Paul Newman, page 23
NEWMAN MAY very well have gotten a kick out of having his identity questioned, as he’d become increasingly frustrated with his inability to live privately. He felt he’d never asked for the intrusions that were part of being famous; he was notoriously reticent with reporters, and he tried almost too hard to play the ordinary guy: the frumpy wardrobe, the VW with the Porsche engine, the bottle opener worn on a dogtag chain around his neck.
And he talked about it. A lot. Just as he felt that he hadn’t forfeited his right to hold political opinions when he became an actor, he felt that he hadn’t signed away his right to have a private life, even if, like everyone else, he occasionally walked into public places such as shops, restaurants, hotels, or resorts.
“You can’t really appreciate anonymity until you’ve lost it,” he told a reporter. “People say that’s sour grapes, but it really isn’t. To be able to walk down the street without people paying attention to you is a real blessing. And you lose it when you become an actor.”
He’d always had a self-contained nature; he had to learn how to step outside his skin to become an actor. And he was prone to brooding and stewing. “When Paul is angry,” his brother told people, “he is very quiet.” Longtime friends saw it clearly: “He is the most private man I’ve ever known,” A. E. Hotchner once said of him. “He has a moat and a drawbridge, which he lets down only occasionally.” He himself saw it a little differently. “I’ve been accused of being aloof,” he said. “I’m not. I’m just wary.” And, another way: “I’m a loner, and I’m always just a private person.”
But it was clear that he didn’t like the sort of attention he received. He took to wearing dark glasses—indoors, outdoors, day, night. This became a theme in itself, because so many of the oglers and intruders whom he resented specifically wanted to see those famous blue eyes.
The glasses, perversely, emboldened people, who would bluntly ask to see his eyes rather than just steal glances at them. It made him, he said, feel like a piece of meat. “If you have success, you’d really like to take credit for it,” he explained. “It’s really hard to take credit because some lady staggers across the sidewalk and says, ‘Take off your dark sunglasses, I wanna see your baby blues.’” And he elaborated, “If you can get by on your baby blues, then what does it mean to be anything in the profession?”
He would make jokes to defuse the situation, replying to the most forward fans that if he took off his glasses his pants would fall down, or telling reporters that his tombstone would declare that he died a failure in life because his eyes turned brown. In a typical bit of Newmanish whimsy, he gave the matter some philosophical consideration: “The thing I’ve never figured out is, how do you present eyes? Do you present them coyly? Do you present them boldly?” But mostly he resented it.
And even worse, he resented requests for autographs. “It’s just swell getting stopped seventy times going to the corner bar,” he groused to a reporter while drinking a beer on a movie set. “If I never get asked for another autograph, I’ll be a happy man.” For a while he obliged, but then—after, he said, being asked to sign his name while he was using a urinal in Sardi’s—he adopted a blanket policy of simply saying no to any and all autograph-seekers. He wasn’t always diplomatic about it: one time he refused Henny Youngman to his face; another time he declined a request from the president of the Chicago Board of Trade—at the very moment when he had brought trade at the Commodity Exchange to a dead stop merely by visiting the floor. He attended a charitable event for a school and refused autographs to the students. “With everything that’s happening in the world,” he asked them, “why do you collect autographs?” “It keeps us off the street,” one of them said. “Isn’t it better than smoking pot?” “Yes,” he admitted, “and I’m sorry, but I still don’t sign.”
Once he thought he’d found a solution for being mobbed, but it didn’t work. “I grew a beard so I wouldn’t be recognized,” he told a reporter. “So what happened: a couple of kids on the street saw me and said, ‘Jesus! It’s Paul Newman in a beard!’”
There was no end to it. He had been mobbed in Queens a couple years back when he took the kids to the World’s Fair, and he wasn’t able to take them to Disneyland without having a guide steer them to special entrances and exits around the park. When the family rented a home in Beverly Hills, rubbernecking tourists with maps to the stars’ homes would snake slowly up the street searching for him; the Newmans slapped a sign on their front lawn that read “Please! They have moved! The Piersons.” The most boorish of them would actually ring the bell—or wander up the drive of the farmhouse in Connecticut. Joanne joked that she’d need to get another sign: “‘Beware of Paul.’ He doesn’t take such things lightly.”
