Paul Newman (45 page)

F
IFTY MOVIES, OR THEREABOUTS, IN THIRTY-ODD YEARS.
It sounds like a lot, but it wasn’t really. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Henry Fonda—guys like that averaged two pictures a year for decades, easy, even with hiatuses for war service, even when they were old and frail.

But those actors were employees of movie studios, with their workloads lined up for them and their images—on-screen and off—carefully managed by their bosses. Newman was a step further along in the evolution of Hollywood. He had put in only a few years before the studio model fell apart and was, for most of his career, an independent operator. He chose his projects one by one and built his career and résumé and persona on his own. In charge of himself, he made decisions about what movies to make and how to present himself to the world in the same way he made decisions about his performances and race cars and salad dressing recipes: studying, mulling, checking his instincts, and, finally, paying careful attention to his gut. There was serendipity to his career—luck, coincidence, happy fortune—but there was also hard application and righteous effort. Being an actor was his job, and he was raised to work at work.

From the vantage of movie theater seats, though, audiences don’t see the machinery or understand the intention of it or really want to know anything about it. Audiences want the magic, the illusion, something to disappear into and lose themselves in. And movie stars, carrying the weight of our collective aspirations, self-projections,
jealousies, dreams, and sexual urges, are a means through which audiences achieve that escape. They reassure, inspire, beguile. We
want
them; we want to
befriend
them; we want to
be
them: a chain of desire. And the greatest stars are the ones who can sustain that chain for the largest number of people over the longest span of time and in the widest variety of vehicles.

Whether he knew it or intended it or was comfortable with it or not, Newman managed that. From
Somebody Up There Likes Me
to
The Color of Money
and on into the dozen or so films that remained to him, he was able to pique an audience’s interest or lust or envy or sense of camaraderie sufficiently to forge a golden career. He made shifts over time—whether because of commerce, art, age, inclination, whimsy, opportunity, or calculation. But he sustained a screen self for, eventually, a half-century, and in sum it would be one of the most estimable movie careers ever built.

N
EWMAN GREW
and shed a series of actorly skins through the decades, but his transformations from one to the next were always subtle; watching his career unfold, taking his films as he made them, you wouldn’t necessarily think he was moving in any direction; look up, though, after twenty or thirty years, and you could see real development—improved craft, deepened humanity, palpable wisdom.

In the first films in which he had an impact, he was an unformed, psychologically delicate brooder of the classic early Method stripe: the oedipally tortured young men of
Somebody Up There, The Rack, The Left Handed Gun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and several of his best TV dramas could have come right out of Actors Studio workshop pieces. He’s trying things out in these roles: accents, physical postures, attitudes, angles of attack. His undeniably Brandoish Rocky Graziano booms through
Somebody
as if crashing a party, demanding center stage, and always on the edge of violence. But the savor of the performance wasn’t as indicative of what he would go on to do as was the energy of it; the only roles like it in the rest of his career were one-offs without resonant impact:
The Desperate Hours, Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, The Secret War of Harry Frigg.

Far more central to defining Newman as a star are the cowed, cracked psyches of his troubled POW in
The Rack
and his Billy the Kid and his boozy, self-lacerating Brick Pollitt: roles that recall James Dean and Montgomery Clift. Not only does he look more like his iconic self in these roles, but he starts to evince some of the qualities that became intrinsic to his lifelong persona. Although Newman is in his thirties in these pictures, he gives these characters a plausibly adolescent feel; they’re young men trying to find a way to fit into a world that demands more of them than they can perhaps bear. There’s hesitancy in them and self-doubt and real struggle to define themselves. They’re wounded; you want to hug them.

