Paul Newman (5 page)

That growth spurt in the navy meant that Newman could finally do at Kenyon what he couldn’t at Shaker Heights High School: play football—albeit only on the practice squad. As it happened, the extra size he’d gained didn’t come with a commensurate increase in ability. “I was one of the
worst
football players in the history of Kenyon,” he remembered later. “I was a defensive linebacker, and I weighed 152 pounds.
Crunch!
Oh man, I used to get
hit
!”

But being on the team meant being one of the boys, and that ultimately may have been his true goal. From the start of the 1946–47 academic year, he could hang his identity on the fact that he was a football player, even if only on the reserve team. It wasn’t an earthshaking status, but being an athlete may have been even more important to him because he didn’t join a fraternity at Kenyon, as he had at
Ohio U. He was in his glory, but barely two months into his first term at the school, the bill for the booze and rambunctiousness came due.

The police got the first word: at approximately midnight on Wednesday, October 23, 1946, somebody at the Sunset Club in Mount Vernon, Ohio—the nearest town to Kenyon—summoned the cops to help break up a fight between some local boys and a band of Kenyon football players who’d come into town to slug back beers and chat up girls. Two plainclothes deputies, one a veteran of the Navy Shore Patrol, wandered into the melee and separated Kenyon football star Bert Fulton from the fracas. As they headed toward the door with him, somebody tripped one of the cops (remember, they weren’t in uniform), and then a small posse of students jumped the duo, intent on freeing Fulton. The officers managed to get out the door and were pursued by the rowdy mob. They bundled Fulton and another Kenyon student, Richard Paisley, into a car and took them to the station. A small contingent followed, four of whom wound up getting arrested along with their friends. One of those four was Newman.

On Thursday afternoon all six were charged with “willfully resisting and obstructing” police officers and were released on $200 bond apiece; more than one hundred Kenyonites were in the courtroom to witness the arraignment. Four of the six arrestees were first-team players, and they were immediately dismissed from the Kenyon team, even with a game scheduled for the very next day. Newman and another player were kicked off the reserve team. On Friday the
Cleveland News
ran a front-page account of the incident and named all the boys involved, specifically mentioning not only Art Newman but the Newman-Stern Company. About ten days later Fulton and Paisley were sentenced: $200 in fines and thirty days in jail, the latter penalty suspended. Newman and the three others had the charges against them dismissed because, according to the prosecutor, they were “a part of the resistance only as they were a part of the crowd.” Fulton and Paisley were expelled from Kenyon; Newman and the others were put on probation.

Those are the facts as the newspapers reported them. Newman, who dined out on this tale of youthful miscreance for years, had his own version, which usually went something like this:

Fair enough. But if he found a way to burnish the memory and make it easy to brush off decades later, the episode must have occasioned some intense soul-searching at the time. Newman was of legal age and paying for college through the GI Bill, so there wasn’t anything his parents could do to punish him beyond the discipline that the court and the school dished out. And he absolutely loved donning the image of a brawling no-goodnik. But he had shamed Art—a sin he couldn’t bear—and had gotten himself separated from the one thing that he most loved at school: football. As it stood after the fact, he was an economics major uninterested in business and deprived of the camaraderie that came with being on the team.

A
ND
so he turned to the stage—eventually.

In most of his accounts of the fight at the Sunset Club and its aftermath, Newman explains that finding himself a man without a football team, he wandered over to the speech department, where auditions were being held for a production of
The Front Page.
Within ten days, he would claim, he was immersed in a new activity.

But memory played tricks on him. Newman did, in fact, make his debut on the Kenyon stage in the role of Hildy Johnson in
The Front Page.
But that production took place something like one year and ten days after the Sunset Club brawl: a program dates the performances as being held on November 6, 7, and 8, 1947.

In the time between the fight and his stage debut, he continued to struggle along as an unwilling economics student who hadn’t yet discovered a channel for his talents. “He was a C student,” recalled James Michael, who taught drama at Kenyon, “but it wasn’t because he wasn’t bright.” Indeed, certain aspects of his intelligence and effervescence shone right on the surface. He had a positive genius, in fact, for partying, for enterprise, and for cutting a singular figure on campus.

“Almost everybody knew Paul,” recalled a classmate, Lewis Weingard. “We had Saturday night parties in every fraternity, and I don’t think Paul ever missed making the total rounds… He had a coonskin coat that he always wore around the campus on party night, and you would know Paul was coming when people would say, ‘Here comes the coonskin coat!’” When there wasn’t a party, he was a regular at the Gambier tavern known as Dorothy’s Lunch. “I lived there,” he recalled fondly. “It had a certain grubbiness about it.” Another classmate, Robert G. Davis, remembered him as a fixture at the tavern: “He gave the impression that drinking and carousing were his primary priorities.”

But he was also an entrepreneur of some repute. When Kenyon held dance weekends and women were allowed on campus, Newman would make runs to Cleveland and load up on corsages and bouquets to sell to his classmates at a premium. Soon after getting thrown off the football team, Newman became the operator of a student laundry on Gambier’s quaint little main street, renting a storefront and some washing machines and cleaning his classmates’ clothes and linens over the weekend. (“I washed so many socks: that’s why I hate ’em today,” he’d later claim.) A light went on in his head one day, and he modified the business in a way Tom Sawyer would’ve admired: he created a do-your-own-laundry policy, luring customers by bringing in kegs of beer that they could partake of gratis while they scrubbed, dried, and folded their things. It was an inspired bit of promotion: “The beer cost me
eleven dollars,” he recalled, “and I was getting 25 percent from the gross of the laundry. Those guys used to bring $250 of laundry each week, and sometimes they got so drunk we put them in the bins with the clothes!”

