Paul Newman (9 page)

Given the frankness and unabashedness that Strasberg’s techniques called for, Newman was predictably cautious about diving into work at the Studio. Indeed, as he soon learned to his great pain, he had reason to be. “When I did my first scene for them,” he confessed, “there must have been some agonizing reappraisal.” The piece he chose was from Pirandello’s
Tonight We Improvise
, and as he remembered, Strasberg ripped into his performance. “Lee can be destructive,” Newman remembered, “as any teacher can be. That sort of set me back, and from that time on I went mostly as an observer.” (Years later Broadway director Gene Saks also recalled Newman’s Studio debut as forgettable: “I said, ‘He’ll never make it. Good-looking kid, but…’”)

But Newman was canny enough to understand that simply being in the room—head down, determined—was a blessing. “It gave me a chance to see how the most gifted American actors worked and to see the nature of their exploration,” he recalled. And despite the crankiness
and pain connected with it, he came to recognize and even revere Strasberg’s genius: “Doesn’t he get to the heart of the matter beautifully?” he asked a reporter who accompanied him to the Studio a few years later. For at least a decade he would make a regular habit of attending the Tuesday and Friday sessions at the Studio whenever he was in New York, no matter how busy he might be onstage or with a film shoot.

In 1953 photographer Eve Arnold was assigned to shoot a day at the Actors Studio. In the most famous image she created, Newman is right in the center, staring with fierce determination at the work going on in front of him. Around him virtually every man is in a suit and tie, but he’s wearing chinos, a white T-shirt, white socks, and deck shoes. He sits astride a chair backward, with one leg up on the seat and the other dangling. His left hand (with wedding band on his pinky) worries an unlit cigarette. His right arm, muscled, sports a chain bracelet. Surely he knows the camera is there, but the look of concentration and attentiveness on his face is deep and genuine; he’s there to learn (and yeah, maybe a little bit to be noticed).

At the Actors Studio Newman emerged from his collegiate acting habits into something more fluent, realistic, and professional. “I watched those people,” he said, “and realized where my style was sort of oratorical, something out of the 1920s, really, and phony.” If, as he later admitted, “I don’t think I came to bat frequently: a matter of courage,” he nevertheless absorbed everything he saw and heard. “It was monkey see, monkey do,” he remembered. “I just sat back there and watched how people did things and had enough sense not to open my big mouth.”

He did a few more scenes, seeking help from his teachers and peers in conquering the emotional blockage that he had first encountered at Yale. Some of the instruction he received was technical: “My body movements were all wrong. I was an untuned piano.” But some of it went deeper, into the sort of psychological probing that Strasberg considered essential to the acting process. “I discovered that I was primarily a cerebral actor,” Newman recalled. “I had a lot to overcome.” He would have to learn to access his emotions and incorporate them in performances through sheer application and hard work, and he found that he enjoyed the challenge of it. He was no longer a kid larking
about on a stage at Kenyon or a young dad looking for a Yale degree that could get him a job. He had discovered his profession. He was an actor.

W
HAT’S MORE
, he was a working actor—and not just on TV. In late 1952, at around the time when he was becoming acquainted with the Actors Studio, Newman found himself involved with a new play that, it was hoped, would open on Broadway in the winter.

It was Bill Liebling, one of the agents who’d found him in New Haven, who thought of him for the cast of the latest project by one of his wife’s literary clients, William Inge—the follow-up to his debut hit,
Come Back, Little Sheba.
Liebling got Newman a chance to audition for the playwright. “I read for him and thought I’d read very badly,” Newman recalled. And he had. But Liebling was tenacious—“Bill always had someone he was pushing,” remembered the play’s director, Josh Logan—and Newman got a second chance. This time, after reading for Logan, he found himself cast in the small role of a wisecracking paperboy.

The show was originally called
Front Porch
, but it would soon be retitled
Picnic.
It was the story of a Kansas town seemingly populated primarily by lonely women and dominated by a wealthy family. In the course of a steamy summer day, it is turned upside down by the arrival of a sexually magnetic vagrant named Hal who has come to visit a friend he’d made in college and perhaps cadge a job or at least a few weeks’ respite from the road. Rather than money or work, though, Hal winds up helping himself to his old chum’s sweetheart, the prettiest girl in town, and running off with her.