There’s a tremendous difference, of course, between the psychological math problem set up for him in the Rod Serling–Stewart Stern script of
The Rack
and the declawed but still splashy soap opera that Richard Brooks made of Tennessee Williams’s
Cat.
But the characters Newman plays in them are kindred: timorous sons who’ve gone errant and squandered their patrimony in their neurotic failings. There’s calculation in these performances: Newman deliberately tamps himself down so as to set up an explosion or a fracture late in the drama. But there’s also something very personal in his playing the disappointing heir: Art Sr. had been gone about eight years when his son played Brick Pollitt; confronting a character named Big Daddy in a basement filled with family heirlooms must have been more than a little bit creepy for Newman.

B
UT BY
then he’d already begun to develop a second skin: the knave. There were hints of the character in the no-good schemer of
The Helen Morgan Story
and again in some of his TV dramas. But he truly cracked it with
The Long, Hot Summer
, in which he blends sexual swagger, animal energy, and frank on-the-make-ism in a way that would surely have impressed Josh Logan sufficiently to give Newman a shot at filling Ralph Meeker’s shoes in the road cast of
Picnic
had Newman been capable of it sooner. Newman based his Ben Quick on the stillness of Brother Fochee, his friend and protector in Louisiana, and that afforded him the firm foundation he required at that stage of his craft. Secure on the ground, he freed himself. The physical confidence he
gained in the boxing ring; his fully avowed happiness at being on the set with Joanne; a certain breezy elation at feeling comfortable, athletic, in his work: all of it oozes out of him deliciously. He’s the cat who not only ate the canary, the cream, and whatever was left on the table after supper but is also rubbing up against you electrically asking for more and confident of getting it.

This guy, or versions of him, made Newman a movie star, the guy men wanted to be like and women wanted to eat on a cracker. You see him starched and cold in
The Young Philadelphians
, gifted and reckless in
The Hustler
, hot and icy in
Paris Blues
, rancid and sweaty in
Sweet Bird of Youth
, and, climactically, wild and mean in
Hud.
It’s not a self-projection; not really. There’s about as much of Newman the man in this character as there is in, oh, the humorless Ari Ben Canaan or the moony schmuck in
From the Terrace—
and surely no more. But it was something he found that he could do, at least in the discreet doses in which he needed to do it to build a performance for a movie: sell himself, anticipate luck, say exactly what he’s thinking, kill with a smile.

Eddie Felson is that way, and so is Hud Bannon. They’re not the same guy, of course: Fast Eddie is a martyr who almost gladly wills his own crucifixion, Hud the jaundiced centurion who’d prick him with a spear for kicks. But they’re equals in self-possession, and they’re equally guilty of overselling their gifts and their charm and their status and power: Fast Eddie is neither the hot item that he thinks he is nor the legend that Minnesota Fats most surely is, and Hud’s domain stretches only so far as his Caddy can go on a tank of gas and shrinks to the size of an empty house by the end of the film.

They’re devastating characters, with their crooked grins and their wantonness and their physical abilities—whether those are expressed in boozing or screwing or fighting or shooting or enduring hours of mortal combat in a pool hall. And they’ve gotten beyond the whole daddy business—or at least learned to sublimate it and transform it into something they can use. Ben Quick is happy to latch on to the coattails of the big man in town and supplant the neurotic prince who should, by rights, inherit things; Hud does just about everything he can think of to offend, alienate, disenfranchise, and damn near kill his old man. Fast Eddie is the nearest of the three to the older Newman
persona, with his agent and his awe of Fats and his apprenticeship to a gambling fixer; but he’s sufficiently evolved to realize, after great pains, that if he’s to be his own man, he needs to overcome not a father figure but himself.

Newman’s confidence in these roles is ravishing. It’s hard to believe that little more than a decade earlier he couldn’t bring himself to be heard weeping offstage in
Saint Joan
at Yale and now he was capable of pulling off such a raw and bold and magnetic and hurtful character as Hud. He spoke of Fast Eddie Felson as a technician who was performing at a high level of his craft, and for the first time he himself was that guy—masterful, deep, inventive—and making it look easy. It’s clear to see how he cemented his status as a movie star at this moment: he’s beautiful and he’s charming and he’s got depth—a keeper.

