Paul Newman (27 page)

Then the inevitable idea of Steve McQueen’s playing Sundance came up. McQueen was a star, but more to the point, he felt a kind of rivalry with Newman as a real man who didn’t stand for Hollywood cant and gloss. They had some affection for each other; McQueen had recently introduced Newman and his brother, Art, to riding dirt bikes in the desert. But when it came to business, McQueen was plainly jealous of the more established star. He liked Goldman’s script but got hung up on the fact that Newman—demonstrably a bigger earner and with a far more respected résumé—would receive billing over him.
Fields tried a number of persuasive schemes to get him aboard, even creating mock-ups of advertisements that gave a sort of equal weight to both actors’ names. But McQueen was never satisfied with what he saw.

Fields told Newman about his predicament: “We’re going to lose McQueen on billing.”

“What do you mean?” asked Newman, genuinely amazed. “I don’t lose pictures on billing.”

“He wants first star billing. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t think that’s nice,” Newman answered. “No.”

And McQueen walked.

I
T WAS
Joanne, Newman remembered, who thought of an actor for Sundance: “She knew his work and thought he was the best.” At thirty-two, Robert Redford, a handsome all-American sort, had been in the business for a decade and still had not broken through to stardom. He’d been in a half-dozen films, with featured roles in
The Chase
and
Inside Daisy Clover
, he’d appeared in TV series at the end of the Golden Age, and he’d had a hit on Broadway with
Barefoot in the Park
, in which he also appeared on-screen. But he hadn’t established himself as a box office attraction, and he was, like McQueen, something of an ornery customer.

He’d been born in Santa Monica in 1936 and had excelled as an athlete at Van Nuys High School, winning a baseball scholarship to the University of Colorado. While he was there, he soured on sports and found his scholarship pulled—shades of Newman—after he got into some trouble with booze. By then he was interested in becoming a painter and wound up in New York, studying art at Pratt Institute and theatrical design at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. That was where he drifted into acting, first landing a small role in the Broadway production of the campus comedy
Tall Story.
(He had an uncredited part in the film version of the play, which was directed by—shades of Newman—Josh Logan.) TV work—including episodes of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dr. Kildare, Naked City, Route 66
, and
The Twilight Zone—
ensued, and film parts. And then in 1963 came
Barefoot in
the Park
, wherein he played a New York newlywed opposite Elizabeth Ashley.

But as his star rose, something in Redford seemed to kick against it. He turned down the chance to appear in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and, more perversely, screen-tested for
The Graduate
just to prove to the producers that he
wasn’t
who they wanted. He and his wife, Lola, who’d married in 1958 and had three children (one of whom died as an infant), lived neither in Los Angeles nor in New York nor even in Connecticut but in Utah, where they owned acreage, including a ski resort about an hour east of Salt Lake City. If Newman was offbeat as a movie star, Redford behaved as if the whole business was noxious to him.

Fields, who recalled first hearing about Redford from an agent in his New York office, visited the actor backstage on Broadway and gave him a script. But Redford was hesitant, suspecting at first that the studio was just trying to use his interest in the role as bait to lure a bigger costar for Newman. He wouldn’t even read the script: “Suppose I liked it?” he remembered thinking. “Who needs the disappointment?” But Fields and Foreman and Goldman and his own agent kept after him, and he read it and agreed to meet Newman.

“We got together for dinner,” Redford recalled. “We talked about car racing, where we liked to live, everything but the film. I don’t think either of us enjoys talking about movies very much. And we didn’t really need to, because right away there seemed to be this understanding that I would make the picture.”

They had some things in common. They both despised the slickness of Hollywood and the way business was done in the town at the expense of art. Like Newman, Redford was an avid outdoorsman—skiing was a real passion—and he had convinced Paramount Pictures to front him a little money to make a film based on Oakley Hall’s novel about Olympic skiing,
Downhill Racer.
And like Newman, he had matinee-idol looks and was suspicious of the advantages they accrued for him.

As they discovered in rehearsal and then again on the set, their acting styles were different. “Redford never intellectualizes,” Hill recalled. “Newman will talk a scene to death… Redford would just
stand there and squirm during all the intellectualizing.” Redford took to watching his director and costar argue about scenes as a kind of spectator sport: “They were constantly into it, and they both have this habit of pointing with their index fingers when they argue, and during this one major, uh, discussion, they were both pointing and their fingers crossed, like locked swords. Hilarious. Everybody cracked up.”

Cracking up was, more or less, the order of the day. They filmed for a while in the towns of Cuernavaca and Taxco in Mexico, where they caroused and drank and played Ping-Pong in shaded courtyards and had the sort of genuine fun that normally doesn’t translate from the set onto the screen but makes for great stories in publicity interviews and at the premiere party. On the first day of shooting Newman was sitting by Redford, reached over, slapped him on the thigh, and said, “Well, kid, how does it feel to be in your first $40 million-grosser?” Redford thought his co star was some kind of egoist for such presumption, but he too came to realize that they were on to something. It was a “verifiable adult fairy tale,” Newman was telling people. Like
Luke
, it felt good to him while he was making it.

After location work in Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, they returned to Los Angeles for several more weeks of shooting. Daredevil Newman impressed everyone with his trick bicycle riding, which was the focus of a breezily romantic scene between him and Katharine Ross that Hill had added at the last minute to create a bit of a romantic triangle among the characters. (Newman did his own riding. Hill had hired a stuntman, initially, and the fellow insisted that the old-fashioned bike they were using wouldn’t stand up to trick riding; while they argued, Newman rode past them standing on the bicycle seat and holding on to the handlebars. Hill fired the stuntman on the spot.)

