Paul Newman (25 page)

Art Newman was on the film as associate producer; the various department heads—cinematographer, editor, art director—were youngish for a studio project, among them editor Dede Allen, who had just worked on
Bonnie and Clyde.
Getting the thing together was a characteristic gung-ho spate of work for Newman: “In a little over a month,” he said, “I had the perfect location, the perfect cast, and I was starting. That’s the way to make pictures, when it’s all in a rush and it’s too late to back out.” And as time is the most expensive item on any film’s budget, he would have to be just as resourceful and expeditious in shooting it as he was in putting it together.

He was determined to get things done promptly and well, but it was also important to him that the crew felt it was a collegial set. “I called them all together on the first day,” he recalled, “and confessed that I was a virgin and told them that I wasn’t sensitive to criticism and that
they would be able to make suggestions—once—on a given point. They did—sometimes more than once; but we got along fine.” The crew recognized his limits (“He’s sometimes stymied because he doesn’t know how to express himself mechanically,” one of them admitted to a reporter) but it was a genial shoot.

Indeed, in some aspects it felt like a summer camp: Newman reported to the set regularly in shorts and T-shirts and, often, barefoot. (One day, when some nuns from a nearby convent were visiting the set, the camera dolly rolled over his unprotected toes, and he sputtered out a stream of profanity just outside their hearing.) He drank beer and worried pack after pack of chewing gum; he’d nervously remove a wad of it from his mouth, shape it into a little ball, and then start chewing it again. Local hippies attached themselves to the peripheries of the production and decorated the crew’s dining area with flowers and posters adorned with beautiful thoughts.

Newman and director of photography Gayne Rescher must have been tempted to get beautiful with the camera as well, and there would indeed be shots that could only have been composed in the Summer of Love. But they tried to maintain an aesthetic discipline. “My motto as a director is ‘Fuck cool,’” he told a reporter. “I’d love to have it stenciled on the back of my chair and written on signs in letters a foot high. For my camera, I have a one-word motto: ‘Eavesdrop.’”

He and Joanne seemed genuinely to enjoy working together. “We have the same acting vocabulary,” he explained. “I would tell her, while [she was] reading a line, ‘pinch it’ or ‘thicken it,’ and she knew just what I meant …You could see her start off the day, and her toes would start to turn inward and her smile would become forced. She would just inhabit the part completely.” She compared their collaboration to “the rapport Bergman has with his actors… About halfway through the film, we began to feel like the Moscow Art Theatre.”

Parsons, whose performance in
Bonnie and Clyde
was just reaching theaters while she was working in Connecticut, was a little less rosy in her impression. “Paul Newman was very nervous and tense,” she remembered, “but I liked his visual style… He knew exactly the way he wanted my hair to look, he told me how to wear my makeup…I
learned how interesting it could be to get involved with a character from him.”

And Stern, perhaps predictably, both
was
and
had
a nightmarish experience on the set. He came to Danbury to ensure that “the sense and intention of scenes that we had agreed about in calmer moments were not destroyed impulsively and under pressure.” And he found himself fighting for his vision when Newman vacillated about including a scene in which young Rachel sees a dead classmate on the embalming table in her father’s mortuary or one in which adult Rachel loses her virginity to a man she hasn’t seen since high school. “Dede Allen and I had to practically break his arm with the argument that it’s better to shoot it and have it than to make that kind of decision on the set,” Stern recalled.

The battles between the writer and the director-producer were real. “To try and maintain the friendship throughout was very difficult,” Stern admitted. “There were times when we simply didn’t talk to one another. Still, every day I was on the set. My obsessive watchfulness became a very heavy burden for Paul and for Joanne. Finally, they had me sitting on a catwalk with a plank in front of me, looking through a knothole, so they couldn’t see my expression. It bothered them that much.”

Fortunately, they had a real foundation of trust beneath their differences. Near the end of shooting, when the budget had effectively been bled dry, Stern became one of the crew. “We were short of equipment,” he remembered. “The dolly and everything had to go back because we were out of money. Instead of a dolly, for the last shot, the cameraman sat in a Safeway supermarket basket, and I pushed him. He had the camera between his knees.”

