Paul Newman, page 38
That winter Newman got a call from Carl Haas, an owner on the Can-Am circuit with whom Newman felt a competitive rivalry that wasn’t always friendly. Haas was thinking of starting a team on the Championship Auto Racing Team, or CART, circuit—a competition among the fastest open-wheeled race cars in the world, with the most famous drivers in the world inside them. As Newman later recalled, “We had not been exactly friendly during the Can-Am days, because he provided my cars for the Can-Am series late and overweight. But that was another discussion. And he said, ‘How’d you like to start a championship car?’ And I said, ‘Well…’ And he said, ‘What if Mario Andretti was the driver?’ And I said, ‘When and where would you like to meet?’”
Newman and Haas put aside their differences—or rather they managed to subjugate them sufficiently to work together, speaking only when necessary and almost never socializing, at least not in those early days. In 1983 they formed Newman-Haas Racing, with Andretti as their lead driver in a Class 7 Lola, one of the fastest classes of cars in the world. Despite the fame that the team would later earn, it wasn’t a success out of the gate; the first season, in fact, ended so poorly that Andretti threatened to leave when it ended. Newman visited the champion driver that winter at his home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, to urge him not to quit. “He had been so loyal, such a good friend,” Andretti remembered. “How could I tell him no?”
Andretti and Newman truly did become friends, and Andretti didn’t know which was more amazing: Newman’s genuine racing ability or his ferocious competitiveness, which would come through in practical jokes, contests of various sorts, and absurd bets. One night the Newmans were dining in New York with Andretti and his wife when the two men fought over who would pay the check; they settled it by betting on how long it would take a bottle to hit the floor after being knocked off the table. Another time Newman and Andretti argued in the middle of another Manhattan meal about how many people were out on the street at that very moment. “He says, ‘At least seventy-five,’” Andretti said. “I said, ‘No way: at the most fifty.’ Our wives roll their eyes and head for the ladies’ room. Paul and I get up and head out to the street to check out our bet. The poor maître d’ thinks we’re running out on the check.”
Newman’s friendship with the great driver paid off for his racing team immediately: Newman-Haas claimed the CART championship in 1984 by winning six races outright. And each spring Newman would relish the nearly month long visit to Indianapolis and the Indy 500, the most prestigious race in American open-wheel racing. Just as when he made Winning more than fifteen years earlier, he spent hours in the pits and garages talking about technical aspects of cars, drinking beer, and schmoozing with the boys. And the boys liked having him around. Jim Fitzgerald, a veteran racer a couple of years older than Newman who raced both with him and against him, recalled, “He never played the big-time movie star routine with us. I mean, he was never, ‘Okay, I’m Paul Newman, give me room.’ He’s someone who genuinely cares about cars and racing, like the rest of us, and really doesn’t like to have special attention paid to him.”
He had enormous fun too. CART had an annual race in Portland, Oregon, and Newman became famous there for his antics during race week. At the press conference for the very first race, Newman was asked to say a few words in honor of Mildred Schwab, the Portland city councilor who supervised parks and gave raceway officials much-needed help in obtaining noise-restriction abatements and other considerations for the event. Schwab was, in the words of one of the race organizers, “the homeliest woman you ever saw—never dressed well, didn’t wear makeup, really a sight.” In front of the assembled press Newman was called up to the podium to thank her for her efforts. He grabbed her up in both arms, leaned her backward, and gave her a big kiss. “She turned red as a beet,” a witness remembered. “And she was speechless: both firsts.”
Another time Newman learned that the CART drivers would be competing in a go-kart race for charity the following day, and he found the suburban Portland venue where the event would be held. He asked the staff which was the fastest kart and then spent a couple of hours gunning it around the track. The next day he organized a betting pool to see who could run the fastest first lap; with the quickest rig and some freshly acquired local knowledge of the course, he won easily.
