Paul Newman, page 7
Joe’s role became slighter and slighter, though, and by 1952 he was able to devote himself fully to writing. In the years remaining to him he continued to write columns for Cleveland newspapers and published his second and third volumes of verse.* When he died in 1960, felled by a bad heart, he was eulogized in editorials in both of Cleveland’s then-surviving daily papers. They recalled his round glasses, his pipe, his lanky physique, and his thatch of stiff hair. The Cleveland Press, for which he’d written regularly for nearly a decade, spoke of his sense of justice, his mischievousness, his agreeable temper, his collegiality, his wisdom. “Joe Newman came pretty close to being a ray of sunshine in a too drab world,” said the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “The city will miss him.”
AFTER THE sale of Newman-Stern, Jim Newman stayed on at the store, Art Newman went off and became a Cadillac salesman, and Paul spent the autumn of 1950 managing a driving range that the new Newman-Stern owners were operating just outside of town. But the urge that had vexed his final months at Kenyon was still eating at him throughout a winter that was brutal even by Cleveland standards. (Two feet of snow hit the city the day after Thanksgiving.) He pined for the theater. “I remember going to the Play House and watching the actors taking their curtain calls,” he said. “It nearly drove me out of my mind.” He auditioned for acting work at local radio and TV stations, landing a couple of spots in ads for the Ohio Bell Telephone Company and National City Bank and for some clients of the McCann Erickson ad agency. (“How the hell they chose me I don’t know,” he later declared.) He made the trek to the nearby town of Brecksville and its Little Theater, where he directed Here Today, a society comedy written by George Oppenheimer. And all the while he was, no doubt, putting his head to the task of coming up with a way to be gone tomorrow.
It hit him: with what he had saved over the year, plus a bit of the proceeds from Art’s estate, he had nearly $2,000. Add the college aid remaining to him on the GI Bill, and he could go to graduate school and get a sheepskin—a master’s degree in theater that would allow him to teach, maybe even at Kenyon. “My ambition had always been greater than my talent,” he would later say of his young self. “But the best of whatever I did was in the theater, and that wasn’t very good, but it was still the best that I had.” He even had the perfect graduate school in mind. He’d already been there, in fact: Yale.
AND WHY not Yale?
At the time he applied to it, the department of drama at the venerable university hadn’t yet become its own school, but it had been awarding master of fine arts degrees for more than two decades, and there could be no more secure credential than a Yale diploma. There was a natural progress from Shaker Heights to Kenyon to the Ivy League, even if the fellow making it was something of a rake. And the sheer practical nature of his intent must have impressed the faculty who admitted him to the program. “I had no stars in my eyes or aspirations to be a Broadway actor,” he recalled, “but I did want to be in some part of the theater, and a master’s degree always protects you. You can teach at Kenyon, which I would have loved to have done.” So for the second time in a little more than a year, he loaded his possessions and his wife—and now a baby boy—into the car and headed off into uncertainty.
It wasn’t a popular decision in the family. Theresa Newman was so worried about the young family that she gave them her ’46 Chevy rather than watch them pull away in the old Packard. Art took his brother aside and asked him flat out, “Why would you want to do this? You’re married and have a baby.”
But he was determined. In New Haven they rented the top floor of what Newman described as “an old wooden three-family house.” Jackie commuted occasionally into New York City to seek modeling assignments, and Newman augmented his savings with work as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. He loved to tell the story of his successes: “I went out and in ten days sold $1,200 worth of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”*
His academic triumphs were less obvious and less forthcoming. He had chosen to specialize in directing but was required to act as part of the degree program. The very first assignment nearly did him in. He was given a few pages from George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and he felt a sick-making jolt when he saw the initial stage directions for his character, who was to enter the scene after being heard sobbing and howling offstage. As Newman recalled, “The machinery started going almost immediately—how can I duck this? How can I find some intellectual way of playing this? Because I had never been able to break through that sound barrier, the emotional barrier.” Lightheartedness he could feign, but not real depth of feeling.
It seems odd that a war veteran with a family and some professional acting experience should be so threatened by the requirement to show a bit of his inner self, but perhaps the atmosphere of Yale, far more sober than the antic days at Kenyon or the hurried merry-go-round of stock acting, made him realize just what acting entailed. As he said, “The muscles contracted in my stomach, and immediately I tried to figure out some way to play the whole thing facing upstage. And then I thought, ‘What an ass! I drag my family with only nine hundred dollars in the bank all the way to Connecticut and then think of all the ways I can to cop out.’”
A sense of responsibility, then, rather than an impulse to artistic expression, drove him to craft a solution. “I took that script downstairs to the boiler room and I said, ‘Okay, buddy, you are going to sit here until you find out where it is going to come from, or you get out of this business right now.’”
He cracked the scene, and he wound up performing more often than directing, taking classes in acting from Constance Welch, a mainstay of Yale’s programs for four decades. Welch had been exposed to the famed system of acting developed by the great director Konstantin Stanislavsky through lessons from one of his acolytes, the actress Maria Ouspenskaya. But the technique she came to teach Yale students diverged importantly from the Stanislavsky system or, as it came to be known in America, the Method. As Elia Kazan, who studied with her at Yale in the early 1930s, at the very beginning of her tenure there, recalled, “She believed that imitating the exterior would produce the interior feeling in the actor and the audience”—the opposite, in many key ways, of what such mavericks as Kazan and Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg would come to teach their acting students.
