Paul Newman, page 31
That spring, when Scott appeared in court, he was found innocent of felony battery but guilty of misdemeanor battery; the judge fined him $1,000 and sentenced him to two years’ probation. Again Newman took an odd tack in response, seemingly blaming the press for making a big deal out of nothing: “The incident with him was blown all out of proportion. And I think that’s deliberate. The accusation is always on the first page and the retraction on page nineteen.” But if he didn’t ascribe blame for Scott’s brush with the law appropriately, it nevertheless seemed to encourage him to take a more active role in his son’s life. He steered him toward acting classes with Peggy Feury, an L.A. teacher with an Actors Studio background, and he helped him get a role in his own latest film, a big-budget movie about a fire in a skyscraper entitled The Towering Inferno.
LOOKING BACK, it would be hard to accuse Newman of choosing his movie roles simply for the money. But in the case of The Towering Inferno, not much else can explain why he agreed to appear in a film in which, as he put it, “the real star…is that damned fire.” The movie was the creation of producer Irwin Allen, who’d made his name in television and then invented a new formula for blockbuster movies with 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure: take a big cast of well-known names, stick them in some sort of disaster, and let a bunch of extras die at the hands of special effects while the stars—minus a sacrificial lamb or two—fight their way to safety. Already he had a second iteration in the can—a seismic disaster film called Earthquake—and now he had acquired the rights to not one but two novels about high-rise fires and had no less a writer than Stirling Silliphant, who’d won an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night, working to combine them into a script.
Newman was cast in the entirely unchallenging role of the architect who designed the dizzying tower and doesn’t know that the financiers have cut corners on fire safety in building it. On the skyscraper’s gala opening night fire strikes, and everything that can go wrong does. To play the key role of the fire chief, who must risk his own life and those of his men to save the very people whose penny-pinching had created the catastrophe, Allen had scored the coup of casting Steve McQueen, meaning that the film would pair two of the biggest stars in the world; surely it would be a moneymaking machine. The cast was filled with impressive names—William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Robert Wagner, Richard Chamberlain, even O. J. Simpson. And Scott Newman would play in a small role opposite McQueen as a rookie fireman with a bad case of the jitters.
He’d gotten onto the film not only because of his father but because he was legitimately capable of stunt work. In preparation, he learned how to rappel down a sheer wall on a rope line. And he even made a sweetheart of a young stuntwoman, Glynn Rubin, whom he met on the shoot. But McQueen was chary of him. McQueen had a genuinely neurotic relationship with Newman, whose career and stature he frankly envied. The two had worked together, in a small way, on Somebody Up There Likes Me, and McQueen was still smarting from having passed on Butch Cassidy over essentially an ego issue. He had seen to it that he would get slightly more desirable billing on Towering Inferno than Newman, and that the two would have equal amounts of dialogue and screen time, but he was cross to learn that he would have to carry his rival’s kid through a big scene. As it happened, though, he took a liking to Scott, praising his work and allowing Allen’s writers to add a couple of lines for him. Later, when the film was released, Scott was employed heavily in the publicity campaign, touring the East Coast and doing interviews with print and TV journalists. It was a big moment for him.
NEWMAN DIDN’T do much either in The Towering Inferno or in support of it—“I knew that the quicker I got off the screen and the stuntman got on, the quicker the picture would start rolling,” he told a writer for The Atlantic, whose readers could hardly be considered the film’s target market. It was an agreeably slick film, with little in the way of credible human drama but reasonably tense action. Newman thought of it as “distinguished junk” and was remunerated impressively for holding his nose, taking home a guaranteed $1 million, as per usual, and a percentage of the gross that was estimated to be more than eight times that: nearly a $10 million payday all told.
And that sum turned out to be gravy: “Towering Inferno was the first and only picture I’ve ever decided to do for money—up until then,” he explained. “After I’d accepted the role, though, the money from The Sting started coming in, so I put that aside and pissed away the Inferno money.”