Despite all the headaches and little quarrels, and despite the noises he’d made about being done with movies, Newman seemed to enjoy his first job as a director a great deal. “I didn’t get anywhere near as tired directing as when I act. As an actor you stop and start the motor all day; it’s like running a hundred yards two feet at a time. When you’re involved with every facet of the production—script, attitudes, lighting, makeup, wardrobe—you’re constantly pumped up and you don’t have an opportunity to slow down.”

Still, to unwind from the shoot, he and a Westport buddy, clothier Mike Hyman, took a boys-only trip to Florida, where they fished, bombed around in speedboats, and drank. He came home to battle with the studio over what to call the film.
A Jest of God
was out: too obscure, too religious. For a spell Newman thought about using a line from a nursery rhyme; later, the film briefly was known as
Now I Lay Me Down.
Finally, they agreed to call it
Rachel, Rachel.

N
EWMAN HAD
had a blast making
Cool Hand Luke
, tooling around central California in a blue Mercury convertible—and sometimes even on a motorcycle—when he wasn’t needed on set. He was open, too, to odd intrusions on the set, such as the day Dennis Hopper invited his San Francisco avant-garde filmmaker buddy Bruce Connor to shoot some footage of the actors clearing brush from a roadside under a blistering sun; Connor’s seventeen-minute film, entitled
Luke
and featuring Newman, Hopper, and the rest swinging scythes in super-super-slow motion, would be studied in museum basement screening rooms for decades to come.

But it was a different matter for Donn Pearce, who hated movie people, thought Newman was too scrawny to play the hero of his novel, and capped his last day on the set by punching somebody out. Newman didn’t seem to notice. He had thrived on the manly camaraderie and the outré pursuits in which his character indulged: fistfights and card games and physical labor in the hot sun and groveling two-faced to the road gang bosses—and, famously, taking on a bet that he could eat fifty eggs.

That scene would be a highlight of the picture, but Newman told an interviewer, “I never swallowed an egg.”

“Isn’t Method acting about doing the real thing?” came the follow-up question.

“Not if you have to swallow eggs.”

He had, however, learned to play the banjo, if not particularly well, for the stirring scene in which Luke learns of his mother’s death. As George Kennedy recalled, “Paul knew as much about the banjo as I do about baking cakes. But he wanted to play his own accompaniment,
and Stuart Rosenberg and everybody else said, ‘You don’t learn to play banjo that easily.’ And he said, ‘I’m gonna try.’ And in the scene you see, Paul makes an error. He wasn’t doing it the way he wanted and became madder and madder, although you can only tell by the increase of the pace of his stroking the banjo. When it was over, it was magnificent. Rosenberg said, ‘Print.’ Paul said, ‘I could do it better.’ And Rosenberg said, ‘Nobody could do it better.’”

It all boded very well. “There’s a good smell about this,” he told a visitor to the set. “We’re gonna have a good picture.” The film was released in November 1967 and succeeded on just about every conceivable level. In Lucas Jackson, Newman had found arguably the signature role of his career. He was lean and rascally and cagy and charming as all get out; he was tough and sharp and daring and loyal and manly. He could bleed and he could cut you, and he could be condescending and moody; but the flaws in him seemed only to magnify his better qualities. He was iconic—saintly and comely and true to himself. His story was like a modern-day gospel that resonated vividly in a time when so many young people were questioning the violent and arbitrary nature of social authority.

Rosenberg had made a brilliant job of it. It was a beautiful film
—too
pretty, indeed, in the eyes of some critics—with a fresh and vivid score by Argentine jazzman Lalo Schifrin; rich, lusty, plausible performances by George Kennedy and Strother Martin; and a script that furnished a drinking party’s worth of memorable catchphrases: “Any man forgets his number spends a night in the box”; “Puttin’ ’em on here, boss”; “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand”; “Stay down: you’re beat”; and most famously (and often misquoted with the addition of the article
a
where the ellipses are), “What we got here is… failure to communicate.” From the bawdy humor to the attack on conformity to the martyrdom of the hero, it was a perfect picture for its moment. And it made money.

It was sure to be remembered at Oscar time—but 1967 was a watershed year in Hollywood movies. Among the films with which
Cool Hand Luke
would have to compete were such genuinely ground-breaking pictures as
Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate
, and
In Cold Blood
, plus capable, sober Hollywood visions of the issues of the day such as
In the Heat of
the Night
and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Luke
was certainly a peer among that throng but not by any means unquestionably superior.

