Paul Newman: Mercurial Life, Mercurial Talent

Paul Newman: My satisfaction with my success has always been tempered with a great sadness that my mother could never truly feel a part of the enjoyment of my success. My mother thought I was simply a weapon of her Catholicism to be paraded in front of my father’s people as the royal vindication of her own family, her smartness, and her genes. Most people who have experienced themselves fully have in common that they remember some person—a teacher, a religious figure, a parent, uncle, grandfather—someone about whom they can say, “That was my mentor. That was my rock. That’s who pointed me in the direction I followed, who inspired me, who gave me the example to learn from and emulate.” I never had that. I’ve always wondered that I was never able to find a mentor. I never had anyone in my childhood I can look back on as an adult and say, “Boy, I never realized what a foundation that was, how I leaned on that.” I did get little bits of morality from my father; I don’t know what I got from my mother. I don’t know that any teachers gave me anything or any understanding of myself. No scout leader or camp person. Nobody in a church. Nothing. As far as I can tell, I got no emotional support from anyone.

I’m no proud ot it, but while I was having troubles in my marriage with Jackie, there were a couple of quick diversions at the Actors Studio; you couldn’t even call them one-nighters. And they were always followed by terrible pangs of recrimination and guilt. My ethical self was overwhelmed by the discovery of these powerful appetites. Betraying my marital vows to Jackie seemed strangely at odds against that discovery. In my marriage, Jackie was available, but there was always a gauze, a veil, over our responses to each other. You know how it’s decided some luminary deserves a special evening, an honor night? If I ever deserve an evening tribute, it should be for the invention of that sex symbol that was created by Joanne Woodward. And it shouldn’t be done at the American Film Institute or the Oscars—it should be a parade right before the Orange Bowl or the Rose Bowl.

I realized that all my desperate fantasies and years of being turned down disappeared with Joanne. I suddenly found the door of opportunity flung open right before my eyes. Joanne made me feel sexy. Joanne made me feel loved. And she made me feel I wanted to make her feel loved. Joanne and I seemed like a couple of orphans. She first knew I was one because of that problem in my pants each time we danced, and I knew that she was an orphan because most of the definition of her personality seemed to rely on her sexuality. We made a point during Picnic and afterwards to let the lusty aspects of ourselves have time to function without interruption or distraction; we left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and motels and public parks and bathrooms and swimming pools and ocean beaches and rumble seats and Hertz rental cars. I don’t know that Joanne and I sat around questioning our morals. But I remember a night when everything exploded on me. I just wanted to drop down on my knees and tell Joanne that I really loved her, and I had to get out of this mess that I was in. Then, all of a sudden, I realized I couldn’t do that; I didn’t have enough money and just couldn’t desert Jackie—God, it was horrible. My indecision and judiciousness, constantly weighing all the elements, was paralleled by Joanne’s unpredictability. She was constantly keeping me off balance.

I only have a few firm convictions. I don’t believe in resurrection, I’m not a mystic. But I am convinced that this is only a dress rehearsal. And when I die and they put me in that box down into the ground, someone is going to yell, “Cut!” Then a director will say, “Okay, let’s go back to the number-one position, let’s get the cameras back there and shoot that scene all over again.” And my box will open up again and some other life will be continued or pursued. I actually think I’ll die seven times. And it will all turn out to be some kind of joke.

Having given Native Americans a fair shake in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill (or at least having attempted to), Newman next turned his attention, surprisingly, to the gays. A popular novel entitled The Front Runner had come out that detailed the love affair between a male track coach and a younger male runner. The author Patricia Nell Warren had originally had two lesbians in mind but was told by the publisher that if the protagonists were gay men, it might sell better. With scarce artistic pretensions and full of cliches about gay men, The Front Runner at least came along at the right time. The chosen front runner for the possible film role was Richard Thomas, who’d been Newman’s son in Winning and could have certainly handled the part. 

