Paul Newman: Masculinity with a sensitive side

Paul Newman did not have an impoverished, terrible, or especially dramatic childhood. Most of the drama was internal, mostly in his head. Arthur Newman was far too busy being secretary and treasurer of Newman-Stern to be much of a father. Paul admitted years later that he never felt close to his father and, in turn, was never as close as he should have been to his own son, Scott. “I think [my father] always thought of me as pretty much of a lightweight,” Newman said. “He treated me like he was disappointed in me a lot of the time.” His older brother Arthur Jr. was better at sports, bigger, taller, seemingly everything Paul wanted to be in his father’s eyes. His mother, Theresa Fetzer Newman, who had been born in Hungary, had grown up in relative poverty and at times seemed more interested in the material things her husband’s success had acquired than in her children. 

Theresa loved the theater and would see play after play at the Hannah Theatre in Cleveland, then come home to regale her son with stories of what she had seen on the stage. Theresa had been raised a Catholic—her husband Arthur was a German Jew—but she converted to Christian Science when Paul was five years old. Paul became a Christian Scientist, too, although the household never stuck too rigidly to the religion’s tenets. Paul graduated in 1943 and promptly enlisted in the navy for flight training. Since it might have been some time before he was called for service, he went to Ohio University in Athens for a few months. There, he met a young lady who became the first real love of his life, and he decided to attend auditions for a play entitled The Milky Way, which was being staged by the speech department. 

He did not, however, make as much of a mark on the young lady who had raised his blood pressure, and probably taken his virginity at 18. In June 1944 Paul had to bid a reluctant farewell to his lady love. The navy was calling, specifically a V-12 program that would begin with training on the grounds of Yale University. Paul had wanted to be a pilot—his head flying with the dreams all young men had of glory, heroism, and patriotism in the wake of Pearl Harbor—but these plans were stymied when his first test revealed that he suffered from color blindness. Although he argued vociferously against the decision, he was told he couldn’t stay in the program if he couldn’t distinguish one ground object from another using color as a differential. He had to settle for being a radioman, third class. A negative note struck was when his lady love in Athens sent him a Dear John letter, which positively floored him. She had found someone else and the woman who might have become the first Mrs. Paul Newman changed the course of Hollywood history by marrying another man. Soon he was on another train bound for Chicago, where he would make his way to Woodstock, Illinois, for a longer season of winter stock. Paul appeared in, did props for, and even directed some of the sixteen plays during the season, all of which were mounted in the town hall: Our Town, Mister Roberts, Born Yesterday, See How They Run, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Meet Me in St. Louis among many others. As the winter progressed, he began to know and like an attractive fellow player named Jackie Witte. 

A Wisconsin native, Jackie had been bitten by the acting bug while studying at Lawrence University in Appleton. She was a very pretty blonde with brown eyes and a good sense of humor, and she was very different from the girls—including the one who’d jilted him—that Paul had known before. As they co-starred in Dark of the Moon, they kissed on the sly in dark backstage corners, and fell slowly in love with each other until he asked her to marry him. Even this didn’t please his father, who felt Paul had no business marrying when he could barely support himself on what he was earning. Acting brought in so little that he was forced to work days as a laborer on a farm. Getting up early to till the soil, dig dirt, and perform other barnyard chores may have helped keep him in shape physically, but it left him in no shape to act in the evenings—although that didn’t stop him. 

Jackie said sometimes she went to bed in her nightie unfulfilled as new hubby snored away from sheer exhaustion. But there was no choice. Paul would not beg his father for money, and he would not have sent it in any case. If Paul wanted money, all he had to do was come home and join the family business. Stubbornly, admirably, Newman resisted and put up with the calluses and the long hours. The Newmans found themselves in New Haven in the fall of 1951, living on the top floor of an old, unattractive wooden house with two other families below them. The floors creaked, everyone worried about fires, and there were enough screaming babies and hollering children to drive a saint to distraction, but Paul was where he wanted to be and that was all that mattered. He was twenty-six years old, attending the Yale School of Drama, where Paul specialized in directing. 

When he wasn’t in classes, he sold encyclopedias door-to-door and made more money as a salesman than expected, undoubtedly because his charming manner and good looks were not lost on all the housewives he called on. They wouldn’t starve—not for awhile yet—but two children would mean they’d need a lot more money than their by now meager savings could provide. Agent Bill Liebling was willing to represent Newman, but he told Paul bluntly that he would have to wait until the right major Broadway part came along before Liebling could do anything for him; the powerful agent did not traffic in bit parts or small roles. Liebling did not explain how Paul was supposed to make a living until this happened. Like many an actor before and since, Paul learned that while waiting for this perhaps mythical role to arrive, he had to basically agent himself, hitting the pavement, going dejectedly from one audition to another. Newman would remember waking up each morning around seven, catching the Staten Island ferry to Manhattan around eight, then walking around in his one seersucker suit in the broiling sun, going from casting call to casting call, then coming back home where he’d sell more encyclopedias door-to-door from the late afternoon until early evening. If nothing happened within a year, it was back to school for him and the end to dreams of acting. If he could teach drama at, say, his old alma mater, Kenyon College, would it really be so bad? Before long he was appearing on such shows as The Web, The Mask, and You Are There and won a recurring role on a soap opera entitled The Aldrich Family (1952-1953). 

