Paul Newman (44 page)

As was his practice, Newman had the actors come to the studio for two weeks of rehearsal, along with the cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, whom Newman had met on
The Color of Money
, and Stewart Stern, Newman’s old screenwriter chum who was on hand as a kind of fly on the wall.
*
The principal intention of the film, as Newman saw it, would be to bring the theatrical experience of
Menagerie
to the screen
as fully as possible. “I was curious what would happen if you didn’t rewrite Williams but still shot the play as a film,” he explained. A highly detailed but more or less stagelike set was being built at the Kaufman Astoria Studios (which, as it happened, Stern’s uncle by marriage, Paramount Pictures founder Adolph Zukor, had built). Newman didn’t intend to shoot it through a proscenium arch—it wouldn’t
look
like a stage play—but he wanted to maintain the domestic intensity that Williams had concocted and that had been embodied in the stage production he was filming.

Newman was working very hard, but to a notable degree, this show was Joanne’s. The play had always spoken deeply to her. Having grown up in a world of manners not unlike those it depicted, she had once shared with Williams himself remembrances of her mother that startled the playwright. “My mother was a little Southern belle,” she recalled. “She had no education. She
was
Amanda Wingfield. Tennessee once said to me, ‘I thought in writing Amanda I was writing about
my
mother, but it seems like I was writing about
yours
!’”

Malkovich, an experienced theater director himself, understood quickly that Newman was as interested in preserving Joanne’s stage performance as he was in creating a memorable version of Williams. “Once,” Malkovich remembered, “he told me that he found me a little too rough with her, or cruel. But I saw that as part of how Tom communicated. He had a tendency to protect Joanne or to feel like he was protecting Joanne, and God knows that was perfectly understandable.”

The two butted heads occasionally in rehearsal, but never with animus, and they seemed to agree, if only tacitly, that they would let the evidence of what they captured on film settle some of their differences about matters of interpretation or authorial intent. Stern, watching them work together as if he were Newman’s cornerman in a boxing match, never felt entirely comfortable with Malkovich. “He has made it clear already that as a student of this play, and as a director, he may consider himself more experienced about its possibilities than Paul,” he wrote in his book-length diary about the production. (Malkovich would recollect no such power struggles.)

There was, though, the matter of the alarm clocks. After the final day of rehearsals on
Menagerie
, Malkovich made a quick trip to London.
Arriving back at his New York flat the night before shooting began, his biological clock failed him; he awoke well before dawn and started to set off to work, only to realize his mistake and get back into bed. When he awoke, after midday, it was to the sound of the manager of his building letting himself into the apartment to see if he was okay; he was seven hours late for his appearance on the set, and the production company had become concerned. He raced to the studio, made his apologies, was assured by Joanne that his tardiness was nothing to worry about, and helped get as much as possible done in the time that remained to them.

When they broke for the day, Newman beckoned for him to walk out of the studio with him. “And as I left the set,” Malkovich said, “about sixty or seventy alarm clocks went off. There were cars, there were ducks, there were golf balls, there were fancy alarm clocks and not-fancy ones and electric ones and battery-powered ones and song-playing ones. And he pushed his sunglasses down and said, ‘They’re all for you.’ And I said, ‘Thank you, that’s very kind. But tomorrow, if my car breaks down on the way to work, does this mean you’ll buy me a Ferrari?’ And he said, ‘Try me.’ And I thought, ‘Probably I won’t.’ They packed up all the clocks and gave them to me, and I gave them away for years. It was such an incredible thing that you could give someone an alarm clock that Paul Newman had given to you because you were such a dick as to sleep through your call on his film.”

N
EWMAN WAS
editing
Menagerie
when he heard that he was nominated for the seventh time as best actor in the Oscar derby for his role in
The Color of Money.
He had joked for years about how elusive the honor was, and now that he finally had one, albeit honorary, on his shelf, it was almost comical to find himself in the running yet again. He was up against a comparatively weak field: Dexter Gordon
(’Round Midnight)
, Bob Hoskins
(Mona Lisa)
, William Hurt
(Children of a Lesser God)
, and James Woods
(Salvador).
But he’d lost in such races before. So he decided, somewhere in the process, not to go to Los Angeles for the ceremony and to stay in New York and watch what happened on TV.

On Oscar night Woods, fidgety in his seat, repaired to the bar at
the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a nerve-soothing drink, and he found Hoskins and Gordon there chatting. “We talked a bit,” Woods remembered, “and then the three of us drank to Paul Newman.” It was a propitious toast. When Bette Davis opened the envelope to announce the winner, it was Newman’s name that she read. Robert Wise, who had directed Newman in a career-making role as Rocky Graziano more than thirty years earlier, accepted the award for his old colleague. Newman, who wouldn’t even touch the statue until it was presented to him at a dinner party at Warren Cowan’s house a few weeks later, released a statement through Cowan’s office: “I’m on a roll. Maybe now I can get a job.”

