrusions in a letter to Stewart Stern. “They stand in front of the hotel all day,” he griped, “staring in at the lobby or hollering upstairs into unknown windows, eyeballs, hundreds of them, peering through the fence. Most people suffer from an excess of never being looked at, and here we suffer the opposite extreme.”

He added that the accommodations were less than ideal:

And it wasn’t enough that the Israelis didn’t respect his privacy or share his enthusiasm for cheap beer and large beds. No, they had other ways of bringing him down a peg, as Joanne remembered: “The day we left to come home, all of us in the
Exodus
company went to pay a call on Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. Mrs. Ben Gurion spent some time in Brooklyn and likes America. She said when we all walked in, pointing to Paul, ‘Is he the handsome one they all talk about?’ and then added, ‘I don’t think he’s so handsome.’ You should have seen Paul blush!”

B
ACK IN
the States for the summer, Newman set up a production company with Martin Ritt who, among the directors associated with the Actors Studio, seemed most eager to work regularly in movies. It was, Ritt told the press, a unique alliance based on a simple principle: “I suppose the production association of an actor and a director is unprecedented. I can think of no other independent company formed by this combination. Paul and I simply found that we had something in common, a philosophy about making motion pictures. We agreed that every American motion picture should be a reflection of our American way of life, just as vital a motive in moviemaking as entertaining people and making money.”

Before they could get to work for themselves, however, they were teamed for a project for Marlon Brando’s Pennebaker Inc.,
Paris Blues
, an adaptation of Harold Flender’s novel about a black American expatriate jazzman who has a fling with a black schoolteacher who is on vacation in France. A succession of writers came in to expand the story by adding a second musician and a second teacher—white, naturally. The romance of the black couple had as a crucial subtext the question of whether the musician should avoid the civil rights struggle by living in dignified exile or form an alliance with this redoubtable woman and return home to make things better. The white guy’s issues were more to do with pursuing an aesthetic dream and remaining committed to himself in a city that asked nothing of him; the woman he dated would thus be trying to domesticate him simply for the sake of marriage and family. Newman and Joanne would play that couple, while Sidney
Poitier and Diahann Carroll would play opposite. Louis Armstrong would appear in a featured part, and Duke Ellington would score the picture.

The Newmans arrived in Paris in autumn and moved into a two-story house in Montmartre. Newman took trombone lessons and liked practicing so much that he actually changed the musculature of his face. (His tone was never very good, he claimed, but he could find the notes well enough to convince real musicians that he was playing.) In his time off he slummed in local cafés, drinking beer with workers and practicing his French, dressed in rough clothes. Joanne did the museums and looked after Nell and the Chihuahuas and entertained her mother for three weeks. They both grew tired of the French food that the studio-provided maid, Desirée, prepared, so Newman found a barbecue and set it up in the back garden; in the dead of winter, he grilled steaks and burgers while the neighbors looked on aghast. And when that got to be a chore, they went to an American southern-style restaurant they’d found just below Place Pigalle. In the midst of this enviable escape from their regular lives, Joanne became pregnant with Lissy, who arrived the following September.

They sailed home from Paris, and Newman, under the influence of Montmartre, at the very least, wrote a postcard to Stewart Stern:

In December 1960, while they were making
Paris Blues, Exodus
was released. The problems that had bubbled just below the surface on the set were glaringly evident when spread across a gigantic screen and more than two hundred minutes of running time. Newman’s Ari was a stiff and unlikable hero for a man who was supposed to be the center of a historical epic—and not necessarily because he was written that
way; Newman played him as humorless, rigid, and dogmatic, as if he was more interested in presenting a stern aspect to his director than in weaving his character into the enormous, impassioned canvas Preminger was attempting. At the same time, Preminger had a kludgy story built around inert set pieces, awkward romances, and unengaging political posturing. For a film of its size and pedigree it was remarkably clumsy. But it had that wonderful Ernest Gold music and those authentic settings. And Newman looked great. So despite its flaws and its length, it drew people; it was one of the top five box office hits of 1961.

Newman had been threatening to pierce Hollywood’s upper tier for a couple of years, and
Exodus
, for all its problems, made it clear that he had earned a place there: to make a hit of a long slog was the sign of a real star. It didn’t matter that the film wasn’t much respected in the business; his appeal as its marquee played was evident, and new opportunities were regularly falling before him.
Two for the Seesaw
, a hit Broadway play about the unlikely romance of a Nebraska businessman and a Greenwich Village dancer, was going to go before the cameras, and Newman was to star opposite Elizabeth Taylor. But somehow the thing fell apart. Indeed, he could have made an impressive career of the films he
didn’t
make over the span of the next half-decade.

To wit, he was supposed to appear in
The Sixth Man
, a biopic about Ira Hayes, the Native American marine who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima;
The Hook
, a Korean War melodrama with Sidney Poitier;
Sylvia
, a romantic detective thriller;
The Last Frontier
, based on the Howard Fast novel about the U.S. Army’s war on the Cheyenne; the political melodrama
Seven Days in May;
an adaptation of
The Wall
, John Hersey’s novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising;
The Enemy Within
, an adaptation of Robert F. Kennedy’s book about his racke-teering investigations;
The Great Race
, Blake Edwards’s gigantic chase movie farce;
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, from the John Le Carré novel;
After the Fall
, from Arthur Miller’s play about a man married to a ravishing second wife (they wanted Sophia Loren opposite him); an adaptation of
Tropic of Cancer
costarring Carroll Baker;
Night at Camp David
, in which he would play an aide to an American president
who may be approaching a nervous breakdown;
The Sand Pebbles
, in the role that Steve McQueen ultimately won; and even
In Cold Blood
, when Columbia Pictures thought that Newman and McQueen combined would be boffo box office as the cold-blooded killers Dick and Perry. Twice Federico Fellini had to stand up to producers who wanted Newman: for the lead role in
La Dolce Vita
(imagine!) and for a never-realized film about a mad cellist. And François Truffaut made a pest of himself with his producers by repeatedly suggesting they try to build their adaptation of
Fahrenheit 451
around Newman, even going so far as to suggest setting it in New York. Only a handful of these films would get made—and without him—but their sheer numbers give an insight into the sort of stature he was achieving: a producer or a director just had to talk with him about a role or mention that he might want to use him in a picture, and it would make the papers.