Unlike those actors who were in touch with their feelings, despite of his training at the Actors Studio, Paul Newman could not simply summon up emotions from within and let them work for him. For example when Newman read for William Inge's Picnic, he was sure, as usual, that he’d muffed it. Instead, he was informed by Joshua Logan that he’d won the part. “All I had behind me was nine months at Yale and a couple of months at the Actors Studio,” Newman said years later, as if that were nothing. Besides, having his agent Bill Liebling going to bat for him—plus the fact that Liebling’s wife was William Inge’s agent—practically added up to a sure thing. Newman did need the work, however. He and his wife, with a second child coming, had only about two hundred and fifty dollars left in the bank. His salary in Picnic started at $150 a week (this included understudying the lead role) and went up to $200 when he got a bigger part. Appearing in Picnic provided Newman’s career with the impetus it needed. It also significantly altered the direction of his personal life. In the cast of Picnic, understudying two of the female roles, was a bewitching young actress: Joanne Woodward. 

At first, Joanne had been unimpressed with him. Paul Newman seemed like just the kind of handsome beefcake she had no use for, an “arrow collar” man without brains. It wasn’t until after weeks of rehearsals that she warmed up to his less obvious charms and personality. Even then, it was awhile before their romance began in earnest. Joanne Woodward occasionally got to go on as Madge or her younger sister, Millie, when Janice Rule or Kim Stanley were indisposed, but mostly she just rehearsed with Newman for the day they would act together as Madge and Hal. One particular bit they rehearsed endlessly was the second-act slow jitterbug that Hal and Madge dance to “Moonglow.” Newman recalling his explosive connection with Woodward during Pinic: "The Shaker Heights rookie runs into a sensational twenty-three-year-old girl named Joanne, who herself is understudying the play’s female lead. Picnic, memorably, has a long dance scene that triggers the primary onstage romance. The kid has no physical grace, so back in the wings Joanne, pearly of skin and sensitive to touch, teaches him how to dance. I was nursing an ailing marriage and this thing I carried around in my trousers every time we danced backstage together." When they weren’t practicing the sexy, slow jitterbug, Paul and Joanne were discovering they were soul mates. 

Both of them were ambitious, wary of some people, and anxious to live life on their own terms. Later, when Newman and Woodward became a golden couple in the film industry, she was never considered totally a typical Hollywood personality, and this led certain people to view her as callous or even hostile. Woodward probably could not have cared less. When The Silver Chalice opened, Newman got mixed reviews. In 1933 Dorothy Parker had said of Katharine Hepburn in the play The Lake, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” The New Yorker critic opined similarly for Newman: “Paul Newman, a lad who resembles Marlon Brando, delivers his lines with the emotional fervor of a Putnam Division conductor announcing local stops.” Newman was possibly more annoyed by the reference to Brando than he was to the infamous summation of his acting ability. He would eventually grow quite tired of people saying that he looked like Brando.

Incidents like the one with The Death of Billy the Kid—whose title was changed to The Left-Handed Gun—annoyed Joanne's ex-fiancé Gore Vidal, when Newman brought in another writer to “punch up” Vidal’s script, all of this without Vidal’s knowledge. Gore was appalled that Newman had just stood by and let all this happen. As Vidal put it, “Paul, no tower of strength in these matters, allowed the hijacking to take place.” Sources concur that Vidal was much more friendly with Joanne than with Paul, whom he reportedly considered a bit of a “lunkhead.” As Billy the Kid, Newman seems mildly retarded in the opening scenes. His performance lacks greatness because Newman is not really an artist who’s able to convincingly detail Billy’s pathology. Instead he makes the most of the alternately sullen and swaggering aspects of his character. Gore Vidal, whose movie had been essentially stolen away from him, had the last word in his memoir Palimpsest: “The Left-Handed Gun is a film only someone French could like.” 

Hud (1963) has also serious problems. In spite of some intense scenes, the film never really develops into anything deep or profoundly moving; a lot of it seems phony and contrived. As usual, Martin Ritt’s direction is adroit, better than usual in fact, but it never even aspires to the poetic. Newman has his moments, but he doesn’t really have the range to make his portrayal work and is easily out-acted by virtually every other performer, including Yvette “Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman” Vickers, who has a small part as a married woman Hud dates and who appears in a brief scene in a soda shop. Variety called Hud "a near miss; its screenplay fails to filter its meaning and theme lucidly through its characters and story." Pauline Kael described Hud as an "anti-Western" and an "anti-American film, so astutely made and yet such a mess that it was redeemed by its fundamental dishonesty."

Joanne saw potential in the material of the play Baby want a Kiss and thought it would be fun, since she was all for doing a favor to her former boyfriend, screenwriter James Costigan (F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood). The Newmans were to play a married movie star couple—quite a stretch—who secretly disliked each other and were as phony as ten-dollar toupees. It was as if Costigan were getting revenge on the two of them for events that had happened years before. Costigan cast himself in a third role, a down-on-his-luck writer friend on whom the famous movie star couple make a patronizing call. 

Actually both Newman and Woodward both got good reviews, but the play was decimated by the critics when it opened off Broadway at the Little Theater in mid-April, 1964. Baby Want a Kiss did manage to make money for the Actors Studio, but it did more harm than good. The Ford Foundation, which had given generous donations to Lee Strasberg in the past, lessened its commitment to the studio. If bad plays bolstered by the participation of movie stars and featuring essentially superficial performances were to premiere under the auspices of the Actors Studio, what did that say about their commitment to art and great acting? Geraldine Page, who had appeared in the formidable Sweet Bird of Youth with Paul Newman, said she hated Baby Want A Kiss. While Newman was playing in the Broadway production of Sweet Bird of Youth (which opened in NYC on March 10, 1959), Joanne took special measures while awaiting the baby. The child was born on April 8, 1959, and named Elinor Teresa after Joanne’s two grandmothers; her nickname would be Nell. 

