Paul Newman (32 page)

Huston approached Newman with a script by a young writer named John Milius, a western about the infamous Roy Bean, a self-appointed judge whose liberal use of the noose and confusion of his own prejudices with actual statute made him an icon of frontier justice, eccentricity, and severity. Milius had serious ambitions for his script,
which he imagined could reveal the rancid truths behind the myths of the Old West—something like
The Wild Bunch
or a Sergio Leone film with a villainous central figure who resembled Richard Nixon in his unambiguous contempt for the law. But Huston and Newman saw the chance for a mock-heroic comedy in the vein of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—
a tall tale, a whopper. And they were big enough, and had paid Milius sufficiently, to get their way.

So a lark it would be: Newman would get to spend some agreeable weeks in Tucson dressing sloppily, drinking, playing cards, cavorting with an actual bear and lion, making eyes at Victoria Principal, and generally behaving like a rascal. Huston went even further: in delicate health as he approached seventy years of age, he drank vodka all day and brought along the woman who would become his fifth wife, a hellcat by the name of CiCi who was less than half his age and whom he himself compared, in a sentence of his fine autobiography that didn’t even deign to mention her name, to a sea snake.

It was a shambles. Ava Gardner, on set only briefly, was always drunk and impossibly ornery the whole while. And she hated Newman. “I can’t stand that man,” she told a biographer. “He’s one of my unfavorite actors. He’s an egomaniac, and so false. He’s ‘on’ all the time.” (For what it’s worth, she thought Kirk Douglas and John Wayne were just as bad.) Tony Perkins complained to Newman that Huston picked on him—he feared it was to do with his sexuality—and Newman orchestrated the bisexual actor into a fling with Principal. Huston and his CiCi were often off by themselves (Newman dubbed the woman “a functional voluptuary”), and Newman gave Principal a lot of direction for her scenes. She in turn babysat for him and Joanne so they could go off on
their
own. Gardner too went on walkabout, wandering drunkenly into the brush one evening; Milius was sent after her. Marlon Brando came by the set. Clint Eastwood visited. The script called for Bean to take in a bear as a pet, and the trainer of the animal that played the part brought a lion to Tucson with him; Huston liked to release the big cat in his trailer when he had guests over to play cards and drink.

And the picture they made was stilted by forced goofiness, chockablock plotting, and an indistinct tone, alternately satirical, elegaic, comic, and laconic. At times you could see the bawdier, bloodier, colder film
that Milius had wanted to make, and at times the ghost of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
overwhelmed it. (The utterly insipid tune “Marmalade, Molasses and Honey” made “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” seem as profound as a Schubert lied.) Newman had great sport with the gruffness of the role—some of the sloppy, seedy characters of his late career can be traced to Roy Bean—and clearly with a scene in which he swears at, yells at, and finally punches the bear. But Huston never made anything more than a pastiche of it. And reviews and the box office were, given the potential of the thing, pretty dismissive.

S
TILL, THE
star and the director had enjoyed working together. They may have been a pair of superannuated juveniles with tastes for the ribald and the macho, but they truly collaborated. Huston was willing to entertain Newman’s questioning and analytic sides and to chew scenes over with him and to bounce around new ideas, engaging in the workshop and preparation aspects of the craft that Newman so loved. “We kept nattering at each other all the time,” Newman remembered fondly. He did little to disguise his admiration for Huston: “I always felt very bourgeois around him. One always feels a certain sense of uneasiness around a man of genius. I was intimidated.” (Filial, even. “Paul would never do anything to cross John,” remembered someone on the crew. “Paul was a bit of a boy scout.”)

Naturally Huston thought the world of Newman, calling him “the Golden Lad” and declaring that “among the gods he would surely find a place as Hermes of the Winged Heels, forever in motion—graceful, stylish, with an inborn rhythm.” So when Newman hit upon a thriller named
The MacKintosh Man
that a young screenwriter named Walter Hill had adapted from
The Freedom Trap
by Desmond Bagley, he thought of Huston to direct it. It was a sweet package: they’d film in London, Ireland, and Malta; it would get Newman-Foreman out of its commitments to Warner Bros.; and there was money on the table. Why wouldn’t Huston go along?

