Paul Newman (30 page)

The film was shot through the late winter and the spring of 1972 in the abandoned parsonage of a deconsecrated Hungarian church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, about fifteen minutes’ drive from the Newmans’ home. To add to the familial atmosphere, fourteen-year-old Nell, once again working under her childhood nickname Nell Potts, was given the featured role of Matilda, Beatrice’s younger, more gifted girl. (Early on there had been thought of having Nell play the older
sister and Lissy, then eleven, the younger, but the role of Ruth went instead to a debuting young actress, Roberta Wallach, the daughter of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.)

Despite the family atmosphere, the shoot wasn’t entirely happy. It rained a lot, continually causing scheduling backups and changes. More important, Joanne didn’t seem to much like the project—the wardrobe, the awful hair, the makeup that made her look worse than if she’d simply worn none, the dreary set of the Hunsdorfer house, the hopelessness and boorishness and negativity of the character. As Newman later recalled, in all their years working together as costars or as director-actor, it was the only time she let herself get overwhelmed by a role: “Joanne
never
brings a character home with her. Never. Except once. She brought home Beatrice Hunsdorfer… She brought home that—that miscreant—that vulgar—that punishing—that
impossible
woman. She just hated that woman so much, hated what it brought out in her, and she brought home that—that hostility
every single night.
And I would just
flee.”

Again, as with
Rachel
, he tried to keep the atmosphere on the set lively and collegial. Perhaps taking a cue from Martin Ritt, he wore a jumpsuit a lot of days—comfortable, equipped with plenty of pockets, and definitely not stylish or showy. He allowed visitors: a writer from the
Christian Science Monitor;
a couple of Yale students making a documentary about the production; and English journalist Charles Hamblett, whose interviews with Newman in Bridgeport and at the house in Westport would form the basis of a biography that appeared in 1975—the very first book about him.

But all that effort to build goodwill for the picture couldn’t overcome the forces working against it: the indifferent studio, some brittle material, the opaque title, and, especially, the lukewarm critical reception, which Newman resented to the point of telling a reporter from
Rolling Stone
that Vincent Canby’s mixed review in the
New York Times
was “bullshit.” The film had its champions: Roger Ebert called it “hard-edged enough to be less depressing than it sounds,” and
Variety
declared, “Newman has gotten it all together here as a director, letting the story and the players unfold with simplicity, restraint and discernment.” Joanne won an acting prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the
film, but somehow it was like it never happened; decades later, it would be, with
The Rack
and
WUSA
, one of the hardest-to-find things he ever did.

H
E HIMSELF
wasn’t hard to find. By the time
Gamma Rays
rushed through theaters, Newman had already played another part—a bigger and more public one than he had in years. Throughout the early part of the year and into the summer and the fall, he was active in the presidential campaign, trying to stop the reelection of Richard Nixon, first by supporting Nixon’s upstart Republican opponent Pete McCloskey and then by backing the Democratic challenger, George McGovern.

Even though the two men were in different parties, they were rivals in New Hampshire. McGovern was running against a group of Democrats including Edmund Muskie of Maine and Sam Yorty, the mayor of Los Angeles. But he was courting the McCarthy voters of four years prior—the independent, antiwar, even libertarian-leaning New Hampshirites, the same sector to whom McCloskey, a congressman from California’s Bay Area, was appealing in the name of casting direct votes against Nixon and the war. Using New Hampshire as a kind of referendum on the war was how activists toppled Johnson in 1968, and McGovern’s camp feared that the enticement to do the same to Nixon would lure its natural constituency into voting as Republicans and ceding the Democratic primary to a more moderate candidate.

So oddly, the two candidates of different parties fought it out that winter for the hearts and minds of the old McCarthy gang. Newman, one of its most famous faces, was more convinced by McCloskey. (As a principled contrarian, it suited him to tilt at windmills in politics.) He had lobbied Nixon to install a Department of Peace in the cabinet; he had joined the likes of Ramsey Clark, John Lindsay, and Tom Seaver (!) in forming a Citizens Committee for the Amendment to End the War; and just the previous year he’d become a director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. He didn’t mind speaking out for a hopeless cause. “It was important Nixon got his wrist slapped,” he said later of McCloskey’s effort. From his Connecticut base, he hopped up for three or four days in New Hampshire,
making scores of appearances. But when McCloskey, inevitably, got his head handed to him, Newman, inevitably, returned to the Democratic fold.

