Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward: "Head Over Heels" (2023) by Melissa Newman

 

Paul Newman with Joanne Woodward video.

Melissa Newman: "They are juicy and passionate. Sophomoric. It’s obvious he fell fast, and I imagine her as he describes her—the seductress, the free spirit that would lead him from his bourgeois upbringing to the bohemian he longed to be. My mother was the more inevitable artist, a woman so instinctively herself even her genteel southern roots couldn’t compromise her. He was a man uncertain of who he was. It’s easy to understand why he was so smitten. The next week of sifting yields a large stack of telegrams sent to my mother after she won the Oscar in 1957. On top is one from Ingrid Bergman. Tucked in the middle is a blue envelope containing a vaguely snarky congratulation from Joan Crawford: “I have heard such wonderful reports of your great willingness to learn.” In the breakfast room is a photo of my mother, clear eyed, unadorned, androgynous. She has been caught, lips slightly parted, as though she is about to speak. She’s just cut all her hair off with fingernail scissors. The studio is furious. 

My mother looks extraordinary. My parents always kept an eye out for opportunities to collaborate. My father loved to direct my mother, and he nurtured some of her deepest and most complex performances. She was his favorite actress, and she knew it. A photograph from the set of Rachel, Rachel shows my father hovering protectively over my mother, who lies on the ground, being embraced by another man. I have scrutinized his face, trying to discern what he is thinking. As a director, he had repeatedly balked at shooting this scene, arguing it was unnecessary or could be accomplished less directly or somehow obscured. He was jealous. They taught me about passion, and they taught me about long-lived passion, the kind that spills over into art and life, that makes sharing coffee at the breakfast table an act as affirming as the carnal act that may or may not have preceded it. My father carried a folded leather picture frame in his suitcase. No doubt my mother gave it to him to remind him of what would be waiting when he got home if he played his cards right. Inside is a double image of the two of them, two variations of the moment just before a kiss. My parents were inexorable, they were forever. They chose each other over and over, sometimes in spite of, sometimes because of. It wasn’t always a fairy tale, but I wanted to remember the best, dreamiest, most sublime part, and that part just happens to be true."

“The thing I resent about this sex-symbol thing is that writers create these sexy, flamboyant, aggressive characters who might have nothing to do with who you really are under the skin. You don’t always have Tennessee Williams around to write glorious lines for you.” —Paul Newman

“I thought Paul was grossly untalented when I first met him. I remember going to dinner with Kim Stanley, when we were all doing Picnic together in Cleveland, and saying to her ‘God, it’s a good thing Paul Newman is so handsome, because he certainly can’t act.’” —Joanne Woodward

“No one sings like Woodward, or acts like Woodward, or bitches like Woodward or kisses like Woodward or talks like Woodward, or talks as long as Woodward, or wipes water out of her eyes like Woodward, or smiles like Woodward or cusses like Woodward. No one is as theatrical as Woodward, or changes like Woodward, or listens like Woodward, or laughs or cries or hiccups or nuthin’ like Woodward. You are a special, a super, an absolutely unbeatable woman and I love you.” —Paul Newman

“I don’t like to talk about acting. It’s very private. An actor is like a magician. You don’t give away your secrets. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot going on before you face the camera or a live audience. I just don’t talk about acting, and I don’t talk about my sex life.” —Joanne Woodward

“Every time I get into an argument with Joanne about cooking or how to launder shirts, she just shakes her Oscar at me, and I’m dead in the water.” —Paul Newman

“Stars are people who are immediately recognizable, who bring their own mystique, their own essence to whatever role they play. Paul is a star. I think I’m a character actress. Nobody recognizes me when I walk down the street. And I can have a hard time getting checks cashed.” —Joanne Woodward

 

“I shall lock myself in an abandoned water closet. I love you so very much. And I'll shut my mouth and carry on in silent communion with your soul.” —Paul Newman 

“When an actor knows what they’re doing you don’t see the work.” —Joanne Woodward

“I think what describes Joanne’s feeling about my racing was a headline once in the New York Post that said ‘Newman Escapes Death, Joanne Furious.’” —Paul Newman

“I could only dance with one person, that was Joanne. I could never dance with anyone else.” —Paul Newman

“Just to watch Joanne listening is a course in acting itself.” —Paul Newman

"Head Over Heels: Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman: A Love Affair in Words and Pictures" (2023) by Melissa Newman 