The problem was, they really didn’t have a fully baked film. “I was vaguely ashamed of the whole thing,” Hill later said. “The story didn’t make any sense.” Newman would play Joseph Rearden, an American
in London posing as an Australian and engaged in a jewel heist. He’s caught and sent to prison, where the agent of a racket specializing in arranging escapes offers to break him out—for a price. He agrees and escapes along with another prisoner, an upper-class traitor who sold Britain’s state secrets to the Soviets. Then we learn that Rearden’s actually a British security agent trying to bring down the escape ring. And
then
we learn that Rearden’s boss is using the operation against the escape ring in a still bigger plot to catch a high-ranking member of Parliament who is himself a Communist spy. Or something.

It was shot sharply and smartly, with a couple of thrilling chase scenes and atmospheric settings and intelligent terseness. But too much of it was off: Newman with his awful Aussie twang, French starlet Dominique Sanda almost impossible to understand as his lover and collaborator, a cardboard villain (who is given life simply because James Mason played him), and an abruptness that felt less like a stylistic choice than a lack of confidence. As Huston confessed, the filmmakers didn’t quite know where they were going as they made it: “The story lacked an ending. All the time we were filming we were casting about frantically for an effective way to bring the picture to a close.” It closed on its own, as it happened, without making a ripple.

B
OX OFFICE
failures rolled off of Newman’s shoulders, though, in part because he had been such a reliable earner and had hit such a peak with
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Indeed, the success of that picture was so massive that it inevitably spurred talk of the dream team of Newman and Redford pairing up again. In 1971 word circulated that the two would appear in a torn-from-the-headlines story as a couple of real-life New York City policemen who testified before the Knapp Commission corruption investigations into crooked goings-on in their department; Newman would play Sergeant David Durk and Redford would take on the role of Detective Frank Serpico.
*

Instead, chance brought them a script by yet another young writer, David Ward, who had been researching the world of conmen and had an idea for a story set in the 1930s. It had twists and atmosphere and drama, and it was built around a pair of guys jauntily paired as a team, kind of like
Butch Cassidy:
a buddy movie, or “dick love story,” as one of its producers, Julia Phillips, called it. She was a fiery kid who had been working as an acquisitions and management factotum at First Artists, a protégee of David Begelman, who’d left the agenting biz to run the company. She had working relationships with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, whom she had convinced to make
The Way We Were.
Now she and her husband, Michael, and a third producer, Tony Bill, had bought the rights to Ward’s smart, engaging script and gotten Redford interested in playing the lead—a conman out to take revenge on a gangster.

They needed a director. Ward wanted to do it himself, but Redford said he’d drop the project if that happened. Someone got the script to George Roy Hill, who said he’d do it. Then Newman asked Hill if he could have a look at the script, and he surprised everyone by leaping into what was, in reality, a supporting role: Henry Gondorff, the older of the two conmen, the one who’s in on the caper less for honor than for kicks. “I don’t give a damn about the size of the part,” he told Hill. “It’s terrific. I want to play it.” While he was in England making
The MacKintosh Man
, Newman hand-delivered a copy of the script to Robert Shaw, who signed on to play the villain. The thing was falling into place almost too easily.

As with
Roy Bean
, the writer envisioned something darker, colder, and harder than the director did. The film was set in the midst of the Depression, but Hill, a one-time Yale music major who played Bach on the piano every day in order to unwind, found himself gravitating toward the ragtime music of decades earlier as he conceived of the treatment. “It’s not the right period,” he said, “it’s the right
spirit.”
(This same gap between what the script called for and how the film was made appeared in the performances of Newman and Redford; as the latter explained, in comparison to Butch and Sundance, they took the attitude that they were “different characters but played them the same way.”)