Chance Wayne was only one of thousands of good-looking guys who thought he could make it in Hollywood just like Paul Newman, if he only got the chance. How could Elia Kazan subdue the winner, movie star Paul Newman, and bring out the Newman that might have been? As rehearsals proceeded, Kazan kept telling Newman to try a line or a scene again. He was never satisfied, never gave him a compliment. No matter what Geraldine Page did, even if she was a little off, Kazan would tell her she was great. After nearly three weeks of this modus operandi, Newman was feeling a little more like Chance Wayne. But there’s more to it. Kazan knew Newman needed more direction than the much more gifted Page did; she would work through whatever initial mistakes she made by herself. At the time Newman said in an interview, “There’s always that terrible fear that one day your fraud will be discovered and you’ll be back in the dog kennel business.”

Newman knew deep down that if life had been a little different for him, he might well have ended up like Chance Wayne? Maybe explaining the difficulty of his approach to his gigolo role, Newman admitted he never understood some aspects of Chance Wayne, or the lifestyle of a male prostitute. The irony was that Newman, like most ambitious actors, was not above using his charm and good looks to get something out of his contacts and should have understood that this was a form of hustling, something he had in common with Chance, even if he’d never gone to bed with anyone for money. Geraldine Page comes off best, at times reaching below the surface histrionics to expand upon her undeniably complex characterization. Tennessee Williams described Geraldine Page as "the most disciplined and dedicated of actresses, possibly the one fate will select as the American Duse (in reference to the famed Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who was noted as one of the greatest thespians of all time for her total immersion in her roles)." 

Geraldine Page demanded that were she to be signed for the Broadway production of Sweet Bird of Youth, she must also have written assurances that she'd play the lead in the film version, as well. Despite that, however, she, herself, was unsure of her ability to pull off such a demanding role, which required her to play a theatrical, sexually voracious woman who was once a beautiful and triumphant movie star. She struggled to find the "ravaged emotional geography of the Princess Kosmonopolis," and during the first table read for the play, it was up to Kazan to convince the skeptical actress she could perform the part. 

Part of the issue was that Geraldine Page was a method actor, which required her to do a level of truth-seeking when performing a role. To prepare for the meaty role, Kazan gave Geraldine a box full of photographs of famed silent film stars and told her to pick which one Alexandra Del Lago had been. Out of a group that included Greta Garbo and Mary Pickford, Page selected Norma Talmadge because "she had an air of great vulnerability, as of someone who greets anyone and anything with a spontaneous open-heartedness. I felt the shocks and hurts would fall in full force on a heart like that could turn someone into a complicated, volatile phenomenon like the Princess."

Joanne Woodward, who had been compared with Geraldine Page in her early career, had stayed friends with most of her ex-fiancés, one of whom was playwright James Costigan. He had concocted a frothy, farcical piece entitled Baby Want a Kiss, which he took to Joanne with the suggestion that she appear in it. Joanne took it to Paul, who had reservations but again gave in to his wife’s demands just as he had with A New Kind of Love. Joanne had gone into a snit when Paul informed her he did not want make the comedy A New Kind of Love. She reproached him that she'd spent most of her time watching the children—this included Jackie’s kids, who often came to visit—trailing after him when he went on location overseas no matter what her own plans might have been. She just wanted to have a good time and he had damn well better do the picture or else. 

Harper (1966) had its genesis in a novel entitled The Moving Target, the first of a series of mystery novels by Ross MacDonald, which featured private eye Lew Archer. Because Newman had had such success with previous H films, The Hustler and Hud, the character and the film were rechristened Lew Harper. Frank Sinatra was actually the first choice for the role; he wound up playing another private eye, Tony Rome, the following year. Newman was still considered a big box-office attraction—and Harper’s success would only add to his rating—despite the fact that several of his recent pictures hadn’t made much money. In fact, in his fortieth year, this weighed on his mind more than one might imagine. Newman really did not consider himself wealthy. 

With five kids to support and another on the way, not to mention a wife and an ex, there was a lot of money going out. Newman was afraid he’d wake up and find all that he’d achieved taken away from him. “It isn’t just the money,” he told an interviewer, “but the fact that I’ve become accustomed to a certain kind of living and recognition that may be totally destroyed. I worry so much that I’m lucky if I get five hours sleep at night—even between films.” Pamela Tiffin, who played Miranda Sampson in Harper, said she was intimidated by Joanne when she visited the set, and as she told one writer, she thought Joanne “doesn’t have a great sense of humor.” Newman assured Joanne he didn't find Tiffin attractive and he thought her advances were childish. 

Newman had a major hit with Harper, but his performance, though breezy and insouciant, left a lot to be desired. He never captured the essence of the character Lew Archer that MacDonald had created. Actors often find a certain motif or theme to help their performance, and in Harper Newman seems to have chosen smugness. Wearing a kind of bored, superficially cool expression throughout the movie, he never seems remotely real, as Archer is in the novels. Newman borrowed one technique from watching Robert F. Kennedy's conversations, which he called “listening sideways”—he would look in another direction from the person who was talking without actually missing a word they were saying. Newman claimed this was what Bobby Kennedy did. His adoption of this technique did nothing to enhance his performance but only made him seem inappropriately languid and blasé, something that Bobby Kennedy was decidedly not.