Still, even given the competition, it was disappointing that it would get only four nominations—acting for Newman, supporting acting for Kennedy (who had mounted an ad campaign for himself at his own expense), score for Schifrin, and adapted script for Pearce and Pierson. Rosenberg and Conrad Hall were overlooked; worse, one of the five best picture nominations had gone, embarrassingly, to
Doctor Dolittle.
In his own category Newman would be facing down stiff competition: Warren Beatty
(Bonnie and Clyde)
, Dustin Hoffman
(The Graduate)
, Rod Steiger
(Heat)
, and Spencer Tracy
(Dinner).
Come the big night, Kennedy won for supporting actor (Newman beamed from his seat) and Steiger, whom Newman had truly admired ever since their days at the Actors Studio more than a decade earlier, won the best actor statuette for his role as a racist southern sheriff.

Newman was magnanimous; he had lost to a pro with unassailable chops. But, as anyone who kept score of such things would have noted, he was now 0 for 4.

C
LASSIC
H
OLLYWOOD STORY, PERHAPS EVEN TRUE:
N
EWMAN IS
walking through a studio commissary at lunchtime and comes upon a table at which John Wayne is dining. “Hey Paul,” booms a voice every moviegoer in the world can imitate, “how’s the revolution coming?” Newman smiles. “How can we possibly win, Duke, with you on the other side?”

They liked each other, Wayne and Newman, but they truly were competitors in several ways: at the box office in ticket sales, at the movie studios in their differing visions of what Hollywood films should be like, and increasingly in the arena of politics, where Newman became more intensely engaged in 1968 than he had been all his life. He certainly wasn’t alone—millions of people felt that key aspects of the country were up for grabs that fevered year. But he was extremely visible and vocal, even for someone so uniquely able to command a platform as a movie star. He became a loud and prominent presence in the country’s discussion of civil rights, the Vietnam War, the arms race, ecology, the farm and labor movements, and other issues. He campaigned for national and local politicians, and it was sincerely suggested to him more than once that he run for office himself.

As for many people, the war seemed to galvanize him—not only because of his ardent beliefs but, surely, because Scott would be turning eighteen in September. Scott hadn’t been a good student; college wasn’t a big attraction for him. He enjoyed daredevil pursuits like trampolining and skateboarding and, soon enough, skydiving. And he
gave his parents trouble, Joanne included. Newman, who had so often played the flawed son in films and who held ambivalent feelings about his own father, didn’t do very well in responding to Scott’s troubles. Unable to corral the young man, he seemed to feel that changing a violent world might be a way to keep him from harm.

He had supported Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but like many others, he felt betrayed by Johnson’s pursuit of a bloody and senseless war. “I had been severely had,” he decided. But, again like many others, he didn’t see an alternative to supporting Johnson for reelection until the advent of Eugene McCarthy, the bookish, hawk eyed senator from Minnesota who not only dared challenge a sitting president from his own party in the New Hampshire primary but beat him there on an antiwar platform. Newman was galvanized.

“I’ve admired the man for years,” he said of McCarthy that summer, “but I admired the
hell
out of him when he came out against Johnson.” He had himself become active in the peace movement before McCarthy’s challenge. In January he appeared at a Lincoln Center fund-raiser in support of a number of sitting Democratic senators and congressmen who had come out against the war. When McCarthy determined to stand against Johnson, his staff called Newman and asked if he’d be interested in recording some commercials to air in New Hampshire. “I went back and checked McCarthy’s voting record,” Newman revealed. “I was so fed up with the present administration that I couldn’t resist going to work for him.”

He made some TV spots and appeared at rallies in New Hampshire, and then he took to the road in earnest as the campaign unrolled, visiting Indiana, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, Connecticut, New York. In the Midwest that spring he hopped around on a private plane and was met by station wagons driven by campaign volunteers and stocked with beer and sandwiches. He visited little town centers and factory parking lots where perhaps one hundred people came out, and college campuses and bigger towns where he could draw twenty times that. He went into the slums of Indianapolis with local Black Power leaders. He did as many as ten or twelve appearances a day, standing on the tailgates of trucks or on the trunks of cars and speaking simply and without pretense: “I am not a public speaker. I am not a politician. I’m not here because
I’m an actor. I’m here because I’ve got six kids. I don’t want it written on my gravestone, ‘He was not part of his times.’ The times are too critical to be dissenting in your own bathroom.”

