Paul Newman (24 page)

The Factory was pointedly meant to serve as an alternative to the Daisy. For one thing it had celebrity owners: in addition to the clothier Jerome K. Ohrbach and the restaurateur Ron Buck, its coterie of investor/directors included Newman, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Anthony Newley, Pierre Salinger, and the young director Richard Donner. Built in an abandoned bombsight factory off Santa Monica Boulevard, it had
four
pool tables in its third-floor bar (the one with red felt was reserved for the ladies), plus pinball machines. The second-floor discothèque featured live bands (including such immortal acts as Pacific
Ocean, which was fronted by a young singer from East L.A. named Edward James Olmos)—another leg up on the Daisy, which played only prerecorded music. And the Factory served food in a dining room and the bars; the Daisy didn’t.
*

In its opening months, even with membership capped at one thousand and costing $1,000 a year, it was a sensation. A galaxy of stars made their way past the bouncer, into a padded freight elevator, and then into dark, vast spaces decorated with Tiffany lamps, thrift-shop furniture, a leather-upholstered bar, windows made of stained glass and chicken wire, and other touches of hippie chic. On a given night, gushed
Time
, you might see “Roz Russell, Sonny and Cher, dress designer Jimmy Galanos, financier Bart Lytton, and fullback-turned-actor James Brown” among the crowd. Lawford purred with satisfaction at the place: “We needed a place to hang our hats. The Factory has turned out to be a big hat stand with lots of hats… melding the dinner jackets and the blue jeans. You dig? No one is embarrassed; no one cares.”

The Factory was such a hit that it fostered imitators, including the Candy Store, partly owned by Tony Curtis. For a time there was talk of opening satellite Factories in San Francisco and Honolulu. A branch eventually opened in Chicago in 1970, with Newman on the board of directors, but it was robbed on opening night, and business never really took off. By then the novelty of seeing Roz Russell doing the Watusi had dimmed, and the original Factory had itself gone bust.

W
HILE HE
was in a buying mood, Newman once again went out of his way to help the Actors Studio. It had been a decade since he and Joanne and James Dean and other Method actors had come to Hollywood barely able to hide their contempt for the work it offered them, huddling at the Chateau Marmont like teenagers up to no good in a suburban basement. But by the mid-1960s a few score Actors Studio
members were living and working more or less full-time in Hollywood and doing estimable work, including Dennis Weaver, Bruce Dern, Lee Grant, and Mark Rydell. In 1966 the actor and teacher Jack Garfein thought that the Studio, which was still saggy after the Actors Studio Theater debacle, could be rejuvenated with a new branch in California. After some meetings, with Newman in attendance, it was agreed that they should establish the Actors Studio West.

Newman and Garfein were tasked with finding a spot, and they drove around L.A. and Hollywood in one of Newman’s sports cars. They had a look at a dance studio near the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street, and Newman was taken with it. “I like the smell of this place,” he told Garfein. “It has the smell of Forty-fourth Street.” He offered the landlady a check as a down payment, but she didn’t like the look of his characteristically sloppy clothes. Garfein, though, was wearing a suit and tie; she accepted Newman’s check once he’d cosigned it.

N
EWMAN MAY
very well have gotten a kick out of having his identity questioned, as he’d become increasingly frustrated with his inability to live privately. He felt he’d never asked for the intrusions that were part of being famous; he was notoriously reticent with reporters, and he tried almost too hard to play the ordinary guy: the frumpy wardrobe, the VW with the Porsche engine, the bottle opener worn on a dogtag chain around his neck.

And he talked about it. A lot. Just as he felt that he hadn’t forfeited his right to hold political opinions when he became an actor, he felt that he hadn’t signed away his right to have a private life, even if, like everyone else, he occasionally walked into public places such as shops, restaurants, hotels, or resorts.

“You can’t really appreciate anonymity until you’ve lost it,” he told a reporter. “People say that’s sour grapes, but it really isn’t. To be able to walk down the street without people paying attention to you is a real blessing. And you lose it when you become an actor.”

He’d always had a self-contained nature; he had to learn how to step outside his skin to become an actor. And he was prone to brooding and stewing. “When Paul is angry,” his brother told people, “he is very
quiet.” Longtime friends saw it clearly: “He is the most private man I’ve ever known,” A. E. Hotchner once said of him. “He has a moat and a drawbridge, which he lets down only occasionally.” He himself saw it a little differently. “I’ve been accused of being aloof,” he said. “I’m not. I’m just wary.” And, another way: “I’m a loner, and I’m always just a private person.”

