Paul Newman (50 page)

The following winter the film was indeed remembered by Oscar voters, chiefly for such so-called technical elements as cinematography, score, art direction, and sound—and also for Newman’s work in a supporting role. His tenth Academy Award nomination found him for the first time in the best supporting actor category, running against the estimable quartet of Chris Cooper
(Adaptation)
, Ed Harris
(The Hours)
, John C. Reilly
(Chicago)
, and Christopher Walken
(Catch Me If You Can).
Once again he had nothing to do with the ceremony or the hoopla leading up to it. If he tuned in to see Cooper’s victory from his home or some other place, there was no record of it.

F
OR PRIZES
he still had racing: not his own, necessarily, but those of the Newman-Haas team, which had become one of the dominant outfits in all of motor sports. After Mario Andretti won the CART championship in 1984, it took the team until 1991 to win another title, when Michael Andretti repeated his father’s feat. In 1993 Newman-Haas scored the immense coup of convincing Nigel Mansell, the Englishman who was then the reigning champ of Formula 1, the world’s most prestigious racing circuit, to be its principal driver. Mansell, who oozed braggadocio and oily charm, was an oversize character after Newman’s heart. “I kept telling him he should have been in films,” Newman recalled. “First time he drove for us, it was on one of those oval tracks, and he swore the United States wasn’t worth living in, that you could take these oval tracks and shove them. Fifteen laps later he’d knocked two-tenths off the lap record. Honestly, the guy
was the biggest hustler you ever saw. He’d hustle you for a nickel—‘Bet you a nickel that gumdrop tastes better than that gumdrop.’” Mansell won the championship for Newman-Haas that year and then went back to Europe. It would be another nine years before the team won another title, in 2002, with the Brazilian Cristiano da Matta as its top driver.

In that time, though, the conditions under which Newman-Haas raced changed notably. In the mid-1990s, tensions broke out between the managers of the open-wheel racing series in which the team competed and Tony George, the owner-operator of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The result was a split of open-wheel racing into two factions, the CART (later Champ Car) series, where Newman-Haas stayed, and the Indy Racing League, or IRL, a new competition that had exclusive rights to appear in the Indy 500, the jewel event of the sport. There were angry voices on both sides of the divide, none more bitter or frequently quoted than Newman’s. He derided George as greedy and extortionate and accused him of destroying not only open-wheel racing but his own home city. “The damage Tony George has done to the sport is unconscionable,” he told a reporter for
Road & Track
a decade into the battle. “I’d love to see an economic impact study of the effects on the business of the city of Indianapolis for the month of May and another one of the effects on the racing industry in that town. I think the results of an economic impact study would shock everybody.” (At one point in his war with the IRL, Newman hired college students to count the number of seats at George’s track to give him statistical ammo in his propaganda battle.)

Given that sort of pugnacity, it was no wonder that Newman kept on driving in races throughout his seventies. Indeed, he bragged about his age, having it painted on his car each year in increasing numbers—79 in 2004, 81 in 2006, and so forth—and tooling around the paddocks and pits on a scooter. His luck and his reflexes, however, weren’t what they had been. In January 2000 he injured his ribs in a wreck at Daytona that could have been a lot worse: he was going upward of 180 miles per hour when he skidded into a barrier. And as ever, he blamed himself for the accident: “I got overconfident on a fresh set of
tires. The tires weren’t warm enough, and I slipped. I’m angry at myself. It was a stupid thing to do.” Two years later he was driving a practice session at Watkins Glen with Kyle Petty in the passenger seat when he cracked up against a wall; he was unhurt, but he was shaken up.

His problems were age-related, and he knew it: “The teeth get longer. The hair gets thinner. The eyes and ears don’t sense danger as quickly as they did before. You can’t go as fast, so you try to go faster.” But at the same time, he contended that the actual danger these incidents represented was blown out of proportion by the media. “Last time I totaled a car somewhere in Ohio,” he joked, “one of the papers carried a headline: ‘Paul Newman Almost Killed—But Uninjured.’”