Putting money aside surely had something to do with another impressive number that was facing him: fifty, which was how old he turned that January, a fact that magazine covers would wonder about in genuine disbelief: how could a fellow so fit and spry and sexy be fifty years old? He celebrated his birthday—January 26—by assembling Joanne and the girls (but not Scott) in Westport to observe his morning swim in the gelid waters of the Aspetuck River. A family luncheon followed, during which he was given, among other gifts, a wicker wheelchair.
That night a coterie of friends—Stewart Stern, George Roy Hill, Robert Redford, A. E. Hotchner, Edward Villella, Cheryl Crawford, Anne Jackson, and Gene Shalit—were among the fifty guests who joined the seven Newmans at La Cave Henri IV in Manhattan for an evening of dining, laughs, and music. (Neil Sedaka performed a few standards for which Sammy Cahn had rewritten the lyrics.) Among the gifts for the Old Fox, as the printed menus called him, was a cache of fifty cans of Coors, then still a cult beer available only in the West. (Redford presented him with a smashed-up old Porsche, which Newman later had compacted and delivered in a shipping crate to Redford’s home on his birthday.) The birthday boy and his wife sent the kids home and spent the night at a Park Avenue hotel.
Approximately three months later he was being celebrated in Manhattan once again, this time alongside Joanne, as an honoree of the Film Society of Lincoln Center at a gala benefit retrospective of their careers. Newman was embarrassed at being given an honor that had previously been accorded only to Charles Chaplin, Fred Astaire, and Alfred Hitchcock. “I depreciate my own work,” he told a reporter over a lunch of omelets and beers. “When they’re good, they’re okay; when they’re bad, they’re really horrid.” Joanne didn’t exactly crow about herself either: “We’re a kind of an artificial couple. Paul is a great star. I’m a character actress.”
On the night of the gala, an array of stars turned out—Myrna Loy, Martin Balsam, Maureen Stapleton, John Houseman, Anthony Perkins, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Richard Thomas, Shelley Winters—plus directors Otto Preminger, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Gil Cates, and Stuart Rosenberg. The Newmans were seated with New York mayor Abe Beame and his wife, and they had to endure, along with everyone else, an endless program of twenty-seven film clips: eleven of “his,” ten of “hers,” and six of “theirs.” Tennessee Williams introduced the Newman portion of the program and got an unintentional laugh by calling the star “Paul Goodman.” (“Why are you all laughing?” Williams asked. “I’m really not that funny.”)
When he finally got to speak, Newman poked fun at how he looked in that infamous “cocktail dress” from The Silver Chalice (a clip from which he insisted be included); when Joanne spoke, she apologized to the audience for a show that ran “longer than Gone with the Wind.” The evening went on for several hours, with the honorees standing patiently at a reception to which the most generous donors were invited. Newman passed the time by draining can after can of Coors.* The next morning he met some reporters for a casual press conference and once again drank beer after beer throughout, even though it started at ten A.M.
LINCOLN CENTER was actually an increasingly familiar place for the Newmans. Having turned to ballet in the late 1960s to tone up after her pregnancies, Joanne had become an avid attendee, donor to, and even patroness of the ballet, and her husband frequently accompanied her to recitals, galas, and benefits in support of dancers, dance education, and new dance companies. The Newmans were spotted at performances around the country, most especially in New York. And they were generous with grant money, giving, for instance, $50,000 to the Los Angeles Ballet in 1975 to help it open a school for dancers, as well as donations to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Paul Taylor company, and many small troupes around the country.
Newman wasn’t exactly keen on dance—“I enjoy all aspects of the theater,” he told a reporter, “though after I’d seen Giselle for the nineteenth time, I became resistant.” But he understood that his attendance at and appreciation of dance served as a way to pay Joanne back for all the weekends she’d been forced to spend doing needlepoint beside Winnebagos on dusty racetracks. “I trade her a couple of ballets for a couple of races,” he explained. He regularly gave her gifts from the world of ballet—posters and sculptures of her favorite dancers; she actually hung a large framed photo of Rudolph Nureyev in their bedroom. And he funded her passion. In 1975 she made a gift of $120,000 in seed money and became a founding board member of a new company, the Dancers; Dennis Wayne, a devilishly handsome and fiery-tempered thirtyish New York native and alumnus of the Joffrey Ballet and the American Ballet Theater, was its artistic director.
