Paul Newman (37 page)

That was the remarkable thing. He was fifty-three years old, and yet he had the zest and energy and appetite of someone one-third that age. He had been a young man on those campus paths and hills and playing fields three decades before, and walking them once again in the chill light of a midwestern autumn, he could feel that he was one again. He was still, in middle age, the Golden Boy, “lively and irreverent,” as his honorary degree had put it, eternally young, restless, inquisitive, iconoclastic, intrepid. He may have seemed like one of the kids, but he was the biggest kid, in many ways, of all.

O
F COURSE
, he had kids of his own, and for them his youthfulness and accomplishments could be crushing. He recognized it, at least in the abstract: of being the child of a superstar, he surmised, “There are liabilities and assets. Some of my children have focused more on the liabilities and others have been able to enjoy the assets.”

In the eyes of Susan Newman, who spent some time at Kenyon while her father worked on the play, the most burdensome aspects of Newman’s fame and image fell truly on one child: Scott. “Some children of public figures hold up well,” she said, “and some get mad as hell and walk away or become the ugly duckling in the family. Because he was a man, it was much harder for my brother. Much as people
might want to compare me with my father as a performer, some of the heat was off me because we were different sexes. A lot of outsiders regard this as a very privileged life, but in many ways it can be draining and very painful.”

According to A. E. Hotchner, who’d known him since he was a boy, “Scott was a big, handsome, outgoing man. He felt the burden of being Paul Newman’s son.” Scott may not have been as handsome as his father, but he was, as Hotchner said, a good-looking young man (Joanne compared him to a French movie star), and he was taller and, when he was feeling well, friendlier than his dad. He was at least as willing as his father to risk his neck with cars or bikes or skydiving, and he had his father’s taste for hijinks. But he continued bootlessly to butt his head against a performing career and to batter himself with liquor and drugs and danger as if in punishment for his failures. “People expect more of me,” he said when asked about being Paul Newman’s son. But nobody, seemingly, expected more than he himself.

In 1977 he got a featured role in a film made by some University of Southern California grad students. Set in the 1950s and called
Fraternity Row
, the film cast Scott as Chunk Cherry, the frat-house sadist who bullies the protagonist and his buddies. It was a dreary, sober portrait of fraternity life gone sour that wanted for humor, drama, and charm. It did almost no business, which was probably a good thing for all involved. Then he tried singing, appearing in cabarets and night spots around L.A. under the stage name William Scott and angling for a record deal with Don (“American Pie”) McLean. It came to naught.

He was increasingly erratic in his behavior. Kathy Cronkite, the daughter of famed newscaster Walter, knew Scott socially and recalled him being in his cups at a party and angrily dismissing someone as being interested in him only because of his father; as it happened, the other fellow had no idea that Scott was the son of a movie star. Later at the same party, Scott puffed up at someone else and sneered, “Don’t you know who my father is?”

The Newmans knew Scott was in trouble, and they got him into the care of a highly regarded addiction counselor, who saw the problem plainly, explaining that he found Scott “terrorized by the idea of trying to be a professional actor. The risk of failure scared the hell out
of him, so he relied on drugs and alcohol.” It was a teeter-totter of emotions, and it always seemed to end with him on the down side. And it left Newman, a self-confessed flaky father, desperate for a solution. “We were like rubber bands,” he said later. “One minute close, the next separated by an enormous and unaccountable distance.” It had even crossed his mind to force his twenty-eight-year-old son physically to hew to the straight and narrow, but as he confessed to a friend, “The kid’s bigger than me, and I can’t tell him what to do anymore.”

Soon it would be too late for even that.

On Sunday, November 19, 1978, Scott spent the day in L.A. watching football on TV with a friend. He’d been doing some stunt work—he’d just filmed a car jump for a “Circus of the Stars” TV special—and he’d recently crashed his motorcycle, which made him more eager than usual to chase away his pains. The day began with rum drinks, but they had no effect on his discomfort. “It hurts right here under my ribs and behind my shoulder,” he said. His friend had some Valium on hand, and Scott swallowed five of them. An hour later he took three more.

Then he went off to see a psychologist whom the Newmans had hired—along with a nutritionist—to help Scott find an even keel. Scott and the doctor spoke for a while, and when they were finished, Scott was given a sample bottle of Darvon and sent off in the keep of an associate of the practice. He went back to his friend’s place for some more rum drinks, then sometime after nine p.m. decided to call it a night. He had recently moved out of an apartment in Brentwood and had been renting a set of rooms at a Ramada Inn in West Los Angeles; he repaired there.