In fact, he suffered his worst auto-related injury not on the track but on a road in Westport, when his souped-up Volvo station wagon, one of a series of such customized rides, was sideswiped by a driver who was coming in the opposite direction and crossed into Newman’s lane. Newman skirted a truly bad accident—Joanne happened to be with him at the time—but he lost the driver’s side-view mirror and his left hand was broken, requiring him to wear a cast for several weeks. Typically, he made light of it: “I wept more for my car than for my hand.”

The excitement of driving and of being around racing, he claimed, was the most enjoyable part of his life and, in fact, the thing that kept him going. “My blood pressure is generally 117 over 76,” he told a reporter, “and I went to the doctor for a checkup, and my blood pressure was 140 over 80 or something. So then we went down and ran the 24 Hours at Daytona and came back, and my blood pressure was 115 over 70. I recommend it to everybody.”

A
ND FOR ALL THAT, IN CERTAIN CIRCLES AND IN A CERTAIN
light, the most remarkable thing he’d done was to stay married to the same woman for forty years, as of 1998, and on into a new century. How in the world did a couple in their position manage that remarkable milestone and more? “Ultimately, I think we both delight in watching the progression,” he told a journalist. “And we laugh a lot.”

By accounts, he still acted around Joanne like he was hopelessly in love. He would light up when she entered a room, observers noticed, even if he’d been glowering or grumbling or cussing or complaining or sitting in one of his unreadable silences barely a minute before. He held her hand on walks or as they sat at the symphony or the ballet. He surprised her with phone calls, flowers, little gifts. (“He gave her his electrocardiogram for Christmas,” Stewart Stern recalled.) He teased her with mocking little praises—“You have a great figure, and you make a hell of a hollandaise sauce,” he told her in front of a reporter—but he needed her in an almost childlike way that he couldn’t disguise. When he was making a film in the late 1990s, she visited the set; between shots, he beckoned her over to sit on his lap; as she did, he was overheard asking her, in a sweet voice, “Are you my broad?” When he talked about her, it was with a zeal that could frankly startle. “She’s a mercurial lady,” he once said. “I never know what I’m going to wake up with the next morning. That’s made for some fascinating experiences, I can tell you.” (An old-fashioned fellow, he demurred from offering an example.)

Predictably, Joanne was better able to articulate certain things about the marriage, which in her view they had been able to sustain because they saw it as an entity in and of itself. “There were times when Paul and I both had to hang in,” she said, “when it felt that the marriage wouldn’t last another day. We had to step outside ourselves and become aware that three things were operating—my ego, his ego, and
our
ego. For the relationship to survive, we had to put the his-and-hers on hold and go for the
our.”

And despite their famous differences—beer vs. sherry, race cars vs. ballet, popcorn vs. hollandaise—they had professional interests and passions in common. Their way of life in Connecticut was one, and another was the theater, which they attended together regularly. In 2000 they were able to combine the two in another of the selfless acts for which they had become revered in Westport.

For more than forty years Jim McKenzie had been the artistic director of the Westport Country Playhouse. But financing the operations of the theater, which ran on box office receipts, rental fees, and donations, had long been a year-to-year game of can-we-do-it? By the time McKenzie retired, after the 1999 season, the directors of the Playhouse had determined that they had to take significant steps to ensure the viability of the institution.

That was when the Newmans—Joanne especially—stepped in and put their stamp on the place. Joanne had long been a donor to the theater and had appeared in benefits—but never a proper play. She agreed to take over some of McKenzie’s functions on a part-time, volunteer basis and to direct a play each season as she was able. Newman joined the artistic advisory council, which boasted Connecticut locals Christopher Plummer, Marlo Thomas, Gene Wilder, and Jane Powell in its ranks. The following year, with a new fund-raising campaign in progress and a successful season behind her, Joanne accepted a full-time appointment as artistic director.

