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