Paul Newman (34 page)

Approximately three months later he was being celebrated in
Manhattan once again, this time alongside Joanne, as an honoree of the Film Society of Lincoln Center at a gala benefit retrospective of their careers. Newman was embarrassed at being given an honor that had previously been accorded only to Charles Chaplin, Fred Astaire, and Alfred Hitchcock. “I depreciate my own work,” he told a reporter over a lunch of omelets and beers. “When they’re good, they’re okay; when they’re bad, they’re really horrid.” Joanne didn’t exactly crow about herself either: “We’re a kind of an artificial couple. Paul is a great star. I’m a character actress.”

On the night of the gala, an array of stars turned out—Myrna Loy, Martin Balsam, Maureen Stapleton, John Houseman, Anthony Perkins, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Richard Thomas, Shelley Winters—plus directors Otto Preminger, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Gil Cates, and Stuart Rosenberg. The Newmans were seated with New York mayor Abe Beame and his wife, and they had to endure, along with everyone else, an endless program of twenty-seven film clips: eleven of “his,” ten of “hers,” and six of “theirs.” Tennessee Williams introduced the Newman portion of the program and got an unintentional laugh by calling the star “Paul Goodman.” (“Why are you all laughing?” Williams asked. “I’m really not that funny.”)

When he finally got to speak, Newman poked fun at how he looked in that infamous “cocktail dress” from
The Silver Chalice
(a clip from which he insisted be included); when Joanne spoke, she apologized to the audience for a show that ran “longer than
Gone with the Wind.”
The evening went on for several hours, with the honorees standing patiently at a reception to which the most generous donors were invited. Newman passed the time by draining can after can of Coors.
*
The next morning he met some reporters for a casual press
conference and once again drank beer after beer throughout, even though it started at ten
A.M.

L
INCOLN
C
ENTER
was actually an increasingly familiar place for the Newmans. Having turned to ballet in the late 1960s to tone up after her pregnancies, Joanne had become an avid attendee, donor to, and even patroness of the ballet, and her husband frequently accompanied her to recitals, galas, and benefits in support of dancers, dance education, and new dance companies. The Newmans were spotted at performances around the country, most especially in New York. And they were generous with grant money, giving, for instance, $50,000 to the Los Angeles Ballet in 1975 to help it open a school for dancers, as well as donations to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Paul Taylor company, and many small troupes around the country.

Newman wasn’t exactly keen on dance—“I enjoy all aspects of the theater,” he told a reporter, “though after I’d seen
Giselle
for the nineteenth time, I became resistant.” But he understood that his attendance at and appreciation of dance served as a way to pay Joanne back for all the weekends she’d been forced to spend doing needlepoint beside Winnebagos on dusty racetracks. “I trade her a couple of ballets for a couple of races,” he explained. He regularly gave her gifts from the world of ballet—posters and sculptures of her favorite dancers; she actually hung a large framed photo of Rudolph Nureyev in their bedroom. And he funded her passion. In 1975 she made a gift of $120,000 in seed money and became a founding board member of a new company, the Dancers; Dennis Wayne, a devilishly handsome and fiery-tempered thirtyish New York native and alumnus of the Joffrey Ballet and the American Ballet Theater, was its artistic director.

She was up and at the barre bright and early every morning—just as Newman was engaged in his daily routine of jogging or biking or swimming followed by a long sauna and a shower. In a marriage that could sometimes seem incongruous, their shared passion for fitness was one of their most reliable bonds. Joanne couldn’t quite drag him into all of her enthusiasms, though. When she and the girls turned to vegetarianism in the mid-1970s, he did so only grudgingly, and then
lived on steaks and burgers whenever he was away from home. In 1975 Joanne attended est sessions—self-awareness training—and got so much out of them that she encouraged Scott, Susan, and Nell to do so too. But she never got her husband involved, even though, she said, “he complains of feeling left out of what’s became an exclusive little clique within the family.”

