Paul Newman (10 page)

He had better luck with material and collaborators in a trio of performances on
You Are There
, the famed CBS series in which Walter Cronkite and other actual newsmen pretended to offer live coverage of historical events. In the show’s initial season he portrayed Brutus in “The Assassination of Julius Caesar” and Plato in “The Death of Socrates.” (“Not right now, please,” he says to a reporter sticking a microphone in his face outside the prison where the doomed philosopher is being held.) When the series debuted its second season, in September 1953, he played the title role in “The Fate of Nathan Hale.” All three shows were directed by Sidney Lumet, and the casts included the likes of E. G. Marshall, James Gregory, Joseph Wiseman, Robert Culp, and Richard Kiley. It was top-shelf stuff, and Newman played it well, imparting some modern vitality and convincing passion into characters and situations that might otherwise have tended toward the formal, stiff, and declamatory. The freedom from financial concerns, the stability of the play, the careful, silent observation of powerful players at the Actors Studio—it was all turning him into a capable performer.

But he still had his limits. In January 1953 Ralph Meeker needed
some time away from
Picnic
, and Newman filled in as Hal for eight performances. Suddenly he seemed to understand why Josh Logan had deemed him insufficient in the role during the understudy rehearsals. “Ralph [was] a big, beefy, muscular, sexual, physical kind of guy,” Newman remembered. And he tried hard to project the same animal qualities that had made Meeker’s performance a success. But he didn’t quite make it. After Meeker returned, Newman asked Logan if he could play Hal in the touring company of the show. “Well,” Logan responded, “it was a very interesting performance, but you don’t carry
any
sexual threat at all.” Newman reeled: “I worried that bone around for a long time,” he confessed later on. “I’ve been chewing on that one for twenty years.”

A
T LEAST
one member of the understudy cast of
Picnic
would have disagreed strongly with Logan’s assessment. Joanne Woodward didn’t reckon too much of Newman’s craft off the bat. “When I first saw him act,” she remembered, “I thought he was terrible. And he was. Just a pretty face.” But the face, nevertheless, was pretty enough to remind her of a Botticelli angel.

In New York she had been dating a lot of young men, even if she wasn’t exactly the type that was in vogue. “The fashion,” she recalled, “was for little, dark neurotic girls from the wrong side of the tracks. The boys wouldn’t date anybody else. I tried to turn myself into that type, but it didn’t work.”

She needn’t have bothered, though, for the sake of catching Newman’s eye. As he’d said, she’d struck him with her looks at their first meeting, and as they got to know each other during the rehearsals and downtime on
Picnic
, she came to seem to him an ideal girl. “She was modern and independent,” he remembered. “I was shy, a bit conservative. It took me a long time to persuade her that I wasn’t as dull as I looked.”

Too, there was the impediment that he was married, with two kids—forbidden fruit, at least in theory. Some observers saw clearly that something was brewing between Joanne and Newman. “We all suspected,” said Eileen Heckart, who was in the cast of
Picnic.
“In her little assertive way there was quite a lot of steel in that lady.” But she
wasn’t so stuck on Newman that she denied herself romantic entanglements. She dated Marlon Brando for a time in 1953 and for a period was engaged to James Costigan, a playwright and actor who was a member of the Actors Studio. Newman, in fact, introduced them, telling Costigan that he could get him a date with “a wonderful girl.”

For his part, Newman was caught in a household that seemed more and more like a trap. Scott, not yet three, was a real discipline problem, prone to temper tantrums and refusing to be consoled. “I can remember going to Paul and Jackie’s apartment,” recalled a friend, “and being unable to carry on a conversation because he was yelling and screaming. He was uncontrollable.” Jackie, initially supportive of her husband’s career choices—she’d already followed him to Woodstock, Cleveland, New Haven, and New York, after all—began to feel like a satellite. She was stuck at home with two small children while he spent days and often nights in Manhattan working, looking for work, schmoozing, and drinking with his acting buddies.

There were real tensions between them. “Jackie lost her interest in acting and the world that meant everything to Paul when she had her children,” remarked a friend. “Her nature is shy and retiring, while Paul’s is gregarious and blossoms when he’s with people interested in the same things he is. He likes late gatherings of writers and actors, as did Joanne. But you seldom saw Jackie. Paul and Joanne were simply two highly attractive people with a deep mutual interest and an obvious feeling of companionship.”