RIGHT AFTER Luke, Newman shot an execrable World War II comedy that went through several name changes before being released—and bombing—as The Secret War of Harry Frigg. He tried to enjoy his role, a private with a penchant for going AWOL, by giving him a Graziano-esque simplicity and a goofy walk that he remembered from a guy he knew in the navy. He had a couple of sexy scenes with Italian starlet Sylva Koscina, but he never fooled himself about the quality of the thing: “I thought there was something there,” he reflected. “The writer took it out.”
But his next film was a different matter. In August 1967 Variety excitedly reported the scoop that Newman was making a new film—had been making it for weeks, in fact, without anyone’s knowing. And what’s more, he wasn’t acting in it; he was directing. It was an adaptation of the novel A Jest of God by the Canadian author Margaret Laurence, and it was being filmed in and around Danbury, Connecticut, with Joanne cast in the lead as Rachel Cameron, a virginal small-town schoolteacher who decides, inch by inch one summer, to start taking chances with her life; Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, as the recently sold studio was newly called, would produce.
Newman’s move behind the camera hadn’t exactly come about without warning. He’d studied directing at Yale, of course, and he’d made On the Harmfulness of Tobacco previously, and he’d been talking for years about how he was more interested in the preparations for acting—the aspects most closely resembling the responsibilities of a director—than he was in actual performances. But it was still a newsworthy event, and the announcement of it indicated that Newman would direct a second film for Warner Bros. and star in two others, all in repayment for the studio’s financial backing of Jest, which was believed to be in the neighborhood of $700,000.
The novel was actually discovered by John Foreman, who sent it in galleys to Joanne, figuring it was something she might appreciate. (He had a good eye; the book went on to win the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s most prestigious literary prize.) They took an option on the material and then surprised Newman with the news; he read it, and although he expressed some admiration for it and saw that she would be a good choice for the part, he deemed it “not movie material.” So she took it to Stewart Stern, who had been mired in a dry spell since his script for The Ugly American had been shot as a Marlon Brando film in 1963. Despite having built up an enormous ambivalence about screenwriting—a couple of his scripts, commissioned as major projects, still sat unproduced on studio shelves—Stern set about adapting the book. When he had a draft, Foreman shopped it to prospective directors. As Joanne recalled, “[Stern] and I went around offering ourselves to everybody, but I’m afraid offering the package of the script and me was hardly like offering Elizabeth Taylor and Tennessee Williams.”
As they kept at it, Newman took an interest in what they were doing, and he went from kibitzing over it to becoming engaged with it. The three went to Palm Springs to work on the screenplay. “I got involved in it about the same way the United States got involved in the Vietnam War,” Newman joked. “I came in as an adviser and found the whole process was escalating until I was directing… There were a few conflicting discussions between myself and [Stern], until I gradually realized I just had to direct it. It was the only way to settle the conflict we’d been having.”
For his part, Stern too recalled the process as arduous, “because of difficulty in communication. I tend to be very verbal. And Paul is minimalistic. Very often I won’t get what he really means. Also, he is refined in a way that I’m not. He is selective in a way that I’m not. He refers to me as ‘baroque,’ and I refer to him as ‘linear Cleveland mind.’ To each other. I mean, that’s how we talk to each other.”
Despite the head butting, Newman the terrier had the scent of something. He would direct and produce—just the opportunity he’d been seeking to make a film but not act in it. He and Foreman offered the project to various studios, he remembered, “but all the companies turned me down flat.” It was a wake-up call, he confessed: “I got total rejection of this picture, massive rejection. I finally had to go off in a corner and say, ‘No, my taste is better; ultimately, I’m more perceptive than they are.’” Finally, they struck the deal with Warner Bros.: he and Joanne agreed to work without salary and to make additional films in exchange for the budget and for one-third of the profits. Newman formed a production company named Kayos (pronounced “chaos”) to handle the deal, and he agreed to personally guarantee funding if he ran over budget.