Paul Newman in his conversations with Stewart Stern (1991): "When the orphan and the ornament become one person, will the question still be “Where is the compassion?” Will the answer be “Holy shit, there isn’t any”? Will you have struggled through a whole life, to find decency underneath the ornament, to see these parts together and ask “Who’s really home?” The completion, the merging—all the impressive attributes you were looking to find in the blending of the halves simply wiped out, your worst fears realized. Me, I’m still wondering. And I dread the terror of discovering that the emotional anesthetic I’ve lived with will never be able to let the orphan get out front and have a life of its own. I’ve often thought what a terrible liability it would be for someone to become an actor who, like me, is somehow anesthetized. 

I’ve always had a sense of being an observer of my own life. Whether that’s been heightened by the Budweisers, I don’t know. I have a sense of watching something, but not of living something. It’s like looking at a photograph that’s out of focus, because the camera was shaken and the head is blurry. In fact, you can almost see three or four separate distinct images, depending on how it’s been vibrating. It’s spacey; I guess I always feel spaced out. I have a feeling that you start out your life with a certain number and certain kind of people you are friendly with. If you become older and more successful, then you start having more friends for the wrong reasons. On the one hand, I hope I’m not as paranoid as my mother was, though on the other hand, I know there are people who have taken advantage of our acquaintance so that I feel used, and I am always very wary about it. I wonder what my old age is going to be like, because I really don’t have many friends. It’s hard to feel lonely in New York, but I do sometimes. When Joanne is out of town, or I’ve been by myself for longer than I’m accustomed to, I realize there aren’t a lot of people I can count on, and the ones I can count on are few and far between. If I wanted company, I wouldn’t know who to call. Most of the people I know well are not around, so I just walk around the house and bump into things."

The fascination with Paul Newman lies in the contrasts of his nature. He was a masculine man with a sensitive side, a pretty-boy actor who took car races to underline his masculinity, a family man who was sometimes distant with his family, a famous sex symbol who stayed married to the same woman for five decades, and so on. —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Lawrence J. Quirk 

RIP Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022)

Jerry Lee Lewis, whose hammering boogie-woogie piano, unleashed-tomcat voice, and unapologetic bad-boy persona made him an architect of rock & roll and an early rival of Elvis Presley, has died. Lewis’ publicist confirmed his death to Rolling Stone, but a cause of death was not immediately available; he was 87. Lewis died at his home in Desoto County, Mississippi, with his seventh wife, Judith Coghlan, by his side. Lewis’ two 1957 singles, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” were some of rock’s earliest and most primal hits: howling, whooping, libidinous performances that announced, as defiantly as any other records of the period, that a new style of music had arrived and would take zero prisoners. “I had created rock & roll before they ever thought about having rock & roll,” Lewis told Rolling Stone in 2014. “When Elvis come out, he was rockabilly. When I come out with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,’ that was rock & roll. That’s when the name ‘rock & roll’ was put in front.” 

“He’s the best rock & roll pianist ever,” Elton John said in 2007. “I couldn’t play like him because he’s too fast.” Born Sept. 29, 1935, in Ferriday, Louisiana, Lewis grew up poor (his father Elmo worked as a carpenter, when he worked at all). Around the house, young Jerry Lee was exposed to cowboy music, blues 78s, and swing records, and he sneaked into local clubs to hear the likes of Ray Charles and B.B. King. Although he was proficient at drums, Lewis began playing piano at age eight — Lewis’ father mortgaged their farm to buy him one, and an older cousin taught him the boogie-woogie style soon after — and he gave his first public performance at 15 in the parking lot of a car dealership. He once said that the first song he learned to play was “Silent Night” — but, as he told Rolling Stone, “I played it rock & roll style.” After high school (where he landed his lifelong nickname, the Killer), Lewis attended Bible school in Waxahachie, Texas. But in an early sign of his struggles between the secular and the sacred, Lewis performed the gospel song “My God Is Real” at a school function — also in a “rock & roll style.” 

In May 1958, Jerry Lee was presented in Uk as some kind of serious threat, an example of the Southern American at his virulent worst. Even the British government took a hand in the affair, sending officers from the Home Office to inspect Jerry Lee’s and Myra’s passports and immigration status. The headlines screamed: 'Baby Snatcher, go home. We Hate Jerry Lee Lewis, shout ex-fans!' The British tabloids ripped Lewis to shreds, and his career "took a nosedive right into the concrete," as told to music journalist Alan Light. Columnists called for his arrest and deportation and for an investigation by the child welfare office. Even Parliament weighed in. Sir Frank Medlicott, of the constituency of Norfolk Central in the House of Commons, questioned why a man of such nefariousness was granted a permit to work in England. Young women announced they were going home to smash his records. At a show in Tooting, South London, fans chanted “We Hate Jerry!” and cried “Cradle Robber!” from the audience. 