Robby Benson was also in contention. Benson had sensitively played Newman’s self-destructive son in Harry and Son. Although there was hardly as much speculation as there had been when Selznick sought his Scarlet O’Hara, the many fans of the novel anxiously awaited the announcement of which actor would be necking with Newman on the big screen. Many pointed out that Thomas and Benson were hardly handsome enough to play the runner and that it would stretch belief that gorgeous Newman would be attracted to either of them. When asked about the picture, which intrigued many of his fans, Newman would always refer to script problems. The screenplay did go through several drafts, none of which were apparently satisfactory. Finally Newman let it be known that he was backing out of the movie. He claimed that no one would find him believable as a homosexual and he seemed to intimate that no one would believe a young runner would have the hots for his middle-aged coach (even if he looked like Paul Newman). Maybe his "emotional Republican" side appeared again. 

Instead of The Front Runner, Newman ran in 1977 to the safety of one of his macho mindless movies, this one entitled Slap Shot. Newman played a coach all right, but definitely not a gay one. He was a coach, a sometime player for a down-and-out hockey team, and a womanizer despite of trying to win back his ex-wife. Once more we have an attempt by Newman to play a hyper-masculine role almost as an apology for being a Hollywood actor and as a means of washing away all the hype that The Front Runner had sprung up. It was as if he felt he had no choice but to do Slap Shot, with its homophobic dialogue littered with all manner of “fag” and “dyke” jokes. 

Newman had another good reason to do the picture. He’d followed two blockbusters, The Sting and The Towering Inferno, with two pictures that barely registered at the box office: The Drowning Pool and Buffalo Bill. Newman was still frightened of becoming a has-been and of not being able to meet all of his considerable bills, with six children to support. The Front Runner was a risky financial proposition, whereas the crude, more visceral Slap Shot seemed like a sure thing. In this instance, Newman traded in his sensitivity and liberalism for money and, as he saw it, common sense. At heart he was still a boy afraid of being called names by the bigger boys. By this time (late 1970s), movies to Newman mostly represented steady income to support his family and racing activities. “I think Paul is bored with acting,” said George Roy Hill, who was reunited with him on Slap Shot. When Newman's character decides to make his team winners by playing dirty and violent, the movie makes the point that the team attracts more fans that way than by simply playing good hockey. 

Nancy Dowd’s script tries to play it both ways by appealing not only to hockey fans of that type but also to those who have contempt for them—it hardly portrays a world that is flattering to the athletes or their fans. The trouble is that the film is too heavy-handed and far-fetched to make a good satire. There are decades-old movies that have made the same cynical points about human nature but done it with much more flair and wit. And at times Newman plays the vulgar coach too charmingly, completely blunting the desired effect. Just because Newman uses profane language, it doesn’t take away his good breeding. He’s frequently self-conscious and wears a jacket with a fur-lined collar that even The Front Runner gay coach probably wouldn’t have been caught dead in. Gore Vidal attended Newman's 52th birthday shortly before the film’s release. One can only imagine what Vidal thought of it when—and if—he even deigned to watch it. Reportedly Newman once tried to deck a man who referred to Vidal as a fag, but whether it was because the man had used a pejorative term to describe a gay friend or had dared to imply that Vidal was homosexual is not known. 

George Roy Hill was directing from a script by Nancy Dowd, who had written a ribald and shaggy story centered on Reggie Dunlop (Newman), an over-the-hill player-coach who responds to the threat that his team might fold for economic reasons by turning them into goons who win games by taunting and fighting with their opponents instead of playing by the rules. Based on the experiences of Ned Dowd, who played for the Johnstown Jets of the North American Hockey League, it was by several measures the most vulgar film Newman had ever done, and it was filled with idiocy and violence, albeit of what Newman called the “Tom and Jerry” stripe. Much of the film had to do with Dunlop’s relationship with his star player, an Ivy League grad who refuses to play on the crass level that his coach demands. Several rising young actors were auditioned for the role, including Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss, but none could skate well enough. Strauss actually broke his leg trying to learn the hockey game. 