Weird Rivalry: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman

Steve McQueen's chronicler Marshall Terrill evenhandedly dishes on the King of Cool’s collisions with fellow superstars Paul Newman, Elvis Presley, and John Wayne. As cerebral San Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, McQueen, stuck with his Colt Diamondback in Peter Yates’ “Bullitt,” won critical acclaim and strong box office receipts on October 17, 1968. Guilty as charged for penning authoritative tomes about Steve McQueen going back to 1993’s Portrait of an American Rebel, Marshall Terrill doesn’t sugarcoat the actor’s ceaselessly fascinating, complex life as was evidenced by a “Biographer of the Year” accolade bestowed by The Arizona Republic. Terrill also served as executive producer of the documentary Steve McQueen: The Salvation of an American Icon, which offers an interview probing McQueen’s lifelong rivalry with Paul Newman, the Boys Republic alum’s competitive romantic streak with Elvis Presley over stunning fashion model-actress Barbara Leigh, and an evening when the King of Cool stumbled upon John Wayne backstage at an awards ceremony.

Broadway had a new lead in Hatful of Rain. At this point, however, one might recycle that old folklore axiom, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” The part often seemed to overwhelm Steve McQueen, especially as he later confessed, in terms of a basic technical capacity, such as voice projection and effectively handling lengthy dialogue passages. He further revealed, “I had this one big scene where the character, who’s a dope addict, gets delirious—and it really spooked me. I mean, each night, doing that scene I got more and more depressed. Got so I couldn’t eat, and I began losing weight. I felt lousy. There was so much about acting I still didn’t know.” Among the major publications covering his Broadway debut, only Variety found him “mildly effective” as Johnny Pope. Not surprisingly, McQueen was dropped from the part after six weeks, with the play closing a month later (October 13, 1956). Paradoxically, even the great achievement of getting into the Actors Studio had been followed by a letdown. The central Method guru at the Studio, Lee Strasberg, was brilliant but also bullish. McQueen’s first wife Neile Adams wrote, “Strasberg had a way of dissecting and criticizing an actor’s work that Steve found intimidating and frightening at the same time. Steve would say ‘I would rather take my chances outside the Studio.’” 

McQueen still learned a great deal at the Studio, but more and more it was about watching others present special scenes. Fittingly, both this perspective and a fear of Strasberg’s merciless criticism, was something McQueen shared with fellow Studio actor (and McQueen's idol) James Dean. People whose association with the Studio put them in the audience for a scene presentation by either Dean or McQueen would include: Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker. James Dean was so hurt by Strasberg’s criticism he threatened to leave the Studio. His vulnerability was later revealed when he confessed, “I don’t know what happens when I act—inside. But if I let them dissect me, like a rabbit in a clinical research laboratory, I might not be able to act again. They might as well sterilize me.” 

Also Marilyn Monroe felt anxious in this environment. It's said James Dean and Steve McQueen, who tried to woo her, only annoyed the iconic blonde star; in the case of Dean probably due to his neuroticism; in the case of McQueen, due to his naked ambition. It seems the only male sex-symbol that attracted her was Paul Newman, and Newman was in love with Joanne Woodward. Somebody Up There Likes Me was undoubtedly the source for McQueen’s beginning of his one-sided rivalry with Paul Newman. New York’s new golden boy after the death of James Dean, Newman now represented the antihero bar for young actors. Being an unbilled player to Newman’s star turn made McQueen set his goal on eclipsing this other blue-eyed, soon-to-be superstar. McQueen later accomplished this goal, for a time, during the 1960s. Yet, McQueen’s fierce pride paid a price, too. For example, he later had an opportunity to costar with Newman in the now celebrated Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), but only if he received top billing. Being naturally generous, Paul Newman, responsible for offering the part to McQueen in the first place, was willing to go the standard compromise route of cobilling, but negotiations broke down when McQueen was adamant that he would have to be number one. 

McQueen never forgot a slight, whether real or imagined. And Newman was always the actor he had to beat, including McQueen’s request for more lines than Newman when they both appeared with an all-star cast in The Towering Inferno (1974), a film in which McQueen received top billing. The bottom line is that McQueen was a kid from the streets who brought that same take-no-prisoners mentality to acting. One might best demonstrate that philosophy by his cutting comments upon the death of Dean, a performer whom he both admired and aped in some of his early roles: "I guess now there will be more roles for me." With James Dean’s death, Paul Newman had become a new McQueen role model, too. Biographer Penina Spiegel drew the following analogy: “Paul Newman was everything Steve McQueen wanted to be: Newman acted, raced, he was sort of an intellectual, he conducted a private life and a private love affair with the same woman. Newman had a reputation for sensitivity and good breeding, yet he was indisputably masculine. Newman was verbal, he was bright, and he was seemingly comfortable in his own skin—all the things McQueen felt he wasn’t.”