Jackie had good reason to be suspicious. Of all the time that her husband spent in Manhattan, a considerable portion was in Joanne’s company. Mutually attracted but staying at a remove from each other out of respect for Newman’s marriage, the two were bonding. As Joanne remembered, “From the beginning, Paul and I had an advantage: we were good friends before we were lovers. I mean, we really liked each other. We could talk to each other, we could tell each other anything without fear of ridicule or rejection. There was trust.”

A
S THIS
taboo romance kindled, Newman held on to a semblance of familial normalcy in part by striking up a semiregular correspondence
with his uncle Joe. In July 1953 Minnie, the eldest of Simon and Hannah Newman’s children, died, and Paul wrote in part to offer condolences and in part to claim entitlement to a portion of her estate. Joe must have agreed, because in November Newman wrote to thank him for a check and to explain that “Jackie and I have been toying with the idea of getting away from apartment house living and buying a small house in Connecticut.”

In lively, literate letters, some written between cues at the theater during performances of
Picnic
, Newman told his uncle of the various cousins who passed through New York—Dick and George Campen, Ed Newman—and the dinners, drinking bouts, and free theater tickets he bestowed upon them. He asked Joe several times to come to New York himself (often jokingly calling it “New Yorick”) and enjoy similar hospitality. He sent pictures of “Mad Scott” and news of baby Susan and of “Jackson,” as he occasionally referred to his wife. He spoke excitedly of taking a getaway trip to Key West when his vacation from the play came due in February.

And he revealed that he still harbored anxieties about his chosen profession: “The old addage [
sic
] about actors goes something to the effect that for every dollar earned, fifty cents should be saved, because an actor does well if he works an average of every other day. This quaint phrase has stuck in my memory, tho [
sic
] I confess a certain inability to conform to it.” By the end of 1953 he was wondering if the continued popularity of the play that had made his name, such as it was, wasn’t hurting him: “Some offers… are coming my way, which are difficult to even think about, because I’m tied to
Picnic
until June. After that I’ll probably be a nice cold property.”

But then in January 1954, in the last of the letters that his uncle saved, a note of cautious optimism entered in a guarded and slightly remote phrase: “There are some movie offers.”

T
HERE THEY STAND, ELBOW TO ELBOW, ICONS OF MALE BEAUTY
as perfect as classical sculptures or paintings of Renaissance boys, but living and breathing.

The one on the left is shorter and thicker of brow, with a slit of a smile and an open-necked shirt and a pocketknife that he tosses in his hand, blade bared. The one on the right is longer of face, and his hair is wavier, and his polka-dot bow tie and the pencil wedged behind his left ear give him the air of a shopkeeper.

They’re delicious, both of them, with slender bodies, finely cut faces, thick heads of hair, killer smiles. Energized and chummy and young and burgeoning with the heady promise of themselves, they take your breath away: you simply can’t decide which is the more perfect.

The taller seems more nervous, quicker to joke and snicker and touch a finger to his nose and, as well, to drop the pretense of play and get serious when asked to; he even gives direction to the other fellow. The little guy seems genuinely edgy: not just because of the knife play, which introduces a random threat into a mundane moment, but also in the insouciant mumbling of his words and in the unfettered way impulses burst out of him.

For instance, somebody off camera starts talking about girls and asks the little guy if he thinks the girls go for the tall fellow. Before an answer can come, the tall guy anxiously interrupts: “It’s a point of whether I go for the girls, you know.” So the off-camera voice changes
tack and asks the tall guy if he thinks the girls would go for the other fellow. He can barely find words: “Ooooh …great …”

And then they turn and face each other and the smaller guy blurts out, just like that, “Kiss me.” “Can’t here,” the tall guy snaps back, and they both laugh, but he’s been rocked on his heels a bit; you can see it.

If you were scoring it as a prizefight, the little guy would have won on points. In fact, it’s something rather like a prizefight: a screen test, conducted sometime in early 1954. Newman is the taller guy, trying to convince the director of his aptness for a big new movie with two meaty roles for young leading-man types.

Surviving details are scant, but the sense is that the two weren’t auditioning for the same role. The other guy was probably already cast and Newman was fishing for a chance to play his brother. He didn’t get it. Instead a third actor, who like these two was clawing his way up from TV to the movies, played the part—a fellow by the name of Richard Davalos, who would never again get near anything like this part, the morally upright but emotionally hollow son of a successful California farmer in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s
East of Eden.

Playing his brother, Cal, the headstrong and yearning black sheep of a fractured family was, of course, the guy with the knife from Newman’s screen test: James Dean.

