Paul Newman (35 page)

Newman had obviously enjoyed himself, as had the rest of the cast, but Altman didn’t manage to convey that pleasure on-screen as, say, George Roy Hill had done in his two Newman-Redford pictures. Joel Grey was of the opinion that the studio had ruined the film. “They were trying to make a straightforward film,” he said. “What we’d made was really about the subtle relationships between all these characters, but they took all that out. It wasn’t allowed to be what we had intended it to be.”

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson
, as it had finally come to be called, confused and even angered critics who’d made a darling of Altman. (Typical was a head-scratching
New York Times
review by Vincent Canby that began, “What are we going to do about Robert Altman?”) The box office was, again, disappointing. And this was becoming a worrying trend: since
Butch Cassidy
, Newman had
made two gigantic hits
—The Sting
and
The Towering Inferno.
But he had also made seven other films, including
Buffalo Bill
, whose grosses, all combined, didn’t earn as much as
either
of those films. And it could be argued that the stars of those hits were actually the dream buddy team and the flaming skyscraper, not Newman himself. In 1976, for the first time since 1965, he failed to be named one of the top ten attractions in the country by the Quigley Poll.

He’d consistently chosen interesting material and collaborators, and his performances had often been pleasurable and authoritative, if not exactly sincere or heartfelt. But he had begun to falter, somehow, or misfire, and audiences felt it. In part, he confessed, he had simply, after more than twenty years of pursuing it as a profession, become bored with acting. He was tired of being offered scripts that reminded him of
Hud
or
The Hustler
or
Cool Hand Luke
or
Butch Cassidy.
He was tired of the grind of finding a decent project and then using up to his capacity to make it feel that the work was worth his while. And he was even tired of Paul Newman the actor. “The thing that I’m concerned about right now,” he confessed to a reporter, “is that I’m running out of original things, and I’m falling back on successful things that I can get away with. I duplicate things now. I don’t work as compactly as I used to work, simply because the demands aren’t asked of me anymore.”

His artistic and spiritual exhaustion became a trope of his interviews. “My teeth hurt,” he told Gene Shalit as he drove him speedily along Connecticut highways. “I’ve been so busy holding up the tenuous career with my teeth, holding my family together, holding up the political structure of the country, that my teeth hurt, and I just want to stop having them hurt.” He had thought of alternative ways of life, he said, but then he realized that he wasn’t up to the challenge of adapting to them. “I’m too tired,” he said, “to go through what I would have to go through to become a marine biologist. I don’t think I can handle the hassle as well as I could have thirty years ago.”

And while he was taking the long view, he expressed a confusion about himself and his achievements that sounded like the existential musings of a young man. “Sometimes I wonder what have I accomplished,” he admitted. “I’ve become famous, something I never wanted, and I’ve made a lot of money, something I was not opposed to having.
But what have I accomplished? [Becoming] an American celluloid sex symbol? Whoopee! I’m not miserable. I’m just not happy. I don’t have inner serenity, and I don’t have the guts to do anything else.”

W
ELL ACTUALLY
, that wasn’t entirely true. Guts, in fact, were an essential component to something else he was as deeply engaged in as moviemaking: auto racing. “I think it takes a certain amount of sensible bravery,” he mused about his pastime. As his film career slowed down, he took every opportunity that presented itself to get away and gun a car around a track in pursuit of his racing education.

His progress was evident, but he could still find it bumpy going. During the filming of
The Drowning Pool
, he’d run a Porsche at a course near New Orleans and had a terrific crash. “Neither of us had a seat belt,” he explained about himself and a passenger

Most of his racing exploits were tamer, if sensational in their own right. Back in Connecticut he had gotten into the habit of traveling back and forth between Westport and Lime Rock by helicopter. In Westport he landed on the playing fields of the middle school right across the road from his home, and it was a kick for neighborhood kids to see him pop out of his helicopter with his suitcase. But the folks who lived near Lime Rock weren’t so pleased; a group of them who felt that the track had outgrown its original intentions got an ordinance passed in 1975 to ban helicopter flights to the place. By then Newman’s race appearances had become such a big deal that he was besieged by media
and women fans wherever he appeared: Connecticut; Ohio; Bridgehampton, New York; Pocono Raceway in eastern Pennsylvania; and in the fall, Road Atlanta, where he once again competed for a national title and once again came away empty-handed.