At the hotel Scott chatted with his keeper, ate a little supper, retired to the bathroom, popped a couple of quaaludes, chased them with some cocaine, and emerged to declare himself ready for bed. By ten he was asleep, snoring loudly. After about an hour and a half the attendant noticed that he could no longer hear the noises from Scott’s room. He went in to check on him and found that he’d stopped breathing.

Paramedics were summoned, and they brought him to the emergency room of Los Angeles New Hospital. But it was too late. At 1:07
A.M.
on the morning of November 20, Scott had succumbed to
what the coroner called “acute proxpoxyphene and ethanol intoxication”: an accidental overdose of drugs and booze. To make the tragedy complete, the hotel in which he had died—with a minder in the very next room—was right across the street from the hospital where his death was pronounced.

T
HIS WAS
a thunderbolt from hell, compounded by the fact that Newman would get the dreadful call about Scott while encamped at Kenyon, site of his early triumphs and of the blissful second youth he was living all that month. It was like a smackdown from the gods: in exchange for his vitality, his energy, and his boyishness, he would pay the price of the only son who would carry his name, his genes, his aura. All the talk of Newman’s Luck seemed suddenly a bitter joke.

“In a way, I had been waiting for that call for ten years,” he said not long afterward, about that day. “Somehow my body mechanism built me an anesthetic for when it really happened. I was
…a lot of things
when I got that call. I was probably more pissed off than anything.”

He claimed that he and Scott had both contributed to their estrangement and, by extension, to Scott’s fate. “Scott and I had simply lost the ability to help each other,” he explained. “I had lost the ability to help him, and he had lost the ability to help himself.” But he took responsibility for his own failure to find a solution: “I just realized that whatever I was doing in trying to be helpful was not being helpful at all. In fact, it could have been harmful.”

Still, he recognized that he was the father and that he should never have stopped being involved, making the effort, looking for signs of real danger in his son’s behavior: “You know, for someone who is supposed to be in the business of observing people, to have a whole series of signals being sent out and having them go right by without any recognition at all, it troubles me.”

When the call came, Newman was, despite the detachment evinced in these retrospective observations, devastated. John Considine happened to be visiting him at his lodgings in Gambier, and as he recalled, “It was a horrendous moment. He could barely talk. We got out into the air and walked around the campus for hours, and he was deciding
what to do and whether or not he could go on with the play. I went back to my room, and he came around later to say that he had decided that the best thing was to keep busy and carry through. He came back and said, ‘I’m gonna do it.’”

Later that day he gathered himself to attend rehearsal. He walked into Bolton Theater and stunned the assembled cast and crew with the awful news. But he insisted that they continue as they had been, that their efforts and energy would be invaluable to him: “What I need right now—I need the show, I need all of you, I need the rowdiness.” After work had finished for the night, Claire Bass and Breezy Salmon, a couple of girls from the chorus line, dressed up like clowns and, along with another cast member, Kevin Cobb, showed up at Newman’s front door with a case of Coors and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Newman took a slug of whiskey—“That’s the first time I’ve touched the hard stuff in eight years,” he told them. And then he shooed them away gently.

In L.A. someone in the office of Newman’s publicist, Warren Cowan, was reached by a reporter who asked if Newman had anything to say. “No,” he responded. “What is there to say?” Cowan’s office issued obituaries that, appropriately in the circumstances, painted a picture of a warm relationship between father and son. But a lot of people knew better, and Scott was offered up by the press as another of those children of fame who lived in pain and had recently died young: Jonathan Peck, Dan Daily III, Diane Linkletter, Diana Barrymore, Edward Robinson Jr., Jenny Arness—an awful tally.

The next day Newman and Joanne drove to Cleveland, where they had a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner with Theresa Newman, who was still in the house on Brighton Road. Then they flew to Los Angeles for Scott’s funeral, a small private affair to which none of his friends were invited. On November 27 Scott’s body was cremated and his ashes interred at the Westwood Village Mortuary.

The family issued no official statement in Scott’s memory, but not long afterward Susan, speaking independently but truthfully, revealed how they may have felt, saying, “I think Scott was a troubled individual from the time he was born. I believe in Karma. I believe certain
things in life may be preordained. I believed from the time I was twelve years old Scott was not going to live to be an old man.”