Nor did he follow her in her next bid for self-enhancement, when she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York—convenient to both their Connecticut and Manhattan homes—to take the classes she’d been promising herself since she dropped out of Louisiana State more than twenty years earlier. She studied philosophy, art history, astronomy, and other miscellaneous subjects without intending to fulfill a degree or, indeed, without any aim in mind other than enrichment. It was as if she had decided that the subjugation of her career to her husband’s wasn’t going to be the end of her growth. If she was going to be seen as an appendage to an internationally famous movie star, she was going to be a cultivated one.

A
S A
sort of working vacation away from their strange multilimb juggling act of careers, homes on two coasts, and passions for auto racing and ballet, the Newmans went to New Orleans to make a film in 1974, the first in which they’d acted together since
WUSA
, which was also shot there. This one would be a sequel to
Harper
, initially entitled
Ryan’s the Name
but renamed
The Drowning Pool
, like the Ross Macdonald novel on which it was loosely based.

The plot had Lew Harper called to the Crescent City by a former lover, Iris (Joanne), who is married to a local big shot and is being blackmailed. In trying to ferret out the source of the threat, Harper encounters any number of depraved, dangerous, and dastardly southern types, from Iris’s sexpot daughter (an impossibly young Melanie Griffith) to a vaguely corrupt police lieutenant (Tony Franciosa) to a Cajun mogul (Murray Hamilton) determined to get his hands on the land owned by Iris’s mother-in-law.

Like all of Macdonald’s books, this one was originally set in Southern California, but Joanne, according to Newman, suggested they
shoot in New Orleans. That allowed the filmmakers to imbue it with some exotic textures—French Quarter bars and antique shops, bayou speedboats, a warehouse full of Mardi Gras floats, and so on. The location had echoes of
The Long, Hot Summer
, with Newman as the outsider visiting an incestuous Louisiana town and sharing an attachment with Woodward while the presumed prince of the place, Franciosa, watches helplessly. And Stuart Rosenberg, who had made
WUSA
, was directing Newman for the fourth and final time.

In one exciting scene Harper and the bad guy’s wife (newcomer Gail Strickland) find themselves locked in the hydrotherapy room of an abandoned sanitarium, then fill it to the ceiling with water in an effort to burst out through the skylight; Newman wears boxer shorts and is incredibly fit on the cusp of his fiftieth birthday. But little of the old
Harper
magic—let alone that of
Long, Hot Summer—
was evident. The film didn’t carry the same saucy charm as the first; the slick irony of the Harper persona felt less fresh and timely than it had a decade earlier. Newman was obviously having a grand time. “I simply adore that character,” he said, “because it will accommodate any kind of actor’s invention… It’s just lovely to get up in the morning, it’s great to go to work, because you know you’re going to have a lot of fun that day.” But this was one of those grand times that didn’t translate from the set to the movie house, and the picture was released to indifferent reviews and business.

His commitment to auto racing had begun to dominate his film choices; he deliberately avoided working during the race season, meaning he either had to develop projects around that schedule or, worse, take the work that was available when he would be finished racing. “If I’ve been available in October,” he explained, “I’ve taken the first picture that’s available in October.” That strategy would lead him down some artistic and commercial dead ends. But his next project—which, yes, was filmed in the fall—was one that he’d been nurturing for years. In 1969 Newman and John Foreman, along with agent David Susskind, had spent $500,000 to acquire the rights to
Indians
, a scabrous play by Arthur Kopit concerning the abhorrent treatment of Native Americans by the white man. The intent was to have Kopit write a script and George Roy Hill direct it.

After five years of back-and-forth, however, the film had come to bear a different aspect. The Buffalo Bill project was in the hands of Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian producer famous for his alternating output of awful schlock and genuine quality. And rather than Kopit and Hill, the chief creative force behind the project was the celebrated independent writer-director Robert Altman, who was riding a string of hits including
M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller
, and
Nashville
and who had written a new version of the script with his protégé, Alan Rudolph. What they had created was less an indictment of the Anglo-American conquest of the Indians than a gimlet-eyed send-up of the notions of fame, myth, and history, a pastiche of the life of a celebrated American hero and charlatan. It was meant to be released during the national observance of the Bicentennial—a pie in the face, as it were, at the big patriotic party.

