Paul Newman (33 page)

And since both actors’ personal value had been increased enormously by the two films, each was associated with any number of potential projects in the coming years. In Newman’s case, some of the films wound up being made, and quite successfully, with other stars instead:
The Eiger Sanction
(Clint Eastwood),
Dirty Harry
(also Eastwood),
Robin and Marian
(Sean Connery),
Cry Freedom
(Kevin Kline),
Bobby Deerfield
(Al Pacino),
Superman
(Marlon Brando),
Romancing the Stone
(Michael Douglas),
I Will, I Will…for Now
(Elliott Gould!),
Ragtime
(James Cagney!), and with his daughter Nell,
Paper Moon
(Ryan O’Neal, of course, appeared opposite his own daughter, Tatum). Other films to which he was attached were never realized: a Mandrake the Magician film, to be directed, perhaps, by Alain Resnais; an Andrzej Wajda film about the Polish-Jewish social activist Janusz Korczak;
an adaptation of Irving Wallace’s paranoid political thriller
The R Factor; Hillman
, about a man who built a home out of trash;
Madonna Red
, in which he would have played a Vietnam vet who has turned to the priesthood; and
Where the Dark Streets Go
, a melodrama in which he would have played a priest who finds himself drawn into a murder mystery.

Now that he was a producer and a director, there were also unrealized projects in which he was to serve behind the camera:
The Trip Back Down
, about a stock-car racer with a broken marriage;
A Fairly Honorable Defeat
, in which Peter Ustinov was to have directed James Coco;
Precious Bane
, the cinematic directorial debut of Actors Studio cofounder Cheryl Crawford; a secret project in which he was going to direct his First Artists partner Barbra Streisand; and
The Tin Lizzie Troop
, a comic action picture about a group of National Guardsmen chasing after Mexican border bandits just before the start of World War I.

He had in mind to direct Dustin Hoffman and George Roy Hill in that latter one, and he commissioned a script from the writing team of Robert Benton and David Newman, who’d written, among other pictures,
Bonnie and Clyde
and
What’s Up, Doc?
“The phone rang one morning,” Benton recalled, “and somebody asked, ‘Is this Newman and Benton?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘This is Paul Newman.’ And I asked, ‘Is this a joke?’ And he assured me it was him and that he was serious, and he told me about this book. And we did several drafts for him and had a wonderful time. He was great to work with—he really understood a lot about characters. But the thing never quite pulled itself together.”

Newman tended to brush off these missed—or indeed, avoided—chances but for two. He passed up the role of Joe Gideon in Bob Fosse’s
All That Jazz
, and asked by a reporter how he felt about the decision after seeing the finished film, he made a gesture of raising a hand to his temple in the shape of a pistol and pulling the trigger. “It was just dumb of me,” he confessed. “I was just so stupid, I didn’t take into consideration what the contribution of the director was going to be. That was a terrible oversight.”

The other was a controversial project that would bounce around
Hollywood for decades: Patricia Nell Warren’s novel
The Front Runner
, which dealt with a track coach in love with his star runner—his
male
star runner. Newman would play the coach, and there was talk that Redford would be cast as the athlete.

By the time he acquired rights to the book, Newman was no longer in business with John Foreman, who had gone out as an independent producer; his new partner was George Englund, whom he had known socially as Cloris Leachman’s husband and who had produced such films as
The Ugly American
with Marlon Brando and
The Shoes of the Fisherman
with Anthony Quinn. The company that Newman and Englund formed, Projections Unlimited, contracted with United Artists to produce eight films, four starring Newman, and had no less than Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of John and Robert Kennedy, as its representative for international deals. Its formation effectively signaled the end of Newman’s connection to First Artists, which had frankly done nearly no business at all on the meager output of its founders: Newman had provided the company with
Pocket Money
and
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
, neither of which generated much revenue, and he was planning a sequel to
Harper;
Streisand had made the disappointing
Up the Sandbox;
Steve McQueen had given the company a moderate success with
The Getaway;
and Sidney Poitier had a comedy in the works,
Uptown Saturday Night
, which would become a tremendous hit for the company and spawn a sequel,
Let’s Do It Again.
But it was clear that the enterprise was dead.
*

Newman and Englund went through several writers attempting to adapt
The Front Runner
, including the playwright John Bishop. And Newman insisted that he wasn’t afraid of risking his image to play a gay man on-screen. “I’m not ready for a cop-out,” he declared. “I won’t tolerate this project being turned into a watered-down love
story, or substituting a female for the role of [the runner]…I’m a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter, either. From the time I was a kid I have never been able to understand the attacks on the gay community.”