Myra Gale Brown later covered their marriage in the 1982 book Great Balls of Fire, which was adapted into a 1989 film starring Dennis Quaid as Lewis and Winona Ryder as Myra. "They were looking for a place to stick the knife into rock & roll. And Jerry gave it to them—well, I did, I opened my mouth. That's exactly what it was," Myra told Alan Light. Journalist Alan Light recounted in a story published in Medium's Cuepoint in 2014 that Jerry Lee Lewis and ex-wife Myra (now Williams) "were playful and affectionate" during the photo shoot for the Rolling Stone story. Light wrote that the duo were "joking and giggling, poking and swatting each other, Jerry Lee even sneaking a kiss at one point..." Dick Clark had already written Jerry Lee off. And it was only beginning. Sam Phillips seemed unsure how to respond, at least publicly, to the attacks on their marquee star. He knew the threat was serious, potentially career-ending. “Jerry Lee can’t be managed,” concluded Phillips. “People ask me what effect England had on me, and mostly the effect was on Sam Phillips and distribution,” Jerry Lee says now. “He just was not puttin’ my records out there.”

His famous 1956 jam session with Presley, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins was turned into a Broadway musical, Million Dollar Quartet, in 2010. At the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, director Ethan Coen premiered Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, his documentary on the icon. In recent years, Lewis — still living in Nesbit, by then with his seventh wife, Coghlan, whom he married in March 2012 — had corralled some of his manic ways, thanks to his daughter and manager, Phoebe Lewis. Source: rollingstone.com

Paul Newman and Sweet Bird of Youth: Dark Depiction Of The American Dream

Geraldine Page, who plays boozy, bitter, has-been movie star Alexandra Del Lago, originally crafted the role on Broadway in Elia Kazan's 1959-60 stage production. And she could hardly have asked for better screen chemistry than with her co-star Paul Newman as the good-looking and naively ambitious gigolo, Chance Wayne. (Kazan's original stage cast also included Madeleine Sherwood, Rip Torn, and Bruce Dern. Sherwood and Torn likewise reprise their roles here.) For the pretty blonde ingénue, Shirley Knight shines as Chance's ex-girlfriend, appropriately named Heavenly, Boss Finley's daughter. Years ago, Finley ran Chance out of town with a one-way ticket and the temptations of the American Dream: "This is America. Today you're nobody, tomorrow you're somebody." He's none too pleased when Chance rolls back into his hometown in a big-fin Cadillac with vodka-soaked "Princess" Del Lago sprawled in the backseat. 

It seems that when Chance headed out to New York and Hollywood with plans to become a matinee idol, he didn't know that he'd left Heavenly pregnant. Her father strongarmed an illegal abortion and has been nursing his revenge fantasies ever since. Holed up in a hotel room with Alexandra, bare-chested Chance connives to trade sexual favors (Alexandra's "only dependable distraction") for her connections in the movie business. Both are pathetic, pill-popping dreamers and desperate manipulators, both fatally damaged and discarded. Still, Tennessee Williams' gift is that we can sympathize with his monsters. Chance aims to reconcile with his one lost love, Heavenly, unaware of what happened to her since he last saw her. 

Flashbacks to their "sweet bird" days reveal that Chance once had the potential for a real relationship and a life better than a flamed-out hustler. But, as Heavenly tells her vindictive father, when Chance left to follow his dream the right doors never opened, so he went through the wrong ones. "Each of us has his own private hell to go to," Alexandra says, and Chance finds his—delivered by Boss Finley's vigilante gang of enforcer thugs led by Rip Torn. This film interpretation awkwardly abuts Williams' meditations on the inescapability of our past with dramatic jest that Brooks transferred well from stage to screen. On the other hand, everyone we see Actors Studio'ing through the material does a toothsome job of it. Newman's Broadway-honed surefootedness in the role (one of his long list of finely turned losers and misfits) never falters. Shirley Knight was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and powerhouse Geraldine Page really should have taken home her nominated Best Actress Oscar that night. (She did get the Golden Globe.) Her phone call soliloquy with Walter Winchell remains a plum audition piece for female actors "of a certain age." Also noteworthy are Madeleine Sherwood as Boss' vengeful mistress and Mildred Dunnock as Aunt Nonnie, who gets the last word.

In “The Glass Menagerie,” (1944) the American Dream for white Americans is portrayed as a pursuit of individual happiness though in the end the Wingfield clan fails to reach their goal. Paul Newman directed The Glass Menagerie film adaptation in 1987, starring Joanne Woodward and Karen Allen as Amanda and Laura Wingfield. In Arthur Miller's “The Death of a Salesman” (1949) the American Dream of Willy Loman's misconceived notion that superficial qualities like personal attraction and popularity among his peers will assure success for his family falls flat. Playwrights Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lorraine Hansberry coming from different backgrounds reveal their own interpretation of the American Dream. Sweet Bird of Youth was actually written in 1956 and was a combination of two plays, The Pink Bedroom and Chance and the Princess. 

Williams's main characters are individuals who are in search of their identity. Mental anguish to a great extent and physical violence to a certain level had been a central part of his plays. Though critics argued that his drinking and drug taking combined with his fear of going insane could be the rationale behind the inclusion of violence in his themes, he could also be reflecting the milieu of the times. As Williams said: “What surprises me is the degree to which both critics and audience have accepted this barrage of violence. I think I was surprised, most of all, by the acceptance and praise of Suddenly Last Summer. I thought I would be critically tarred and feathered and ridden on a fence rail out of New York theatre, with no future haven except in translation for theatres abroad, who might mistakenly construe my work as a castigation of American morals, not understanding that I write about violence in American life only because I am not so well acquainted with the society of other countries.” 