But it was clear that he didn’t like the sort of attention he received. He took to wearing dark glasses—indoors, outdoors, day, night. This became a theme in itself, because so many of the oglers and intruders whom he resented specifically wanted to see those famous blue eyes.

The glasses, perversely, emboldened people, who would bluntly ask to see his eyes rather than just steal glances at them. It made him, he said, feel like a piece of meat. “If you have success, you’d really like to take credit for it,” he explained. “It’s really hard to take credit because some lady staggers across the sidewalk and says, ‘Take off your dark sunglasses, I wanna see your baby blues.’” And he elaborated, “If you can get by on your baby blues, then what does it mean to be anything in the profession?”

He would make jokes to defuse the situation, replying to the most forward fans that if he took off his glasses his pants would fall down, or telling reporters that his tombstone would declare that he died a failure in life because his eyes turned brown. In a typical bit of Newmanish whimsy, he gave the matter some philosophical consideration: “The thing I’ve never figured out is, how do you present eyes? Do you present them coyly? Do you present them boldly?” But mostly he resented it.

And even worse, he resented requests for autographs. “It’s just swell getting stopped seventy times going to the corner bar,” he groused to a reporter while drinking a beer on a movie set. “If I never get asked for another autograph, I’ll be a happy man.” For a while he obliged, but then—after, he said, being asked to sign his name while he was using a urinal in Sardi’s—he adopted a blanket policy of simply saying no to any and all autograph-seekers. He wasn’t always diplomatic about it: one time he refused Henny Youngman to his face; another time he declined a request from the president of the Chicago Board of Trade—at the very moment when he had brought trade at the Commodity
Exchange to a dead stop merely by visiting the floor. He attended a charitable event for a school and refused autographs to the students. “With everything that’s happening in the world,” he asked them, “why do you collect autographs?” “It keeps us off the street,” one of them said. “Isn’t it better than smoking pot?” “Yes,” he admitted, “and I’m sorry, but I still don’t sign.”

Once he thought he’d found a solution for being mobbed, but it didn’t work. “I grew a beard so I wouldn’t be recognized,” he told a reporter. “So what happened: a couple of kids on the street saw me and said, ‘Jesus! It’s Paul Newman in a beard!’”

There was no end to it. He had been mobbed in Queens a couple years back when he took the kids to the World’s Fair, and he wasn’t able to take them to Disneyland without having a guide steer them to special entrances and exits around the park. When the family rented a home in Beverly Hills, rubbernecking tourists with maps to the stars’ homes would snake slowly up the street searching for him; the Newmans slapped a sign on their front lawn that read “Please! They have moved! The Piersons.” The most boorish of them would actually ring the bell—or wander up the drive of the farmhouse in Connecticut. Joanne joked that she’d need to get another sign: “‘Beware of Paul.’ He doesn’t take such things lightly.”

R
IGHT AFTER
Luke
, Newman shot an execrable World War II comedy that went through several name changes before being released—and bombing—as
The Secret War of Harry Frigg.
He tried to enjoy his role, a private with a penchant for going AWOL, by giving him a Graziano-esque simplicity and a goofy walk that he remembered from a guy he knew in the navy. He had a couple of sexy scenes with Italian starlet Sylva Koscina, but he never fooled himself about the quality of the thing: “I thought there was something there,” he reflected. “The writer took it out.”

But his next film was a different matter. In August 1967
Variety
excitedly reported the scoop that Newman was making a new film—had been making it for weeks, in fact, without anyone’s knowing. And what’s more, he wasn’t acting in it; he was directing. It was an adaptation
of the novel
A Jest of God
by the Canadian author Margaret Laurence, and it was being filmed in and around Danbury, Connecticut, with Joanne cast in the lead as Rachel Cameron, a virginal small-town schoolteacher who decides, inch by inch one summer, to start taking chances with her life; Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, as the recently sold studio was newly called, would produce.

Newman’s move behind the camera hadn’t exactly come about without warning. He’d studied directing at Yale, of course, and he’d made
On the Harmfulness of Tobacco
previously, and he’d been talking for years about how he was more interested in the preparations for acting—the aspects most closely resembling the responsibilities of a director—than he was in actual performances. But it was still a newsworthy event, and the announcement of it indicated that Newman would direct a second film for Warner Bros. and star in two others, all in repayment for the studio’s financial backing of
Jest
, which was believed to be in the neighborhood of $700,000.