But personal beliefs aside, he was fighting an uphill struggle. At one point Newman’s
Winning
costar Richard Thomas was being considered for the younger role; at another, it was said that Newman was shooting second-unit footage at the Montreal Olympics. Articles about the film started appearing in gay publications such as
Blueboy;
movie magazines ran stories with appalling headlines like “Will Success as a ‘Homo’ Spoil Paul Newman?”

All the negatives were too much for Newman and Englund to overcome. “We could never get the script right,” Newman said later on, disappointed.
The Front Runner
seems to have influenced
Personal Best
, Robert Towne’s 1982 movie about a track athlete’s lesbian affair with a teammate, and in 2007 the novel was rumored to be back in development as a project for Brad Pitt. But no adaptation of it ever appeared.

W
HEN JOANNE WAS OUT PROMOTING
T
HE
E
FFECT OF
G
AMMA
Rays on the Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
, she went on Dick Cavett’s TV show and brought along a clip of herself playing a scene with Nell. After it had run, Cavett remarked that he didn’t mean to be rude, but he thought that the daughter might be even more beautiful than the mother. “Well, it’s no surprise,” Joanne told him.
“My
father wasn’t Paul Newman!”
*

That was part of Newman’s legacy to his girls—both Jackie’s daughters and Joanne’s. The five of them, from twenty-one-year-old Susan to nine-year-old Clea, were pretty not only because they had lovely mothers but also, of course, because of their father. But when they traveled with him, they stood in amazement—and no little discomfort—at the attention he received from women, who would sometimes literally bowl the girls over to gain proximity to their father. It was a puzzlement, a curiosity, and a joke. And it bled into their self-images.

Susan, the oldest girl, had genuine troubles in her late teens. In high school she had a crush on her French teacher but decided she was too chunky to woo him, so she went on a fasting diet for more than a
month, losing forty pounds and becoming unhealthily weak in the process. She was moody and would often retreat into her bedroom, talking to nobody in the household for days on end. “I was intolerable,” she admitted. “I was known to lock myself in my room for a year of my life and only come out when I had to. I’d come home from school and read or crochet in my room.”

When she hit her early twenties, she got involved romantically with a guy about a decade older, going so far as to move in with him, to the distinct disapproval of both her sets of parents. (Jackie, who worked as a high school English teacher in the San Fernando Valley, had remarried and had a daughter with her new husband in the late 1960s.) She had no interest in college. She was tart and cynical and quarreled with Joanne. She was a handful.

But her troubles were nothing compared to Scott’s. The only son, having to carry the legacy of his famous father, he was less apt to shrug off the strange accoutrements of Newman’s celebrity than to see them as tokens of achievement—standards, in effect, that he would have to live up to in order to reckon himself a real man. The girls had their mothers to emulate; Jackie was an ordinary working mom, and Joanne had her feet sufficiently on the ground—for a movie star—that her daughters didn’t seem to be cowed by her example. But Scott alone felt compelled to follow in the footsteps of a titan, and predictably, the prospect overwhelmed him.

From the time he was a teen he dabbled in drugs and alcohol, and as his indulgences and inherent wildness took their toll on his schoolwork and his ability to fit in with classmates, he was forced to leave one school after another. He’d spent two years at Washington College but never went back after working in Oregon on
Sometimes a Great Notion.
Rather, he was drawn to a lifestyle even more exciting than the one his father was falling in love with on the race circuit. At college Scott discovered skydiving, and he became sufficiently enamored of it that he left school to learn the craft, taking more than five hundred parachute jumps in pursuit of certification to be an instructor.

