Paul Newman (40 page)

Strasberg’s death shook the community of mature and seasoned Actors Studio veterans. People who had moved on in their lives and careers started to come back. Newman had watched Strasberg’s memorial service from the back of the Shubert Theater, where he stood alongside Anthony Quinn, and he soon found himself so drawn into rescuing the Studio that he allowed himself to be elected president of its corporate board in October. Among the people joining him in the new administration were Arthur Penn, a face from his first days at the Studio; the artistic director’s position that Strasberg had held for decades was to be shared by Ellen Burstyn and Al Pacino. The Actors Studio West would have new leadership too, including the likes of Sydney Pollack, Martin Landau, and Martin Ritt. They were planning a renaissance.

But from the start there was trouble. In 1983 the Studio was drawn into a messy legal battle with Strasberg’s widow, Anna, over the tape recordings of more than one thousand workshop sessions in which Strasberg and other participants—but mostly Strasberg—critiqued a piece of work they’d just seen. Anna believed these recordings were the equivalent of a professor’s lecture notes and belonged to Strasberg’s estate; the studio saw them more as collaborative artifacts produced as part of the organization’s ongoing activity. The matter came to the surrogate’s court in Manhattan, and Newman spent two and a half hours one November afternoon testifying on behalf of the Studio, explaining that in his view the material on the tapes was “criticism by your working peers.” Eventually Anna got the original tapes, and the Studio was given copies for educational purposes.

In 1984 Pacino resigned his co–artistic directorship, leaving Burstyn, who was also involved with Actors Equity and had a career as an actress and a director, on her own. In the coming years there was grousing from within the ranks of the Studio about its lack of coherent leadership. In 1987 the twice-a-week workshops were actually suspended—not for the first time, but still a significant step. In January 1988 a group of administrators, including Newman and Burstyn, who were believed to be at odds with one another, sat down to discuss what needed to be done to save the place. It was apparently a dramatic meeting. “We thrashed out all our problems and hopes,” Burstyn said. “It was a healthy period of reexamination.” The upshot: she let go of the reins. She and Newman were joined by the playwright Peter Masterson on a search committee for her replacement, and in a few months they settled on Frank Corsaro, a member of the Actors Studio for almost as long as it had existed (and the Newmans’ director in
Baby Want a Kiss
), as the institution’s first-ever full-time, salaried artistic director. Speaking at the news conference announcing the hiring, Newman acknowledged Burstyn’s efforts and admitted that she had saved the Studio from potential closure.

From that point on his involvement with the Studio would be more promotional and financial than administrative, even as he kept his name at the top of the board of directors until 1994. (“His contributions after that were more in the way of donations,” Arthur Penn recalled.) Whenever a significant documentary or book about the Studio appeared, Newman would be interviewed; he hosted the New York premiere of his film of
The Glass Menagerie
as a benefit for the Studio; he appeared as the guest on the first episode of the popular TV talk show
Inside the Actors Studio.
And he gave a lot of money to the Studio, personally and through Newman’s Own. But he had lost his appetite for actually running the thing.

O
R MAYBE
he was just too busy running a race-car team.

He still raced himself—and pretty well. Better than pretty well, even, considering that it was his second or third profession and that he was sidling up to sixty years of age. In 1981 he set a lap record at the Bridgehampton raceway on Long Island. In 1982, racing on the
professional Trans-Am circuit, he won a victory at Brainerd, Minnesota, in a race that he considered the best he’d ever run, beating a field of top-class drivers in a hundred-mile sprint race on a rain-soaked track. The very fact that he was in the race was a testament to his uncanny improvement as a driver. Several times, in fact, he’d been invited by Bob Sharp to race more powerful cars against stiffer competition. It was no publicity stunt. (Indeed, Newman was very strict about what Sharp could do with his name.) Rather, Sharp saw that Newman was actually improving—and getting faster—with age. He said, “He’s racing against truly professional drivers… comes in on weekends and does a darn good job.”