But his driving was improving—markedly, according to observers. Bob Sharp had originally agreed to outfit him but hadn’t put him on his SCCA team; gradually Newman improved so dramatically that Sharp asked him to join the team—even when it meant, as it often did, that the two would race against each other. In the 1976 season Newman raced cars in two classes—the Datsun 510 he’d been driving for a few years and a Triumph TR-6. When he got to Road Atlanta that fall, everything fell into place for him. He ran third in the championship race in the Datsun, but he won the national championship in the Triumph, and his combined performance was rewarded by SCCA officials with the President’s Cup for overall excellence, the highest honor accorded at the Runoffs.

At the party following the awards ceremony, he was ebullient. “In a spectrum of ten, this ranks in the high nines,” he told the assembled drivers, crew members, and spectators. “Screw the Oscars. This is terrific.” And then he got a little reflective. Speaking generally to the racing fraternity that had initially received him as an oddity, he confessed, “It’s good to finally be on the inside.”

The championship gave him the confidence to commit himself more fully to racing. He allowed Sharp to use him for certain types of publicity and sponsorships (including Budweiser, which paid him in unlimited cases of beer). He tried driving different types of cars, some much faster than he’d been racing previously. His natural instinct for the sport started to kick in. “Newman has something that drivers can only be born with,” said Sam Posey, “a soft touch. He can get the most out of a car without hurting it.” Increasingly, his driving style came to resemble those of top professionals. “Newman liked the car best when it was sliding the most,” Posey said. “He liked to hang it out. This was the sure sign of the true racer.” His dogged learning technique had yielded real results. “Look at that man,” Bob Sharp said admiringly of Newman as he ran a race. “Same line through the turn every time. Consistent as a clock. So smooth you can’t hear him shift.”

He had an appropriate respect for the sport, and in truth he was aptly built for it, with a compact body that made him more comfortable in the tight, airless confines of a race car than a bigger man would have been. For the first time since he was a boy, he felt like a jock. “I always wanted to be an athlete,” Newman said, “a football player or a baseball player. I tried skiing for ten years. The only thing I ever felt graceful at was racing a car, and that took me ten years to learn.”

And, too, he was lucky. As he drove faster cars in more competitive races, he started to experience the spectacular accidents—and lucky escapes—that all veteran drivers had to their names. At Nelson Ledges another guy’s car got airborne and flipped on top of Newman’s in the middle of a race. At Lime Rock he lost his brakes at upward of 140 miles an hour and aimed his car toward an escape path designed for such emergencies. Track manager Jim Haynes witnessed the near-calamity:

Walking away from such accidents seemed only to embolden him. And as his personal wealth grew—the money he’d earned from
Butch Cassidy, The Sting
, and
The Towering Inferno
was bolstered with investments, including an ownership interest in a shopping center in Merced, California—he made a major decision: he would take 1977 off from moviemaking and concentrate on driving. Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania: he raced everywhere. He didn’t have a very successful campaign—his team fought mechanical troubles all season—but he was dedicated.

That February he returned to Daytona for the twenty-four-hour race, and this time he shone. He and the other drivers with whom he
shared the driving duties finished fifth overall, and he fell in love with endurance racing. “I’d never driven at night before,” he said. “I’d never driven a car with this much horsepower, and I’d never been involved in a race more than three or four hours long. Would I like to do it again? You bet your life.”

In June 1979 he fulfilled that wish in spectacular fashion. With team owner Dick Barbour and the German pro Rolf Stommelen, Newman drove a Porsche 935 in the only other twenty-four-hour race in the world: the Le Mans road race in southern France. After taking in the Monaco Grand Prix with Joanne from a balcony in the palace alongside Princess Caroline, Newman went to Le Mans and drove all day and night at speeds upward of two hundred miles per hour in rainy conditions and on a course he’d never seen before. “Boy, it sure gets your attention,” he said during a pit stop. The awful weather knocked a number of teams out of the race, and in the end it came down to two cars, both fighting engine trouble: the Whittington brothers of Florida, who had bad fuel injectors, and the Barbour team, which grabbed the lead in the final laps only to have their engine die, leaving them to limp over the finish line in second place.