Newman was impressed. “I went down to Maryland to see him the other day,” he told a reporter. “You ought to try watching your son jump out of an airplane sometime… It was all I could manage
to watch from the ground… It must be quite something. Really thrilling, I guess.”

Scott managed to get work teaching parachuting to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy, but he wasn’t offered a full-time position, and he drifted on. He got it into his head that he wouldn’t accept any money from his father but would live on his own, and he next turned up at a California ski resort, where he drove a bus shuttling skiers around and, for less than three dollars an hour, cut down trees to build new ski runs. He worked construction for similar wages, borrowing money from friends rather than asking for help from his father.

The help came anyway. In late 1973 George Roy Hill, who had fallen in love with flying as a boy in Minnesota and served as a marine pilot in the Korean War, sent Newman a script about old-time barnstorming stunt pilots. Newman passed on the picture—Robert Redford wound up playing the title role,
The Great Waldo Pepper—
but he thought there might be work on the movie for Scott, maybe as a stuntman. He forwarded the script to Scott, and Scott contacted Hill, and after Redford and Hill refused to let him do any wing-walking or similarly risky business, he was cast in a small role as a rival pilot to the hero.

Before he made his way to Texas for the shoot, however, Scott found himself in a mess. One February night in the eastern Sierra Mountain town of Bridgeport, California, he got stinking drunk and vandalized a bus, slashing its tires. Three Mono County sheriff’s deputies responded to calls about his behavior, and it took all three to subdue the six-foot, 180-pound twenty-three-year-old when they got there. When they finally got him into the rear seat of a patrol car, he squirmed loose and kicked the driver in the back of the head, causing him to veer off the road. And at the county lockup he tore apart the jail cell into which they stuck him. At the station he identified himself by his birth name—Alan Newman—and was charged with public drunkenness, destruction of public property, and, most seriously, felony battery with a dangerous weapon—namely the boot with which he kicked the deputy who was driving him to jail.

It was an ugly but unexceptional incident; but the bad guy in it was the son of a movie star, so it made headlines across the country. Newman learned about it in a middle-of-the-night phone call; asked a couple
years later how he’d reacted, he confessed, “You go into the kitchen and you get about three ice cubes, and you chill a beer mug, and you sit there and think awhile. Listen, there’s not much you can do except offer what support you feel is required.”

Right there was the problem, or at least part of it. Scott was clearly having substance abuse issues, but Newman himself, a functioning alcoholic, was in no position to lecture him on the evils of drink. Newman would tell friends that he had no means at hand with which to reach his son, but the truth of the matter was that to be an effective voice and example of reform for his son, he would have had to make a significant self-accounting and changes in his own lifestyle.

That spring, when Scott appeared in court, he was found innocent of felony battery but guilty of misdemeanor battery; the judge fined him $1,000 and sentenced him to two years’ probation. Again Newman took an odd tack in response, seemingly blaming the press for making a big deal out of nothing: “The incident with him was blown all out of proportion. And I think that’s deliberate. The accusation is always on the first page and the retraction on page nineteen.” But if he didn’t ascribe blame for Scott’s brush with the law appropriately, it nevertheless seemed to encourage him to take a more active role in his son’s life. He steered him toward acting classes with Peggy Feury, an L.A. teacher with an Actors Studio background, and he helped him get a role in his own latest film, a big-budget movie about a fire in a skyscraper entitled
The Towering Inferno.

L
OOKING BACK
, it would be hard to accuse Newman of choosing his movie roles simply for the money. But in the case of
The Towering Inferno
, not much else can explain why he agreed to appear in a film in which, as he put it, “the real star…is that damned fire.” The movie was the creation of producer Irwin Allen, who’d made his name in television and then invented a new formula for blockbuster movies with 1972’s
The Poseidon Adventure:
take a big cast of well-known names, stick them in some sort of disaster, and let a bunch of extras die at the hands of special effects while the stars—minus a sacrificial lamb or two—fight their way to safety. Already he had a second iteration in the
can—a seismic disaster film called
Earthquake—
and now he had acquired the rights to not one but two novels about high-rise fires and had no less a writer than Stirling Silliphant, who’d won an Oscar for
In the Heat of the Night
, working to combine them into a script.