He skipped the convention in Miami that year but showed up at Madison Square Garden in June as a celebrity usher at the Warren Beatty–produced “Together with McGovern” rally. He was in fairly amazing company: Julie Christie, Raquel Welch, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Shirley MacLaine, Bette Davis, Jack Nicholson, and Goldie Hawn were among the other very famous escorts who led the more generous guests—and some lucky stiffs from among the mob—to their seats. Simon and Garfunkel; Peter, Paul and Mary; and Dionne Warwick would all perform. Big night.

Somebody had the idea to lead all the celebrity “seat escorts” out in a kind of introductory parade rather than have them just be present when folks showed up. And somebody else, maybe Newman himself, had the idea to stick Newman in the upper deck among the real people. So when he started to climb to the cheap seats, beer in hand, he became the focus of a small melee, with men and women mobbing him, despite the pair of policemen keeping watch. “My God, they’re going to kill him,” someone said aloud, and the cops ran him into an elevator and got him backstage where he belonged. Before long they took the precaution of wrangling all the celebrities to safety.

During the general campaign Newman appeared in fund-raising TV ads for the Democratic Party, becoming so visible and persuasive that Nixon’s backroom operatives watched him. In June special White House counsel Charles Colson wrote a memo to John Dean, the president’s counsel, naming twenty people in public and behind-the-scenes life who should be considered enemies of the president and explaining why. The list included such politicians as Allard Lowenstein, John Conyers, and Ron Dellums, the journalists Daniel Schorr and Mary McGrory, and bizarrely, nineteenth of the twenty, “Paul Newman, California; radic-lib causes. Heavy McCarthy involvement ’68. Used effectively in nationwide TV commercials. ’72 involvement certain.”

There was a longer list, but in the view of the most nefarious guys on Nixon’s team, these were the real biggies: the twenty fund-raisers, agitators, and conspirators most liable to bring the president down. In
1973, when the list came to the attention of the public during the Watergate investigation, it was a shock to learn the extent of the Nixon team’s paranoia. People who found their names on the roster had good reason to feel rattled: who’d been watching them, and when, and why? But, too, there was a bit of status in being singled out, a recognition that one was big enough for one’s voice to be heard. The longer list cited more than two hundred enemies, a mere ten of whom were “celebrities,” a group in which Newman was joined by Carol Channing, Bill Cosby, Jane Fonda, Dick Gregory, Steve McQueen, Gregory Peck, Tony Randall, Barbra Streisand, and, bizarrely, Joe Namath—none of whom appeared on Colson’s annotated list.

It obviously wasn’t a thorough account of liberally active entertainers and athletes. (Shirley MacLaine was excluded, and Joanne revealed, “She’s furious!”) But it was, Newman would say ever after, his proudest achievement. He cited it in official biographies and public-relations announcements over the years. It touched, in fact, his very sense of family. Speaking of his father’s politics, he declared, “My one great regret is that he didn’t live to see his son named number 19 on the White House Enemies List of Richard Nixon. My dad would have been puffed up over that!” On the anniversary of the list’s appearance, he told Daniel Schorr, “I have been fortunate in my lifetime to be tapped for a reasonable abundance of honors, but none delighted me or elevated me in the eyes of my children more.”

I
T WAS
odd that he would associate a quirky bit of fame like this with his children’s impression of him. If anything, the kids were overly aware of how famous he was. “When they go anywhere with Paul,” Joanne said, “they may be pushed aside literally by fans who want to get near him. As if they don’t count at all; as if they’re nothing in themselves. And then think how disturbing it must be for a girl to know that her friends are madly in love with her father!” (This was no joke: Susan remembered that at age twelve a friend asked her if she wanted to “rape” her father. “Do
you
want to rape
your
father?” she replied.)