The film was set mainly in Chicago, but the crew filmed for about
five weeks in studios in L.A., where the Newmans rented a house in Malibu, and then for a mere couple of days in Chicago, where a springtime snap of winter weather messed up the shooting schedule. Despite Redford’s rising popularity—he had parlayed
Butch Cassidy
into a career that was rising to the stature of Newman’s—it was Newman who grabbed all the attention wherever they went. When the pair, with costar Shaw, showed up at Union Station for a day’s work, Newman got a standing ovation from the extras.

Shaw, a bona fide intellectual who wrote novels and plays, was dumbfounded by the adulation Newman received. He compared Newman to Laurence Olivier in terms of sheer magnetism, but he saw a crucial difference in the way their personal charisma was integrated into their acting techniques. “I certainly don’t feel in any way as an actor that [Newman’s] overawing at all,” he remarked to a reporter. “I tell you candidly that what he does always seems to me to be better in the dailies than I think it is at the time…. There’s something photogenic—a chemistry. What the hell is it? I don’t know, but he certainly has it. If Newman were a completely unknown actor and had two lines in a potboiler he would absolutely stand out.”

Newman, as always, only wanted to stand out for doing his work well and honorably—and maybe for busting George Roy Hill’s chops when he had the chance. Making
Butch
, Newman had come to learn that his director was tight with a buck, and the insight took on a life of its own during their second film together. One day Hill invited Newman to his trailer for drinks but offered him only hard liquor, which Newman had sworn off; Newman repaired to his own trailer to fetch beers from his own fridge—and then sent Hill a bill for them. Hill responded with a memo about abusing their friendship, to which Newman replied by cutting the director’s desk in half with a chain saw—a trick his character pulled in
Sometimes a Great Notion.
Hill sicced Universal on Newman; the studio dunned him for the money to replace the desk; Newman never paid.

Despite the tomfoolery and the weather problems, the film was finished by the summer, and Universal realized it had something special. Not only had the stars of one of the biggest studio films in the past
decade been successfully reunited, but Hill had put it together with pep and charm and that undeniably delicious music. They had a prestigious picture on their hands, but it was a crowd-pleaser too. Normally, a film with hopes of Oscars and positive reviews would have opened on a small number of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then spread out gradually into the national marketplace; wide national releases were reserved for lowbrow action fare and comedies. But Universal took the gamble of opening
The Sting
on Christmas in the top thirty-five markets in the country, and it paid off splendidly—even against so formidable a competitor as
The Exorcist
, which opened the very next day.

Screenwriter David Ward suggested that the film worked because he and Hill managed to keep viewers unsteady. “The trick was not just in working the con game,” he said, “but in conning the audience as well …You didn’t want people leaving the theater saying, ‘Well, that was nice, but I’d never fall for anything like that.’” It wasn’t a total love fest. “This isn’t a movie,” carped
Time
, “it’s a recipe.” But audiences lapped it up, particularly the camaraderie of Newman and Redford, which was drawing comparisons with such immortal screen pairs as Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy and James Cagney and Pat O’Brien. The film rolled up an amazing $156 million at the box office—representing nearly 100 million tickets sold, one of the top ten gates in movie history at the time—and capped that success with a staggering ten Oscar nominations: best picture, actor (Redford), director, original screenplay, cinematography, art direction, sound, adapted score, editing, and costumes. Newman was skipped over, a slight that was magnified, perhaps, when Joanne was nominated as best actress for
Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.
*
At the end of the evening, which would long be remembered for the spectacle of a streaker darting nakedly past host David Niven,
The Sting
had won seven prizes, including best picture
(only Redford, the soundmen, and cinematographer Robert Surtees lost), making it by a wide margin the most successful movie Newman had ever been part of in a career dotted with some fairly prominent successes.
*

H
AVING MADE
two titanic hits together, Newman and Redford were surely destined for a third pairing, but it never came, despite years of rumors indicating that they were considering something:
The Man Who Would Be King
(John Huston himself sent the script to Newman, who set him straight: “For chrissake, John, get Connery and Caine!”—which, it happened, he did), a stage production of
What Price Glory?
, a screen adaptation of Bill Bryson’s
A Walk in the Woods
, one directing the other in something, and so on.
**