Paul Newman (41 page)

But Galvin was another strain of mutt altogether. “He’s panicked. He’s frightened. He’s out of control. He’s on the edge of things all the time,” said Newman. “It’s a relief to have an unprotected character to play. The guy’s an open wound. As the curtain rises, he is face down in a urinal. Sensational.” Simply by embracing the role, Newman felt, he had made a breakthrough as an actor.

Nevertheless Lumet, who had directed such remarkable performances
as Rod Steiger’s in
The Pawnbroker
, Al Pacino’s in
Serpico
and
Dog Day Afternoon
, and Peter Finch’s in
Network
, felt his star wasn’t wholly revealing himself. After the two weeks of rehearsal were over, Lumet asked Newman to sit for a chat. “I told him,” Lumet recalled, “that while things looked promising we really hadn’t hit the emotional level we both knew was there in David Mamet’s screenplay. I said that his characterization was fine but hadn’t yet evolved into a living, breathing thing.” Newman explained that he hadn’t yet memorized his lines and would soon have a better sense of the flow of the script. But Lumet held firm: “I told him I didn’t think it was the lines. I said that there was a certain aspect of Frank Galvin’s character that was missing so far. I told him that I wouldn’t invade his privacy, but only he could choose whether or not to reveal that part of the character and therefore that aspect of himself. I couldn’t help him with the decision.” When they met again to begin shooting, Lumet recalled, “sparks flew. He was superb. His character and the picture took on life.”

Newman, echoing his wife, credited his activities away from acting with helping him reach the breakthrough. “Racing has destroyed every iota of conservatism that was in me,” he said. “Only at this point in my life could I have played such a splattered character as Frank Galvin. Any time before, I’m afraid, I would have held back and played him much too cautiously.”

The film shot in New York and Boston in the early months of 1982, with a cast that included James Mason as Galvin’s rival counsel, Milo O’Shea as a hostile judge, Jack Warden as Galvin’s loyal old friend, and Charlotte Rampling as a barroom beauty with whom Galvin has an unlikely affair. Newman had a real feel for the character, prodding himself with reminders to do less, to let the emotions bubble up from an internal place and not play them out broadly. He let his hair grow out a little, to give Galvin the look of someone who was too distracted to have a sense of his own appearance. (His dresser on the film nevertheless found him almost impossible to clothe so that he looked seedy: the wardrobe just fit him too well.) He even enjoyed a bit of Newman’s Luck on the set in Boston when he got up off a couch minutes before a huge chandelier fell right on it. “God was with us,” producer David Brown swore.

When it was over, Newman was delighted with the work he’d done and the film they’d made. “I welcomed the opportunity to let the blemishes, the indecision—the wreckage—show through,” he told an interviewer. “There’s a tendency for an actor after a period of time to protect himself. You couldn’t get away with that in this part. You just had to let everything hang out. And that was refreshing.”

Milo O’Shea described Newman’s transformation this way: “He personally has been through a great deal. Losing his son was a terrible blow both to him and Joanne. You can’t push that off, not when you have a great wound like that. It has had a great effect on his work and his life. He really is feeling his way into a deeper part of himself, to a layer that has never been exposed before.”

And the response to the finished film was unanimously favorable. “Newman always has been an interesting actor,” wrote Roger Ebert, “but sometimes his resiliency, his youthful vitality, have obscured his performances; he has a tendency to always look great, and that is not always what the role calls for. This time, he gives us old, bone-tired, hung-over, trembling (and heroic) Frank Galvin, and we buy it lock, stock and shot glass.” “This is as good a role as Mr. Newman has ever had,” Janet Maslin added in the
New York Times
, “and as shrewd and substantial a performance as he has ever given.” And people came out to see it: at $54 million, it reaped the highest gross of any of Newman’s films since
The Towering Inferno.

Surely he would now win an Oscar, after having gotten to the altar five times only to be jilted. Around the corridors of the publicity department at 20th Century–Fox,
The Verdict
had been referred to as “Paul Newman’s Oscar picture.” The studio sponsored a TV special, aired nationally on ABC, to promote the film and its star:
Paul Newman: The Man and His Movies.
But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, Newman found himself amid a formidable pack of competitors: Dustin Hoffman
(Tootsie)
, Jack Lemmon
(Missing)
, Peter O’Toole
(My Favorite Year)
, and the relatively unknown Shakespearean actor Ben Kingsley, who had played the title role in
Gandhi.

