Paul Newman (29 page)

In prose as thick and dreamy as Faulkner’s, Kesey told the story of the Stampers, an iconoclastic Oregon logging family who insist on fulfilling their timber contracts even when all their neighbors, who belong to a union, have put down their chain saws in a strike. In the midst of this labor crisis, the Stamper family is tearing apart. Flinty old
paterfamilias Henry is laid up with a broken arm; his gung-ho son, Hank, and nephew, Joe Ben, keep up the business; their obliging, subservient wives feed and bed them like maids, without complaint; the delicate household balance is shattered by the arrival of Leland, Hank’s estranged half brother, who is there to demand his place in the family in the wake of his mother’s death.

It’s a notoriously complex text and hard to imagine pared down for the screen: Newman had initially put Stewart Stern to the task of adapting it, but the version that was eventually filmed was credited to another veteran screenwriter, John Gay. An impressive cast was assembled: Newman as Hank Stamper, Henry Fonda as his dad, Lee Remick as his wife, Richard Jaeckel as his cousin, and Michael Sarrazin as his long-lost brother. They would shoot in the summer of 1970 in the southern Oregon towns of Newport and Lincoln City, where the Siletz and Yaquina rivers supported the local fishing and logging economies: just the sort of places the Stampers—and indeed Kesey—called home. Newman and Foreman entrusted the project to director Richard Colla, a relative novice who had a single feature film and a fair bit of episodic TV to his credit. (He had worked with George Kennedy, which was perhaps how he came to Newman’s attention.)

Newman planned to spend the summer commuting from Oregon to Los Angeles, where he was having fun running a Formula One race car around Ontario Speedway, taking driving lessons, and competing, in a low-stress way, in pro-am fund-raisers for charity. In Oregon he rented a house on a spit of land stuck into the Pacific and had an Irish wolfhound for company, as well as a train of Hollywood visitors, including Marlon Brando and John Derek. Scott Newman would be there as well, working with the second filming unit between semesters at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, a small liberal arts school actually founded by George Washington. And Joanne and the girls visited a fair bit.

Newman had gone up early to Oregon to get in with the loggers and absorb their work ways and personalities. As usual, he committed himself physically to the job, even learning to climb eighty-foot-tall trees with a full load of chain saws, axes, and safety equipment—despite a phobia of heights. “It takes a lot of acting to cover up that fear,” he
said. (Perhaps to help, he was hitting the sauce: whiskey, and lots of it, on top of his daily diet of beers. And he had a new trick: crushing beer cans with his feet so that they formed clanky shells that stuck to his shoes.) His role included a scene in a motorcycle race at a loggers’ picnic, so he was learning the ins and outs at the feet of champion desert racer J. N. Roberts. He killed time roaring around on a motorcycle right on the beach outside his rented home.

The shoot began in late June 1970, and right away there were problems. Colla had decided to employ a fluid camera style to impart some of the savor of Kesey’s prose in the visuals. But his approach was working against the actors, who felt that he was emphasizing their position relative to the camera more than their interaction with one another. After two weeks Newman and Foreman weren’t happy with what they were getting from the young director, and they put him on notice that he had to change his technique.

The big test would come when Colla filmed one of the dining room scenes in the Stamper house—big, noisy, manly affairs with old Henry scarfing food and cracking wise and mean, Hank and Joe Ben joining in, the kids all carrying on, and the women doing the serving. On the set that day was Ted Mahar, a reporter from the
Oregonian
, the state’s biggest daily paper. As he recalled it, Colla had contrived a long, elaborate tracking shot with the camera gliding above the actors’ heads and coming to rest on specific faces as they spoke. “It required intricate planning and rehearsal,” Mahar recalled, and the crew had to “pull back a wall so the camera could orbit the table in one smooth take.”

They did it again and again and never got it right. And the next morning, according to Mahar, “Colla wasn’t even in Oregon anymore.” During the evening Newman and Foreman had fired the director, and now they had to replace him. Although he had not chosen the material for himself to direct, and had not prepared at all to fill that role, Newman agreed to do it himself. As he put it, “Rather than close down and find another one [director], and then have him learn about the whole logging thing, it just seemed better for me to take over.”

Newman, who the previous day had been happy enough to have a reporter around that he’d offered Mahar a beer from the fridge in the
Stamper kitchen, was now stuck somewhere by a phone, working out the situation with Foreman and the money people back at Universal. Mahar passed the time talking with Fonda and cinematographer Richard Moore and learned the whole story. Mahar wrote up his hot scoop at his hotel before dictating it over the phone to his editors. And then he went back to Portland, where Foreman called him the next day after seeing it in print, “furious to the point of tears.”

Newman meanwhile enlisted the help of George Roy Hill, who flew up to Oregon to look over all of Colla’s footage and give Newman a sense of how he could incorporate it into the stuff he was preparing to shoot. As Newman recalled, “He said, ‘You need twenty set-ups, you need a point of view on the kid, you need his walking-away shot, and so forth.’ And then he got in his airplane and left.”

Stuck in this stressful situation, Newman plowed ahead and went a little crazy. “To act and direct at the same time is like sticking a gun in your mouth,” he said. “I don’t think I’d ever do it again.” He coated his exhaustion and stress with drink. “I drank whiskey a lot,” he admitted years later. “For a while it really screwed me up. There are periods of my life in which I don’t take any particular pride …I gave up hard liquor because I simply couldn’t handle it. That was my sledgehammer. We were finishing shooting
Notion.
I don’t know if it was the pressure of the picture, but I was
really
out of line.” He imperiled the film further by cracking up on a motorcycle, busting his left ankle, and bringing the production briefly to a halt. He flew to Los Angeles for X rays, and as it turned out to be merely a bad sprain, he actually resumed riding. Sue Bronson, a novelist who visited the set to do research for a book about a Hollywood film crew shooting a movie on location, saw Newman skid and nearly dump a bike on the beach one day while his foot was still in a cast; he came up unhurt, laughing at his clumsiness and urging her with a shushing gesture to keep what she’d seen to herself.