She was up and at the barre bright and early every morning—just as Newman was engaged in his daily routine of jogging or biking or swimming followed by a long sauna and a shower. In a marriage that could sometimes seem incongruous, their shared passion for fitness was one of their most reliable bonds. Joanne couldn’t quite drag him into all of her enthusiasms, though. When she and the girls turned to vegetarianism in the mid-1970s, he did so only grudgingly, and then lived on steaks and burgers whenever he was away from home. In 1975 Joanne attended est sessions—self-awareness training—and got so much out of them that she encouraged Scott, Susan, and Nell to do so too. But she never got her husband involved, even though, she said, “he complains of feeling left out of what’s became an exclusive little clique within the family.”
Nor did he follow her in her next bid for self-enhancement, when she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County, New York—convenient to both their Connecticut and Manhattan homes—to take the classes she’d been promising herself since she dropped out of Louisiana State more than twenty years earlier. She studied philosophy, art history, astronomy, and other miscellaneous subjects without intending to fulfill a degree or, indeed, without any aim in mind other than enrichment. It was as if she had decided that the subjugation of her career to her husband’s wasn’t going to be the end of her growth. If she was going to be seen as an appendage to an internationally famous movie star, she was going to be a cultivated one.
AS A sort of working vacation away from their strange multilimb juggling act of careers, homes on two coasts, and passions for auto racing and ballet, the Newmans went to New Orleans to make a film in 1974, the first in which they’d acted together since WUSA, which was also shot there. This one would be a sequel to Harper, initially entitled Ryan’s the Name but renamed The Drowning Pool, like the Ross Macdonald novel on which it was loosely based.
The plot had Lew Harper called to the Crescent City by a former lover, Iris (Joanne), who is married to a local big shot and is being blackmailed. In trying to ferret out the source of the threat, Harper encounters any number of depraved, dangerous, and dastardly southern types, from Iris’s sexpot daughter (an impossibly young Melanie Griffith) to a vaguely corrupt police lieutenant (Tony Franciosa) to a Cajun mogul (Murray Hamilton) determined to get his hands on the land owned by Iris’s mother-in-law.
Like all of Macdonald’s books, this one was originally set in Southern California, but Joanne, according to Newman, suggested they shoot in New Orleans. That allowed the filmmakers to imbue it with some exotic textures—French Quarter bars and antique shops, bayou speedboats, a warehouse full of Mardi Gras floats, and so on. The location had echoes of The Long, Hot Summer, with Newman as the outsider visiting an incestuous Louisiana town and sharing an attachment with Woodward while the presumed prince of the place, Franciosa, watches helplessly. And Stuart Rosenberg, who had made WUSA, was directing Newman for the fourth and final time.
In one exciting scene Harper and the bad guy’s wife (newcomer Gail Strickland) find themselves locked in the hydrotherapy room of an abandoned sanitarium, then fill it to the ceiling with water in an effort to burst out through the skylight; Newman wears boxer shorts and is incredibly fit on the cusp of his fiftieth birthday. But little of the old Harper magic—let alone that of Long, Hot Summer—was evident. The film didn’t carry the same saucy charm as the first; the slick irony of the Harper persona felt less fresh and timely than it had a decade earlier. Newman was obviously having a grand time. “I simply adore that character,” he said, “because it will accommodate any kind of actor’s invention… It’s just lovely to get up in the morning, it’s great to go to work, because you know you’re going to have a lot of fun that day.” But this was one of those grand times that didn’t translate from the set to the movie house, and the picture was released to indifferent reviews and business.
His commitment to auto racing had begun to dominate his film choices; he deliberately avoided working during the race season, meaning he either had to develop projects around that schedule or, worse, take the work that was available when he would be finished racing. “If I’ve been available in October,” he explained, “I’ve taken the first picture that’s available in October.” That strategy would lead him down some artistic and commercial dead ends. But his next project—which, yes, was filmed in the fall—was one that he’d been nurturing for years. In 1969 Newman and John Foreman, along with agent David Susskind, had spent $500,000 to acquire the rights to Indians, a scabrous play by Arthur Kopit concerning the abhorrent treatment of Native Americans by the white man. The intent was to have Kopit write a script and George Roy Hill direct it.