Newman was cast in the entirely unchallenging role of the architect who designed the dizzying tower and doesn’t know that the financiers have cut corners on fire safety in building it. On the skyscraper’s gala opening night fire strikes, and everything that can go wrong does. To play the key role of the fire chief, who must risk his own life and those of his men to save the very people whose penny-pinching had created the catastrophe, Allen had scored the coup of casting Steve McQueen, meaning that the film would pair two of the biggest stars in the world; surely it would be a moneymaking machine. The cast was filled with impressive names—William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Robert Wagner, Richard Chamberlain, even O. J. Simpson. And Scott Newman would play in a small role opposite McQueen as a rookie fireman with a bad case of the jitters.

He’d gotten onto the film not only because of his father but because he was legitimately capable of stunt work. In preparation, he learned how to rappel down a sheer wall on a rope line. And he even made a sweetheart of a young stuntwoman, Glynn Rubin, whom he met on the shoot. But McQueen was chary of him. McQueen had a genuinely neurotic relationship with Newman, whose career and stature he frankly envied. The two had worked together, in a small way, on
Somebody Up There Likes Me
, and McQueen was still smarting from having passed on
Butch Cassidy
over essentially an ego issue. He had seen to it that he would get slightly more desirable billing on
Towering Inferno
than Newman, and that the two would have equal amounts of dialogue and screen time, but he was cross to learn that he would have to carry his rival’s kid through a big scene. As it happened, though, he took a liking to Scott, praising his work and allowing Allen’s writers to add a couple of lines for him. Later, when the film was released, Scott was employed heavily in the publicity campaign, touring the East Coast and doing interviews with print and TV journalists. It was a big moment for him.

N
EWMAN DIDN’T
do much either in
The Towering Inferno
or in support of it—“I knew that the quicker I got off the screen and the stuntman got on, the quicker the picture would start rolling,” he told a writer for
The Atlantic
, whose readers could hardly be considered the film’s target market. It was an agreeably slick film, with little in the way of credible human drama but reasonably tense action. Newman thought of it as “distinguished junk” and was remunerated impressively for holding his nose, taking home a guaranteed $1 million, as per usual, and a percentage of the gross that was estimated to be more than eight times that: nearly a $10 million payday all told.

And that sum turned out to be gravy:
“Towering Inferno
was the first and only picture I’ve ever decided to do for money—up until then,” he explained. “After I’d accepted the role, though, the money from
The Sting
started coming in, so I put
that
aside and pissed away the
Inferno
money.”

Putting money aside surely had something to do with another impressive number that was facing him: fifty, which was how old he turned that January, a fact that magazine covers would wonder about in genuine disbelief: how could a fellow so fit and spry and sexy be fifty years old? He celebrated his birthday—January 26—by assembling Joanne and the girls (but not Scott) in Westport to observe his morning swim in the gelid waters of the Aspetuck River. A family luncheon followed, during which he was given, among other gifts, a wicker wheelchair.

That night a coterie of friends—Stewart Stern, George Roy Hill, Robert Redford, A. E. Hotchner, Edward Villella, Cheryl Crawford, Anne Jackson, and Gene Shalit—were among the fifty guests who joined the seven Newmans at La Cave Henri IV in Manhattan for an evening of dining, laughs, and music. (Neil Sedaka performed a few standards for which Sammy Cahn had rewritten the lyrics.) Among the gifts for the Old Fox, as the printed menus called him, was a cache of fifty cans of Coors, then still a cult beer available only in the West. (Redford presented him with a smashed-up old Porsche, which Newman later had compacted and delivered in a shipping crate to Redford’s home on
his
birthday.) The birthday boy and his wife sent the kids home and spent the night at a Park Avenue hotel.