So the part went to Michael Ontkean, the Canadian-born star of the TV series The Rookies and a former hockey player at the University of New Hampshire. The roles of virtually every other member of the team—rechristened the Charlestown Chiefs—were taken by actual hockey players, including a trio of brothers, Steve, Jeff, and Jack Carlson, who were cast as the Hanson brothers, the gooniest of goons, whose arrival signifies the transformation of the Chiefs from a team that played hockey into a self-destructive yet menacing gang. Newman, who’d spent his boyhood skating on frozen lakes around Shaker Heights and had kept up his skating occasionally when the Aspetuck River beside his Westport home froze over, spent seven weeks training to do most of his own stunt work. “It was hard to go back to using the muscles again,” he admitted. He was fifty-one and he saw his limits. “On the eleventh day of shooting the hockey scenes, I really ruined myself,” he said. “It was a big fight sequence on the ice. So I strained all the muscles on the inside of my thighs and in my abdomen. Isn’t the movie business great? I’ve learned how to drive a race car, to ride a horse, to play the trombone, to shoot billiards, and to play ice hockey.” He'd had fun but he was ambivalent towards the violent content.

Newman made an impression, as well, on a young actress named Swoosie Kurtz, who was playing one of the players’ wives. “It’s interesting to watch his decisions in acting,” Kurtz remarked. “When there’s a choice of being sexy or funny or macho, he’ll choose the last two every time, even though he comes off sexy.” The ticket sales, however, never materialized. The movie grossed $20 million in the same year that Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit were released: having a budget over $6 million it was really peanuts. Perhaps it was the very subject matter—hockey is at best a second rate game in the American sports pantheon. Perhaps it was the profane language and violence. Perhaps it was because Paul Newman’s star was itself in decline. George Roy Hill was not convinced of having made a good film and Newman even reneged on Slap Shot due to its crassness.

When it came down to shoot Blaze (1989), Ron Shelton recalled, Paul Newman was uncomfortable with the idea of himself paired with a younger woman. “He had a daughter the same age as the Blaze character,” Shelton said, “and that made him uneasy.” So even though the Hollywood trade papers had announced that he would play the role, he backed out. There was talk of offering the part to Gene Hackman. And then, Newman remembered, “I just woke up one morning and said, ‘Screw it.’” He would make the film. That, of course, left Shelton the problem of finding the right Blaze Starr. At one point, producer Dale Pollock claimed, the filmmakers had seen more than four hundred actresses for the part. With Newman attached, the pressure to get it right was heightened; rumors that Melanie Griffith or Nancy Travis would play the role bubbled up. In fact, recalled Shelton, they had four or five candidates read with Paul. And one of them looked too much like his daughter, and Newman said, ‘I couldn’t do that.’ Eventually Shelton had Newman read with a virtually unknown actress named Lolita Davidovich, “and she just blew him away. She got in his face and was funny and brave and guileless, and when she left, he looked at me and said ‘Who is that woman?!’”

Blaze Starr would give Lolita Davidovich pep talks and tell her how to play the part whether she wanted to hear it or not. Before long, Davidovich froze Blaze out and refused to even pose for photographs with her. In truth, both on and offscreen, Davidovich is more ladylike than the more vulgar Starr. Reportedly, Davidovich, although she liked working with Newman, was not as impressed with his physical appearance. But then she was the kind of beauty who could have any young man she wanted; Newman must have seemed a bit superannuated by her standards. Although the studio could not be faulted for its publicity—they launched a big campaign for Blaze—word of mouth sunk the picture at the starting gate. 

Perhaps it was the food or the Cajun accents, but Newman found himself, once again, pining for his wife Joanne, whom he had openly courted on a Bayou State film set three decades prior. Joanne was, in fact, enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College during that spring term—she’d been attending on and off for more than a decade, hoping to finish the college degree she’d abandoned in Louisiana in the early 1950s. And then she got a pleading phone call from her husband. “He asked me to join him because he missed me,” she remembered. “There’s no academic degree in the world that can compare in importance to the fact that the person you’ve loved for thirty-one years is missing you.” She put her educational plans on hold and went to join him on the film set. As Roger Ebert put it in 1982, casting his eye back to the 1950s, “Like Brando, Newman studied the Method. Like Brando, Newman looked good in an undershirt. Unlike Brando, Newman went on to study life, and so while Brando broke through and then wandered aimlessly in inexplicable roles… Newman continued to work on his craft. Having seen what he could put in, he went on to see what he could leave out. In The Verdict, he has it just about figured out.”