Welch’s emphasis on external technique may not have been strictly Method, but it suited the repressed young Newman. “I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor,” he confessed. “Acting is like letting your pants down: you’re exposed.” Having a series of concrete physical exercises to follow—voice, breathing, anger, jealousy, laughing, crying—appealed to his practical, problem-solving side and allowed him to create at least a simulation of letting himself go emotionally. In a raw actor such as Newman, Welch’s teaching allowed not for genuine psychological exploration but rather for an old-fashioned declamatory style. As a result, even though he was earnest and looked great, he lacked poetry, and he knew it. “If you talk with the people I worked with in school,” he confessed later on, “they will say I had a great deal of promise. Two years of drama and undergraduate school, a year at Yale for my master’s, two years of summer stock, and a year of winter stock—but I really didn’t know anything!”
Still, he cut a good figure at Yale. Decades after the fact, Frank McMullan, one of his teachers, recalled that “he proved to be a very good student… He was in my first-year directing class, and he was interested in acting as much as directing and, indeed, showed talent in both of those fields.” He appeared in three or four full-length plays and perhaps a dozen one-acts. And he progressed well enough to get a role in one of the major productions of the academic year, an original student play about Ludwig van Beethoven. “I like to think I gave him a chance,” McMullan said, “when I cast him in the role of Beethoven’s nephew, Karl… It was apparent to me that his was a magnetic presence on the stage.”
It may have been apparent to McMullan, but Newman was still uncomfortable: stiff and repressed on the inside, even if he could harness the confidence to make it seem otherwise to an audience. He remembered Karl without much affection as “a very formal guy”—but it simply may have been that he was still far enough from mastering his craft to make the character into anything else.
BESIDES THE education and the teaching credential, Newman had another reason to be at Yale: New York was a mere train ride away. That allowed Jackie to pursue her sputtering modeling career, and it also meant that New York theatrical agents would occasionally attend Yale’s plays to scout for new talent. And thus it was that the stiff but handsome young actor playing Beethoven’s nephew in the spring of 1952 got noticed by Audrey Wood and William Liebling, a pair of New York agents who were married to each other and who represented a number of important theatrical and cinematic figures, including Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Carson McCullers, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Elia Kazan, and Joshua Logan. After a performance of the Beethoven play, Liebling came backstage, Newman remembered, “and suggested that if I ever came to New York I should look him up.”
Summer was fast approaching, as was the unpleasant prospect of looking for a gig in stock somewhere. So why not take a flyer on the big city, the big time, a real career? Newman and Jackie thought hard about it, and he consulted with the faculty at Yale. Eventually he came to a decision. “I was prepared to try it for a year,” he later said, “and if I got nowhere, to go back to Yale and get my degree. I had a family, I had responsibilities. Things were a little crowded in New Haven financially, but I was making out fairly well with the encyclopedias.”
It was a calculated gamble. This wasn’t Williams Bay or Plymouth or Woodstock. This was an international center of art and business with the potential for paying work in several media: theater, television, advertising, and, as location shoots were becoming more common, film. Jackie had an aunt there who could watch little Scott; Paul had connections at the McCann Erickson advertising agency from his Cleveland days. If he was leaping from a height, he was doing it with a parachute and a plan. “I wasn’t going to subject my family to the hanging-out-at-Schwab’s-drugstore-in-Hollywood routine,” he remembered. “I had no intention of waiting around till I was bruised and bitter.” A reasonable stance.
New York in the summer of 1952, then: the sort of place where anything could happen.
*The precocious Orson Welles attended prep school in Woodstock and performed Shakespeare at the Opera House with his classmates.
*Yes, he shocked corn—that is, piled stalks of it in a field with the butt ends down—as opposed to shucking it, which is to remove the husks. (Who knew?)
*The new owners would themselves sell Newman-Stern to a Kansas City concern in 1963. That company would merge the store with a couple of suburban outlets operating under the Gateway Sporting Goods name. In 1968 the big downtown store was demolished in an urban renewal project and replaced by a smaller space, which in turn was shut down, along with its suburban satellites, in 1973. A spin-off of the family business run by Jim Newman, Joe’s son, formed as Newman-Adler and continues to sell camping and outdoor equipment in the Cleveland suburbs under various names to this day.
*Before his death Joe Newman had the singular honor of having three of his poems recorded by the beatnik poet and performance artist Lord Buckley. One of those works, “Black Cross,” a frightening dialect poem about a lynching, was performed in the early 1960s by a young Bob Dylan when he was still on the folk club circuit.
*It is impossible to imagine New Haven housewives answering the doorbell to find the young Paul Newman peddling encyclopedias and think that sex never entered into the picture. Impossible.
IT’S ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING FIVE-WORD PHRASES IN THE language: New York in the ’50s.