Sweet Bird of Youth can be rightly said that the play is about loss of innocence and perception of responsibility. 1950s America was about power, sex and money, where all three were equally important for the disillusioned youth as portrayed in the literature of that era. By the end of the play, the readers realize that the great American Dream as a goal has lost its importance in a world which tries to achieve it through questionable means. Williams also quotes the Aristotelian idea that violence is purged by its poetic representation on the stage. The play is set in St. Cloud, Florida. Chance Wayne works as a waiter in Boss Finley's club. There he meets Finley's daughter, Heavenly, and he falls in love with her. Chance tries to seek Finley's consent to date Heavenly. Finley does not like the idea so he manipulates Chance into leaving the town by enticing him with the promises of achieving the American Dream. Chance pursues an acting career but fails to make it in Hollywood; instead he ends up as a drifter and a gigolo.

Chance comes back with an ageing actress, Princess Kosmonopolis to St. Cloud to help her escape negative publicity of a movie role. But Chance realizes that Heavenly is pregnant with his baby. In spite of knowing the severity of the punishment that awaits him, Chance decides to stay back in St. Cloud and face the consequences of his behaviour. The two main characters, Chance Wayne and Alexandra Del Lago represent the citizens in quest of realizing the great American Dream. But unfortunately they are blind in their quest to achieve their goals. Goaded by Boss Finley, the crooked father of the girl he loves, Chance Wayne dreams of becoming a Hollywood star. He does not comprehend Finley's scheme to try to get him out of Heavenly's life. Chance Wayne tries to use his sexual favours to Del Lago to be promoted as an actor in Hollywood. 

Alexandra Del Lago is a fading star who attempts to hide after what she thinks was a disastrous performance in a movie. She relies on drugs and drinking to get her through trying times. She relies on Chance as his devotion for her temporarily makes her feel younger. She represents individuals who are unstable and insecure at the helm of success. At the end of the play, she offers to help Chance to get away from an impending punishment for his role in ruining Heavenly. Chance decides to stay back and be punished by Finley's men in spite of knowing that the punishment is castration (in the film it was changed to disfigurement). Time has the power to change the priorities of Chance Wayne's American Dream into matured redemption. In truth, Chance and Heavenly's love for each other emerges constant, pure and strengthened, notwithstanding their trying times. Moreover, by the end of the play, Chance, Heavenly and Del Lago realize that standing for what they believe as right is more important than pursue the American Dream through unscrupulous means. In the New York Times Brooks Atkinson called the film version of Sweet Bird of Youth “one of Williams’s finest dramas” and declared that it was “brilliantly acted.” 

Walter Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune called it “a succession of fuses deliberately—and for the most part magnificently—lighted.” The New York Mirror took special notice of Paul Newman’s intensity when it noted, “His disintegration, when he finally faces up to reality, has genuine emotional impact. Newman, as well as the audience, was moved by the concluding passages of the film. There were tears in his eyes as well as in those of the audience.” They might have been tears of emotional exhaustion as much as genuine emotion. Newman may have been especially nervous, because he and Joanne were expecting once again, and this time things were going well. It had been a little over a year since her miscarriage in London. Now she was ensconced at their New York apartment on West Eleventh Street waiting for the baby to come. Newman had found the meaning of true love in Joanne and—feeling loved for the first time—projected that mythical quality of being redeemed by love in Chance Wayne. —"The Flight: Depiction Of The American Dream In Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird Of Youth" - International Organization of Scientific Research (IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science -Volume 8, 2013)

Paul Newman didn't use those magnetic blue eyes promiscuously, as jeepers-creepers peepers. He hooded them, slit them, closed them tightly in pain. When open, they were sky blue with a milky haze. You could get lost in them; you could also see that he was sometimes lost behind them. Trim, smooth, chiseled, pretty, Newman was physically our most wide-open movie star, yet on one level he was also our most unfathomable. We feared for him onscreen, and he got battered (or even killed) unexpectedly—as the impulsive-country-boy Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun, and most famously, as the title character in Cool Hand Luke, a heavy-handed Christ-behind-bars picture. He senses the hell he's bringing on himself and acts out anyway, as if he's daring the universe to punish him. I don't know if his penchant for smart-ass renegade roles had its roots in his difficult relationship with his father, evidently a cold and disapproving man, but he had a knack as the prodigal son. Newman was ambivalent about his prettiness, but his voice—gruff and increasingly gravelly—balanced out his looks somewhat. He was mesmerizing in wounded Adonis parts (as in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), but he was better with a shot of self-satire. 

In The Long Hot Summer, he was Ben Quick, an enigmatic stud-muffin who brazens his way into a prominent Southern clan led by Orson Welles' patriarch. It was on that film when everybody could see that Newman and Joanne Woodward had a deep relationship. Woodward played Clara Varner, the brainy, rigid, somewhat repressed young woman who finally surrenders to him. As different as they are onscreen, their chemistry is palpable. In real life, he adored her eccentric ways and valued her advices greatly. His Oscar came for The Hustler sequel, The Color of Money, and unlike Tom Cruise, Newman was sly and funny; his self-containment was a marvel. But the showboat of that film was director Martin Scorsese, doing his rock-'n-roll whip-pan thing, and the movie has none of its predecessor's brilliant poignancy. In his late career, Newman tested himself in character parts, although he didn't have the greatest acting range. Great actors and great artists don't have to be role models in life to inspire you with their work. But when they are, like Newman was, they give a special kind of joy. Paul Newman's real character is found in his lack of self-centeredness, in the way it radiated out off-screen. Source: nymag.com