In New York he swelled the crowd of speakers at a political cabaret, Eugene’s, where folks paid to be entertained by the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary; Elaine May; Phil Ochs; and Richie Havens and listened to speeches and poems read by such screen stars as Lauren Bacall, Myrna Loy, Lou Gossett, and Newman himself. He performed in a comic skit at a rally at Madison Square Garden where Albert Gore, the Tennessee Democrat, spoke about arms control prior to a Senate debate on the subject. He emceed an evening at the Manhattan discothèque Arthur, during which Joanne and Tammy Grimes hosted lessons in cooking crêpes, omelets, and fondues. Joanne spoke about her own wish for the election: complaining that she hadn’t seen Newman since New Hampshire, she urged the attendees to vote for McCarthy “and help bring my husband home.”

He brought madness on the road with him. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, he started his speech with the usual stuff about being a father of six. “Paul! Adopt me!” squealed a teenage fan amid a mob of teenage fans. Women rushed his car as it drove up to an American Motors plant. When an empty beer can fell out of his station wagon, a girl picked it up off the ground and kissed it. “All this for the star of
The Silver Chalice,”
he muttered in chagrin.

Sometimes it got ugly: in South Bend, Indiana, he and the other McCarthy operatives with whom he was riding in the station wagon were met by a crowd that threw debris at them; Scott Newman, spending time on the road with his dad, was hit in the face with a rock.

Sometimes it was deeply humbling. In New Hampshire, Newman met a policeman whose son had died in Vietnam just the day before. Newman offered his sympathy and then, bucking his courage, looked the man in the eye and asked, “What did [the cop] think about some creep, some Hollywood peacenik, a functioning illiterate, coming in there and telling him about the war?” The cop replied that he didn’t resent Newman: “Even if a war takes your boy… that doesn’t make it right.”

But Newman managed to find fun. In New Hampshire a local
Jaguar dealership loaned him a car for a couple of days. When he returned it, he learned that they were going to offer the same car to Richard Nixon the following day. He left a note on the dashboard: “You should have no trouble driving this car at all, because it has a very tricky clutch.” Later in the campaign Nixon had occasion to speak with John Foreman by phone and told him, “Tell Paul I think he’s a first-rate actor even if he thinks I’m a lousy politician.”

A
LONG WITH
a number of Hollywood stars who had come out equally volubly in support of Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy, Newman helped turn the Democratic presidential race into a newfangled media event. In May
Life
put him on the cover to illustrate a photo essay on various stars working for their various candidates: Shirley MacLaine, Bobby Darin, Sonny and Cher, and Lesley Gore (all for Kennedy); Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Hal Holbrook, Dustin Hoffman, and Tony Randall (for McCarthy). Frank Sinatra, the
New York Times
reported, was backing Humphrey, in a split with his Rat Pack buddies Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, who had turned the Factory into a clubhouse for the pro-Kennedy crowd. (“Dean Martin is taking no part in the campaign,” intoned the paper of record, “nor is Joey Bishop.”)

In July he was named to the Connecticut delegation to the national convention; among the forty-three other members was Arthur Miller. In August, Newman joined Ralph Bellamy and Dore Schary in reading excerpts from the speeches of Adlai Stevenson from the podium. Later, as the streets outside the auditorium seethed, Newman was photographed snarling in anger on the convention floor, with Miller staring on intently behind him.

And he was on hand to witness one of the most famous battles of that mad week, when Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, in their roles as analysts for ABC television, engaged in a series of inflamed debates. The Newmans had maintained their friendship with Vidal, sailing the Greek isles with him and Howard Austen a year or so earlier and keeping in steady touch. And Newman knew Buckley well enough to be allowed to help himself to booze and beer from the conservative columnist’s dressing
room at the convention hall. One night on the air, in the midst of a particularly rancorous exchange, Vidal had accused Buckley of espousing fascist tactics by supporting the actions of the Chicago police. A remarkable out-burst ensued. “Now, listen, you queer,” Buckley shouted. “Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face!” A few minutes later Newman confronted Buckley outside his trailer and told him, “That was the most disgusting display I’ve ever seen.” “But Vidal called me a Nazi,” Buckley replied. “That’s political,” Newman said. “What you called him is personal.” Buckley stormed into his dressing room, unpersuaded.