The anxiety and privation of World War II were memories. The economy was bounding. There was money; there was promise; there was robust vitality and opportunity. But there was a layer, too, of contentment in the air. To be a white American male of twenty something years of age and some education in that city at that time was to be a king, or at least a prince. New York was the gilded metropolis where the elite met at their most feverish, a home of champions in commerce, in geopolitics, in sports, and, perhaps most of all, in the arts.
Name a field of creative activity, and the New York of the 1950s was its font or its center or was striving mightily to overtake any other city in the world at excelling in it. Revolutions in painting, jazz, pop music, and poetry spilled out of nightclubs and lofts and walkup flats and dingy rented offices and rubbed up against one another in the streets. Beatniks, abstract expressionists, beboppers, Method actors, folkies, comics, critics, tunesmiths, hoofers, longhairs, ad men: a fantastical stew of creative humanity.
The prewar culture of symphonic music and quality publishing and international dance and opera had fully revived, and bracing waves of modern architecture and fashion and decorative art buoyed alongside. And the dramatic arts were particularly vital. Broadway thrived with delightful musicals and titanic dramatic voices: Williams, Miller, Inge. On any given night of the summer of ’52 you could see The King and I, I Am a Camera, Pal Joey, Top Banana, Guys and Dolls, Stalag 17. Movie theaters were bursting almost literally with widescreen spectacles like The Greatest Show on Earth, This Is Cinerama, and Quo Vadis, while such stalwart exemplars of the Hollywood system as The Quiet Man, High Noon, and The African Queen vied with them for attention. TV studios around town ravenously ate up every script and performance and gimmick that the sharpest new minds could produce and poured out live dramas and variety shows and experiments in bringing movie and radio dramas to the new small screen.
Hit the street, and giants of painting, acting, poetry, theater, journalism, architecture, photography, jazz, fashion, classical music, and a dozen other fields might walk right by you on Broadway or in Greenwich Village. It was arguably the greatest heyday in a city that’s had more than its share of them.
Imagine Augustan Rome or Elizabethan London with V8 engines and an upwardly mobile middle class; imagine fin-de-siècle Vienna or Paris of the 1920s without old-world prejudices or class divisions and with air-conditioning and reliable plumbing. Can you talk about a center of the world? New York in the summer of 1952 might well have been it.
ALAS, THE young Newman family wasn’t quite capable of pulling up a chair to Manhattan, the grown-up table at this remarkable feast of affluence and artistry. Rather, they rented a furnished room in the Art Deco–style Ambassador Apartments at 30 Daniel Low Terrace in the New Brighton section of Staten Island. It was a building popular with theatrical types; some years later another Ohio actor, Martin Sheen, would be living there with his wife when their son Emilio Estevez was born. The place was cheap: the Newmans paid $60 a month in rent, and they availed themselves of the babysitting services of Jackie’s nearby aunt. And it was conveniently close to the Staten Island Ferry and quick commutes into Manhattan, which glistened across the harbor with promises of work, pay, and advancement.*
Being Art Newman’s son, Newman worried about money, especially in these circumstances. Even more than going to Yale, moving to New York was a leap of faith—and before very long Jackie told him that she was expecting another child. If New York was truly the El Dorado it seemed to be, he had better figure out how to get some of its riches for his family.
So he developed a routine. “I had one decent suit in those days,” he remembered, “an old seersucker. And I’d put it on every morning. I’d start out at eight every morning, take the ferry to Manhattan, make the rounds of the casting agents, follow up all the tips in the trade papers, and then get back to Staten Island in time to peddle encyclopedias.” (Ah, the encyclopedias…) “It was one of the hottest summers I can remember in New York,” he said, but he persevered, making a regular if genial pest of himself at all the casting agents’ offices (“The guy in the white seersucker is here again,” he recalled secretaries saying) and then ringing doorbells around Staten Island until suppertime.
Before long, little bits of fortune started to fall to him. He got small roles on television, some quite well-paying. He earned, he claimed, $75 for dressing as an old man applauding at the inauguration of President McKinley on The March of Time. In August he got his first credited part, playing an air force sergeant in an episode of the TV science fiction series Tales of Tomorrow, a ludicrous little potboiler called “Ice from Space.” Performing half his lines off camera and another half with understandably strained seriousness, he certainly couldn’t be said to have transcended the laughable material, which concerned a chunk of extraterrestrial ice that was slowly turning the Earth into a frozen wasteland. To his credit, he knew how silly it was. “For the strange block of alien ice,” he recalled, “they had built a huge plastic cube filled with pulsating lights. So here we are, standing around and supposedly freezing, when a fly buzzes onto the set. And for the big close-up you see this little fly hopping around on the giant ice cube. I could barely get out my lines, I was trying so hard not to laugh.”
These were wildcatting days in the television business, though, so working on such a trifle didn’t count as a black mark. Indeed, as Newman began to make the rounds, he landed a number of gigs. He got the gigantic MCA talent agency to represent him, and they helped him secure a sporadically recurring role on The Aldrich Family, the TV version of the popular radio drama about the life and times of Henry Aldrich, Normal Teen. Typecast as the College Hero, Newman made $50 a week—enough that he could give up the encyclopedias and tell his professors at Yale that he was staying in New York.