At the start of her tenure, subscriptions and donations to the Playhouse rose appreciably. It helped that she was able to bring to the stage for the occasional staged reading or benefit the international movie star who shared her bedroom. During Valentine’s Day week 2000 Newman joined her on the Playhouse stage for performances of A. R. Gurney’s
Love Letters.
Later that year he played alongside her in a production of Gurney’s family drama
Ancestral Voices
, with Swoosie Kurtz, James Naughton, and Paul Rudd. (They reprised the roles in 2002 with Matthew Broderick, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon.) The following year he appeared on the Playhouse stage in a fund-raiser for local families affected by September 11. In 2004 he headlined in
Trumbo
, a one-man show about the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who, a lifetime ago, had written the script for
Exodus.
And in 2007 he stood onstage beside Joanne and read love poems in another Valentine’s Day program entitled
Come Be My Love.

But his biggest contribution to the health of the Playhouse came in 2002, when Woodward and her colleagues were thinking of ways they could respond artistically to the trauma of 9/11. On a personal level, Newman had already made a dramatic gesture. The night after the terrorist attacks, he and Joanne were dining at a restaurant near Westport when Newman, responding to the air of gloom hanging in the room, stood and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”; the entire house joined him.

A similar communitarian urge inspired a more organized artistic response to the trauma. Specifically, the Newmans got to thinking about
Our Town
, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 chestnut about life, love, and death in a small American town. The sparseness of the show (performed traditionally on bare stages without sets or curtains), its vision of the consolation of the departed, its emphasis on home and simple pleasures and the human need to accept whatever life brings: all of this made it seem a natural curative for a wounded civic soul. And it had a history at the Playhouse: Wilder himself had performed the role of the Stage Manager—the narrator and presiding genius of the play—in a fondly remembered production mounted in 1946 amid the sense of loss associated with World War II. Joanne discussed the idea of putting on the show with Newman, and he so immediately grasped the aptness of the choice that he asked if he could play the Stage Manager, the role he’d played at the Woodstock Opera House more than forty years prior.

Suddenly the Playhouse had something big on its hands. James Naughton, another member of the artistic advisory council, would
direct the show, and a number of actors with local connections—including Jayne Atkinson, Frank Converse, Jane Curtin, and Jeffrey DeMunn—joined the cast. When the production was announced, it sold out its entire two-and-a-half-week run almost immediately—a financial bonanza as well as a publicity coup.

The show opened on June 5 after only three weeks of rehearsals, and the
New York Times
deemed the production “rickety,” adding that “the pace of the play is fitful; so are the New England accents of the players.” But for Newman there was nothing but praise. Calling the role “a perfect fit,” the
Times
declared, “It’s his show; the rest of us are there in his honor…When he is still, he is commanding. His profile is stunning and fierce, and often, as he stands observing with other actors at center stage, you can feel your gaze drawn by the magnetic tug of his presence.” Another writer for the
Times
, also dismissive of the production but not of the star, saw in the show the seeds of what Woodward and her colleagues had first intended. “If only this production,” wrote Alvin Klein, “crossed the state line—a mere 50 miles or so—for a short stopover on Broadway, it could be a heady balm for a still-grieving city.”

When
Our Town
closed in late June, Woodward and her fellow executives turned their heads to the question of whether there could be a bigger stage yet for it. The Playhouse hadn’t exported a show to Broadway since
Butterflies Are Free
more than thirty years earlier; but it seemed possible that they could bring this one, with this star, anywhere. There was a hitch: the Roundabout Theater Company had already announced that it would be doing a production of
Our Town
on Broadway during the 2002–3 season. But that company decided to concentrate on works with smaller casts and canceled its plans. In September it was announced that the Playhouse would be bringing the show—at a cost of $1 million—to the Booth Theater, and that Newman would be making his first appearance on a New York stage in nearly forty years.

As he told a reporter at the time, the choice to come to Broadway was his alone. “I decided I would not go to my grave without coming back,” he explained. “There is no second reason.” But the Playhouse was also engaged in a $17 million fund-raising campaign intended to
completely renovate itself, and a successful Broadway run of
Our Town
might result in a real windfall.