He couldn’t necessarily get other folks to share his passion. One race week he flew John Huston and his lady of the moment up to Portland and arranged for them to get VIP treatment at the track, including a police escort from the nearby airport. Huston watched about an hour of the race and then stormed out, barking, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Maybe. But for Newman, it was heaven on earth.
AND SOMEHOW all this new energy—the food business, the charities, the engagement with the Actors Studio, the driving, the management of a racing team—fed the career upsurge that had begun with Fort Apache and Absence of Malice. The coolness in his screen persona that used to come off as flippancy had coalesced and hardened into something crystalline, pure, and solid. Not only was he enjoying working more than he had a decade or so earlier, but he was working better. According to Newman, Joanne had told him that it was all due to the car racing: “She says I was getting bored as an actor, maybe because I couldn’t get out of my own skin any longer. And that I was starting to duplicate myself. She says that she thinks that part of my passion for racing has now bled back into my acting. I don’t know. It’s as valid a theory as any other I’ve heard.”
In 1982 the proof of her surmise would emerge as Newman embarked on a new film, one with as distinguished a pedigree as any he’d ever made. Sidney Lumet, with whom Newman had worked nearly thirty years earlier in those episodes of You Are There on television, was trying to make a film of Barry Reed’s novel The Verdict, about an alcoholic Boston personal-injury lawyer who finds in a desperate and probably unwinnable case a path to personal salvation. David Mamet had adapted the book, and his script was tart and piquant and filled with scenes of the protagonist doing what Lumet liked to call “kicking the dog”: behaving so contrary to ordinary morality that the audience would have to struggle to like him.
Frank Sinatra, a curious first choice, had turned down the role, but Lumet landed an even bigger star, arguably, when Robert Redford got interested. The trouble, as Lumet recalled, was that Redford wanted to replace all the kicking-the-dog material with petting-the-dog scenes. A string of writers rewrote Mamet’s script, eliminating the raw and coarse stuff and turning the story bland and dull. After the third or fourth neutered version of the original came to his desk, Lumet reread Mamet’s work and told Redford that he was going to make that film. Redford walked. And Newman signed on to play Frank Galvin: rummy, ambulance-chaser, and quixotic champion of a lost cause.
Newman had played flawed, broken, and troubled heroes since the 1950s; some of his greatest roles—in The Left Handed Gun; The Long, Hot Summer; The Hustler; Hud; his Tennessee Williams adaptations Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth; and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean—were predicated on his willingness as an actor to play kick-the-dog scenes. Even the good guys he played in films like Somebody Up There Likes Me, Harper, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting had antisocial and even criminal streaks to them. Perhaps because of his looks, perhaps because he could be such a Boy Scout in real life, he came most alive when playing a scoundrel or a rogue.
But Galvin was another strain of mutt altogether. “He’s panicked. He’s frightened. He’s out of control. He’s on the edge of things all the time,” said Newman. “It’s a relief to have an unprotected character to play. The guy’s an open wound. As the curtain rises, he is face down in a urinal. Sensational.” Simply by embracing the role, Newman felt, he had made a breakthrough as an actor.
Nevertheless Lumet, who had directed such remarkable performances as Rod Steiger’s in The Pawnbroker, Al Pacino’s in Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, and Peter Finch’s in Network, felt his star wasn’t wholly revealing himself. After the two weeks of rehearsal were over, Lumet asked Newman to sit for a chat. “I told him,” Lumet recalled, “that while things looked promising we really hadn’t hit the emotional level we both knew was there in David Mamet’s screenplay. I said that his characterization was fine but hadn’t yet evolved into a living, breathing thing.” Newman explained that he hadn’t yet memorized his lines and would soon have a better sense of the flow of the script. But Lumet held firm: “I told him I didn’t think it was the lines. I said that there was a certain aspect of Frank Galvin’s character that was missing so far. I told him that I wouldn’t invade his privacy, but only he could choose whether or not to reveal that part of the character and therefore that aspect of himself. I couldn’t help him with the decision.” When they met again to begin shooting, Lumet recalled, “sparks flew. He was superb. His character and the picture took on life.”