And it gave rise to another example of Newman’s Luck—another near-escape of the sort that seemed to bless him regularly. Toward the end of his senior year Newman sold the laundry to a fellow who followed the same business model but was less charmed than his predecessor. “One day a stallion had the misfortune of standing in front of the laundry,” he said. “It wasn’t long after the Saturday beer had been delivered. One of the college customers had put on a pair of boxing gloves and was seen performing an unnatural act on the stallion. Suffice it to say that they shut the laundry down the next day.”

He escaped blame for that one, but he was still notorious for cutting up. In his senior year Newman took a major part in an invasion of the women’s dorms at nearby Denison College. As a witness put it, “Various groups of men dispersed themselves throughout the buildings, serenading the occupants and at the same time securing dates for Saturday. Meanwhile, Mr. Newman, who had arrived somewhat earlier than the rest, was entertaining the crowd outside. In the tradition of a gentleman from Kenyon, Paul graciously offered to burn his car to amuse the people. This is representative of the chivalry that Kenyon offers.”
*
On another occasion he convinced a Kenyon policeman to handcuff him to his date during a dance weekend, one of the few times all year when women were permitted on campus; the joke backfired when the young woman needed to use a restroom and she and Newman had to race around the grounds to find the fellow with the key.

Both of those events occurred in his senior year, by which time it was an even bet whether Newman was better known on campus for his antics or for his acting. From the start of his junior year until he graduated in May 1949, he appeared in or helped stage nine plays:
The
Front Page, Antigone, The Alchemist, R.U.R., Charley’s Aunt, Ghosts, The Taming of the Shrew, Heartbreak House
, and
Rude Awakening
, which was written by his professor James Michael, who directed every one of the productions in which Newman appeared.
*

Later, when asked to discuss the early work of his most famous student actor, Michael would recall “having trouble not casting Paul as the lead in every play.” (To his credit, he forced his star to paint flats, work the lights, and carry out other glamour-free duties.) He recognized a spark in the young man: “He showed all kinds of talent.” But he recognized too that Newman tended to lapse into lethargy and bad habits if not pushed. “I pride myself on the fact I called the turn on Newman. I told him if he learned discipline he would go far.” The result was a kind of determination, inherited perhaps from Art Newman, to turn acting into a job that could be mastered through application and sheer dogged effort. “He was not a faddist,” Michael remembered, “but a good technician and a no-nonsense actor. He had great intelligence, physical stamina, and the ability to work hard.”

Later on Newman would dismiss his own collegiate ability. “I was probably one of the worst college actors in history,” he’d declare. “I didn’t know anything about acting. I had no idea what I was doing. I learned my lines by rote and simply said them, without spontaneity, without any idea of dealing with the forces around me onstage, without knowing what it meant to act and to react.” But that was an experienced veteran of the Actors Studio talking. At the time he was rather delighted with his success. “I got some measure of local recognition,” he admitted. “I took several bows and had my first, heady taste of acting.”

Kenyon student Ira Eliasoph saw some of Newman’s first performances, and as he remembered, “He took that stage. He had a wonderful voice that projected through the auditorium with style and grace. It was quite apparent that he had the presence and the charm and the vocal ability. He certainly was more capable than most of the people around.”

But he had his limits. “In college once,” Newman confessed, “I took five or six bottles of beer before doing a play. I thought I was brilliant. Without exception, everybody said, ‘What the hell was wrong with you?’” That misstep aside, he really did become a standout through his theatrical efforts, developing a kind of grace that made his peers respond to him with more than the ordinary acknowledgment one grants a chum who sticks his neck out to perform in public. He had magnetism, charisma, and a kind of glow that inspired affection and admiration in audiences. This latter quality came to the surface in his final term at Kenyon, the spring semester of 1949, by all accounts one of the most wrenching ever to hit the tiny school.

On a February night Old Kenyon, the gothic edifice that stood as the traditional heart of the campus, was engulfed in fire. Seven students died. Five others were hospitalized. It was a staggering loss, even for a campus filled with World War II veterans. Barely a week later, the drama department was set to put on its production of
Charley’s Aunt
, the classic farce by Brandon Thomas about randy students who connive to get a friend to pose as a spinster and serve as their chaperone while they enjoy a pair of hot dates. Naturally, given the devastating fire, it wasn’t obvious that staging such a lighthearted entertainment was appropriate. After some debate, though, the school decided that the show should in fact go on. Newman was singled out in the campus newspaper, the
Kenyon Collegian
, for his contribution: “Paul Newman starred as Lord Fancourt Babberley, the impersonator of Charley Wykeham’s real aunt, Donna d’Alvadorez. Dressed in demure black, he looked and acted convincingly enough to convince almost all that he might be the real aunt. However, he could have been more careful when he was pouring tea.” “His hilariously broad interpretation,” another review noted, “will long be remembered.”

Two months later Newman further cemented his reputation as a fellow of unusual gifts with
The Kenyon Revue
, a comic musical that he coauthored with classmate Doug Downey and in which he took the role of Dean Frank E. Bailey, the actual name of the dean of the school. As Downey recalled, they put the thing together during the spring break: “Paul wrote most of the lyrics, I wrote most of the dialogue, and we shamelessly stole all of the music.” Burlesque or pastiche or what
have you, with some of its all-male cast dressed as chorus girls, it took the form of a freshman’s introductory tour of an unnamed college that had many not-so-coincidental resemblances to Kenyon. Coming near the end of such a traumatic semester, it was a tonic and a hit. The real Dean Bailey declared of Newman’s performance, “He played me better than I could have played myself,” and the president of the college, Dr. Gordon Keith Chalmers, was seen in the audience on all three nights of the production.