Newman was in Florida at work on a new film when word of his sixth nomination reached him. “I told him that
The Verdict
got five nominations and that he was one of them,” recalled a friend who was
on the set with him that day. “He just smiled and said that would be good for the movie. He’s not making a big fuss.”
*

But a big fuss was being made. The film was released at more or less the time his food business began, and at around the same time that Newman was doing public-service TV ads to remind drivers to buckle their seat belts: he seemed to be everywhere. When the film premiered, he was on the cover of
Time.
Naturally,
Newsweek
saw all the publicity as an orchestrated plot and ran an item suggesting that Newman was campaigning for an Oscar. “He’s a willing participant,” said an unnamed studio executive, “no matter what he says about hating awards.” Warren Cowan shot back a tart riposte: “As Mr. Newman’s public-relations representative, we would know if there were a campaign on his behalf. There isn’t. He would not permit it.”

And it didn’t matter anyway. On Oscar night Kingsley took home the Academy Award as part of
Gandhi
’s haul of eight trophies. Newman, who had to be prodded into attending, joked afterward, “I flew to the Coast only to prove I’m a good loser.” When he got back to Florida, his colleagues presented him with a T-shirt bearing an image of himself with his hands wrapped around Gandhi/Kingsley’s throat. He had the good grace to laugh the whole thing off, but his failure to win Hollywood’s most glamorous acting prize was beginning to make everybody concerned look a bit ridiculous.

A
FTER
The Verdict
had finished shooting, the Newmans took a family vacation to Europe—Paris, Nice, Florence—and then split up again on their separate but parallel tracks: he spent the summer racing, she went to Kenyon to appear in a production of Noël Coward’s
Hay Fever.
(Newman caught her performance and was dazzled: “I thought, ‘I don’t know that woman. She must be a real scorcher.’”) They were reunited for the holidays in Westport, as per the traditional custom, and again in January 1983, when they marked their twenty-fifth anniversary
in front of a small group of family and friends by renewing their vows, with their five daughters standing as bridesmaids. That same month they moved into a new apartment in Manhattan, a place with Central Park views, a large terrace, and a custom-installed sauna.

And then they set off to Florida to work on a film together. Ronald Buck, the Los Angeles lawyer with whom Newman had owned the Factory and the burger joint Hampton’s, had written a screenplay called
Harry’s Boy
, about the relationship of a widowed blue-collar squarejohn and his bookish, sensitive son. Buck had been peddling the thing around Hollywood to various stars; Henry Fonda, Telly Savalas, Jason Robards, and Anthony Quinn had all considered it. But he’d had no luck, and then he showed it to Joanne, who he thought would be a good choice to play the gal who lives next door to Harry and carries an unrequited torch for him. Joanne, in turn, showed it to Newman, who called Buck and asked to be allowed a chance to direct it.

After two years and several rewrites (he once claimed there were as many as twenty) Newman felt they had a picture worth making. He showed the script to various studios and producers—and was rebuffed everywhere. “I thought it was stageworthy,” he said, “but a lot of people didn’t. That pissed me off, and I find I work very well when I’m pissed off.”

So he decided to commit himself to the project even further. “It reminded me of
Rachel, Rachel,”
he explained, “which was turned down by every major studio. And this was turned down by about five, I guess, which just served to get me angry. So I finally agreed to act in it.” Buck was astounded at his good fortune. “It never dawned on me that Paul was right for the role,” he admitted. But with Newman on board as star and director and Woodward on board in the role Buck had thought of her for, they got a $9 million green light from Orion Pictures.