Paul Newman's possible romances: Marilyn Monroe, Lita Milan, Nancy Bacon

Paul Newman may have been a better actor than many moviegoers realized. Self-assured in his talents the Oscar winner was not. A sexual ace with the ladies? Hardly. Newman grappled with alcoholism, too, and the man who famously played fun-loving Butch Cassidy could turn into a moody drunk before passing out. After he became a social activist in the 1960s and ’70s he considered getting into politics, but thought his drinking might become an issue. Says who? Newman himself, in “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” a memoir by an actor who could convincingly play a charismatic but self-destructive outsider because he knew the breed all too well. Just watch “The Hustler,” “Hud,” “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Verdict” or “Nobody’s Fool.” Newman began working on a memoir in 1986 with screenwriter Stewart Stern. After several years of effort that included recorded interviews with relatives, friends and colleagues, their project began to drift. Newman’s daughters Melissa and Clea decided to turn that raw material into a book punctuated by first-person accounts by others, including Newman’s first wife Jackie Witte as well as his second and soul-mate, actress Joanne Woodward. 

The result is a painfully frank reflection on a life filed with self-doubt. Newman grew up in a dysfunctional household in Shaker Heights, Ohio, his parents marrying when their first son Arthur was conceived out of wedlock. Paul soon followed, not making the marriage any happier. His heavy-drinking father was emotionally distant while his mother might beat him one moment and hug him the next. His mother draws the most criticism in his memoir, followed closely by Newman himself. She became a symbol of his bottled-up emotions and low self-esteem, and success did little to wash away those feelings. When he became a star, his mother sent him clips of negative reviews. After one slight too many —what he considered an insult aimed at Joanne Woodward — Newman didn’t speak to her for 15 years. 

The blue-eyed future sex symbol recalls being terribly shy as a teenager, a short and skinny kid smitten with girls but more comfortable playing a laugh-getting buffoon. In college a date once told him, “I like going out with you because you’re so harmless.” An unfocused student, he mainly chased girls and drank alcohol. A stint in the U.S. Navy flying as a radioman gunner during World War II put some meat on Newman’s bones and forced some maturity on him. What’s an insecure showoff to do? “Acting gave me a sanctuary where I was able to create emotions without being penalized for having them,” Newman writes. Good looks, charm and an air of confidence provided an effective cover. He went from understudy in the 1953 Broadway production of “Picnic” to featured roles, then to starring in the movies. It sounds so meta: the professional faker faking it so professionally.

Things just seemed to go his way — “Newman’s luck,” he called it. The irresponsible drinker booted from the Kenyon College football team found a place in college theater. The lazy student managed to graduate and later study drama at Yale. The immature husband and father pivoted to eager adulterer when Woodward made him feel sexy for the first time. However, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man” lacks the keen look at filmmaking that usually punctuates a movie star’s story. While a bumpy, disjointed confessional, it also smolders with introspection as Newman tries to ascertain what he couldn’t see in himself that so many others did. Source: apnews.com

Lita Milan, (co-star of Paul Newman in "The Left-Handed Gun," directed by Arthur Penn, was the daughter of a Polish homemaker and a Hungarian fur salesman in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and originally named Iris Lia Menshell, Lita shot like a rocket into the mid-1950s Hollywood. A wild and lovely woman, she had a smoldering beauty onscreen. "She drew men to her like moths to a flame," said producer Fred Coe. "One of those moths was Paul Newman himself." According to Lita, it was "a passionate affair" with Newman. Afterwards, Lita Milan had brief flings with Steve McQueen while filming Never Love a Stranger and with Steve Cochran in I Mobster.

Lita had been a Las Vegas showgirl and model before getting cast as a spitfire senorita in The Ride Back in 1957. The sultry, even fiery, Lita Milan was cast as Celsa in The Left Handed Gun. Coe felt that in the movie Billy the Kid, Lita's character was created for a diversionary romance, even though Celsa in the film is already married to a goodnatured locksmith (Martin Garralga). In any biographical sketch of Lita Milan, there appears this fact: "She had a passionate affair with Paul Newman during the filming of The Left Handed Gun." She had admitted she had seduced him after a long night of drinking beer.

In his memoir, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal addressed the rumors of a menage a trois between Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman and himself. "I should note here that over the years, I have read and heard about the tryst between me and Paul Newman. Unlike Marlon Brando, whom I hardly knew, Paul has been a friend for close to half a century, proof, in my psychology, that nothing could ever have happened. I liked Paul Newman, but I loved Joanne Woodward." 

It is mainly through Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger that we know of the brief friendship between Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe. Steiger was fascinated by Marilyn and dug most of the secrets of their relationship from assorted insiders from the Actors Studio. From scattered, fragmented accounts revealed over the years, a rather touching story emerged. Supposedly, when she'd flown back to Hollywood from New York, Marilyn was still hoping to play the lead in Picnic, starring opposite Newman. Both allegedly had a meeting at the Chateau Marmont. Newman would later tell Steiger that it was Marilyn's voice more than her body that he "found the most seductive part I've ever known. No one has a voice like hers. It was the perfect voice to sing `Bye, Bye Baby,"' he would recall. Shelley Winters surmised that in Newman, Marilyn "found one of her safe ports. It wasn't sexual. It wasn't that kind of relationship. Marilyn knew that he was committed to Joanne. Until the final day of her life, she had a tender feeling for Paul and always regretted never having appeared in a film with him." While Newman was chatting with Marilyn at the Chateau Marmont, he almost forgot about his publicity photo sessions at Warners with Virginia Mayo and Pier Angeli. "I remember her sitting in the hotel armchair," Newman told Steiger. "She just sat there staring out the window at the blinding sunshine of the day. She'd washed off all that makeup and her hair was a bit matted. She didn't feel the need to talk, huddled in that chair almost like a little girl. It was like she was waiting for some message to invade her mind. She was waiting for some answer. But an answer to what question?"