The role of Hal was already cast with Ralph Meeker, then an unknown Broadway understudy with a few minor film credits; Janice Rule, another newcomer with a handful of stage and film roles, would play Madge, the female lead. Alan Seymour, the wealthy guy who loses the girl, was written by Inge as someone older and less virile than Hal—which meant, as rehearsals began to reveal, that the character didn’t add much spark to the romantic triangle. Worse, as Logan later recalled, the actor who was originally cast as Alan wasn’t helping to sell
the role: “He was kind of dull.” Logan had a brainstorm—why not rewrite the role so that Alan was
younger
than Hal and put Newman in the part? He approached the playwright with this suggestion and received approval. (“Bill Inge, who liked young boys very much, said, ‘Oh, sure.’”) The role was rewritten specifically for Newman. Suddenly he had gone from a bit part to a featured role.

But he found himself struggling to make the part his own. As he remembered:

Indeed, he got more than the part. He would also understudy Meeker in the lead. That meant that he would have two entire rehearsal schedules to deal with. With the main cast he would be Alan Seymour, collegiate and privileged and just a slight bit full of himself, yet too blinded by his own rosy situation to see that he’s losing the girl; with the rehearsal cast he would be Hal, a renegade with a checkered past, an animal sensuality, and a willingness to risk his neck for something he wanted. Obviously Alan Seymour was well within the grasp of Paul Newman of Shaker Heights, Kenyon, and Yale. But he would need Logan’s help in turning himself into a credible Hal. In particular, he was having trouble with the scene in which Hal seduces Madge while twirling her at the picnic dance.

“He was such a clean-cut, well-put-together boy,” Logan said of Newman, “that I said, ‘Now, you’ve got to learn how to be a little
dirtier
to play the part of Hal.’ And he said, ‘How do you mean?’ I said,
‘Well, wiggle your ass a little bit when you’re dancing.’ And he said, ‘Do you think I really should?’ And I said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’ And he did, and was just as physical, quickly, as Meeker. He changed from all of his nice-boy upbringing in order to aim for this kind of a dirty Hal, and I think it did Paul a lot of good.”

If nothing else, the transformation was definitely noticed by the girl with whom he was dancing throughout all those rehearsals, the young actress who had been cast as the understudy to the role of Madge.

Her name was Joanne Woodward.

A
CTUALLY, THEY HAD MET BEFORE
.

Earlier in the summer, when he was still in his “guy in the seersucker” phase, Newman had been visiting Maynard Morris, the MCA agent who got him the “Ice from Space” job, and the meeting went on a little long. The agent’s next appointment was already waiting for him in the reception area, a young actress with credits and experience no more impressive than Newman’s. Morris introduced the two by way of apologizing to her for running late.

As Woodward later remembered it, “I had been making the rounds, and I was hot, sweaty, and my hair was all stringy around my neck. [Morris] brought out a pretty-looking young man in a seersucker suit, all pretty like an Arrow collar ad, and said, ‘This is Paul Newman,’ and I hated him on sight, but he was so funny and pretty and neat.”

Newman too took away an instantaneous reaction: “Jeez, what an extraordinarily pretty girl.”

I
F THAT
neat young man had come to be in the MCA offices that day as a result of a roundabout flight from the sporting goods business, that extraordinarily pretty girl was there because she had always wanted to be. She had been born twenty-two years earlier in the Georgia town of Thomasville and was given a name that bespoke old-time southern origins: Joanne Gignilliat Trimmier Woodward. Gignilliat and Trimmier were family names on her mother’s side, the latter indicating
a Huguenot lineage. The name Joanne was actually a tribute to her mother’s favorite actress, Joan Crawford, altered to accommodate a southern drawl.

Like Theresa Newman, Joanne’s mother, the former Elinor Trimmier, had stars in her eyes, and she shared her enthusiasm for the theater and movies with her only girl, the younger of her two children. The zeal took. “My mother tells a marvelous tale of my getting up to do the pledge of allegiance to the flag when I was two,” Joanne remembered. “My brother had the measles. He was supposed to do it. I said the pledge of allegiance to the flag, and they applauded, and I said it again, and they applauded again, and I was well into my third rendition when she finally dragged me off the stage.”

Elinor Woodward took this irrepressible girl to movies, and the child demonstrated a precocity of taste by naming Laurence Olivier her favorite star. In 1939, when
Gone with the Wind
had its premiere in Atlanta—just fifteen or so miles from Marietta, where the Woodwards were then living—Elinor took nine-year-old Joanne to the big gala; the girl not only scooted away from her mom, she popped up in a car carrying Olivier and his wife, Vivien Leigh, and sat in her idol’s lap. She’d go far.

