Paul Newman (7 page)

For Art’s younger son, undoubtedly shocked by the suddenness of his father’s passing, there was a disturbing hangover. He had never shown his father that he was a capable young man. Without a career and without prospects, with a pregnant wife and no sure purpose or direction, he felt an acute pang of shame.

“He treated me like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time,” Newman recalled later of his father, “and he had every right to be. I wanted desperately to show him that somehow, somewhere along the line I could cut the mustard. And I never got a chance.” The sense that he’d failed his father haunted him for years: “One of the great anguishes of my life is that he didn’t see my success. He thought I was a ne’er-do-well.”

And so, perhaps in a mood of penance, he set about doing what it always seemed he would: working at Newman-Stern alongside his brother, Art, and his uncle Joe and Joe’s son, Jim, selling canoes and binoculars and basketballs and whatnot to recreation-minded Clevelanders—and desperately yearning for a way out. “I was a pretty
good salesman,” he later admitted, quickly pointing out that he had no innate love of business. “I couldn’t relate to the romance of retailing,” he’d say in a common plaint. “It just wasn’t a good match.”

He rented a house for himself and Jackie and their soon-to-arrive child in Bedford, a blue-collar community just southwest of Shaker Heights on the outskirts of Cleveland. A son, Alan Scott, was born to Jackie on September 23. (The boy would always be known as Scott; the Alan portion of his name may have been in honor of Art Newman, following the Ashkenazi tradition of naming newborns after recently deceased relations, if only with an initial.)

Newman was twenty-five, a college graduate, a navy veteran, a failed actor, a dad, an inheritor of a dependable business—in short, a young man staring squarely at a future that, surely, struck him as miserable. “I was very successful at being something I was not,” he remembered in pain, “and that’s the worst thing that can happen to a person.” It was evident to those close to him that he wasn’t happy. “Paul worked hard,” Joe Newman remembered, “but his heart just wasn’t in the business.”

As it happened, Joe also felt that the Newman-Stern portion of his life was over. Throughout the summer of 1950 he sought buyers for the store, and by Labor Day he’d found them: Nat Marcus of Marcus Department Stores; Allan Kramer, a salesman and executive in a number of midwestern firms; and Nate Schultz, a movie theater owner and speculative investor, bought what the newspapers called “a substantial interest” in the business and began managing it on October 1. Joe retained a percentage and stayed on as an adviser and a living link to the store’s history and renown.
*

Joe’s role became slighter and slighter, though, and by 1952 he was
able to devote himself fully to writing. In the years remaining to him he continued to write columns for Cleveland newspapers and published his second and third volumes of verse.
*
When he died in 1960, felled by a bad heart, he was eulogized in editorials in both of Cleveland’s then-surviving daily papers. They recalled his round glasses, his pipe, his lanky physique, and his thatch of stiff hair. The
Cleveland Press
, for which he’d written regularly for nearly a decade, spoke of his sense of justice, his mischievousness, his agreeable temper, his collegiality, his wisdom. “Joe Newman came pretty close to being a ray of sunshine in a too drab world,” said the
Cleveland Plain Dealer.
“The city will miss him.”

A
FTER THE
sale of Newman-Stern, Jim Newman stayed on at the store, Art Newman went off and became a Cadillac salesman, and Paul spent the autumn of 1950 managing a driving range that the new Newman-Stern owners were operating just outside of town. But the urge that had vexed his final months at Kenyon was still eating at him throughout a winter that was brutal even by Cleveland standards. (Two feet of snow hit the city the day after Thanksgiving.) He pined for the theater. “I remember going to the Play House and watching the actors taking their curtain calls,” he said. “It nearly drove me out of my mind.” He auditioned for acting work at local radio and TV stations, landing a couple of spots in ads for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company and National City Bank and for some clients of the McCann Erickson ad agency. (“How the hell they chose me I don’t know,” he later declared.) He made the trek to the nearby town of Brecksville and its Little Theater, where he directed
Here Today
, a society comedy written by George Oppenheimer. And all the while he was, no doubt, putting his head to the task of coming up with a way to be gone tomorrow.

It hit him: with what he had saved over the year, plus a bit of the proceeds from Art’s estate, he had nearly $2,000. Add the college aid remaining to him on the GI Bill, and he could go to graduate school and get a sheepskin—a master’s degree in theater that would allow him to teach, maybe even at Kenyon. “My ambition had always been greater than my talent,” he would later say of his young self. “But the best of whatever I did was in the theater, and that wasn’t very good, but it was still the best that I had.” He even had the perfect graduate school in mind. He’d already been there, in fact: Yale.

A
ND WHY
not Yale?

At the time he applied to it, the department of drama at the venerable university hadn’t yet become its own school, but it had been awarding master of fine arts degrees for more than two decades, and there could be no more secure credential than a Yale diploma. There was a natural progress from Shaker Heights to Kenyon to the Ivy League, even if the fellow making it was something of a rake. And the sheer practical nature of his intent must have impressed the faculty who admitted him to the program. “I had no stars in my eyes or aspirations to be a Broadway actor,” he recalled, “but I did want to be in some part of the theater, and a master’s degree always protects you. You can teach at Kenyon, which I would have loved to have done.” So for the second time in a little more than a year, he loaded his possessions and his wife—and now a baby boy—into the car and headed off into uncertainty.

It wasn’t a popular decision in the family. Theresa Newman was so worried about the young family that she gave them her ’46 Chevy rather than watch them pull away in the old Packard. Art took his brother aside and asked him flat out, “Why would you want to do this? You’re married and have a baby.”