Joanne understood that it was exceedingly hard for the two sets of kids to grow up on two coasts, in multiple homes, at multiple schools,
in a bohemian household with celebrity parents. “Children like a normal life,” she said. “They don’t like oddity. Our children have all gone through that stage of really hanging out with their close normal friends and wanting to be at their houses, where Mommy and Daddy are home and people don’t come up to them and ask them for an autograph.”

But there was more to it. As Newman himself admitted, “I didn’t have any talent to be a father.” He had never really felt a connection with Art Newman, and when required to forge bonds with six young people, he was at a loss. “The process of really connecting is very long and painful for me,” he confessed, even with his own kids. “I sometimes have a hard time talking because I have a hard time talking to anybody.” Add to that the fact that he tended to brood about his work when it was approaching, and then disappear for months on end to do it, and then overcompensate for his absence with effusions of generosity, and there was a real potential for disastrous parenting.

“When they were growing up, I wasn’t there much,” he acknowledged later. “I was very inconsistent with them. I was all over the place, too loving one minute, too distant the next. One day they were flying on the Concorde, and the next day they were expected to do their own laundry. It was very hard for them to get a balance.” Despite the privileges they were granted, the kids went through rough patches.

For Joanne’s girls, it was a little bit better, if only because they were younger and lived more of the time with their father than did Jackie’s children. Nell changed schools quite often and wasn’t terribly interested in academics, but she was brilliant with animals, especially birds. She’d become absorbed by in falconry at age eight and appeared in a TV special about eagles and hawks four years later; by the time she was fourteen, she had been specially trained in handling birds of prey and had been granted a rare license to keep a hawk as a pet. A few years after that, she was working as an ornithological researcher out in the field in Idaho. (Her acting career was limited to working with her parents, who had forbidden her from even auditioning for the role of Reagan in
The Exorcist
when the opportunity arose.) Lissy, eleven in 1972, was into horses, and Clea was still just a little girl of eight; neither would ever stray too far outside the lines.

But Jackie’s kids were another story. Scott wasn’t doing anything
especially permanent or promising by his early twenties; he drifted in and out of private high schools and attended college sporadically. Far more interesting to him was the sort of neck-risking stuff that his dad enjoyed. He was tall and strapping—bigger than his dad—and handsome, though not as shockingly as his father. Susan, also not much for school, had thoughts of acting and was involved, to the dismay of her parents and stepparents, with a much older guy. Stephanie was artistic too, with craft skills and a love of building and making things; like her brother and sister, she didn’t stick with her schooling, though she did attend some college.

In part the woes of the older kids had to do with being the children of divorce and simply being young people at a time when a lot of young people were feeling troubled or confused by the changing world. And, of course, they weren’t the three little blond girls with the Oscar-winning mommy. So they had to feel somewhat like outsiders even when they were in rooms of their own in their father’s various homes. Joanne admitted that she had a difficult relationship with Jackie’s children. “I think that I experimented on them to their detriment,” she said, “and maybe to the betterment of
my
children. We are all six friends, but we’ve had some rough times. I mean, Scott and I didn’t speak for several years. He was going through difficult times, and I resented the fact that he wasn’t standing on his own feet and was using Paul. That made me angry, for Paul. And Susan and I had a to-do, and now Susan and I are very close.”

Like Newman, she wasn’t afraid to take at least some blame for some of the kids’ problems. “I had a baby because that’s what you did, right?” she revealed. “You had a baby. I didn’t know anything about it; I was scared to death. I still don’t like children. I don’t like children.
I…don’t…like…children!
I like my own children; I occasionally like other people’s children. But I don’t like babies per se.” And yet there she was with six of them to see to and a public career that required that she be more vain and egoistical than an ordinary working mother would have to be. It was a poor mix. “My career has suffered because of the children,” she said, “and my children have suffered because of my career… The only child I have raised out of the six children, three of whom are mine, is Clea. She is the only child I didn’t
immediately turn over to a nanny—while I went off to make a movie. I suffered great guilts.”