B
UT AFTER
Hud
Newman grew restless. He had found a groove but was chary of it, hitting the limits of his patience with repetition just as, in an unfortunate coincidence of timing, he was reaching the limits of his technical versatility. He tried to stretch, in
The Prize, The Outrage
, and
Lady L.
But these films simply didn’t fit him, and he knew it. What he didn’t know was where to go or how to present himself next. And then he found not a new path or a new mask but a new attitude. He became an ironist, a rascal, a scamp. Again, there was some hangover from prior roles—Ben Quick especially, who it seems would be perfectly content to walk out of the movie he appears in and come face-to-face with whatever might be next for him.

That cocky mien was shared by Fast Eddie and Hud, but it didn’t define them. It was an essential component, though, of the persona Newman wore in the most popular films of his career and during the longest single chunk of work he did: from
Harper
to
Slap Shot
, a string of ne’er-do-wells who can laugh off both adversity and good fortune with a cynical, breezy chuckle. Harper, who seems more interested in getting drunk with a buddy than in solving a case, operates, in this light, just across the dotted line of legality from Cool Hand Luke Jackson or Butch Cassidy or Henry Gondorff or Roy Bean or—insofar as the rules of hockey are laws—Reggie Dunlop. They’re all rambunctious and
smart-alecky, these characters, unable to hold on to marriages or well-paid jobs or to settle in homes or, really, to grow up.

Newman made these pictures in his forties and beyond, and he carries himself like a man—like a boy, really—half his age or less. Between
Hud
and
When Time Ran Out…
he made two dozen films, and he played married men in only two of them:
Winning
, which was about a failed late-life marriage, and
Sometimes a Great Notion
, in which the Stamper women are treated as chattel by their macho husbands. At a time when Newman was continually celebrated (rightly or not) for the stability of his real-life marriage, the characters he played continually failed to mature into the responsibilities that his generation commonly associated with manhood. And an unwillingness to be tied down was, quite often, the least of the boyish aspects of these fellows. They boozed and brawled and skirted the law and cussed and drove too fast and were disagreeable when they felt like it and generally carried on like superannuated kids.

It might seem a risk for a man old enough to have served in World War II to try to sustain a top-flight Hollywood movie career in the 1960s and ’70s by playing rakes, roués, renegades, and other countercultural types. And yet such was Newman’s appeal and such was his nose for a project that fit him that he was embraced by audiences his own age as well as by the younger crowd that was otherwise turning on to actors like Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino. He could at once color inside the lines and impart the air of somebody who didn’t care a whit where the lines were. And even as his instinct for choosing projects became spottier in the 1970s and he turned his most engaged attention to auto racing, he could still, if only in flashes, rekindle his most charismatic, impish aspect. Reggie Dunlop, foulmouthed, adulterous, drunk, punchy, and filled with unsubstantiated, cockeyed hope, was the epitome of the type: this was truly an eternal boy-man.

B
UT THEN
came the death of Scott, and Newman began to behave as if he had learned that playing men to whom life, death, responsibility, and the feelings of others didn’t matter might not be such a cool hand
after all. The five films he made after losing his son
—Fort Apache the Bronx, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, Harry & Son
, and
The Color of Money—
found his film characters suddenly enmeshed in a number of realities to which they had previously been immune: the scourges of age, death, disloyalty, greed, sullied honor, soured blood. There was a commensurate leap in his skills. Previously, even when he was playing against his looks, as in, say,
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
, the very act of attempting to look awful was a kind of joke. But now his characters had bags—and baggage—under their eyes. They had losses that they couldn’t shake off with a beer or a brawl or by banging around with the boys or by bedding some girl. He played a cop for the first time in
Fort Apache
, and in that role he could be seen evolving from a fun-loving sort like Reggie Dunlop into the more haggard and rueful likes of Michael Gallagher, Frank Galvin, and the older, wiser, sour Eddie Felson.