Scott’s friends, organized by actor Allen Goorwitz (aka Allen Garfield), director Mimi Leder, and psychologist Burton Kittay, met on that Friday for a memorial at, with painful irony, the Actors Studio West. Kathy Cronkite was there, taking notes for a book she was writing about the children of superstar celebrities, and she recorded some of what was said:

And then, because he had made the commitment, Newman returned to Kenyon, to finish rehearsals. As Ted Walch recalled, “The kids in the play were the healers for him—at least at that moment. When they realized that he was coming back to work with them, they just leaped back into it with love and appreciation. Their youthful resilience really buoyed him. And Paul just went on with his work. He wouldn’t talk about Scott.” John Considine, who would lose a child of his own later on, was aware that Newman was still in pain: “You could tell at times that he was distracted, but he carried through.”

The play finally premiered on December 9 to a sold-out gala crowd who’d paid $100 a pop to see the show and rub elbows with the Newmans. (The press were banned from the production, but the
Plain Dealer
of Cleveland sneaked in a reviewer, who found the show “a delight.”) Newman stayed on through the couple of weeks of performances, giving further encouragement and instruction to the actors, leaving everyone deeply impressed with his ability to work on through unimaginable pain.

But, he said, it was the cast and the crew and the play and the college that had given him so much, that had restored him in a time when he might’ve self-destructed.

“When the college finally called in its chit—my longtime promise to direct the first play in a new theater—it was the last thing I really wanted to do,” he confessed. “But I felt I owed it to Jim Michael and to Kenyon. Now, as I’m getting ready to leave, I feel like I owe Kenyon all over again.”

Before many years had passed, he would find a way to repay that debt, and others, both directly and indirectly, and many times over.

P
ERHAPS THE MOST TERRIBLE, THE MOST GNAWING THING ABOUT
Scott’s death was that Newman had been aware for years of the dangers that drugs posed to kids. As early as 1968 he was narrating public-service documentaries about opiate addiction, and over the years he would occasionally speak to student and youth groups about alternatives to drug use.

It could have been taken as a sign of hypocrisy. After all, he was famous for how much he drank, and he admitted to being curious about stronger vices. “I’ve smoked grass,” he confessed to an interviewer, “but I’ve never done anything else. I’m a square.” (In fact, he was: when he first saw someone wearing that great icon of 1970s cocaine use—a gold-plated razor blade hanging on a chain—he thought it was a joke about slashing your wrists when the going got tough.) But his awareness of drug abuse could also be seen as part of his long-held belief that a man must be engaged in the issues of his time, and as the father of six, he was palpably aware of its specter.

In 1979, mere months after Scott’s death, the Newmans served as narrators for a TV documentary about the dangers of angel dust; the film was made by David Begelman, the former agent and studio boss who was caught forging checks against Columbia Pictures’ accounts, as part of the community-service portion of his sentence. Two years later Newman helped out yet another mogul in trouble, Robert Evans, who was making a series of public-service announcements about the
perils of drug use as part of
his
community-service obligation after conviction on a misdemeanor charge for cocaine possession.

He wouldn’t speak about Scott—interviewers were specifically warned away from the subject. But Joanne occasionally did, and the wounds she revealed were fresh and deep. “Maybe it would have been a good idea if we had been able to stand up somewhere along the line and announce to the public, ‘Wait a minute. Here is what is happening in our household,’” she said, singling out for praise comedienne Carol Burnett, who spoke openly about her daughter’s drug problems.
*

But Newman wasn’t the confessional sort. And he had to find something more tangible to do, so as to feel there had been a reason for this terrible loss. Soon after Scott’s death, several friends of the Newmans—John Foreman, Stewart Stern, and Warren Cowan principal among them—combined their resources and connections to form the Scott Newman Foundation, which would dedicate itself to the cause of promoting antidrug education through films, TV shows, and lecture tours. The Newmans were involved, although not as founders. And Jacqueline McDonald, as Scott’s mother was known after her second marriage, joined the staff full-time and stayed on for the rest of her working days.