Paul Newman was always happy to lead through his example through his fame or fortune. Along with John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George magazine, Newman encouraged the sort of corporate philanthropy that his food businesses epitomized. The Newman’s Own/George Award was an annual award for a corporation that practiced “innovative and significant philanthropy.” The prize of $25,000, to be presented to the charity of the winner’s choosing, was endowed by a $250,000 grant from Sony Electronics. The award was remarked by the media, but it ceased after Kennedy’s death and the shuttering of his magazine. Newman also continued his efforts to turn corporations into more responsible public citizens with his Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, an informational group that showed businesspeople how their companies might follow in the shoes of Newman’s Own. At the same time, he donated his time and image to Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a group formed by Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cofounder Ben Cohen to lobby Congress for tighter budgetary control of military spending and the reassignment of excesses from the defense budget to schooling programs and health care for children. 

Paul Newman had been the most tempted male star who remained (at least officially) faithful to his wife. As Joanne had advised to him: "It takes such a long time to grow up and by the time you really get there the people usually you’re growing up for are gone." As a proof of his supporting of his wife, Joanne appeared as Abby Brewster, one of the homicidal aunties in Arsenic and Old Lace, in a 1995 production at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. In an old tradition associated with the play, the curtain call on opening night was marked by a stagehand opening the door to the basement, where Abby and her sister, Martha, have buried the lonely men whom they’ve killed off with poisoned elderberry wine; a cast of a dozen actors, representing the corpses, would come out to take a bow. Among the dead men that night, to the audible delight of the sold-out audience, was Paul Newman, wearing a Yale sweatshirt and a baseball red cap: his first appearance in a play in more than thirty years, and he got an ovation without even delivering a line. In certain circles, the most remarkable thing he’d done was to stay married to the same woman for fifty years. How in the world did a couple in their position manage that remarkable milestone? 

“Ultimately, I think we both delight in watching this progression,” Newman told a journalist. “And we laugh a lot.” By all accounts, Paul Newman still acted around Joanne like he was hopelessly in love. He would light up when she entered a room, observers noticed, even if he’d been glowering or grumbling or cussing or complaining or sitting in one of his unreadable silences barely a minute before. He held her hand on walks or as they sat at the symphony or the ballet. He surprised her with sudden phone calls, flowers, and little gifts. “He gave her his electrocardiogram for Christmas,” Stewart Stern recalled. He teased her with mocking little praises—“You have a great figure, and you make a hell of a hollandaise sauce,” he told a reporter—but he needed her in an almost childlike way that he couldn’t disguise. When he was shooting Message in a Bottle in 1999, she visited the set; between shots, he beckoned her over to sit on his lap; as she did, he was overheard asking her, in a sweet voice, “Are you my girl?” When he talked about her, it was with a zeal that could frankly startle. 

“She’s a mercurial lady,” Newman once said of Woodward. “I never know what I’m going to wake up with the next morning. That’s made for some fascinating experiences, I can tell you.” An old-fashioned fellow, he demurred from offering an example. Time ago, his long obsession with speed cars and racing had become the perfect balance to the acting craft that had similarly beguiled him and turned him into a lifelong devotee. But where acting’s rewards were, in his view, fleeting and rare, racing’s were verifiable, demonstrable, and concrete. 

“I’m a very competitive person,” Newman said. “I always have been. And it’s hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive on the track, because their rules are very simple and the declaration of the winner is very concise.” In January 2008, just as he and Joanne prepared to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, a tabloid reported that he had undergone surgery for lung cancer—and that his prognosis was poor. On the twenty-sixth he reached his eighty-third birthday; on the twenty-ninth he and Joanne marked their golden anniversary. Tenderly, Newman toasted Joanne before their children and their dearest friends. “I feel privileged to love that woman,” he said. “That I am married to her is the joy of my life.” Paul Newman played some unforgettable roles onscreen. But the ones for which he was proudest never had top billing on the marquee. Devoted husband. Loving father. Adoring grandfather. Dedicated philanthropist. —"The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man: A Memoir" (2022) by Paul Newman