Paul Newman (8 page)

I
T’S ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING FIVE-WORD PHRASES IN THE
language:
New York in the ’50s.

The anxiety and privation of World War II were memories. The economy was bounding. There was money; there was promise; there was robust vitality and opportunity. But there was a layer, too, of contentment in the air. To be a white American male of twenty something years of age and some education in that city at that time was to be a king, or at least a prince. New York was the gilded metropolis where the elite met at their most feverish, a home of champions in commerce, in geopolitics, in sports, and, perhaps most of all, in the arts.

Name a field of creative activity, and the New York of the 1950s was its font or its center or was striving mightily to overtake any other city in the world at excelling in it. Revolutions in painting, jazz, pop music, and poetry spilled out of nightclubs and lofts and walkup flats and dingy rented offices and rubbed up against one another in the streets. Beatniks, abstract expressionists, beboppers, Method actors, folkies, comics, critics, tunesmiths, hoofers, longhairs, ad men: a fantastical stew of creative humanity.

The prewar culture of symphonic music and quality publishing and international dance and opera had fully revived, and bracing waves of modern architecture and fashion and decorative art buoyed alongside. And the dramatic arts were particularly vital. Broadway
thrived with delightful musicals and titanic dramatic voices: Williams, Miller, Inge. On any given night of the summer of ’52 you could see
The King and I, I Am a Camera, Pal Joey, Top Banana, Guys and Dolls, Stalag 17.
Movie theaters were bursting almost literally with widescreen spectacles like
The Greatest Show on Earth, This Is Cinerama
, and
Quo Vadis
, while such stalwart exemplars of the Hollywood system as
The Quiet Man, High Noon
, and
The African Queen
vied with them for attention. TV studios around town ravenously ate up every script and performance and gimmick that the sharpest new minds could produce and poured out live dramas and variety shows and experiments in bringing movie and radio dramas to the new small screen.

Hit the street, and giants of painting, acting, poetry, theater, journalism, architecture, photography, jazz, fashion, classical music, and a dozen other fields might walk right by you on Broadway or in Greenwich Village. It was arguably the greatest heyday in a city that’s had more than its share of them.

Imagine Augustan Rome or Elizabethan London with V8 engines and an upwardly mobile middle class; imagine fin-de-siècle Vienna or Paris of the 1920s without old-world prejudices or class divisions and with air-conditioning and reliable plumbing. Can you talk about a center of the world? New York in the summer of 1952 might well have been it.

A
LAS, THE
young Newman family wasn’t quite capable of pulling up a chair to Manhattan, the grown-up table at this remarkable feast of affluence and artistry. Rather, they rented a furnished room in the Art Deco–style Ambassador Apartments at 30 Daniel Low Terrace in the New Brighton section of Staten Island. It was a building popular with theatrical types; some years later another Ohio actor, Martin Sheen, would be living there with his wife when their son Emilio Estevez was born. The place was cheap: the Newmans paid $60 a month in rent, and they availed themselves of the babysitting services of Jackie’s nearby aunt. And it was conveniently close to the Staten Island Ferry
and quick commutes into Manhattan, which glistened across the harbor with promises of work, pay, and advancement.
*

Being Art Newman’s son, Newman worried about money, especially in these circumstances. Even more than going to Yale, moving to New York was a leap of faith—and before very long Jackie told him that she was expecting another child. If New York was truly the El Dorado it seemed to be, he had better figure out how to get some of its riches for his family.

So he developed a routine. “I had one decent suit in those days,” he remembered, “an old seersucker. And I’d put it on every morning. I’d start out at eight every morning, take the ferry to Manhattan, make the rounds of the casting agents, follow up all the tips in the trade papers, and then get back to Staten Island in time to peddle encyclopedias.” (Ah, the encyclopedias…) “It was one of the hottest summers I can remember in New York,” he said, but he persevered, making a regular if genial pest of himself at all the casting agents’ offices (“The guy in the white seersucker is here again,” he recalled secretaries saying) and then ringing doorbells around Staten Island until suppertime.

Before long, little bits of fortune started to fall to him. He got small roles on television, some quite well-paying. He earned, he claimed, $75 for dressing as an old man applauding at the inauguration of President McKinley on
The March of Time.
In August he got his first credited part, playing an air force sergeant in an episode of the TV science fiction series
Tales of Tomorrow
, a ludicrous little potboiler called “Ice from Space.” Performing half his lines off camera and another half with understandably strained seriousness, he certainly couldn’t be said to have transcended the laughable material, which concerned a chunk of extraterrestrial ice that was slowly turning the Earth into a frozen wasteland. To his credit, he knew how silly it was. “For the strange
block of alien ice,” he recalled, “they had built a huge plastic cube filled with pulsating lights. So here we are, standing around and supposedly freezing, when a fly buzzes onto the set. And for the big close-up you see this little fly hopping around on the giant ice cube. I could barely get out my lines, I was trying so hard not to laugh.”

These were wildcatting days in the television business, though, so working on such a trifle didn’t count as a black mark. Indeed, as Newman began to make the rounds, he landed a number of gigs. He got the gigantic MCA talent agency to represent him, and they helped him secure a sporadically recurring role on
The Aldrich Family
, the TV version of the popular radio drama about the life and times of Henry Aldrich, Normal Teen. Typecast as the College Hero, Newman made $50 a week—enough that he could give up the encyclopedias and tell his professors at Yale that he was staying in New York.

He liked the odds. “Boy, there was work,” he recalled. “You got a week off and you could be right back in a film or on television or in a play.” By September, Cleveland newspapers, no doubt tipped off by Joe Newman, were writing about his minor successes, as was
The Kenyon Alumni Bulletin
, which referred to him fondly as “one of the finest actors we’ve ever had.”