Again, Joanne spoke publicly about the effort. “This may sound corny,” she said, “but we didn’t want Scott to have lived in vain. His life didn’t seem to have much point, and we wanted—even after the fact—to make it have a point.” At first the foundation was a very small operation, dedicated to lobbying for drug-prevention programs, to educational film production, and to an annual awards ceremony honoring people who made films or TV shows with antidrug messages. But because the Newmans were involved, the foundation drew Hollywood stars to its fund-raisers and to the casts of its informative programs. Within a few years the Newmans had upped their stake in the fight against drugs considerably, donating $1.2 million to the University of Southern California to create the Scott Newman Chair in Pharmacy and the Scott Newman Center for Drug Abuse Prevention and Health
Communications. Newman himself was present at the press conference announcing the gift, and it was one of the rare times he spoke publicly about the toll that drugs had taken on his family.

“The biggest problem is when the subject is swept under the carpet,” he told reporters. “Communication has to be brought out in the open. It can be tough. You have to keep the lines of communication open.”

Had he done that with Scott? he was asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered, on the verge of tears. “I really can’t answer that.”

B
ESIDE HIM
on the dais that day was Susan, now the oldest of his children and the director of special projects for the Scott Newman Foundation. When her brother was playing out the last chapter of his life, Susan was still a struggling actress, drawing publicity because of her famous lineage but compiling a rather ordinary résumé of roles and performances. After
Slap Shot
she had a small part in Robert Altman’s
A Wedding
and then a featured role in
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
, an early film of Robert Zemeckis’s that concerned the hysterical reaction of American girls to the 1964 arrival of The Beatles.
*
She was saucy and outspoken: when
People
did an article about her, she revealed, “Losing my virginity was hard. I was always asking myself, ‘Do they want to lay me for myself or because I am Paul Newman’s daughter?’” A few years later, reflecting on her brother’s death, she told a newspaper, “That predisposition to compulsive behavior is present in every Newman. My addiction is food. I am a compulsive overeater.”

Statements like that, along with her willingness to participate in Kathy Cronkite’s book about the children of superstars, might have driven a wedge between her and Newman. But Susan gave up acting as she reached her thirties and sought other outlets for herself; most
important, she found a way to bond with her father, partly out of their shared grief at losing Scott. “In the last year,” she admitted to a reporter, “he has been reaching out in a more direct way. Less guarded. More open. We’ve become closer. Daddy has really made an effort recently. Perhaps his priorities have changed. Scott’s death had something to do with it. Maybe he’s going through some sort of mid-life crisis. He’s changing physically; he’s changing mentally.”

Before she dedicated herself to the foundation that bore her brother’s name, Susan had a chance to collaborate with her father professionally. With a documentary filmmaker named Jill Marti, she had acquired the rights to
The Shadow Box
, the Tony-and Pulitzer Prize—winning play by
C. C. Pyle and the Bunion Derby
author Michael Cristofer that dealt with the lives of patients in a cancer hospice. Susan and Marti had the idea of producing it as a television movie, and they brought it to Joanne—there’s a juicy role as the flamboyant ex-wife of one of the patients—who in turn suggested that they ask Newman to direct it. Having directed a play of the author’s previously, and seeing an opportunity to present the “voluptuous, kinky” Joanne he knew to the world, he agreed. And he went to work with Cristofer on adapting the stage play for television.

The two neophyte producers, meanwhile, shopped the idea around to the TV networks, which initially all balked at the idea of entertaining their audiences with such grim material. Susan and Marti were prepared for this reaction. “We got together all the reviews of the play,” Susan recalled. “If they said, ‘But it deals with death,’ we said, ‘But look at this review, which talks about how funny it is.’ So when we walked in with this package, which included Joanne and Paul, it was pretty impressive. It was hard to say no.”

Having the Newmans in the mix attracted a stellar cast: Christopher Plummer as Joanne’s ex, James Broderick and Valerie Harper as a blue-collar couple, and Sylvia Sidney and Melinda Dillon as a crabby old woman and her dutiful, selfless daughter.
*
ABC agreed to fund the
film to the tune of $1.9 million—a hefty sum for a TV film—and granted the production a couple of real liberties: the right to a two-week rehearsal period (Newman, as ever, was particularly insistent on this) and a twenty-two-day shooting schedule.

The Newmans rented a house in Malibu for the month, and the production set itself up not far away, at a former Salvation Army camp in a canyon of the Santa Monica Mountains. The weather that winter, though, was brutal; Southern California had some of the worst rains in memory, and the old camp cabins that were being used as sets and offices were actually in danger of being swept away in landslides or flooding.
*
And yet somehow—perhaps because they had prepared so well during rehearsal—the film was finished more or less on time.