Ironically, for all this arbitrary competition and envy toward Newman as a paper lion, McQueen’s attraction to no-account screen characters often seems Newman-like. For example, McQueen’s part in Love with the Proper Stranger was originally earmarked for Newman. And The Cincinnati Kid is very much like The Hustler, in which another young hotshot is pitted against a wily veteran—only the game has changed, from pool to poker. Paradoxically, by the time Le Mans (1971) finally appeared, even McQueen’s self-appointed rival, Newman, had released a well-received racing film, Winning (1969). In The Towering Inferno, Newman is saddled often with the most stilted dialogue. Toward the movie’s conclusion, after the fire has finally been extinguished, Newman and his lover (Faye Dunaway) are safely at the tower base, and he says of the burned out skyscraper, “Maybe we should leave it this way as a kind of shrine to all the bullshit in the world.” 

For critics of the movie, which received decidedly mixed reviews, this quote was a popular target. To illustrate, New York Magazine’s Judith Crist responded directly to the actor in her critique, “Not all the bullshit in the world, Paul—just in movies co-produced by Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros.” A suite at the Wilshire hotel was where McQueen met his third wife, fashion model Barbara Minty, twenty-four years his junior. He had seen her in a Club Med advertisement, and he set up a movie audition for a female part in Tom Horn (1980). Ironically, given McQueen’s long one-sided rivalry with Newman, Minty initially thought the audition would be with Newman. How was Steve McQueen intertwined with Elvis Presley? Sonny West told a story of how the two met one day on the way to the studio in the mid-’60s. Elvis was in a limousine when McQueen pulled up on a motorcycle. They were pleasant to each other but the exchange was brief. The two legends really collided when they were competing for the affections of actress Barbara Leigh, who Marshall Terrill also wrote a book with: The King, McQueen and the Love Machine [2002]. Barbara Leigh was Steve’s co-star in his 1972 rodeo western, Junior Bonner.

Before she met Steve, Barbara Leigh was dating Elvis and Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio executive Jim Aubrey in August 1970. She then got the role of “Charmagne”, and she and Steve started seeing each other on the set of Junior Bonner, and even after the movie was completed. Barbara, Steve, and Elvis had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the people they were dating. Steve knew she was still seeing Elvis and that Elvis knew she was seeing Steve. So when Elvis would call, he’d ask, “How’s that motorcycle hick”? And Steve would ask, “Was that the guitar hick?” It wasn’t often that McQueen or Elvis had to compete for a woman, but Barbara Leigh, who was a stunner, was worth the chase. When you got down to it, Barbara was really in love with James Aubrey. She knew Elvis would never give up other women and realized she and Steve weren’t a great match. The film that Terrill regretted seeing McQueen turn down the most was William Friedkin’s The Sorcerer. That’s a very good film with Roy Scheider in the lead role, but McQueen would have given it another dimension and made it a classic. Friedkin [The French Connection, The Exorcist] would have pushed McQueen to greatness on that film. It’s a shame that he didn’t make that movie, because right around the time he did An Enemy of the People in 1977, he could have used a box-office hit.

Psychologist Peter O. Whitmer believes that Steve McQueen had what he called a “weird professional sibling rivalry” with Paul Newman. In retrospect, did Newman speak about McQueen on-the-record? That’s a very interesting question because I’ve never come across an article or interview where Newman commented on the record about McQueen either during his lifetime or after his death. I find this very telling given that Newman lived almost 30 years after McQueen passed away. Newman’s lifelong friend, A.E. Hotchner, writes about visiting Newman on the set of The Towering Inferno. Hotchner said that Newman was very unhappy with himself and McQueen, going so far as to call McQueen "chicken shit" for counting up the lines in the screenplay and demanding parity. — Steve McQueen: The Great Escape (2009) by Wes D. Gehring 

Paul Newman: one of the best actors of all time

For Empire’s February 2023 issue, we asked readers to vote for the best actors of all time – the silver-screen stars that always deliver, that have changed the game, and whose distinctive talents cannot be replicated. And the winners, in no particular order, are…