It was an enormous achievement: a close second place in one of the world’s most storied auto races at age fifty-four. But in a sense it was a disappointment—victory had been so close, and it would have been monumental. Worse, the press and the paparazzi dogged him in a way that they never did at lower-profile races back home. “They were insufferable,” he groused. “I never, ever had an experience as bad as that. When I went out jogging in the morning they were there, like locusts. So I just ran along holding my middle finger up.” Even during the race he felt assaulted: “You’re strapping yourself in the car in the middle of the night and they knock off about 150 flashbulbs. I just wish I had a grenade.” Finally, he swore never to return. “My racing here places an unfortunate emphasis on the team,” he said. “It takes it away from the people who really do the work.”

Back home he followed up this success with a string of eight straight wins on the SCCA circuit and another national championship victory at Road Atlanta. “It took seven years,” Newman said, “but all at once things have started to pull together. I can feel it.” He
was especially proud of having earned the esteem of fellow racers, who, he feared, had initially dismissed him as a dilettante. “Perhaps now,” he said, “people will stop taking me for a stupid actor who’s playing at racing and accept me as a serious racer.”

They did. Said one SCCA rival, “The man’s a freak. There’s no way he should be out on the track driving as well as he does at his age. He’s just got talent coming out of his ears.”

I
N THE
1960S
THE
N
EWMANS BEGAN TO SHARE THE WEALTH
and good fortune they’d enjoyed with people they didn’t know, sponsoring a girl from a mountain village in Colombia with monthly donations to the organization Save the Children, which was based in Westport. Over time they added six other children to their makeshift family and became spokespeople for the organization, appearing in magazine ads and TV commercials. But there was a sad irony that they should become involved in any organization by that name. In the mid-1970s some of the Newmans’ biological children were as in need of saving as any of the kids they “adopted.”

Scott, as ever, was in the worst shape. Despite the patronage of such Hollywood stalwarts as his father, George Roy Hill, Robert Redford, Irwin Allen, and even Steve McQueen, he hadn’t exactly taken the town by storm after
The Great Waldo Pepper
and
The Towering Inferno.
He got a small role in a Charles Bronson action picture,
Breakheart Pass
, and appeared a few times on television—in episodes of
Marcus Welby, M.D.; S.W.A.T.;
and
Harry-O
, as well as a visit to Merv Griffin’s talk show. But the bigger prizes kept eluding him.

The media were interested in him, and the attention made him nervous. “I sometimes feel compelled to dispel a public myth that I get work because of my father,” he said. “The only thing my dad helps me get is my foot in the door.”

But even that wasn’t happening much, and he was hardly his own best friend in the matter. He was still drinking heavily, still using
drugs. He had enrolled in acting classes, yes, but he was something of a catastrophe in them. He would miss sessions, sabotage rehearsals, and disappear from school and even his apartment for days on end, not answering his phone, not responding to his classmates’ pleas for cooperation. He could go through bursts of self-improvement and self-rescue, hitting the gym, running, laying off the booze and the pills, slurping down health-food drinks. And then he’d relapse into a diet of liquor and drugs and junk food. In one thing he remained steadfast: he adamantly refused to turn to his father for financial or professional assistance. “I’m flat broke,” he told a reporter. “I don’t even have a bank account. Everyone assumes I have tremendous funds, but I haven’t got a cent.”

By this time he wasn’t the only one of the kids in trouble. Nell, who had tasted acting twice by the time she was thirteen, seemed to have a stable foundation in her love of birds. (“I was really frustrated because I couldn’t fly,” she said, “seriously.”) She and her sisters had appeared on TV with their parents in
The Wild Places
, a consciousness-raising 1974 documentary program about hiking and camping in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She was their earth child, the keeper of the Newman menagerie. But she was confronted by the burden of two famous parents and a childhood spent inconsistently in multiple homes on two coasts, and when she hit her teens, she dropped out of high school and flitted dangerously close to the same lifestyle that had trapped her brother. When she learned to drive, she had several accidents, alarming Newman sufficiently that he had her take driving lessons from racing professionals. According to Joanne, “Nell …also got into drugs. Not like Scott, thank God, but she did miss a whole period of her life.” She didn’t fall terribly hard, but as her mother explained, “What she did was to screw up school and everything else in her life… She finds herself way behind her peers.”