He seemed enlivened by the sense of adventure and risk taking that directing entailed. “I’m curious about my taste, my dramatic selection, my technical ability with the camera,” he told a visitor to the set. “There’s no way to find out but to get up there and do it, and then let people hit you with baseball bats.” Stern was impressed with his friend’s determination. “He’s the only man I ever met,” he said, “who decides what makes him nervous—like directing a movie—and then, with his hands sweating and his feet sweating, goes right into it.”
The film would shoot toward the end of summer in Bethel, Connecticut, near Danbury; they set up offices in a Danbury hotel and built soundstages in the gymnasium of the Danbury Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. “There was some talk at one stage of shooting the film in California,” Newman said, “but we finally did it in Connecticut because I very much wanted to contrast the schoolteacher’s rather arid, dry existence with the lush, verdant spring background—it would have been far too obvious to have placed a barren life against a barren setting.”
The cast included Estelle Parsons, James Olson, Kate Harrington, Donald Moffat, and Geraldine Fitzgerald in featured roles. Several of the key actors read for their parts with Paul at the house in Westport while Joanne and the kids and the pets all ran about. But others had more immediate paths into the film: Frank Corsaro, from the Actors Studio and Baby Want a Kiss, was also in it, as was Newman’s auto mechanic, for that matter. And playing the role of young Rachel Cameron, who would be seen in the mature Rachel’s memories and reveries of defining childhood events, was a debuting actress named Nell Potts—actually Nell Newman, the eight-year-old daughter of the star and the director. “It’s cheaper to use your own children,” Joanne cracked, and Newman explained, “She’s not impressed with movies. The only reason she made this one was to earn money to feed her pigeons …I refused to subsidize them anymore, so she had to go out to work.” But the truth was that Nell looked a great deal like her mother (with, lucky girl, her father’s eyes), and the casting made perfect sense.
Art Newman was on the film as associate producer; the various department heads—cinematographer, editor, art director—were youngish for a studio project, among them editor Dede Allen, who had just worked on Bonnie and Clyde. Getting the thing together was a characteristic gung-ho spate of work for Newman: “In a little over a month,” he said, “I had the perfect location, the perfect cast, and I was starting. That’s the way to make pictures, when it’s all in a rush and it’s too late to back out.” And as time is the most expensive item on any film’s budget, he would have to be just as resourceful and expeditious in shooting it as he was in putting it together.
He was determined to get things done promptly and well, but it was also important to him that the crew felt it was a collegial set. “I called them all together on the first day,” he recalled, “and confessed that I was a virgin and told them that I wasn’t sensitive to criticism and that they would be able to make suggestions—once—on a given point. They did—sometimes more than once; but we got along fine.” The crew recognized his limits (“He’s sometimes stymied because he doesn’t know how to express himself mechanically,” one of them admitted to a reporter) but it was a genial shoot.
Indeed, in some aspects it felt like a summer camp: Newman reported to the set regularly in shorts and T-shirts and, often, barefoot. (One day, when some nuns from a nearby convent were visiting the set, the camera dolly rolled over his unprotected toes, and he sputtered out a stream of profanity just outside their hearing.) He drank beer and worried pack after pack of chewing gum; he’d nervously remove a wad of it from his mouth, shape it into a little ball, and then start chewing it again. Local hippies attached themselves to the peripheries of the production and decorated the crew’s dining area with flowers and posters adorned with beautiful thoughts.
Newman and director of photography Gayne Rescher must have been tempted to get beautiful with the camera as well, and there would indeed be shots that could only have been composed in the Summer of Love. But they tried to maintain an aesthetic discipline. “My motto as a director is ‘Fuck cool,’” he told a reporter. “I’d love to have it stenciled on the back of my chair and written on signs in letters a foot high. For my camera, I have a one-word motto: ‘Eavesdrop.’”