Joanne’s father, Wade Woodward, was a public school official, a job that offered neither great security nor great remuneration during the Depression. “He started off being a teacher,” Joanne recalled, “and then became a principal in another school, and a superintendent in another, which is one of the main reasons we moved around.” He was a cultured man, who eventually left the schooling profession for a position in book publishing, and he was shaping his older child, Wade Jr., into an upright citizen. But he was remote from his daughter and, indeed, had a strained relationship with his wife.

By the end of World War II, when Joanne was in high school, the Woodwards were living in Greenville, South Carolina, and her parents divorced—in part, it has been hinted, because of Elinor’s stage-motherly encouragement of Joanne’s charm and talent. Always a strong student, Joanne was prompted by her mother to enter beauty pageants and throw herself into the theater program at her high school. Upon graduating in 1947, Joanne wanted to go to Hollywood or New York and become a
professional actress, and she had encouragement from one of her teachers. But her father believed in education, and in a compromise Joanne enrolled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, which boasted one of the best drama departments in the region.

After two years of college, though, she returned to Greenville, where she did some secretarial work and acted in some local productions. She appeared in the role of Laura Wingfield, the physically and emotionally hobbled girl in Tennessee Williams’s
The Glass Menagerie
, and her performance was strong enough to convince Wade to let her go to New York to take a stab at a career onstage. What was more, he agreed to fund her with a stipend of $60 a month. By 1951 she was on her own—and exactly where she wanted to be.

In New York she lived in the stereotypical starving-actress flat, breakfasting on hot dogs, spending days trudging to modeling agencies and casting offices, buying standing-room tickets to Broadway shows, and nursing coffees and beers in the luncheonettes and bars that young actors favored. She was admitted to the Neighborhood Playhouse, an acting school run by Sanford Meisner, practitioner of a Stanislavskyan acting theory and system distinct from Lee Strasberg’s. Meisner saw talent in Joanne, but he also heard a Georgia drawl that had to go, and he forced her to speak differently and to adopt his techniques and strategies for acting. It was a tough education: two acting classes a day, dance classes (taught by Martha Graham), and classes in speech, singing, and theater history. Meisner was a demanding mentor: “Sandy Meisner discovered at an early stage of my career in the Playhouse that I was a character actress, which was a shock to me,” Joanne recalled. “I’d always thought I was an ingénue. So he refused to give me anything but character roles, which I hated at the time.” The stern education bred a kind of competitive spirit in her. “For two years I was slapped down, torn apart, and taught to act by Sandy Meisner,” she said. “One of my ambitions has always been to ‘show’ Sandy Meisner.”

All her effort paid off. Joanne was spotted by a scout for MCA in a Neighborhood Playhouse showcase and brought into the agency as a client of a young agent named John Foreman, who was handling the
television careers of new actors. He got her a series of roles on TV—in episodes of
Robert Montgomery Presents, Philco Television Playhouse
, and
Goodyear Television Playhouse
; she played Ann Rutledge in a five-part series about Abraham Lincoln on
Omnibus
; she even got TV roles that required that she travel to Hollywood, where she worked regularly, she claimed, because she had nothing else to do with her time. “I didn’t have enough money to rent a car,” she later boasted. “Can you imagine being in California with no car?”

The steady stream of TV jobs was a bracing education, a true trial by fire: “I remember playing a twelve-year-old girl,” Joanne said, “and two weeks later I played a butcher-knife murderess… Those were marvelous days!” When she made her way back to New York, her agents got her into the understudy cast of
Picnic
, which was how she wound up spending afternoons dancing with the newly wiggly-assed Newman.

T
HOSE REHEARSALS
were only part of what Newman was up to in December 1952.
Picnic
was paying him $200 a week for the twin work of playing Alan Seymour and understudying Ralph Meeker’s Hal. He and Jackie and little Scott and the baby-on-the-way moved from Staten Island to a two-bedroom, $88.50-a-month unit in an airy complex of garden apartments in Queens Village, a semisuburban development within a commute of Manhattan yet with some of the feel of a village—a little like Shaker Heights, in fact. But he would be on the road before long with the touring tryouts of the show—right after Christmas.

The plan was to take the play to Columbus, Ohio; then to William Inge’s hometown of Saint Louis; and then of all places to Cleveland, where Jackie and Scott would join Newman for a brief family reunion. After that it was on to Boston, where, as so many shows routinely did, it would apply a final coat of polish under the gaze of Elliot Norton of the
Boston Post
, the genteel dean of theater critics. If all went to plan, the show would debut on Broadway in February.