I
N RETROSPECT
, it amused him that
The Color of Money
should have been the film he won an Oscar for. “I don’t think they gave it to me for the film,” he said, “but for a body of work, which is funny because I got it for a body of work before I got it for a body of work.” But in fact he
was
on a roll. Buoyed by the success of
The Color of Money
, he had signed a three-year nonexclusive development and production deal with Disney that winter. Peter McAlevey was the production executive on what was called “the Newman account,” and he found a couple of projects that he thought might interest the actor, including
Seven Summits
, an account of Disney president Frank Wells’s effort to climb the highest mountain peaks on each continent, and something called
Monte Carlo Cop
, a
policier
in which Newman and Richard Dreyfus would play a father and son trying to find Billy Baldwin, their grandson and son, respectively, after he has gone missing while investigating an arms-smuggling ring on the Riviera. The problem, McAlevey said, was that Newman made it clear that “he would rather be driving race cars than acting in a formulaic programmer to fill out an opening on the release date. He was either going to work with the finest people on the best stuff, or he was just going to race.”

And why not? He had won national racing titles at the Runoffs at Road Atlanta in 1985 and 1986—giving him four overall. He’d won a second race at a higher level of competition, the Trans-Am circuit, in 1986 at Lime Rock. And he’d followed Henry Fonda as only the second
actor to win a competitive Oscar the year after being awarded an honorary one.

The Glass Menagerie
premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1987 to respectful if not adulatory reviews. Gene Siskel called it “a surprisingly emotional version of the play,” while his partner in the balcony, Roger Ebert, averred, “Paul Newman is a very good director, very quiet, and he respects the material.” In the
Washington Post
Hal Hinson disagreed almost violently: “The simple fact is that Newman is a bad director. And, even worse, sitting in the director’s chair, he seems to forget everything he ever knew about acting… Newman has failed to do the one basic thing a director must do: He has settled on a style for his adaptation without arriving at an interpretation.” In the
New York Times
Janet Maslin fell somewhere in between, concluding with a passage that Newman cited as especially annoying in his conversations with other reporters: “Quiet reverence is its prevailing tone, and in the end that seems thoroughly at odds with anything Williams ever intended.” That fall the New York Film Festival passed on showing it (in large part because Newman and his distributor insisted it be made the opening- or closing-night showcase), but it was the centerpiece of a lucrative fund-raising gala for the Actors Studio.

Once again he was complaining that there wasn’t anything worth doing as an actor, but now he seemed genuinely content to take time away from the movies. As ever, projects passed through his hands, some of which were made without him (
Witness, Rollover, Who Framed Roger Rabbit
, and two adaptations of A. E. Hotchner books,
Papa Hemingway
and
King of the Hill
) and some of which were never made at all, including an English-language remake of
Das Boot
, a sequel to
Rachel, Rachel
, adaptations of the police thriller
The Man with a Gun
, and the western
The Homesman
, as well as biographical films about journalist Walter Lippman, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and controversial World War II–era general “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell. For the first time since he broke into movies, he went two years without premiering a new one in theaters—and by the time he finally got around to choosing a film, it would be three.

He was still racing—he introduced Tom Cruise to full-scale competitive
driving that summer, and he watched on in horror that autumn when Jim Fitzgerald, one of his best friends in the automobile world, was killed in a Trans-Am race in Florida; Newman was ahead of Fitzgerald in the race, and he found himself unable to continue driving after the pause caused by the fatal wreck.

He maintained his loud and public interest in politics. He outright refused to appear in an antidrug ad with Nancy Reagan, claiming, per a spokesman, that he “just couldn’t find the time.” And he augmented his activism by becoming vocal about the preservation of various landmarks in New York City: theaters in the Times Square area, the traditional architecture of the Yorkville district of the Upper East Side, and the neighborhoods around the New York Coliseum and the Guggenheim Museum.

After decades of resisting the temptation to hawk products for money, he allowed himself to get a little bit pregnant, as it were, appearing in commercials for coffee and automobiles in Japan, then showing up on American TV screens in an ad for American Express, donating his fee to the Newman’s Own charitable funds.

In May 1988 he appeared in New Haven to accept an honorary degree from Yale University in recognition of his artistry and philanthropy. And in June he appeared in a courtroom in nearby Bridgeport, defending himself and Newman’s Own in a lawsuit filed by a Westport delicatessen owner who claimed that he had been a consultant in the formation of the successful salad dressing business and was due a percentage of its profits. Newman took the stand and angrily sparred with the lawyer for the plaintiff, defending the operating model of his company and its method of dispersing funds, which, it was revealed, included a small salary to A. E. Hotchner and some donations to fledgling race-car drivers. Newman’s frustration with the trial spilled out into the street; leaving the courtroom after a particularly contentious session, he bumped into a Westport newspaperman who had sided with the
New York Post
in declaring him five foot eight; he loudly berated the fellow, calling him, among other things, an “asshole”; the reporter, fearing for his safety, later said, “My first thought was, ‘Would he hit an old man?’ Then I realized we’re the same age.”

After eighteen days of sometimes explosive and sometimes comical
courtroom wrangling, a mistrial was declared when the judge learned that someone had accidentally left copies of several pretrial depositions in the jury room. Two years later another judge, with a much firmer hand, presided over a more sedate and expeditious trial, which was decided in Newman’s favor after little more than a week. Newman’s Own, the jury decided, was indeed Newman’s own.