He and Joanne seemed genuinely to enjoy working together. “We have the same acting vocabulary,” he explained. “I would tell her, while [she was] reading a line, ‘pinch it’ or ‘thicken it,’ and she knew just what I meant …You could see her start off the day, and her toes would start to turn inward and her smile would become forced. She would just inhabit the part completely.” She compared their collaboration to “the rapport Bergman has with his actors… About halfway through the film, we began to feel like the Moscow Art Theatre.”
Parsons, whose performance in Bonnie and Clyde was just reaching theaters while she was working in Connecticut, was a little less rosy in her impression. “Paul Newman was very nervous and tense,” she remembered, “but I liked his visual style… He knew exactly the way he wanted my hair to look, he told me how to wear my makeup…I learned how interesting it could be to get involved with a character from him.”
And Stern, perhaps predictably, both was and had a nightmarish experience on the set. He came to Danbury to ensure that “the sense and intention of scenes that we had agreed about in calmer moments were not destroyed impulsively and under pressure.” And he found himself fighting for his vision when Newman vacillated about including a scene in which young Rachel sees a dead classmate on the embalming table in her father’s mortuary or one in which adult Rachel loses her virginity to a man she hasn’t seen since high school. “Dede Allen and I had to practically break his arm with the argument that it’s better to shoot it and have it than to make that kind of decision on the set,” Stern recalled.
The battles between the writer and the director-producer were real. “To try and maintain the friendship throughout was very difficult,” Stern admitted. “There were times when we simply didn’t talk to one another. Still, every day I was on the set. My obsessive watchfulness became a very heavy burden for Paul and for Joanne. Finally, they had me sitting on a catwalk with a plank in front of me, looking through a knothole, so they couldn’t see my expression. It bothered them that much.”
Fortunately, they had a real foundation of trust beneath their differences. Near the end of shooting, when the budget had effectively been bled dry, Stern became one of the crew. “We were short of equipment,” he remembered. “The dolly and everything had to go back because we were out of money. Instead of a dolly, for the last shot, the cameraman sat in a Safeway supermarket basket, and I pushed him. He had the camera between his knees.”
Despite all the headaches and little quarrels, and despite the noises he’d made about being done with movies, Newman seemed to enjoy his first job as a director a great deal. “I didn’t get anywhere near as tired directing as when I act. As an actor you stop and start the motor all day; it’s like running a hundred yards two feet at a time. When you’re involved with every facet of the production—script, attitudes, lighting, makeup, wardrobe—you’re constantly pumped up and you don’t have an opportunity to slow down.”
Still, to unwind from the shoot, he and a Westport buddy, clothier Mike Hyman, took a boys-only trip to Florida, where they fished, bombed around in speedboats, and drank. He came home to battle with the studio over what to call the film. A Jest of God was out: too obscure, too religious. For a spell Newman thought about using a line from a nursery rhyme; later, the film briefly was known as Now I Lay Me Down. Finally, they agreed to call it Rachel, Rachel.
NEWMAN HAD had a blast making Cool Hand Luke, tooling around central California in a blue Mercury convertible—and sometimes even on a motorcycle—when he wasn’t needed on set. He was open, too, to odd intrusions on the set, such as the day Dennis Hopper invited his San Francisco avant-garde filmmaker buddy Bruce Connor to shoot some footage of the actors clearing brush from a roadside under a blistering sun; Connor’s seventeen-minute film, entitled Luke and featuring Newman, Hopper, and the rest swinging scythes in super-super-slow motion, would be studied in museum basement screening rooms for decades to come.
But it was a different matter for Donn Pearce, who hated movie people, thought Newman was too scrawny to play the hero of his novel, and capped his last day on the set by punching somebody out. Newman didn’t seem to notice. He had thrived on the manly camaraderie and the outré pursuits in which his character indulged: fistfights and card games and physical labor in the hot sun and groveling two-faced to the road gang bosses—and, famously, taking on a bet that he could eat fifty eggs.