Marilyn Monroe

Notable roles: Rose Loomis (Niagara), Lorelei Lee (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Pola Debevoise (How to Marry a Millionaire), The Girl (The Seven Year Itch), Sugar "Kane" Kowalczyk (Some Like It Hot), Roslyn Tabor (The Misfits)

Oscars won: 0

Iconic line: "I wanna be loved by you, alone… Boop-boop-a-doop!" (Some Like It Hot)

A true movie star, in every sense, Marilyn Monroe's earth-shattering fame sometimes threatened to overshadow everything else – but beneath the ‘blonde bombshell’ sex symbol was the heart of a true artist, who was comfortable with her sexuality and femininity and used it to brilliant ends, in comedies and dramas.

Bette Davis

Notable roles: Margo Channing (All About Eve), Julie Marsden (Jezebel), Leslie Crosby (The Letter), Charlotte Vale (Now, Voyager), Baby Jane Hudson (What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?), Mildred Rogers (Of Human Bondage)

Oscars won: 2 (Jezebel, Dangerous)

Iconic line: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” (All About Eve)

Seldom has an actor emanated so much force on-screen: Bette Davis was a cinematic cyclone, sweeping through scenes, leaving co-stars dazed and debris in her wake. She took on one complex role after another, not caring if the characters were unlikeable, and aced them all. Her work still bites today.

Humphrey Bogart

Notable roles: Rick Blaine (Casablanca), Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), Frank McCloud (Key Largo), Charlie Allnutt (The African Queen), Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Duke Mantee (The Petrified Forest), Harry Dawes (The Barefoot Contessa), Roy Earle (High Sierra), Harry 'Steve' Morgan (To Have And Have Not)

Oscars won: 1 (The African Queen)

Iconic line: “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid” (Casablanca)

The thing about Bogart is that his “iconic line” is basically every line he ever said. His laconic, tough-guy energy gave every line a spin of cool defiance that screenwriters rose to match. He wasn’t the tallest, strongest, or most handsome, and at times he barely seemed to move – but you could never take your eyes off him.

Marlon Brando

Notable roles: Stanley Kowalski (A Streetcar Named Desire), Terry Malloy (On The Waterfront), Vito Corleone (The Godfather), Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now), Jor-El (Superman: The Movie)

Oscars won: 2 (On The Waterfront, The Godfather)

Iconic line: “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” (The Godfather)

Among the most influential screen actors of all-time, Brando hit Hollywood like a hammer in the early 1950s – fundamentally changing the definition of “good” acting, despite Truman Capote calling him "dumb as hell." Brando’s deeply-felt naturalism was magnetic, and all his famous difficulty was worth it for his undeniable power. 

Paul Newman

Notable roles: “Fast” Eddie Felson (The Hustler, The Color Of Money), Reggie Dunlop (Slap Shot), Frank Galvin (The Verdict), Hud Bannon (Hud), Henry Gondorff (The Sting), Luke Jackson (Cool Hand Luke), Butch Cassidy (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid), John Rooney (Road To Perdition)

Oscars won: 1 (The Color Of Money)

Iconic line: “You don’t know what winning is, Bert. You’re a loser. ‘Cause you’re dead inside! Too high, Bert - the price is too high.”  (The Hustler)

Cool, laconic, capable of eating way more hard-boiled eggs than you – he was a bona fide movie star, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Oscar Levant wrote that Newman initially was hesitant to leave New York for Hollywood, and that Newman had said, "Too close to the cake. Also, no place to study." The Hustler was the portrait of a sad man who's afraid to be a winner, that type perhaps was a first in the cannons of American cinema. Source: www.empireonline.com

While Hud does not shoot Homer in the film Hud, Lonnie nonetheless assigns him responsibility for his granddad’s demise. Old Homer moans and dies while lying across Hud’s lap. Lon pulls his dead granddad’s head out of Hud’s lap into his, accusing Hud of “fixing it so that he didn’t want to live anymore.” James Wong Howe gives us a high angle of Hud standing and moving to his right toward the Cadillac’s headlamps.  We cut to an instant of blackness before Hud enters the frame screen right, camera looking up. Hud stops in the center of this extraordinary shot, starkly but flatteringly lit against black, looking down at Lon and us: “You don’t know the whole story.” And then adds: “I guess you could say I helped him about as much as he helped me.” By now Martin Ritt may have assumed the audience would feel that no backstory could excuse Hud. But we must draw a vital distinction between explanation and justification in order to consider more thoroughly why Ritt’s desired effect was “lost in translation” from novel to film. First, the Hollywood-conditioned audience was likely pulling for Hud to be a misunderstood hero who will be redeemed by a good woman. Except for the attempted rape scene, for example, Newman is always photographed in classic three-point lighting, which enhances the star’s attractiveness. 