N
EWMAN ARRIVED
in Hollywood in 1954 on the strength of one of those offers he wrote his uncle Joe about. The movie studios were signing talent from the Actors Studio, and Newman, like Dean, was among the lucky cohort they chose.

During the run of
Picnic
, despite his fears that he would become a cold property, Newman’s MCA agents had pricked Hollywood’s interest in signing him to a contract. Anyone could see that he had the looks to make it in movies. And if his performance as Alan Seymour wasn’t exactly a sizzler, his increasingly confident and competent work on television showed that he could, potentially, muster whatever a film role might require of him.

It was still potential, though. In 1953 he was one of three Actors Studio members to audition for a production of
Oklahoma!
that was being planned by Fred Zinnemann. The big dog in the trio of hopefuls was Rod Steiger, who remembered testing in color and in black and white with James Dean and said, “None of us knew Newman at the time.” Zinnemann didn’t like what he saw in any of them, however, particularly not Newman. “Paul Newman is a handsome boy, but quite stiff, to my disappointment,” he wrote in his casting notes. “He lacks experience and would need a great deal of work. Still, in the long run he may be the right boy for us. He certainly has a most winning personality, although I wish he had a little more cockiness and bravado.”

Later that year, with the end of his commitment to the Broadway production of
Picnic
in sight and no interest in playing the role of Alan Seymour in the upcoming road production, Newman took a hard look at other movie offers his agents at MCA were bringing him. “I had a lot of people inquire—Metro, Columbia, Paramount, Hal Wallis. All of them were sort of sniffing around, and I kept saying no,” he recalled. But, he said, “There’s that horrible moment when people say, ‘You know, you are hot and cold in this business, and there comes a time when opportunity knocks, and if you pass up the last one, then all of a sudden, for no reason…’”

As with other major decisions he’d made about his career, he acted out of practical necessity: “I was starting to get a little worried, and I had a family to support and everything, so I went into this thing.” He was flown out to Los Angeles for screen tests, and on April 8 Warner Bros. signed him to the sort of contract that it had been presenting to fledgling actors for decades: two movies a year, with an option on a third, for five years, plus the right to loan him out to other studios; in exchange, he got $1,000 a week, with a guarantee of ten weeks of work annually, a promise of a $250-per-week raise each year, and the opportunity to appear in a “first-class” stage show in New York for up to nine months.

Three weeks after he signed the deal, the
New York Times
reported that he had been cast in a feature role as Basil, the hero of the biblical drama
The Silver Chalice
, a $3 million adaptation of a popular novel by
Thomas B. Costain about the creation of a drinking cup commemorating the last supper of Jesus Christ. The veteran (if not especially distinguished) English director Victor Saville had been assigned the material, and he dutifully—if dubiously—pronounced of his star, “I saw Paul Newman on Broadway and I knew here was the ideal man for the role of the Greek silversmith who fashioned the chalice.”

The cast would include Virginia Mayo, Jack Palance, and the Italian starlet Pier Angeli, and it was intended to be a big Christmastime CinemaScope release in an age when movie theaters that had lost customers to television were being filled once again by such classical spectacles as
Quo Vadis, The Robe
, and
The Egyptian.
It was a plum, in fact—and it might well have been the last film Newman ever made.

I
N
M
AY
Newman packed up Jackie, Scott, and Susan and, stopping en route to pay a visit to Shaker Heights, dropped them off in Wisconsin and headed out to Hollywood. He rented a furnished apartment—little more than a glorified motel room—and the family would visit him during the production. But most of the time he was on his own.

He didn’t embrace the lifestyle. He felt an immediate kinship with the handful of New York actors then working in Hollywood, and he spent a little time socializing with Dean, whom he introduced to Angeli on the set of
Chalice
, kindling what would become a brief, intense affair. But he found himself by and large deprived of the camaraderie of actors that so enthralled him on Broadway and around the New York TV studios. And he developed a reputation as an uncooperative smart-ass.

There was the time he met the producer Sam Spiegel, who had just made
The African Queen
and was now casting
On the Waterfront.
Spiegel had only recently begun to work under his own obviously Jewish name rather than billing himself as S. P. Eagle, as he had done previously. Newman was screen-tested, among scores of other actors, for the role of ex-boxer Terry Malloy. And when he met the producer, he recalled, he was offered what was no doubt meant to be sage advice.

“ ‘Have you ever thought of changing your name, from Paul Newman to something else?’

“I said, ‘Why?’

“He said, ‘Well, it doesn’t sound very phonetic.’

