Paul Newman: A Life, Moral Education

 

America's national epic is reflected poetically in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938, and it was described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written." Our Town contains the snapshots of bygone days, cracker-barrel philosophies, homespun homilies, good-natured ironies, the hints of pain caused by epiphanies, and that climax which brings a welling to your eyes despite yourself. It contains us. The Stage Manager is knowing and vigilant. With his spectacles perched on the tip of his nose and a vaguely distracted air, he stills looks imposing. He appears to have lived every vicissitude of life. Such is his air of decency and authority that you find yourself hoping he deems you worthy. George Gibbs, the youthful hero, is an all-American boy. His heart is in the right place, even if he must occasionally be reminded of just where that place is. He’s handsome, and when caught up in the spell of love, he croons; you wouldn’t tune a piano to it, but he’s sincere. Later, when George escorts his sweetheart, Emily, to the drugstore for an ice cream soda, the Stage Manager takes on the persona of Mr. Morgan, who crafts the fountain treats for the youngsters. When it turns out that George has forgotten his pocket money at home, he refuses to accept the boy’s gold watch as collateral for the debt: “I’ll trust you ten years, George—not a day over.” You sense affection in the older man and, equally, respect in the younger; the mutuality is warming. The old man has acted for Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise, Richard Brooks, Robert Rossen, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese. He has lent his voice to Doc Hudson in the Pixar movie "Cars," teaching Lightning McQueen that "life isn't about the destination but about the journey." 

You could think of him in the company of legends as Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart. The young man is making a name for himself, but he keeps getting compared to Marlon Brando and James Dean. The young man has just turned thirty, has been married for six years, and has three children. The older man is seventy-eight, with his forty-fifth anniversary coming up and five grown daughters and a pair of grandkids with whom to celebrate it. The old guy is serious, a World War II vet who attended Kenyon College and the Yale School of Drama on the GI Bill; he’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charity and served as president of the Actors Studio. The older man is Paul Newman, playing the Stage Manager in the Westport County Playhouse production of Our Town, at the Booth Theater on Broadway in October 2003. And the younger man, you know him too: Paul Newman, playing George Gibbs in the same play for NBC in September 1955.

For fifty years, on-screen and off, Paul Newman vividly embodied certain tendencies in the American male character: earnest and roguish, sly and determined, brave and vulnerable. He was equally at home on Hollywood soundstages, in theatrical workshops, in the pits of racetracks, and especially on the blessedly raucous fields and in the log cabins and swimming holes of the camps he built and maintained for seriously ill children. The world was his for the claiming—and he claimed only the bit that he felt was reasonably due to him, and he gave back more, by far, than he ever took. Newman had an intense discipline that demanded he earned, through sheer perseverance, a place alongside the Method gods Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean. He was ultimately the one true superstar to emerge from the original Actors Studio generation, the most popular Stanislavskyan actor in American screen history.

Pauline Kael on her review of Hud (1963): "Paul Newman's range isn’t enormous; he can’t do classics. But when a role is right for him, he’s peerless. Newman imparts a simplicity and a boyish eagerness to his characters. We like them but we don’t look up to them. Even when he plays a bastard, he’s not a big bastard—only a callow selfish one, like Hud. He can play what he’s not—a dumb lout. But you don’t believe it when he plays someone more perverse or vicious, and the older he gets and the better you know him, the less you believe it. In his personal life, his likableness seems infectious and it's difficult not to like Paul Newman. But Hud is just possibly the most completely schizoid movie produced anywhere anytime. Hud is much of an anti-Western and I think it's also an anti-American film, yet so astutely made and such a mess that it is redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty."

As he would bemoan for the rest of his life, director Martin Ritt—along with screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr., adapting Larry McMurtry’s 1961 debut novel Horseman, Pass By—had intended to make a film taking the side of Homer Bannon and the impressionable Lon (Brandon De Wilde), Homer’s grandson and Hud’s nephew. “Hud was meant to be the ultimate heel, condemned to a life of loneliness and alcoholism for his harsh arrogance,” Ritt said at the American Film Institute in 1974. “If I’d been near as smart as I thought I was,” Ritt added, “I would have seen that Haight-Abshbury was right around the corner. The kids were very cynical; they were committed to their own appetites, and that was it.” “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire,” Homer says in decrying Hud, and the same is true of our cinema. Shades of gray were on their way in, and with Hud, Paul Newman’s cold blue eyes served as the headlights on the dark road to come. Source: online.ucpress.edu

   

Paul Newman was visiting Maynard Morris, the MCA agent who got him a role for “Ice from Space” TV episode in 1952 (from the sci-fi show Tales of Tomorrow) and the agent’s next appointment was already waiting for him in the reception area, a young alluring actress named Joanne Woodward. Morris introduced the two by way of apologizing to her for running late. As Woodward later remembered it, “I had been making the rounds, and I was hot, sweaty, and my hair was all stringy. Morris introduced me to a pretty-looking young man in a seersucker suit, all pretty like an Arrow collar ad, and said, ‘This is Paul Newman,’ and I hated him at first sight, but he was so funny, he disarmed me.” Newman said his first reaction to her was to think: “Jeez, what an extraordinarily pretty girl.” Woodward had been spotted by a scout for MCA in a Neighborhood Playhouse showcase and brought into the agency as a client of a young agent named John Foreman, who was handling the television careers of new actors. He got her a series of roles on TV—in episodes of Robert Montgomery Presents, and Goodyear Television Playhouse; she played Ann Rutledge in a five-part series about Abraham Lincoln on Omnibus that required that she travel to Hollywood. “I didn’t have enough money to rent a car,” she later boasted. “Can you imagine being in California with no car?” In New York, Joanne had reportedly dated a lot of young men, even if she wasn’t exactly the type that was in vogue. 