Newman, echoing his wife, credited his activities away from acting with helping him reach the breakthrough. “Racing has destroyed every iota of conservatism that was in me,” he said. “Only at this point in my life could I have played such a splattered character as Frank Galvin. Any time before, I’m afraid, I would have held back and played him much too cautiously.”
The film shot in New York and Boston in the early months of 1982, with a cast that included James Mason as Galvin’s rival counsel, Milo O’Shea as a hostile judge, Jack Warden as Galvin’s loyal old friend, and Charlotte Rampling as a barroom beauty with whom Galvin has an unlikely affair. Newman had a real feel for the character, prodding himself with reminders to do less, to let the emotions bubble up from an internal place and not play them out broadly. He let his hair grow out a little, to give Galvin the look of someone who was too distracted to have a sense of his own appearance. (His dresser on the film nevertheless found him almost impossible to clothe so that he looked seedy: the wardrobe just fit him too well.) He even enjoyed a bit of Newman’s Luck on the set in Boston when he got up off a couch minutes before a huge chandelier fell right on it. “God was with us,” producer David Brown swore.
When it was over, Newman was delighted with the work he’d done and the film they’d made. “I welcomed the opportunity to let the blemishes, the indecision—the wreckage—show through,” he told an interviewer. “There’s a tendency for an actor after a period of time to protect himself. You couldn’t get away with that in this part. You just had to let everything hang out. And that was refreshing.”
Milo O’Shea described Newman’s transformation this way: “He personally has been through a great deal. Losing his son was a terrible blow both to him and Joanne. You can’t push that off, not when you have a great wound like that. It has had a great effect on his work and his life. He really is feeling his way into a deeper part of himself, to a layer that has never been exposed before.”
And the response to the finished film was unanimously favorable. “Newman always has been an interesting actor,” wrote Roger Ebert, “but sometimes his resiliency, his youthful vitality, have obscured his performances; he has a tendency to always look great, and that is not always what the role calls for. This time, he gives us old, bone-tired, hung-over, trembling (and heroic) Frank Galvin, and we buy it lock, stock and shot glass.” “This is as good a role as Mr. Newman has ever had,” Janet Maslin added in the New York Times, “and as shrewd and substantial a performance as he has ever given.” And people came out to see it: at $54 million, it reaped the highest gross of any of Newman’s films since The Towering Inferno.
Surely he would now win an Oscar, after having gotten to the altar five times only to be jilted. Around the corridors of the publicity department at 20th Century–Fox, The Verdict had been referred to as “Paul Newman’s Oscar picture.” The studio sponsored a TV special, aired nationally on ABC, to promote the film and its star: Paul Newman: The Man and His Movies. But when the Academy Award nominations were announced, Newman found himself amid a formidable pack of competitors: Dustin Hoffman (Tootsie), Jack Lemmon (Missing), Peter O’Toole (My Favorite Year), and the relatively unknown Shakespearean actor Ben Kingsley, who had played the title role in Gandhi.
Newman was in Florida at work on a new film when word of his sixth nomination reached him. “I told him that The Verdict got five nominations and that he was one of them,” recalled a friend who was on the set with him that day. “He just smiled and said that would be good for the movie. He’s not making a big fuss.”*
But a big fuss was being made. The film was released at more or less the time his food business began, and at around the same time that Newman was doing public-service TV ads to remind drivers to buckle their seat belts: he seemed to be everywhere. When the film premiered, he was on the cover of Time. Naturally, Newsweek saw all the publicity as an orchestrated plot and ran an item suggesting that Newman was campaigning for an Oscar. “He’s a willing participant,” said an unnamed studio executive, “no matter what he says about hating awards.” Warren Cowan shot back a tart riposte: “As Mr. Newman’s public-relations representative, we would know if there were a campaign on his behalf. There isn’t. He would not permit it.”