For his role as the great self-aggrandizer, Newman grew a jaunty goatee (which made him look rather like Altman, who wore similar facial hair most of his adult life) and sported a long, blond wavy wig and the sort of ornate leather outfits favored by the actual Buffalo Bill Cody. He was surrounded by a cast of Altman regulars (including Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, and Geraldine Chaplin), Native American actors (including Will Sampson, the giant who had played Chief in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
), oddball cameo actors (opera star Evelyn Lear), and various curiously chosen screen icons: Joel Grey (the former Cleveland Play House Curtain Puller and an Oscar winner for
Cabaret
) as Cody’s producer, and Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline, the pulp novelist who helped sell Cody’s myth to a public eager to be gulled.

Once again Newman was as keen on making merry on the set as he was focused on his performance. The company were staying in Calgary and took a bus each day out to the set on the prairie, but Newman had a Porsche with him and drove himself. “I went out with him to the set in the mornings,” recalled John Considine, an actor on the film, “and he was always trying to break his speed record. It was a little hairy.” As with
The Drowning Pool
, Newman spoke fondly of the freedom he felt in the character he was playing—a description that often meant he was reaching a little too hard for the quirky affect at the expense of real feeling. “I’m using this stance for my Buffalo Bill character,
” he said to a reporter on the set. “Know where it comes from? Baryshnikov! His curtain call! Actors are sponges. Terrible, terrible sponges. You steal from friends.”

He had long had the habit of treating film shoots as a kind of version of summer camp: practical jokes, cookouts, beer blasts, getting up to no good among the locals. On the relatively isolated and dull
Buffalo Bill
set near Calgary, Alberta, Newman reached virtuosic heights of sophomoric invention, and he was goaded into them by, of all people, his own director. Altman was himself a famous enfant terrible, a pothead given to outrageous acts of defiance and tomfoolery. He made sport of Newman’s constant diet of popcorn and contrived one day to have the actor’s trailer packed with the stuff so that it spilled out all over him when he opened the door. Newman laughed it off, but then he issued a dire warning to his director: “You shouldn’t have done that, Bob. I’m richer than you are, and I’ve got more time.”

In the coming weeks he made Altman’s life hell. They were filming in Canada in autumn, and Altman wore calfskin gloves to protect his hands from the nippy weather. Newman had them stolen, breaded, deep-fried, and served to the director as a garnish on his lunch plate. The two had debated whether Newman’s daily river of beers or Altman’s similarly voluminous stream of chablis was more manly; Newman called Altman’s tipple “goat’s piss” and presented him with an actual goat kid with a sign around its neck reading “Now you can have your own vineyard.” He had Altman’s trailer filled with a couple hundred live chickens, imparting a scent that could never be entirely eradicated. He hired a helicopter to fly over Calgary and drop invitations to a party at the rented home where Altman was living. In his most elaborate gag, he arranged for a local radio disk jockey to record a false news report, saying the film company needed 2,500 extras for the next day’s shoot and would pay each $155 for their work instead of the going rate of $17.50; interested parties, the announcement continued, should call…and then came the sound of Altman’s private phone number. Newman arranged to have the tape broadcast on radios on the set as if it were really going out over the airwaves, then sat beside the director to watch him as it aired. “Bob just turned white, pure white,” he beamed.

To mark the end of the shoot, Newman flew in hundreds of live lobsters and ears of fresh corn for a prairie clambake. He tried to get Robert Redford to show up in Buffalo Bill garb to startle the partygoers, but he couldn’t make that last bit work. Instead, he had a plan to auction off a pretty girl to a high bidder as a date—a bit of hijinks. As John Considine recalled