After five years of back-and-forth, however, the film had come to bear a different aspect. The Buffalo Bill project was in the hands of Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian producer famous for his alternating output of awful schlock and genuine quality. And rather than Kopit and Hill, the chief creative force behind the project was the celebrated independent writer-director Robert Altman, who was riding a string of hits including M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Nashville and who had written a new version of the script with his protégé, Alan Rudolph. What they had created was less an indictment of the Anglo-American conquest of the Indians than a gimlet-eyed send-up of the notions of fame, myth, and history, a pastiche of the life of a celebrated American hero and charlatan. It was meant to be released during the national observance of the Bicentennial—a pie in the face, as it were, at the big patriotic party.
For his role as the great self-aggrandizer, Newman grew a jaunty goatee (which made him look rather like Altman, who wore similar facial hair most of his adult life) and sported a long, blond wavy wig and the sort of ornate leather outfits favored by the actual Buffalo Bill Cody. He was surrounded by a cast of Altman regulars (including Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, and Geraldine Chaplin), Native American actors (including Will Sampson, the giant who had played Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), oddball cameo actors (opera star Evelyn Lear), and various curiously chosen screen icons: Joel Grey (the former Cleveland Play House Curtain Puller and an Oscar winner for Cabaret) as Cody’s producer, and Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline, the pulp novelist who helped sell Cody’s myth to a public eager to be gulled.
Once again Newman was as keen on making merry on the set as he was focused on his performance. The company were staying in Calgary and took a bus each day out to the set on the prairie, but Newman had a Porsche with him and drove himself. “I went out with him to the set in the mornings,” recalled John Considine, an actor on the film, “and he was always trying to break his speed record. It was a little hairy.” As with The Drowning Pool, Newman spoke fondly of the freedom he felt in the character he was playing—a description that often meant he was reaching a little too hard for the quirky affect at the expense of real feeling. “I’m using this stance for my Buffalo Bill character, ” he said to a reporter on the set. “Know where it comes from? Baryshnikov! His curtain call! Actors are sponges. Terrible, terrible sponges. You steal from friends.”
He had long had the habit of treating film shoots as a kind of version of summer camp: practical jokes, cookouts, beer blasts, getting up to no good among the locals. On the relatively isolated and dull Buffalo Bill set near Calgary, Alberta, Newman reached virtuosic heights of sophomoric invention, and he was goaded into them by, of all people, his own director. Altman was himself a famous enfant terrible, a pothead given to outrageous acts of defiance and tomfoolery. He made sport of Newman’s constant diet of popcorn and contrived one day to have the actor’s trailer packed with the stuff so that it spilled out all over him when he opened the door. Newman laughed it off, but then he issued a dire warning to his director: “You shouldn’t have done that, Bob. I’m richer than you are, and I’ve got more time.”
In the coming weeks he made Altman’s life hell. They were filming in Canada in autumn, and Altman wore calfskin gloves to protect his hands from the nippy weather. Newman had them stolen, breaded, deep-fried, and served to the director as a garnish on his lunch plate. The two had debated whether Newman’s daily river of beers or Altman’s similarly voluminous stream of chablis was more manly; Newman called Altman’s tipple “goat’s piss” and presented him with an actual goat kid with a sign around its neck reading “Now you can have your own vineyard.” He had Altman’s trailer filled with a couple hundred live chickens, imparting a scent that could never be entirely eradicated. He hired a helicopter to fly over Calgary and drop invitations to a party at the rented home where Altman was living. In his most elaborate gag, he arranged for a local radio disk jockey to record a false news report, saying the film company needed 2,500 extras for the next day’s shoot and would pay each $155 for their work instead of the going rate of $17.50; interested parties, the announcement continued, should call…and then came the sound of Altman’s private phone number. Newman arranged to have the tape broadcast on radios on the set as if it were really going out over the airwaves, then sat beside the director to watch him as it aired. “Bob just turned white, pure white,” he beamed.