In the fall Newman contributed money to and campaigned for Allard Lowenstein, the political activist and McCarthy organizer who was running for Congress from the South Shore of Long Island. In a single night, leapfrogging about in a helicopter, he appeared at a rally at the Green Acres shopping center, a fund-raiser at a country club in the Five Towns, and another fund-raiser in Merrick. Richard Weidman, a campaign operative who had some knowledge of piloting, was sent around as an advance man to ensure that there was an appropriate place for the helicopter to land.

When he got to Merrick for the evening’s last event, Weidman realized that word about Newman’s itinerary had leaked. “I come wheeling around the corner into this parking lot,” he remembered, “and there’s like five hundred people …I get there just ahead of the chopper. I can hear the whomp of the blade when I get there, and I’m trying to scream, ‘Get out of the way!’ I had set it up with the Nassau County police; they had one cop there. I go over to the cop and say, ‘Do something!’ and he said, ‘What do you want me to do?’”

Weidman created a landing area, and when the helicopter was on the ground, he escorted Newman and the others to his car. “They’re just like freaked by this scene,” he remembered. “These screaming kids and middle-aged women acting like bobby-soxers, and Newman jumps into the front seat, and this woman, who is probably late thirties, early forties, in a white suit—very attractive… is like hysterical and jumps in Newman’s lap! And Newman is actually pretty cool about the whole thing. He picks her up, pats her on the butt, and says, ‘Thanks, dear.
Got to get out.’” The car was engulfed by women and kids, banging and rocking it; Weidman had to inch forward through the heaving mass until more cops arrived and cleared a path.

That campaign ended well—Lowenstein was elected. But McCarthy lost, and then of course Humphrey lost, and in the wake of those disappointments Newman tried to remember the good that he felt he’d helped accomplish. “We walked away from New Hampshire with the resignation of the president of the United States and with a whole new set of national priorities,” he declared. “New Hampshire was the beginning of participatory politics.” But at the same time, he recognized how entrenched and intractable the system was. “We blew the convention,” he admitted. “We thought we’d go in there and the machine would have to respond. But the machine was a lot tougher than we hoped; the old bird’s still got a lot of legs.”

After Nixon’s inauguration he continued to give voice to his beliefs. He and Joanne attended Senate hearings on the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Peace, and they carried protest signs in an antiwar rally outside the American embassy in London. He joined Alan Arkin, Peter Fonda, Arlo Guthrie, Dennis Hopper, and Jon Voight in asking moviegoers to boycott their own films for a day as a sign of solidarity with the antiwar movement. In the 1969 elections he undertook another barnstorming campaign in support of Reverend Joseph D. Duffey, who was running for the U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut; that was a losing effort too. “He really took it hard when Duffey was defeated,” Joanne said.

He was so caught up in it that he blurted out to David Frost in an interview that he had “seriously considered” running for office: the Senate, even the presidency. “This might be facetious, but the issues are not,” he pronounced. Frost pressed him, sensing a huge scoop, and Newman backpedaled: “I think I may have carried my credentials about as far as they can go.”

He knew in his bones that he wasn’t cut out to be a politician. “I’ve got sort of a short fuse,” he admitted to an interviewer. “Besides, I don’t have the arrogance to run for office. And I don’t have the credentials.” Another time he confessed, “I can barely, barely, just barely handle the aspects of my life that are public right now.”

But he had said it, right? And so he was approached by political interests wondering if he would truly consider it. Gore Vidal joined them. “He had a chance to run for senator from Connecticut,” he recalled, “and I urged him to do so. He declined, probably for financial reasons—he was supporting forty people at the time. I’m sorry he didn’t run. He is one of the few people I know who has good character. That is rare in politics and just as rare in show business.”

He knew his own limits, though, and demurred: “I chickened out. It would have been great for me but terrible for the public.”