For the role of Howard, the son, Newman and Buck looked at dozens of young actors, finally settling on twenty-eight-year-old Robby Benson, who was trying to transform himself from teen idol to serious actor. A strong supporting cast, including Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Judith Ivey, and Morgan Freeman, was added. The film was shot in
the early months of 1983 in southern Florida—Fort Lauderdale, mostly, to emphasize the ordinary working-folks aspect of it. Newman had directed himself once before, on
Sometimes a Great Notion
, and he’d sworn he’d never do it again, but he thought he had a way to make it work. He asked Joanne, who had recently directed a television film called
Come Along with Me
, to keep an eye on him, serving as a director surrogate when he was acting. But it didn’t quite work out. “She felt uneasy about asserting herself,” Newman said, “and I felt uneasy about delegating responsibility.” As a result, he thought that he had given a less-than-committed performance. “There are places where I caught myself on film watching the other actors instead of playing the character,” he admitted. “I think we got it all out in the editing. But I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.”

To be sure, he hadn’t given his all to the production. He was in the habit of getting away on the weekends, going to Tampa to see Clea in an equestrian competition, to Arizona to race his car, to Los Angeles for the Oscars. The crew respected and liked him; they waived union rules to create some time to allow him to attend the Academy Awards, for instance, and they came to rely on the snack of popcorn he provided them in the afternoons. (“It’s incredible how cranky those guys would get if they didn’t get their popcorn exactly at four,” Newman said.)

Most of all they avoided the obvious: making comparisons between the material they were shooting and the real-life tragedy of Scott Newman’s death. According to Buck, “The name Scott Newman never came up” during the screenwriting process. But, he continued, “How could Paul not think of him? He had to be drawing on that experience. He never said so, but he had to have those feelings.” When the picture, retitled
Harry & Son
, finally appeared the following year, Newman refused point-blank to make the comparison or indeed talk about Scott at all. “That’s not in the public domain,” he told a reporter for
People.

Unfortunately,
Harry & Son
wasn’t either—or not for long, at any rate. It was a stilted if sincere film with little of the credible intimacy of Newman’s other works as a director. Benson seemed grown-up at some times and half-witted at others. From a directorial standpoint, Newman flubbed the script’s light comedy and made a hash of a pair of
risqué scenes focused on a man-eater played by Judith Ivey. His own performance was grounded and true, but the film seemed unreal, despite all the efforts to give it blue-collar cred. It fizzled, deservedly.

H
E HAD
taken 1977 off from making movies so that he could concentrate on auto racing. And he had so much going on in 1984 and 1985 that he could have done more or less the same—dedicated himself to his own driving and to the activities of the Newman-Haas team, tended to the unexpected growth of Newman’s Own—without excuses.

He wasn’t tired of work, that was for sure: in January 1985 he joined with a group of his fellow Connecticuters in forming a limited partnership to acquire and run the Westport Country Playhouse, a treasure of a small-town theater housed in a converted barn that had hosted legions of the greatest names of Broadway’s and Hollywood’s golden ages since 1931, when its opening season had starred Dorothy Gish. He and Joanne would remain intimately involved in the operations of the theater for decades.

Like so many other things they did, this decision to roll up their sleeves and help the local theater in its hour of need endeared them to their fellow Westporters. The town had many celebrity residents, but the Newmans were granted special status, left to be their unassuming selves, to shop, to play badminton at the Y, to carol or trick-or-treat, to eat at ordinary restaurants, to pick through ears of corn at roadside produce stands, to play softball in the summer league in the park, to participate in the reading-aloud-to-kids program at the local library.

Those simple pleasures gratified Newman and sustained him into his later years. But at the same time, he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the script opportunities that were coming his way: films that weren’t written to the standard he would hope for or that asked him to repeat something he felt he’d done—perhaps overdone—before. So whether by plan or whimsy or mere circumstance, he stayed out of it for a while, aloof, remote.

That same January he turned sixty, and the milestone caught him a bit unprepared emotionally—and even in something of a downspin. “Joanne was working,” he remembered, “and I was at the beach, letting
her support me, which is terrific. I kept going down, down, down. I thought, ‘Well, that’s interesting. You say it doesn’t make any difference, eh? Then why are you stretched out on a sofa with a wet cloth on your forehead?’ And of course the next day I had a temperature of 103. I had the flu! And I thought, ‘Thank God! At least it’s legitimate!’”