Everyone was aware that Newman was doing the film in large part to bolster Joanne. “I was fed up seeing her play frumps,” he declared proudly of her glamorous, brazen character. “She finally got into the part the day she glued on her fingernails.” Plummer, whose character has divorced Joanne’s after acknowledging his own homosexuality, was especially pleased that the Newmans’ collaborative instincts extended to the whole company. “It’s always slightly uncomfortable for the other performers when a husband directs a wife,” he said. “But Paul and Joanne have none of the secrets you find in that situation. I have the distinct impression that when Paul and Joanne go home they don’t talk about this at all.”

But the working rapport between the director-father and the producer-daughter was a trickier matter. “I’m an actress,” Susan reminded a reporter. “I always wanted to be directed by my father. Now I have to argue over the phone with him about renting some piece of equipment.” She spoke of “complex role playing” and “testy waters” and joked, “It’s hard to tell your father ‘No helicopter shots,’ but we did.” And Newman ultimately realized, after a little head-butting, that she was serving the project—and its director—very well. “I know
Susan’s not going to make any deals that are not in my interest,” he admitted. “She watches everything like a hawk.”

She was especially vigilant over the press. For a made-for-TV film,
The Shadow Box
had an impressive pedigree, and so it drew a lot of interest from reporters. But in all the coverage of the film in national magazines and in the most prestigious newspapers, not a word appeared about one of the most obvious aspects of the project: Newman and his daughter were making a film about saying good-bye to a loved one just a year after Scott’s death. Newman only hinted at a personal stake in the project when he described the film’s themes: “The statement is that we should have reverence for what happens today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, not throw time away.” It was not a statement of grief, certainly, but evidence nonetheless that a certain costly knowledge of life’s pains had informed the film.

After shooting wrapped and Newman began the editing, he found that the film was too long for the traditional two-hours-minus-commercials slot for which he made it. ABC magnanimously agreed to let the film run seven minutes overtime, bumping the evening news. And while they failed to find a major underwriting sponsor for the film—too much honesty about death and homosexuality, perhaps, for the prime time of the era—the network agreed to let the final thirty-five minutes air without interruption.

Unfortunately, they aired it on December 28, when even a funny, tasteful, and exquisitely performed movie about such grim themes was a tough sell. The reviews were respectful but not exactly enthusiastic. The acting was quite fine, but the production had a flatness that kept it from becoming truly evocative emotionally. Joanne was dazzling as a wise, boozy floozy, and Plummer, Broderick, Dillon, and Sidney were good, as was Harper. But the film didn’t really make a splash, either in the ratings or among TV insiders; it was nominated for three Emmys (including one for Newman) but won none.

If the makers of
The Shadow Box
had to content themselves with a
succès d’estime
, that was more than was available to the folks behind
When Time Ran Out…
, Newman’s second bit of work-for-hire for Irwin Allen. The disaster movie craze had come to an end once Steven Spielberg and George Lucas showed up with their special-effects pictures,
but Allen was still chugging along, and he paid Newman $2 million to come to Hawaii, along with the likes of Jacqueline Bisset, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine, William Holden, and Burgess Meredith, and confront a volcanic eruption. James Goldstone, who had made
Winning
, was on board as director, and—and nothing. It was dreadful make-work, stodgy and laughable and thrust into the marketplace well past its sell-by date. Nobody wanted to see it in theaters, and it had such an unpromising air about it that it was retitled for video release
(The Day the World Ended)
and then again when it aired on television
(Earth’s Final Fury).
Newman had rarely worked solely for money, and he hadn’t, since he left Warner Bros. more than two decades earlier, appeared in something that bore absolutely no potential for artistic innovation or experiment. This time he had done both.

A
T LEAST
he was putting the money to good use. In 1981 the Newmans expanded their Connecticut property significantly. Their original parcel had been gradually improved over the decades with out-buildings and so on, but they were hemmed in a bit. Their property ended at a small bluff above a finger of the Aspetuck River; across that waterway, in which Newman swam virtually every day he was in Westport, sat another, much larger parcel, owned by a widow whom the Newmans feared would someday sell out to a new owner who would build a modern monstrosity and ruin their view. They had approached the woman and asked to buy the portion of her acreage that faced theirs, but she didn’t want to break up the property. At the time Newman put a proposition to her: When she was ready to sell, he said, “You get two appraisals made, and I’ll get two made, and we’ll add ’em up and divide by four, and I’ll write you a check.”