Robert Kennedy had toyed with the idea of Newman playing him in a movie based on his book, The Enemy Within. "It's about Jimmy Hoffa and the mob," Marilyn explained to Newman. "Bobby wanted me to contact you because he wants you to star in it." "I'd be honored," Newman said. "I'd like to meet with him to discuss it." "That's not possible right now," she said. "Some people could be spying on us, watching our every move. Jerry Wald is negotiating with Bobby for the screen rights. I want to co-star in the movie with you. Jerry has promised to write in a role for me. Bobby has agreed. I want to play a secretary who, arm in arm, works with Bobby to bring Jimmy Hoffa to justice. With me in the picture and with you as Bobby, we can virtually guarantee box office. I want to sink my teeth into a substantial political drama like Sinatra did." She was no doubt referring to Sinatra's appearance in The Manchurian Candidate, an upcoming release she'd seen at a special screening in Las Vegas.

Marilyn hardly needed to introduce producer Jerry Wald to Paul. He was well known to both the Newmans. He'd produced two filsm starring Joanne Woodward: No Down Payment and The Sound and the Fury. Wald had also produced Faulkner's The Long, Hot Summer. In a touch of irony, he was about to produce Hemingway 's Adventures of a Young Man, in which he'd cast Paul in a minor role, and also The Stripper, a film in which he'd cast Joanne Woodward as the star. Wald was long familiar with Marilyn as well, having produced her Clash by Night (1952) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Lets Make Love (1960). "Scriptwriters can work wonders," Wald assured Newman. "Besides, Bobby demands that we create a role in the movie for Marilyn. I think Bobby really likes her." Wald later discussed privately with friends why The Enemy Within was never made. The studio, 20th Century Fox, began to receive death threats, no doubt from some shady members of the Jimmy Hoffa Teamsters' Union. Wald claimed that he was warned that if the movie were made, "it'll be your last picture." 

"Both Marilyn and Paul also received death threats," Wald said. "Paul Newman pulled the plug. He was very concerned with those death threats, and was very anxious that no harm come to his family. The final blow came when Newman read the first draft of the script and rejected it as mediocre." Pierre Salinger, the press secretary at the White House, reckoned that "Bobby was furious when Newman rejected the role to play him in The Enemy Within. And Bobby was a guy to hold a grudge." Bobby allegedly sent Newman a note, which was probably short but not sweet. Like so many other projects in Hollywood, the film died a slow death. And Jerry Wald died just one month before Marilyn, on July, 13, 1962, at age 50. On the contray, JFK didn't favor Newman for playing him in another failed project: PT 109. Actually, Jackie Kennedy wanted Warren Beatty in the role of her husband. When Newman, upon hearing the televised news of Marilyn's death, he was paralyzed in shock and shared his grief with his wife. 

Nancy Bacon: "I sneaked a look at Paul as he talked easily with the crew. He appeared vulnerable and boyish in his tan Levi’s and moccasins. Then our eyes met and I found myself waiting, as he seemed to be, for the others to leave. And then they did leave and we were alone. Paul put down his beer and ordered a Scotch, and I had a gin and tonic. It began to get dark and he said maybe we should have something to eat. We went into the dining room, which was like a cavern spotted with wooden tables covered with red and white checkered oilcloth. We sat with some of the people from the picture crew, and word got out that I was a writer down there to do a story on Newman. He looked at me strangely for a moment—but only a moment, then his eyes softened. We sat like strangers in my hotel room for a few minutes, nervous, like children, and then he kissed me and after a while he did something he really didn’t have to do. He fell to his knees and clutched me tightly around the waist, his head pressed against my breasts, and he whispered, ‘Please.’ Like a small boy asking for a dime. He didn’t have to say it because I had made up my mind a long time ago. Maybe by the pool, maybe at dinner, or in the dungeons. I took him by the hand and led him up to my bedroom. He was a most tender and gentle lover and even though the last thing he said to me before he fell asleep was not exactly romantic, ‘Whew! It’s heart attack time, baby!’,  I felt he knew this was not just a casual thing. 

I suppose I was in love with him. I suppose he was in love with me. After the first time he said he loved me, it seemed easier for him to repeat it. But I never said it back to him because I was insecure, of course. How can you be secure with a man when you don’t even know his telephone number? He was making a movie called Hall of Mirrors (the title was later changed to WUSA) with Joanne. When Paul came back to Los Angeles he came to see me and he glowered at me and said, ‘I mustn’t be happy. I’m playing Reinhardt, and Reinhardt is a dark man, a man in a black mood.’ And later I noticed that the red in his eyes dimmed the blue, like in a bad color print. I think it was late spring (1970) when I realized how sordid the affair had become. Why didn’t he call me his girl? Then I knew why. He was really a square. He felt he was sinning—and he was always drunk. Or maybe in his guilt he was looking for death. I realized the affair was straining at the seams now." —Legends and Lipstick: My Scandalous Stories of Hollywood’s Golden Era (2017) by Nancy Bacon