He made the Runoffs at Road Atlanta as a finalist in 1982 and again in 1983, but he had engine trouble the first time and lost the second when he crashed late in the race; Joanne was on hand for that crack-up, and she had some hot words for him when he managed to get his crippled car back to the pits and emerged unhurt. But he had matured into the sort of driver who could handle wrecks without undue alarm. In 1980 at Sonoma he’d rolled his Datsun 280Z three times before it skidded to a stop on its roof; not only did he refuse to be taken to a hospital, but he was put out that anyone thought enough of the accident to ask him about it. “Why are you making such a big deal of this?” he replied testily to a curious reporter. “I lost control, and you either do something smart or you don’t. I tried to muscle my way through. It didn’t work. So what can you do?”

He became known as a methodical and mechanical driver—fast, yes, but also precise and deliberate. “He’s amazing to watch on the racetrack,” said a fellow driver. “He’s so consistent. His concentration has to be outstanding to run lap after lap like that.” His sometime teammate Sam Posey agreed: “He has this incredible ability to focus, and he memorizes and knows a track inside out before he starts driving, and this makes him a fine driver.” Newman had a theory about his own style on the track: “I think as a racer you can either be violent and aggressive or you can be smooth. I’ve always found it compelling to see if you can go fast and do it very gracefully.”

But like many successful drivers before him, he knew that he would
one day be too slow in his bones to be fast—or even safe, let alone graceful. And so his thoughts turned from driving to managing a racing team—owning and maintaining cars for others to drive at levels higher than he could himself compete in. He began small, with a company called Broken Wheel Racing in the Can-Am series, a racing circuit that, as the name indicates, split its seasons between Canada and the United States. In the five years he had the team, he employed such drivers as Bobby Rahal, Danny Sullivan, and Al Unser. But the series shut down for financial reasons in 1982.

That winter Newman got a call from Carl Haas, an owner on the Can-Am circuit with whom Newman felt a competitive rivalry that wasn’t always friendly. Haas was thinking of starting a team on the Championship Auto Racing Team, or CART, circuit—a competition among the fastest open-wheeled race cars in the world, with the most famous drivers in the world inside them. As Newman later recalled, “We had not been exactly friendly during the Can-Am days, because he provided my cars for the Can-Am series late and overweight. But that was another discussion. And he said, ‘How’d you like to start a championship car?’ And I said, ‘Well…’ And he said, ‘What if Mario Andretti was the driver?’ And I said, ‘When and where would you like to meet?’”

Newman and Haas put aside their differences—or rather they managed to subjugate them sufficiently to work together, speaking only when necessary and almost never socializing, at least not in those early days. In 1983 they formed Newman-Haas Racing, with Andretti as their lead driver in a Class 7 Lola, one of the fastest classes of cars in the world. Despite the fame that the team would later earn, it wasn’t a success out of the gate; the first season, in fact, ended so poorly that Andretti threatened to leave when it ended. Newman visited the champion driver that winter at his home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to urge him not to quit. “He had been so loyal, such a good friend,” Andretti remembered. “How could I tell him no?”

Andretti and Newman truly did become friends, and Andretti didn’t know which was more amazing: Newman’s genuine racing ability or his ferocious competitiveness, which would come through in
practical jokes, contests of various sorts, and absurd bets. One night the Newmans were dining in New York with Andretti and his wife when the two men fought over who would pay the check; they settled it by betting on how long it would take a bottle to hit the floor after being knocked off the table. Another time Newman and Andretti argued in the middle of another Manhattan meal about how many people were out on the street at that very moment. “He says, ‘At least seventy-five,’” Andretti said. “I said, ‘No way: at the most fifty.’ Our wives roll their eyes and head for the ladies’ room. Paul and I get up and head out to the street to check out our bet. The poor maître d’ thinks we’re running out on the check.”

Newman’s friendship with the great driver paid off for his racing team immediately: Newman-Haas claimed the CART championship in 1984 by winning six races outright. And each spring Newman would relish the nearly month long visit to Indianapolis and the Indy 500, the most prestigious race in American open-wheel racing. Just as when he made
Winning
more than fifteen years earlier, he spent hours in the pits and garages talking about technical aspects of cars, drinking beer, and schmoozing with the boys. And the boys liked having him around. Jim Fitzgerald, a veteran racer a couple of years older than Newman who raced both with him and against him, recalled, “He never played the big-time movie star routine with us. I mean, he was never, ‘Okay, I’m Paul Newman, give me room.’ He’s someone who genuinely cares about cars and racing, like the rest of us, and really doesn’t like to have special attention paid to him.”