It did. The show was set to open on December 5 and run until January 26, Newman’s seventy-eighth birthday, and every performance was sold out before the first reviews were published. As before, the play was shown no special love by the reviewers, but they could find nothing but superlatives for the star. Calling it “the most modest performance ever by a major American star on a Broadway stage,” Ben Brantley of the
Times
wrote, “Mr. Newman has… the aura of someone figuring out things as he goes along, almost seeming to invent his lines on the spot and to marvel when they sound deep…He now knows that his living-legend status requires no special enhancement, and he’s all the more resonant for not working at it.” “He is the star here,” wrote the
Washington Post
, “yet this is no star turn.” And nodding to his evident age,
Entertainment Weekly
said, “Whatever he lacks in vocal strength these days, he more than makes up for in charisma (of course) and arrow-sharp, punctuated gestures.” He was really superb, imparting a combination of homespun wisdom, Yankee cynicism, paternal affection, and wiseacre knowingness to his scenes, standing aside for most of the play while the real protagonists lived, loved, worked, played, died, and mourned as Wilder’s script called for them to. If ever there was a valedictory performance, he had achieved it—and onstage, night after night, for weeks, at a time in life when most actors of his stature might be leery of filming a commercial for fear of shocking their public with the spectacle of age’s toll. It was a remarkable coup.

On many nights during the play’s short run, there was as much going on behind the scenes as onstage. Newman had been ensconced in a tiny dressing room upstairs from the stage area at the Booth, a space no bigger than the bathroom of an ordinary home, according to Randy Blair, who served as Newman’s dresser for both productions. “People would see it and say, ‘This is where Paul Newman is?’” he recalled. It was. Newman was visited by a firmament of stars from the worlds of acting, auto racing, and politics, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and actors Tom Hanks, Kate Winslet, John Travolta, Liam Neeson, Al Pacino, James Earl Jones, and Matt Damon.

Because there was no waiting area near the dressing room, Blair had Newman’s guests gather downstairs and would bring them up, one by one, after announcing them to Newman, who never wanted to know who was in the house before he went on. Blair found too that if he told anyone in the show who the night’s guests were, word would seep out and little scenes of chaos would result. “The rest of the cast and crew would come to me and say, ‘Who are we going to get to see tonight?’” he remembered. “And I’d have to tell them, ‘I’m not telling. I don’t want him to hear it, because I’ll get yelled at.’” His vigilance was tested one night when an unannounced visitor appeared. “His name wasn’t on the list,” Blair said, “but I mean, it’s Robert Redford. I said, ‘Okay, sneak him backstage so he doesn’t get mobbed, and I’ll tell Paul.’ That was incredible, to see them together.”

Before the show wrapped, on Newman’s birthday, with the cast and crew greeting him with a cake and appropriate salutations, a performance was filmed over a couple of days to air on the Showtime cable network and, later, on PBS. In May, when the Tony nominations were announced, Newman’s name alone among the people involved with
Our Town
appeared on the list as best actor in a play alongside Brian Bedford
(Tartuffe)
, Eddie Izzard
(A Day in the Death of Joe Egg)
, Stanley Tucci
(Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune)
, and the eventual winner, Brian Dennehy
(Long Day’s Journey into Night).
Predictably, just as he had ignored the Oscar nomination he’d received for
Road to Perdition
earlier that year, he skipped the big night on Broadway. “I burned my tuxedo five years ago,” he explained, “and with that comes a certain resolution…I promised myself that I wasn’t going to attend any of those functions. I’ve never been very comfortable at them, and at my age a man is entitled to burn his tuxedo.”

A
T HIS
age a man would also have been entitled to slow down, but he didn’t, not really. He still considered various film scripts, he still supervised the rollout of new Newman’s Own products, he still toured the various Hole in the Wall Camps to be among the kids, he still did private charity work such as putting in sweat equity hours for Connecticut
chapters of Habitat for Humanity, he still showed up for fund-raising events, he still attended the theater, he still involved himself in his race team, he still drove the occasional race himself.