B
EING ONE
of Kenyon’s finest actors may have constituted high praise in Gambier, but in New York it was hardly a calling card of distinction. Regardless of Newman’s success in getting small roles on the strength of his telegenic looks, he knew that his appearance alone wasn’t going to get him far. Yale had shown him just how much he lacked as an actor, and he determined to apply what resources he had to continuing his education and honing his craft. And he knew exactly where he wanted to do it. At Yale, he remembered, “I heard a lot of reverent talk—and rightly so—about the Actors Studio.” So he thought he’d give it a try.

In some ways this was like a weekend hiker declaring himself interested in an assault on Everest. Only five years old, the Actors Studio had been, virtually from its opening day, the high temple of the new American acting style, the Method. The most exciting actor of the
moment—Marlon Brando—was the talismanic figure of the Studio, and he and the techniques he practiced there were spoken about in tones of awe and mystery wherever people chattered about acting.

The Actors Studio was founded by Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, and Robert Lewis, who had spent the 1920s and 1930s with the Group Theater developing the acting techniques pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavsky and staging plays that promoted their liberal (indeed, radical) political ideals. The Group was a volatile band—incestuous, cliquish, rabid, blessed with a surfeit of geniuses, given to internecine quarrels. It gave the theater some truly extraordinary productions—most notably Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy, Awake and Sing!
, and
Waiting for Lefty—
and its ranks included a veritable pantheon of theatrical gurus and demigods: Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, Sanford Meisner, and Lee Strasberg.

The Group dissolved in 1941, and six years later Crawford and Kazan initiated the Actors Studio as a place where actors could practice their craft independently of specific stage or film projects. The idea was to teach Stanislavskyan principals—or, at least, the sundry versions of them that had evolved in America—in workshop settings. Actors would prepare scenes and then present them to an audience of actors and teachers, and they would get feedback right on the spot about, say, a specific interpretive problem or whether a new approach was working. There were exercises, improvisations, and lectures, but mostly there were short performances and the ensuing critiques—which could be ten times as long as the scenes that occasioned them: “the work,” as Studio regulars called it.

Within weeks of the founding of the Actors Studio, Kazan and his star pupil, Marlon Brando, stunned the world with their stage production of Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
, which boasted in its cast two other charter members of the fledgling Studio, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden. Their peers in that first class represented a phalanx of young talent that ensured the Studio would be taken seriously: among them Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Anne Jackson, Cloris Leachman, Sidney Lumet, E. G. Marshall, Patricia Neal, Maureen Stapleton, and Eli Wallach. In the next few years Richard Boone, Lee Grant, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Stanley, and Rod Steiger would join
as well. At any random workshop you might find yourself among a crop of young talents who would literally define the face of American acting for the next half-century.

This pantheon of acting giants met in a series of rented halls and dance studios, finally settling down in 1955 in a former Greek Orthodox church at 432 West Forty-fourth Street. As they moved about in those early years, the rules for selecting and granting membership also evolved. At first admission was by invitation. By 1952 a more or less permanent system was in place: applicants to the Actors Studio needed to perform two auditions for the selectors, and membership, once granted, was for life.

Newman came to the Studio in sidelong fashion. He was savvy enough about his own limitations that he didn’t consider himself adequate Actors Studio material. But he was always game, if nothing else, so when an acquaintance asked him to stand in for the actor with whom she had already performed at her first audition, he agreed. The text she’d selected was a scene from
Battle of Angels
, Tennessee Williams’s first Broadway play. Even though it wasn’t his own head on the chopping block, Newman was deeply anxious. He was acting in front of the most respected teachers in the world. Or maybe he wasn’t acting at all. “They must have misunderstood sheer terror for honest emotion,” he recalled.

He survived, and somehow in the aftermath of the audition, there was a foul-up. The actress who was auditioning wasn’t admitted. But Newman—who technically hadn’t auditioned at all—received notice in the mail that he, in fact, had been. It was a perfect instance of Newman’s Luck—and the most important influence on what would become his life’s work. “The Actors Studio, whether they like it or not, has either credit or blame for what I’ve become as an actor,” he said throughout his life. “I learned everything I’ve learned about acting at the Actors Studio.”

What he learned was the specific flavor of Stanislavskyan practice developed and propagated by Lee Strasberg, a feisty Ukrainian Jew with a professorial bent who had become the most visible proponent of the Method. Following the Russian model, Strasberg insisted that an actor’s chief responsibility was to ferret the emotional truth out of each
work, each scene, each line. Specifically, he demanded that his students use their own life histories as reservoirs of emotions that could be used to express the sentiments their roles demanded. Acting became, in his model, a process of self-discovery and even self-analysis.

He encouraged the use of specific techniques to assist his students. In one, “sense memory,” they learned to recall and even relive specific emotional events from their lives by thinking of the physical sensations that accompanied the initial experience: how things sounded, smelled, felt to the touch, and so on. Actors could then use these recollected sensory experiences as paths to recovering the emotions that their work called on them to reproduce.

Coupled with this deeply psychological work, Strasberg encouraged a naturalistic acting style that scraped away at the layers of glamour and artifice that were common in older styles of acting and that, he believed, impeded an actor’s ability to share emotional truths with the audience. Stereotypically, this combination of unwelled emotion and raw technique could produce overemoting and mumbling; at its finest, though, it gave rise to the Stanley Kowalski and Terry Malloy of Marlon Brando and to the Cal Trask and Jim Stark of James Dean, characters ripped apart by powerful emotional struggles in a way that seemed more real than anything that had ever been filmed before.