Throughout the shoot Newman and Redford drank and trash-talked and kept each other amused and rattled with practical jokes. Newman hated the way Redford was always late for work, dinner, whatever, and taunted him with the adage “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.” (He even had Joanne sew and frame a sampler with that caution and presented it to him.) Newman and Hill devised an elaborate plan to lure
Redford into a bet in which he’d have to prove his alleged fencing prowess, only to have it backfire when one of Newman’s daughters warned Redford, “They’re going to do something bad to you.”

Hill had Conrad Hall as his director of photography and had the inspiration to get Burt Bacharach to write a score and original songs for musical interludes. The film was released in September 1969 and was an instant hit. They had revived a hoary genre—the buddy movie—by giving it a slightly camp sheen. It was a movie without sex or bloodshed, but it felt modern because it was played with winking comedy, anti-authoritarian cheek, and hints of a countercultural lifestyle.

Like any movie about men who are close friends, it had subtle hints of homoeroticism—and, lord knows, a pair of stars whom people might actually want to imagine in those ways. But this one excluded that possibility by introducing Ross’s Etta Place character into the plot and giving the film the titillating suggestion of a ménage à trois. In many ways, it was an extremely simple film: two guys get chased. But the interplay between the leads was so breezy and infectious that it created a sense of depth: it wasn’t a film about outlaws and a posse; it was a film about friendship. And it ended—like
Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch
, and
Easy Rider—
in the death of the protagonists (although, uniquely in that company, the deaths in
Butch
were implied, not shown). The idea that those two guys who were such good company were gone made the time spent with them seem that much sweeter. That there could always be another Hope and Crosby picture made the bunch of them seem indistinguishable from one another and forgettable individually; that Butch and Sundance were gone, hopelessly, made them beautiful, golden, immortal.

The critics weren’t overly impressed. Vincent Canby in the
New York Times
called it “a very slick movie” and complained about “a gnawing emptiness”; Pauline Kael said the film left her “depressed… and rather offended”; Roger Ebert surmised that it “must have looked like a natural on paper” but found the completed film “slow and disappointing.”

Didn’t matter: the box office was astounding. Newman, who once complained that he’d never made a picture that grossed $20 million,
had thought he named a big figure when he suggested to Redford that this one would double that mark. He was wrong, by a lot:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
took in $102 million, ranking it among the twenty biggest ticket-sellers up to that time. It was eventually nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture and director, and it won four: best original screenplay, original song, original score, and cinematography. None of the actors were nominated—Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, who played the antihero buddies in
Midnight Cowboy
, took two of the five best actor slots, but both lost out to John Wayne for
True Grit.
But the thing worked out splendidly, and their agents and producers were already looking for something that would allow Newman and Redford to work together again.

I
N A
ballroom at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, Newman sat one afternoon with two other stars, and they made a hell of a lineup: the number one box office star in America and Hollywood’s reigning male sex symbol; the multimillion-selling recording artist who’d just won an Oscar in her first-ever film; and the number two box office star in America, also an Oscar winner, and an icon of the civil rights movement: Newman, Barbra Streisand, and Sidney Poitier.

It was June 11, 1969, and they had convened to sign contracts to form First Artists Production Company, a new business that would unite them as financiers, producers, stars, and distributors of films made outside the Hollywood studio system. There was nothing new about actors forming companies of their own to produce movies that they didn’t feel the studios would want or know how to make. But this was a real murderer’s row of talent and celebrity—with more stars to come, it was promised—and it made the business take notice. “As things now stand,”
Variety
figured, “any one of the three can virtually write his own ticket. As a unit they pose an undeniable threat to the uneasy status quo in Hollywood filming.”

Newman was vice president and secretary of the company, Poitier president, Streisand vice president and treasurer. As Newman explained, it represented a response to everything he felt was wrong and unfair about making movies:

There was a precedent for all this: United Artists, a company founded by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Mary Pickford exactly fifty years earlier. That enterprise was also launched amid a splash of ballyhoo, and it was greeted with an immortal helping of skepticism when Richard Rowland, who ran Metro Pictures, declared, “So, the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.” It ended badly: the UA stars rarely worked for their own company, the films they did contribute to the communal effort tended to founder, and they finally lost the company altogether in 1951 when, ironically, it began a long run as a vital independent alternative to the older, established studios.

This new gang of lunatics was being chaperoned by Creative Management Associates president Freddie Fields, who had replaced John Foreman as Newman’s agent and who had dreamed up the scheme more than two years prior. As Fields explained, each star had agreed to make three films for First Artists for no salary, working instead for a percentage of the gross, starting with the very first ticket sold. The films would be financed one-third by First Artists and two-thirds by an as-yet-to-be-determined distribution company, but the content of the films would be decided entirely by First Artists.
*
The company was also looking into television production and music recording and publishing. And it might consider a stock issuing down the line.

Fields felt it was a “significant step in filmmaking.” But when the company presented its bona fides to the Securities and Exchange Commission before making its stock offering public, it was ordered to tell prospective shareholders that its strategy of ceding creative control to artists—of handing the asylum keys to the lunatics—represented “a significant departure from traditional industry practice.”

That was exactly true. But 1969 was the year of
Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, Midnight Cowboy, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Take the Money and Run, Medium Cool
, and
Z.
Traditional industry practice was falling apart, and First Artists looked less and less like a gamble. Within two years Steve McQueen joined the team. And then Dustin Hoffman. Newman and company might have been lunatics, but they had momentum.