Stephanie too was drifting, leaving Bennington College to apprentice in a number of building trades—bricklaying, carpentry, electricity—and then working on a photojournalism project in Mayan communities in Guatemala. The youngest girls, Lissy and Clea, seemed to be doing well, pursuing interests in equestrian sports; Lissy actually dabbled in acting, once, appearing opposite her mother in
the made-for-TV film
See How She Runs
, about a housewife who becomes a top-class marathoner. But the family pattern was certainly disconcerting.

There was hope amid the roiling: Susan had blossomed into a pretty and unusually forthright young woman and had begun to pursue a performing career of her own. She attended acting classes in New York at the Circle in the Square Theater School, making her home in the Newmans’ luxurious coop apartment on East Fiftieth Street, and she got roles in a few small off-Broadway shows and workshop productions and in at least one Broadway bomb. Like her brother, she found that there were natural advantages in being Paul Newman’s kid. “The terrific part is that I can get in to read for most roles,” she said. But she also recognized that the people whom she would be auditioning for would have a set of preconceptions about her: “Everyone in that room already knows ten or twelve things about me, right off the bat. And I don’t know a thing about them.” She also found that some people felt that there were disadvantages to casting a famous actor’s daughter: it could be seen purely as a publicity stunt and had the potential to dwarf other aspects of the production. For a while she went professionally by her first and middle names only—Susan Kendall. But that didn’t fool anybody, and she struggled along like any other young actress, albeit with the most sensational of lineages.

In 1976 her father offered her a leg up. He was off to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to film
Slap Shot
, a movie about minor-league ice hockey that struck him as something he would enjoy doing. He offered Susan a chance to work for him as his secretary on location as well as a cameo role in the film. Johnstown was nobody’s idea of a vacation, but the film looked like a hoot. She went.

George Roy Hill was directing from a script by Nancy Dowd, who had written a ribald and shaggy story centered on Reggie Dunlop (Newman), an over-the-hill player-coach who responds to the threat that his team might fold for economic reasons by turning them from also-rans who play by the rules into goons who win games by taunting, goading, and fighting with their opponents. The script, based on the experiences of Dowd’s younger brother, Ned, who played for the Johnstown Jets of the North American Hockey League, was by several
measures the most vulgar thing Newman had ever done, and it was filled with violence, albeit of what Newman called the “Tom and Jerry” stripe.

Much of the film had to do with Dunlop’s relationship with his star player, an Ivy League grad who refuses to play on the base level that his coach demands of him. Several rising young actors were auditioned for the role, including Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss, but none could skate well enough. (Strauss actually broke his leg trying to learn.) So the part went to Michael Ontkean, the Canadian-born star of the TV series
The Rookies
and a former hockey player at the University of New Hampshire. The roles of virtually every other member of the team—rechristened the Charlestown Chiefs—were taken by actual hockey players, including a trio of brothers, Steve, Jeff, and Jack Carlson, who were cast as the Hanson brothers, the gooniest of goons, whose arrival signifies the transformation of the Chiefs from a team that played hockey into a gang engaged in something more like professional wrestling.
*

Newman, who’d spent his boyhood skating on frozen lakes in the wild spaces around Shaker Heights and had kept up his skating occasionally when the Aspetuck River beside his Westport home froze over, spent seven weeks training to do most of his own stunt work. “It was hard to go back to using the muscles again,” he admitted, adding, “I’d forgotten how much fun it is.” He was fifty-one, though, and he had his limits. “On the eleventh day of shooting the hockey scenes, I really ruined myself,” he said. “It was a big fight sequence on the ice. You have to brace yourself very differently when you get into a brawl without good solid footing. So I strained all the muscles on the inside of my thighs and in my abdomen.” He actually loved it, though—“Isn’t the movie business great? I’ve learned how to drive a race car, to ride a horse, to play the trombone, to shoot billiards, and to play ice hockey.” But he confessed there was a cost: “This has been the toughest physical film I’ve ever done. And believe me, I’ve done some rough ones.”