And it didn’t matter anyway. On Oscar night Kingsley took home the Academy Award as part of Gandhi’s haul of eight trophies. Newman, who had to be prodded into attending, joked afterward, “I flew to the Coast only to prove I’m a good loser.” When he got back to Florida, his colleagues presented him with a T-shirt bearing an image of himself with his hands wrapped around Gandhi/Kingsley’s throat. He had the good grace to laugh the whole thing off, but his failure to win Hollywood’s most glamorous acting prize was beginning to make everybody concerned look a bit ridiculous.
AFTER The Verdict had finished shooting, the Newmans took a family vacation to Europe—Paris, Nice, Florence—and then split up again on their separate but parallel tracks: he spent the summer racing, she went to Kenyon to appear in a production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. (Newman caught her performance and was dazzled: “I thought, ‘I don’t know that woman. She must be a real scorcher.’”) They were reunited for the holidays in Westport, as per the traditional custom, and again in January 1983, when they marked their twenty-fifth anniversary in front of a small group of family and friends by renewing their vows, with their five daughters standing as bridesmaids. That same month they moved into a new apartment in Manhattan, a place with Central Park views, a large terrace, and a custom-installed sauna.
And then they set off to Florida to work on a film together. Ronald Buck, the Los Angeles lawyer with whom Newman had owned the Factory and the burger joint Hampton’s, had written a screenplay called Harry’s Boy, about the relationship of a widowed blue-collar squarejohn and his bookish, sensitive son. Buck had been peddling the thing around Hollywood to various stars; Henry Fonda, Telly Savalas, Jason Robards, and Anthony Quinn had all considered it. But he’d had no luck, and then he showed it to Joanne, who he thought would be a good choice to play the gal who lives next door to Harry and carries an unrequited torch for him. Joanne, in turn, showed it to Newman, who called Buck and asked to be allowed a chance to direct it.
After two years and several rewrites (he once claimed there were as many as twenty) Newman felt they had a picture worth making. He showed the script to various studios and producers—and was rebuffed everywhere. “I thought it was stageworthy,” he said, “but a lot of people didn’t. That pissed me off, and I find I work very well when I’m pissed off.”
So he decided to commit himself to the project even further. “It reminded me of Rachel, Rachel,” he explained, “which was turned down by every major studio. And this was turned down by about five, I guess, which just served to get me angry. So I finally agreed to act in it.” Buck was astounded at his good fortune. “It never dawned on me that Paul was right for the role,” he admitted. But with Newman on board as star and director and Woodward on board in the role Buck had thought of her for, they got a $9 million green light from Orion Pictures.
For the role of Howard, the son, Newman and Buck looked at dozens of young actors, finally settling on twenty-eight-year-old Robby Benson, who was trying to transform himself from teen idol to serious actor. A strong supporting cast, including Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Judith Ivey, and Morgan Freeman, was added. The film was shot in the early months of 1983 in southern Florida—Fort Lauderdale, mostly, to emphasize the ordinary working-folks aspect of it. Newman had directed himself once before, on Sometimes a Great Notion, and he’d sworn he’d never do it again, but he thought he had a way to make it work. He asked Joanne, who had recently directed a television film called Come Along with Me, to keep an eye on him, serving as a director surrogate when he was acting. But it didn’t quite work out. “She felt uneasy about asserting herself,” Newman said, “and I felt uneasy about delegating responsibility.” As a result, he thought that he had given a less-than-committed performance. “There are places where I caught myself on film watching the other actors instead of playing the character,” he admitted. “I think we got it all out in the editing. But I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.”
To be sure, he hadn’t given his all to the production. He was in the habit of getting away on the weekends, going to Tampa to see Clea in an equestrian competition, to Arizona to race his car, to Los Angeles for the Oscars. The crew respected and liked him; they waived union rules to create some time to allow him to attend the Academy Awards, for instance, and they came to rely on the snack of popcorn he provided them in the afternoons. (“It’s incredible how cranky those guys would get if they didn’t get their popcorn exactly at four,” Newman said.)