Picnic
premiered at the Hartman Theater in Columbus and was
well received in
Variety
(“a generous, moving slice of life”) and the
Columbus Dispatch
(“a play of wide-dimensional quality, of immediate theatrical effectiveness”). Quite naturally, the bulk of critical attention centered on Inge’s script, the acting of Meeker and Janice Rule, the electric support of Eileen Heckart, the stage design by Jo Mielziner, and Josh Logan’s directorial hand. But Newman—not identified as a local boy, despite being a hundred miles from Kenyon—also got a couple of nice nods.
Variety
lumped him in with other supporting players in adding “strong assists”; but the
Dispatch
took the time to note, “Mr. Newman plays Alan with sensitively precise understatement”—his first professional review.

From Saint Louis, Newman wrote to his uncle Joe to thank him for sending along a copy of his latest book of poems and to let him know about the upcoming engagement in Cleveland. “A pretty damn good part, too,” he bragged. By the time the play arrived onstage at the Hanna Theater, where Theresa Newman used to watch the touring stars perform, it was still a bit wobbly. The daily papers were divided on the play, and even its admirers expressed confusion as to whether certain moments were meant as drama or comedy. Nightlife columnist Windsor French in the
Cleveland Press
called it “an evening to remember forever,” and Omar Ranney, drama critic for the same paper, praised it as “a drama of vigorous contents.” But W. Ward Marsh in the
Plain Dealer
confessed that it “made me unhappy most of the time,” and Arthur Spaeth in the
News
called it “rambling, uneven, thin and minor.” All three critics mentioned Newman favorably, but none pointed out that he was a native son of their city, and the show left Cleveland without anyone’s writing anything about Newman’s connection to his famed newspaperman uncle or the iconic downtown sporting goods store that bore their name.

In Boston, Norton declared
Picnic
“a terrific, driving drama which fills the stage with lusty life and the harsh clamor of passion.” He wrote two feature stories about the show, including a lengthy one describing the fixes that Logan and Inge had instituted during the tryouts, but he never once mentioned Newman, not even in his review.

That would change on Broadway. The show opened at the Music
Box Theatre on West Forty-fifth Street on February 19, 1953, and was immediately (although not unanimously) recognized both for its artistic quality and for its commercial appeal. In the
New York Times
Brooks Atkinson called it “an original, honest play with an awareness of people”; in the
Journal-American
, John McClain said “it succeeds wonderfully well in bringing a small theme to a high level.” Most of the reviews focused, rightly, on Inge’s sophomore effort, the debuts of Meeker and Rule, and the work of reliable pro Josh Logan. But Newman was noticed by the
New York Post
(“excellent work”), the
New York Daily News
(“well played”), the
New York Mirror
(“excellent”), and the
New York World-Telegram
(“does well”). The initial run, a subscribers-only sale to members of the Theatre Guild, was completely sold out. By summer the production was running a profit, and it would pay off the entire $90,000 invested in it before Labor Day. In all it would play 477 performances in its initial production before becoming a standard of the American stage.

Being in a hit play must have been nice, but it’s hard to imagine that Newman had much time to appreciate it. While he performed on opening night, Jackie was nigh bursting with their second child; on February 21, less than forty-eight hours after the first Broadway performance of
Picnic
, Newman was a father once again, this time to a daughter, Susan Kendall Newman. Looking at his situation, all Newman saw was luck: “I could just as easily have landed in a flop which closed in a few days. But instead, there I was with no financial responsibilities for over a year, able to continue my studies at the Actors Studio and appear on Broadway at the same time.” For the next fourteen months he could reliably bank his
Picnic
checks, attend sessions at the Actors Studio, oversee his growing family, bask in a little bit of glory (
Theater World
named him one of the most promising new stars of the year), and maybe look ahead to bigger things.

H
E HAD
an additional reason to think positively about his situation. Tele vision series kept scooping him up, for instance. MCA had assigned a young agent named John Foreman to find him work, and
Foreman remembered it as one of the easiest jobs he ever had. “He looked like a Greek god,” Foreman later said. “Paul was cast for nearly every part he tried out for.”
*

In 1953, while he was still performing in
Picnic
, Newman appeared at least five times on TV. On the episodic dramatic showcase
The Web
he played the spoiled, gambling, womanizing son of an immigrant scrap metal magnate (in “Scrap”) and a Korean War veteran en route to prison on a murder charge who manages to escape, only to fall in love with a blind girl he meets in his flight (in “One for the Road”). The scripts were awful—he admitted as much in a letter to his uncle Joe—but the parts were juicy, and his approach to them was wisely utilitarian: it sometimes seemed as if he was working out problems of technique in an Actors Studio session.