For the duration of their stay in Johnstown, the production had rented a house for Newman in one of the nicer sections of town. But he preferred to be closer in, where he could hang out with the other player-actors and get in on the fun. So he spent his nights at the Johnstown Sheraton unless Joanne was in town, when he would use the big rented house. He hit bars with the guys, took them to nearby racetracks to watch him run practice laps, and even brought a couple of them along on the movie studio’s private jet when he flew to Watkins Glen to do some racing. One afternoon he stopped by Dave Hanson’s apartment to watch a car race on TV and have a few cold ones. They all loved him. “He’s a great guy, not at all like a big shot,” Jeff Carlson told a reporter. “We’ll go out for a beer, and he’ll buy a round, then we’ll buy a round. It’s not like he’s always laying out a hundred-dollar bill.”

Jeff’s brother Steve recalled Newman behaving as if he had as much to learn from the young hockey players as he had to teach them as a veteran actor. “We had no clue what to do and how to do it. He would pull us off to the side and say, ‘Try to do it this way. Try it that way.’ Vice versa, we were the hockey players. He didn’t know how to do something, and he’d ask our advice. He wasn’t shy about that. He was a perfectionist.” Newman made an impression, as well, on a young actress named Swoosie Kurtz, who was playing one of the players’ wives. “It’s interesting to watch his decisions in acting,” she remarked. “When there’s a choice of being sexy or funny or macho, he’ll choose the last two every time, even though he
comes off
sexy.”

His daughter certainly saw the evidence of that. On-screen she was limited to the tiniest of roles as a drugstore clerk with whom the players flirt during their idle afternoons. But as the gatekeeper who opened her father’s mail, she was privy to a truly exclusive and provocative glimpse of the world. “I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned,” she told a reporter. “Women in America are absolutely not getting laid! Maybe they’re unhappy in a lot of different ways, but they’re
also
not being satisfied by their husbands. Whatever crushes I’ve had on rock stars or actors have been fantasy-like things, but these women are
actively
pursuing my father.”

It was as Kurtz said—even if Newman tried not to attract them, he
attracted them. In
Slap Shot
he wore a garish wardrobe of polyester slacks and gaudy shirts and a cheap leather bomber jacket. But he looked great. The set of his character’s apartment was the actual apartment of one of the Johnstown Jets—the one least capable of keeping a neat house—and Newman walked around it guzzling from beer cans in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and he still looked good. (But at the film’s first preview, one female member of the audience got a load of his infamously skinny legs and blurted aloud, “You mean he skates on
those
?”) And although he swore like a sailor—the film was rated R almost entirely for its language, which Dowd had adapted from actual tape recordings that her brother had made for her in hockey locker rooms—he still exuded charm. Indeed, the film was released at approximately the same time as a new celebrity magazine,
US
, and it slapped Newman on the cover, salty mouth and all.

Slap Shot
did startle audiences with its profanity: one woman from Indiana wrote Newman to say that the high point of her life had come a couple years earlier when he had raced his car at a track she owned; having seen
Slap Shot
, she said, she would turn her dogs on him if he ever came around again. But it was an entirely successful sports movie in which the clichés of triumphant underdogs were skirted for something that felt more like a slice of the real, asymmetrical, organic life of an obscure but vital subculture. Dowd’s plotting was pleasantly shaggy, and Hill had captured the mood of it without any of the forced frivolity of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
or
The Sting.
The reviews were admiring. Pauline Kael raved that
Slap Shot
was Newman’s best work: “the performance of his life… His range isn’t enormous; he can’t do classics …But when a role is right for him, he’s peerless… He’s one of the few stars we’ve got in a normal emotional range… His technique seems to have become instinct. You can feel his love of acting.”

The ticket sales, however, never materialized. The movie grossed $28 million in the same year that
Star Wars
and
Smokey and the Bandit
were released: in one regard, a respectable take, but really peanuts. Perhaps it was the very subject matter—hockey is at best a kid brother in the American sports pantheon. Perhaps it was the language and violence. Perhaps it was because Newman’s star was itself in decline. But
he was splendid in it: raunchy and cockeyed and filled with piss and vinegar. And the film caught on with the frat-boyish male audience, who made it—and much of the dialogue, and almost everything to do with the Hanson brothers—the object of a cult.