The novel was actually discovered by John Foreman, who sent it in galleys to Joanne, figuring it was something she might appreciate. (He had a good eye; the book went on to win the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s most prestigious literary prize.) They took an option on the material and then surprised Newman with the news; he read it, and although he expressed some admiration for it and saw that she would be a good choice for the part, he deemed it “not movie material.” So she took it to Stewart Stern, who had been mired in a dry spell since his script for
The Ugly American
had been shot as a Marlon Brando film in 1963. Despite having built up an enormous ambivalence about screenwriting—a couple of his scripts, commissioned as major projects, still sat unproduced on studio shelves—Stern set about adapting the book. When he had a draft, Foreman shopped it to prospective directors. As Joanne recalled, “[Stern] and I went around offering ourselves to everybody, but I’m afraid offering the package of the script and me was hardly like offering Elizabeth Taylor and Tennessee Williams.”

As they kept at it, Newman took an interest in what they were doing, and he went from kibitzing over it to becoming engaged with it. The three went to Palm Springs to work on the screenplay. “I got
involved in it about the same way the United States got involved in the Vietnam War,” Newman joked. “I came in as an adviser and found the whole process was escalating until I was directing… There were a few conflicting discussions between myself and [Stern], until I gradually realized I just had to direct it. It was the only way to settle the conflict we’d been having.”

For his part, Stern too recalled the process as arduous, “because of difficulty in communication. I tend to be very verbal. And Paul is minimalistic. Very often I won’t get what he really means. Also, he is refined in a way that I’m not. He is selective in a way that I’m not. He refers to me as ‘baroque,’ and I refer to him as ‘linear Cleveland mind.’ To each other. I mean, that’s how we talk to each other.”

Despite the head butting, Newman the terrier had the scent of something. He would direct and produce—just the opportunity he’d been seeking to make a film but not act in it. He and Foreman offered the project to various studios, he remembered, “but all the companies turned me down flat.” It was a wake-up call, he confessed: “I got total rejection of this picture, massive rejection. I finally had to go off in a corner and say, ‘No, my taste is better; ultimately, I’m more perceptive than they are.’” Finally, they struck the deal with Warner Bros.: he and Joanne agreed to work without salary and to make additional films in exchange for the budget and for one-third of the profits. Newman formed a production company named Kayos (pronounced “chaos”) to handle the deal, and he agreed to personally guarantee funding if he ran over budget.

He seemed enlivened by the sense of adventure and risk taking that directing entailed. “I’m curious about my taste, my dramatic selection, my technical ability with the camera,” he told a visitor to the set. “There’s no way to find out but to get up there and do it, and then let people hit you with baseball bats.” Stern was impressed with his friend’s determination. “He’s the only man I ever met,” he said, “who decides what makes him nervous—like directing a movie—and then, with his hands sweating and his feet sweating, goes right into it.”

The film would shoot toward the end of summer in Bethel, Connecticut, near Danbury; they set up offices in a Danbury hotel and built soundstages in the gymnasium of the Danbury Veterans of Foreign
Wars hall. “There was some talk at one stage of shooting the film in California,” Newman said, “but we finally did it in Connecticut because I very much wanted to contrast the schoolteacher’s rather arid, dry existence with the lush, verdant spring background—it would have been far too obvious to have placed a barren life against a barren setting.”

The cast included Estelle Parsons, James Olson, Kate Harrington, Donald Moffat, and Geraldine Fitzgerald in featured roles. Several of the key actors read for their parts with Paul at the house in Westport while Joanne and the kids and the pets all ran about. But others had more immediate paths into the film: Frank Corsaro, from the Actors Studio and
Baby Want a Kiss
, was also in it, as was Newman’s auto mechanic, for that matter. And playing the role of young Rachel Cameron, who would be seen in the mature Rachel’s memories and reveries of defining childhood events, was a debuting actress named Nell Potts—actually Nell Newman, the eight-year-old daughter of the star and the director. “It’s cheaper to use your own children,” Joanne cracked, and Newman explained, “She’s not impressed with movies. The only reason she made this one was to earn money to feed her pigeons …I refused to subsidize them anymore, so she had to go out to work.” But the truth was that Nell looked a great deal like her mother (with, lucky girl, her father’s eyes), and the casting made perfect sense.