“I said, ‘You mean it sounds Jewish.’

“He said, ‘All right, if you want to put it like that—it sounds Jewish.’

“So I said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I have thought about changing my name.’

“He said, ‘To what?’

“I said, ‘To S. P. Newman.’”

(“That was the last conversation I ever had with him,” Newman later confessed. “I could have destroyed my career.”)

He wasn’t doing much better on the film set. As soon as the shoot began, trouble started. Newman had been attending classes at the Actors Studio for nearly eighteen months and was accustomed to talking about the intricacies of performances in ways that didn’t necessarily fit into Hollywood’s clock-punching production schedules. It was still the early days in the history of American Method acting, and the style of performer that the Studio produced hadn’t yet been absorbed comfortably into an industry interested in stars and not artists. Right away Newman gave the studio just the sort of fits they’d come to expect from New York Method actors, questioning the script and the direction in a way that his bosses and colleagues saw as confrontational and insubordinate.

One day a
Variety
reporter showed up during the production and found Newman at loggerheads with Saville over a speech Basil was supposed to deliver after having a divine revelation that would inspire the crafting of the chalice. “If you had just seen a vision, what would you do?” he asked the reporter. “Wouldn’t you want to be completely quiet and go off by yourself for a while? They had some words for me to say, but I don’t want to say any—I just want to show what I feel. Maybe it won’t work out. Maybe I won’t be able to show it at all, and we’ll have to go back to the words. But I think this man is so worked up that when the vision comes he’s—well, he’s limp. It would take an hour for him even to touch his hand to the chalice to try to reproduce what he has seen.”

Jack Warner, notoriously boorish and bullheaded even for a Hollywood studio boss, didn’t take to such fussiness, and he made it clear to
Newman that he should shut up and work. “I was flailing around and got a reputation in Hollywood as a very difficult actor,” Newman admitted. “Every time I asked a question there was trouble.” He couldn’t do the smallest thing that was asked of him without causing an incident. “I had to ride a camel,” he remembered years later. “Have you ever tried to ride a camel? The gait is very uneven. Just try to hit a mark on a camel.” What was worse was that he knew in his heart that he was doing a poor job: “I couldn’t handle the language I was supposed to speak. My acting was terrible, and I knew it was terrible.”

This wasn’t the sort of nervous fear he had felt about exposing himself at Yale. This was an honest professional assessment of himself and the production: he was doing a lousy job and he was making a lousy picture, and if nothing else, he was smart enough to recognize it and come up with a plan. “Three weeks after we started shooting,” he said, “I called my agent in New York screaming desperately for him to get me a play. I figured the picture would kill me. I wasn’t really convinced that I would survive as an actor.”

He made it back to New York at the end of the summer with his tail between his legs, eager to get as much work under his belt as he could and strengthen his reputation prophylactically for the big hit it was about to take when
Chalice
saw the light of day. Again he got lucky: Robert Montgomery, the actor who’d become a successful television producer and film director, had planned to bring a new drama, entitled
The Desperate Hours
, to Broadway at the end of the year, but he had pushed the opening back a few months so that he could act as an adviser on Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential election campaign. As a result of the delay Cliff Robertson, who’d been set to play one of the leads, had to back out of the show. By October, Newman had been cast in his role, with rehearsals planned for the holiday season and an opening on Broadway scheduled for February.
*

In the interim, Newman’s agents landed him some solid television roles. In “Guilty Is the Stranger,” an episode of
Goodyear Television
Playhouse
directed by Arthur Penn and written by Tad Mosel, he played a Korean War veteran who visits the wealthy, widowed mother (Fay Bainter) of a slain comrade. The young man speaks of his great affection for the dead boy, and he knows all kinds of details about the house, the family, and the fellow’s sweetheart (Pat Crowley). He’s embraced by the older woman, but the younger one remains suspicious of him, eventually tricking him into revealing that not only wasn’t he a friend of her fallen beau but that he may have accidentally caused his death. His confession is so wrenching, heartfelt, and tragic that he is taken in by the women despite his awful deed.

Newman is strong in the role, believable first as an overeager gladhander, then as a conniving huckster with a surfeit of charm (he absolutely preens in the ugly suit of clothes—the “Dapper Dan”—he buys himself with the widow’s money), and finally as a young man riddled with guilt and shame. It was the first time he ever displayed the combination of brashness, fragility, impulsiveness, and struggle toward decency that would become his screen skin. “I felt comfortable in the part,” he recalled. “It was the first part I’d ever played that I found the character for.”