He had enormous fun too. CART had an annual race in Portland, Oregon, and Newman became famous there for his antics during race week. At the press conference for the very first race, Newman was asked to say a few words in honor of Mildred Schwab, the Portland city councilor who supervised parks and gave raceway officials much-needed help in obtaining noise-restriction abatements and other considerations for the event. Schwab was, in the words of one of the race organizers, “the homeliest woman you ever saw—never dressed well, didn’t wear makeup, really a sight.” In front of the assembled press Newman was called up to the podium to thank her for her efforts. He
grabbed her up in both arms, leaned her backward, and gave her a big kiss. “She turned red as a beet,” a witness remembered. “And she was speechless: both firsts.”

Another time Newman learned that the CART drivers would be competing in a go-kart race for charity the following day, and he found the suburban Portland venue where the event would be held. He asked the staff which was the fastest kart and then spent a couple of hours gunning it around the track. The next day he organized a betting pool to see who could run the fastest first lap; with the quickest rig and some freshly acquired local knowledge of the course, he won easily.

He couldn’t necessarily get other folks to share his passion. One race week he flew John Huston and his lady of the moment up to Portland and arranged for them to get VIP treatment at the track, including a police escort from the nearby airport. Huston watched about an hour of the race and then stormed out, barking, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Maybe. But for Newman, it was heaven on earth.

A
ND SOMEHOW
all this new energy—the food business, the charities, the engagement with the Actors Studio, the driving, the management of a racing team—fed the career upsurge that had begun with
Fort Apache
and
Absence of Malice.
The coolness in his screen persona that used to come off as flippancy had coalesced and hardened into something crystalline, pure, and solid. Not only was he enjoying working more than he had a decade or so earlier, but he was working better. According to Newman, Joanne had told him that it was all due to the car racing: “She says I was getting bored as an actor, maybe because I couldn’t get out of my own skin any longer. And that I was starting to duplicate myself. She says that she thinks that part of my passion for racing has now bled back into my acting. I don’t know. It’s as valid a theory as any other I’ve heard.”

In 1982 the proof of her surmise would emerge as Newman embarked on a new film, one with as distinguished a pedigree as any he’d ever made. Sidney Lumet, with whom Newman had worked nearly
thirty years earlier in those episodes of
You Are There
on television, was trying to make a film of Barry Reed’s novel
The Verdict
, about an alcoholic Boston personal-injury lawyer who finds in a desperate and probably unwinnable case a path to personal salvation. David Mamet had adapted the book, and his script was tart and piquant and filled with scenes of the protagonist doing what Lumet liked to call “kicking the dog”: behaving so contrary to ordinary morality that the audience would have to struggle to like him.

Frank Sinatra, a curious first choice, had turned down the role, but Lumet landed an even bigger star, arguably, when Robert Redford got interested. The trouble, as Lumet recalled, was that Redford wanted to replace all the kicking-the-dog material with petting-the-dog scenes. A string of writers rewrote Mamet’s script, eliminating the raw and coarse stuff and turning the story bland and dull. After the third or fourth neutered version of the original came to his desk, Lumet reread Mamet’s work and told Redford that he was going to make
that
film. Redford walked. And Newman signed on to play Frank Galvin: rummy, ambulance-chaser, and quixotic champion of a lost cause.

Newman had played flawed, broken, and troubled heroes since the 1950s; some of his greatest roles
—
in
The Left Handed Gun; The Long, Hot Summer; The Hustler; Hud;
his Tennessee Williams adaptations
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
Sweet Bird of Youth;
and
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean—
were predicated on his willingness as an actor to play kick-the-dog scenes. Even the good guys he played in films like
Somebody Up There Likes Me, Harper, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, and
The Sting
had antisocial and even criminal streaks to them. Perhaps because of his looks, perhaps because he could be such a Boy Scout in real life, he came most alive when playing a scoundrel or a rogue.