As they got to know each other during the rehearsals and downtime on Picnic, she came to seem to him an ideal girl. “I was shy, a bit conservative. It took me a long time to persuade her that I wasn’t as dull as I looked.” “Joanne and I have had difficult, mind-bending confrontations,” Newman told columnist Maureen Dowd many years later in The New York Times Magazine. “But we haven’t surrendered. I’ve packed up and left a few times, and then I realize I have no place to go, and I’m back in ten minutes.” “Being Mrs. Paul Newman has its good and bad days,” Joanne confessed to Good Housekeeping. “Obviously, since we’re still together, most of them have been good. But it hasn’t been easy, and I don’t think any valid relationship is.” Joan Collins (co-star of Newman and Woodward in Rally Around the Flag) once weighed in on their marriage. "I believe he was totally faithful to Joanne in the many years of their relationship in spite of the fact that many starlets, and even some stars were interested in more than just staring into his blue eyes." By "stars," she may have been referring to Marilyn Monroe, Piper Laurie or Sandra Dee.

As with Rachel Rachel (1968), Paul Newman demonstrated his loyalty by committing himself to Joanne Woodward’s work. Almost everything he would produce or direct going forward would include her. And he learned to accommodate her interests and moods, encouraging her love of ballet by giving her gifts of ballet-inspired artworks, and by helping her to fund a dance/theatre company of her own. Theirs would often be praised as a fairy-tale marriage. And perhaps because it contained and overcame some dark and perilous episodes, it was worthy of the name. Playwright A. E. Hotchner, who knew Paul Newman longer and better than almost anybody, assesed: “Paul was an unadorned man. He was simple and direct and honest and off-center and mischievous and romantic and very smart… He was the same man in 2008 that he was in 1956—unchanged, despite all the honors and the movie stardom.” —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy

The researcher Susan Shimanoff of San Francisco State University discovered that regret was the most common negative emotion, and the second most common emotion of any kind – after love. However instructive past regrets may be toward making better decisions in the future, imagining that we could be happier with someone else can burden an otherwise reasonable life or romantic relationship. As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in Monogamy (1996): ‘We are prone to think, erroneously, there should be someone else who could love us more, understand us better, or make me feel more sexually alive.’ Looking for someone ‘better’ may be particularly tempting today: with Internet and advertising finding its way into every nook and cranny of our consciousness, we are invited to hate what we love, and envy that which is not worth pursuing. 

‘I don’t think individuals in the 1950s and ’60s tended to imagine a happier life with another romantic partner, at least in the sense that they could build a happier life with someone else,’ explained the historian Stephanie Coontz, author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011): ‘I think they imagined that everyone else was happy with their lives, and that there was something wrong with them not being happy. Because the sitcoms and magazine articles of that era portrayed successful families as ones that followed a formula, and it looked easy to replicate.’ Yet, the idea of pursuing happiness, however compelling, can have a very high costs for parents and children. In a follow-up study I did with Philip Cowan – professor of psychology at the University of Berkeley – we found that estranged parents who didn’t divorce were more likely to eventually reconcile with their children than those who did. In my clinical experience, divorce can increase the risk of a more conflicted or distant parent-adult child relationship in multiple ways. As Deborah Levy writes in her memoir, The Cost of Living (2018): ‘Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want.’

The sociologist Allison Pugh found that first marriages of ‘moderately educated’ women (those with some college education) are twice as likely to break up in the first five years as those of women with college degrees. Sometimes we are in the midst of depression and have gotten feedback from a therapist or others that our mood is distorting our view of our relationship. Alternatively, it's good to make attempts to communicate more effectively with your partner, and those attempts probably will be well-received and will be able to change the perceived problems. Sadly, some relationships have to be brought to the brink of a breakup to get the attention of the other person. E Mavis Hetherington’s study of divorce For Better or For Worse (2002) found that 25 per cent of men were completely surprised when their wives served them with divorce papers. 

One of Émile Durkheim’s central insights in the late 19th century: that in removing the rituals, traditions, roles and expectations that had guided desire for centuries, we also removed the ability to know that we had arrived and could stop trying. ‘As soon as there is nothing to stop us, we cannot stop ourselves,’ he wrote. ‘Beyond the pleasures that we have experienced, we imagine and yearn for others, and if one should happen to have more or less exhausted the possible, one dreams of the impossible – one thirsts for what is not.’ However constraining and outdated are social roles, they at least provided clarity of whether we should stop and smell the roses – or exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of the sweeter ones that might be just over the hill. So the endless pursuit of happiness can produce the opposite result: rather than leading us to a deeper, more meaningful life, we just end up getting one more thing we don’t really need. Source: aeon.co