But he was determined. In New Haven they rented the top floor of what Newman described as “an old wooden three-family house.” Jackie commuted occasionally into New York City to seek modeling assignments, and Newman augmented his savings with work as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. He loved to tell the story of his
successes: “I went out and in ten days sold $1,200 worth of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
*

His academic triumphs were less obvious and less forthcoming. He had chosen to specialize in directing but was required to act as part of the degree program. The very first assignment nearly did him in. He was given a few pages from George Bernard Shaw’s
Saint Joan
, and he felt a sick-making jolt when he saw the initial stage directions for his character, who was to enter the scene after being heard sobbing and howling offstage. As Newman recalled, “The machinery started going almost immediately—how can I duck this? How can I find some intellectual way of playing this? Because I had never been able to break through that sound barrier, the emotional barrier.” Lightheartedness he could feign, but not real depth of feeling.

It seems odd that a war veteran with a family and some professional acting experience should be so threatened by the requirement to show a bit of his inner self, but perhaps the atmosphere of Yale, far more sober than the antic days at Kenyon or the hurried merry-go-round of stock acting, made him realize just what acting entailed. As he said, “The muscles contracted in my stomach, and immediately I tried to figure out some way to play the whole thing facing upstage. And then I thought, ‘What an ass! I drag my family with only nine hundred dollars in the bank all the way to Connecticut and then think of all the ways I can to cop out.’”

A sense of responsibility, then, rather than an impulse to artistic expression, drove him to craft a solution. “I took that script downstairs to the boiler room and I said, ‘Okay, buddy, you are going to sit here until you find out where it is going to come from, or you get out of this business right now.’”

He cracked the scene, and he wound up performing more often than directing, taking classes in acting from Constance Welch, a mainstay of Yale’s programs for four decades. Welch had been exposed to
the famed system of acting developed by the great director Konstantin Stanislavsky through lessons from one of his acolytes, the actress Maria Ouspenskaya. But the technique she came to teach Yale students diverged importantly from the Stanislavsky system or, as it came to be known in America, the Method. As Elia Kazan, who studied with her at Yale in the early 1930s, at the very beginning of her tenure there, recalled, “She believed that imitating the exterior would produce the interior feeling in the actor and the audience”—the opposite, in many key ways, of what such mavericks as Kazan and Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg would come to teach their acting students.

Welch’s emphasis on external technique may not have been strictly Method, but it suited the repressed young Newman. “I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor,” he confessed. “Acting is like letting your pants down: you’re exposed.” Having a series of concrete physical exercises to follow—voice, breathing, anger, jealousy, laughing, crying—appealed to his practical, problem-solving side and allowed him to create at least a simulation of letting himself go emotionally. In a raw actor such as Newman, Welch’s teaching allowed not for genuine psychological exploration but rather for an old-fashioned declamatory style. As a result, even though he was earnest and looked great, he lacked poetry, and he knew it. “If you talk with the people I worked with in school,” he confessed later on, “they will say I had a great deal of promise. Two years of drama and undergraduate school, a year at Yale for my master’s, two years of summer stock, and a year of winter stock—but
I really didn’t know anything
!”

Still, he cut a good figure at Yale. Decades after the fact, Frank McMullan, one of his teachers, recalled that “he proved to be a very good student… He was in my first-year directing class, and he was interested in acting as much as directing and, indeed, showed talent in both of those fields.” He appeared in three or four full-length plays and perhaps a dozen one-acts. And he progressed well enough to get a role in one of the major productions of the academic year, an original student play about Ludwig van Beethoven. “I like to think I gave him a chance,” McMullan said, “when I cast him in the role of Beethoven’s nephew, Karl… It was apparent to me that his was a magnetic presence on the stage.”

It may have been apparent to McMullan, but Newman was still uncomfortable: stiff and repressed on the inside, even if he could harness the confidence to make it seem otherwise to an audience. He remembered Karl without much affection as “a very formal guy”—but it simply may have been that he was still far enough from mastering his craft to make the character into anything else.

B
ESIDES THE
education and the teaching credential, Newman had another reason to be at Yale: New York was a mere train ride away. That allowed Jackie to pursue her sputtering modeling career, and it also meant that New York theatrical agents would occasionally attend Yale’s plays to scout for new talent. And thus it was that the stiff but handsome young actor playing Beethoven’s nephew in the spring of 1952 got noticed by Audrey Wood and William Liebling, a pair of New York agents who were married to each other and who represented a number of important theatrical and cinematic figures, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Carson McCullers, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Elia Kazan, and Joshua Logan. After a performance of the Beethoven play, Liebling came backstage, Newman remembered, “and suggested that if I ever came to New York I should look him up.”

Summer was fast approaching, as was the unpleasant prospect of looking for a gig in stock somewhere. So why not take a flyer on the big city, the big time, a real career? Newman and Jackie thought hard about it, and he consulted with the faculty at Yale. Eventually he came to a decision. “I was prepared to try it for a year,” he later said, “and if I got nowhere, to go back to Yale and get my degree. I had a family, I had responsibilities. Things were a little crowded in New Haven financially, but I was making out fairly well with the encyclopedias.”

It was a calculated gamble. This wasn’t Williams Bay or Plymouth or Woodstock. This was an international center of art and business with the potential for paying work in several media: theater, television, advertising, and, as location shoots were becoming more common, film. Jackie had an aunt there who could watch little Scott; Paul had connections at the McCann Erickson advertising agency from his Cleveland
days. If he was leaping from a height, he was doing it with a parachute and a plan. “I wasn’t going to subject my family to the hanging-out-at-Schwab’s-drugstore-in-Hollywood routine,” he remembered. “I had no intention of waiting around till I was bruised and bitter.” A reasonable stance.

New York in the summer of 1952, then: the sort of place where anything could happen.