Bronson was on the set a few days later when the most memorable scene in the film was shot. In the aftermath of a landslide, Joe Ben finds himself trapped in the mud of the estuary underneath the weight of a fallen tree; Hank tries a number of ways to free his cousin, but the tide is coming in and he’s working against it. After several exhausting
efforts, the two realize that they must wait for help; but the tide is liable to drown Joe Ben before help comes; the stillness and strangeness of the setting become almost intoxicating, and they break into laughter. When the water finally swallows Joe Ben, Hank keeps him alive by breathing gulps of air into his mouth. But that too becomes impossible after a while, and Joe Ben drowns.

The incredible drama and pathos of the scene, and its implicit theme of the power of nature over man, was what recommended the project to Newman in the first place. “Our company really bought the book because of that one scene,” he said. “To me the film was worth doing because of the impact there.” The close-up work was done in a large water tank, Bronson recalled; Newman and Jaeckel, forced in effect to kiss each other over the course of several hours of work, “could not stop laughing.” But the finished scene played magnificently, and Jaekel would eventually get an Oscar nomination for his work in it.
*

Newman had hopes for the picture: “It wasn’t great, but it certainly wasn’t a
lousy
movie,” he said. The finished film wasn’t released until the spring of 1972, a full eighteen months later. Reviews were mixed: admiring the effort, the naturalistic acting, the scenery, and the scene of Jo Ben’s death, they generally cited it as muddled and bland. Vincent Canby, who championed the film in the
New York Times
more than once, called it “happily impure” and compared it favorably to classic films about workingmen by Howard Hawks and John Ford. But the studio had no clue what to do with it even after all that time. “Those schmucks at Universal released it in sporadic spurts across the country, mostly at drive-ins,” Newman complained. “They killed it before it got a chance to attract any serious attention.” He conceded that the title didn’t help:
“Sometimes a Great Notion
didn’t give any idea of what it was about.” And he did achieve a milestone of sorts with it: on November 8, 1972, it was the very first attraction presented on the world’s first pay-cable station, Home Box Office, or HBO.

B
Y THE
time
Notion
was finally released, Newman already had another picture out,
Pocket Money
, a lackluster attempt to make Newman-Redford hay out of the more dubious seed of a Newman–Lee Marvin pairing. A comedy about the half-baked get-not-too-rich-not-too-quick schemes of a pair of chums who are kind of grifters and kind of cowboys, it was adapted from J. P. S. Brown’s novel
Jim Kane
by Terrence Malick. Stuart Rosenberg was directing, and John Foreman was producing under the aegis of First Artists, marking that company’s first screen credit—more than two years after the starry announcement of its formation.

Much of the picture was shot on location in Santa Fe; when Joanne and the girls rode through on a train to New York, the production company arranged for it to slow down sufficiently for them to wave at Newman as they passed through. Newman and Marvin hadn’t worked together since
The Rack
, a full seventeen years earlier, and they didn’t bond. English photographer Terry O’Neill visited the set to shoot some publicity snaps, and he found Marvin on edge. “He’d decided everyone was against him,” O’Neill recalled. “He was always being cast as the ugly one. It was difficult standing up next to Paul Newman, who was so fantastically good-looking.”

Vogue
magazine sent a young reporter to the set for a few days, and she turned in an insightful and beautifully written piece. Her name was Candice Bergen, and she captured Newman with great vividness: “His face is so handsome you almost start laughing. It’s like a joke… He is a physical phenomenon. We should bequeath him to the Museum of Natural History.” She was a careful observer, noting his nail-biting and his complaints of insomnia, reporting that he had been calling himself “the Old Fox” around the set, “A nickname,” she recalled, that “he originated and no one else ever took up. Consequently, his calling, ‘Hey, get the Old Fox a beer,’ is met with people shifting positions to see who the Old Fox is.” She came to a wise understanding of his acting too: “His working technique is rigidly logistical and linear. He is an intellectual actor, dealing in motivation, and uncomfortable in an extemporaneous
or improvised situation. His style is subtle and cerebral. And he is constantly refining it. ‘The Master of Underplay’ they call him.”

Marvin was less impressed with his costar, though, and when the picture was released, he complained to a reporter that Newman had “finessed” him into a subordinate role in the film. Newman was stunned to hear such a claim:
“I
finessed him? I never even looked at the picture.” Nor did most anybody else: the film had a lazy charm—Newman’s obliquely comic performance was like a pared-down version of his Harry Frigg of a couple of years earlier—but it had no real bite or energy. The reviews were tepid and so was the box office, and the two uncomfortably matched stars never worked together again.

N
EWMAN FOLLOWED
Joanne and the girls back home to Connecticut and a chance to reunite the director of
Rachel, Rachel
with the film’s star and costar on a new movie.
The Effect of Gamma Rays on the Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
was the unlikely title of Paul Zindel’s play about Bea trice Hunsdorfer, a dumpy, bitter mother of two teenage girls, one a misfit epileptic, the other a brilliant science scholar. Beatrice is mean and awful and lives, like an especially acrid Tennessee Williams character, on a diet of sour and selectively sweetened memories and impossible schemes for bettering her situation. Newman and John Foreman had acquired the Pulitzer Prize–winning material specifically for Joanne to star in and Newman to direct. But even given the success of the play and of
Rachel, Rachel
, they were unable to get funding from a studio unless Newman signed away his right to the final cut of the film. (“Perhaps if I played Beatrice and Joanne directed there would have been more interest,” he joked.)