After the rape attempt, Hud spots Alma waiting at the bus station; “I’m sorry,” he says, cocking his hat. She reasserts her own libido and female power by stating an irony: she might have seduced him eventually “without the roughhouse.” Her silent stare at Hud when he responds, “Why didn’t you speak up sooner?,” fairly clenches Patricia Neal’s Academy Award for Best Actress. “I’ll remember you, Honey,” he says as she boards the bus, camera looking down on him from within. “You’re the one that got away.” Hud, the outsider, drifts to screen right and out of frame as bus and camera take Alma mercifully away from this “cold-blooded bastard.” But the original audience might still have wondered whether some part of Hud, a remorseful, tragic hero, really means, “You’re the one I could have loved had I not injured you so”? 

In any case, the film turns the novel’s antagonist into an ironic protagonist. This strongly suggests that Hud’s having accidentally killed his older brother Norman (Lon’s father) in a drunken car crash at age seventeen accounts for his need to protect himself from the guilt and loss. Homer “took that hard,” but reviled Hud long before the accident, we are surprised to learn. There are several instances of Hud’s aberrant behavior that might, with a different mode of narration, elicit compassion: Homer raised him harshly, kept him “driving that feedwagon” instead of letting him go to college (Horseman). In the novel Homer had sent him to the Pacific in World War II where he was left traumatized. Paul Newman’s biographer Daniel O’Brien writes, the actor “felt the audience had only seen the ‘cool’ superficial Hud Bannon, failing to pick up on the dark, amoral character underneath.” Newman said in 1967: "I got a lot of letters after that picture from kids saying Hud was right. The old man’s a jerk and the kid’s a schmuck. That son of a bitch that I hated they loved. So the audience makes a film their own – it depends what’s going on at the time in the country." 

Ritt, Ravetch, Frank Jr., and Newman transformed Hud somewhat out of the novel’s sociopath into what I call a wounded narcissist with antisocial traits, a role that proved the perfect vehicle for Paul Newman’s “sensitive rebel” persona, even if here Ritt thought to cast Newman against type as a raw villain. For in their urgency to portray Hud as no mere two-dimensional reprobate like his prototype in the novel, the filmmakers re-created the novel’s antagonist into the movie’s protagonist, yet evidently expecting the audience to condemn him nonetheless. As we know, in rebellious youth culture, the meaning of “cool” is that temporary ironic reversal of the very virtues and values the elders are trying to imprint onto the next generation, as if to question why the better part of wisdom is about never getting to have any fun. By the early 1960s, to be “cool,” perhaps, seemed integral to that separation and individuation process. It is important to understand that Hud’s original audience, did not need to endorse all of these behaviors in any literal sense in order for Hud’s acts to symbolize, even self-caricature, its own rebellious impulses. 

What was dominant in the post-World War II West was that version of capitalism known as Keynesianism, a holdover from the New Deal. It was based on economist John Maynard Keynes’s notion that capitalism, while the best of all possible economies, nevertheless needed government intervention, progressive taxation, and regulation to balance private profit with public well-being: that is, to minimize negative and optimize positive externalities. “An external cost occurs,” writes economist Steven L. Slavin, “when the production or consumption of some good or service inflicts costs on a third party without compensation. An external benefit occurs when some of the benefits derived from the production of some good or service are enjoyed by a third party”. As Granddad Homer tells Lon early in the film, “I expect you’ll get your share of what’s good,” implying the capitalist ideal of pursuing personal gain without costing others: 

“A boy like you deserves it.” Indeed, after a night of carousing with, and defending, Hud, Granddad tells Lon, “You’re going to have to make up your own mind someday what’s right and what’s wrong.” Homer in fact speaks for the filmmakers when he warns the teen, “Little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.” A large contingent of the New Left youth, likewise, would succumb to what Adam Curtis analyzes in the BBC documentary series The Century of the Self (2002). While some activists remained altruistically motivated, and counterculture hippies were communal, according to Curtis, many left-wing participants despaired of any outward revolution in favor of social change brought about through each individual’s inward liberation from outmoded social constraints. Technological advances in mass production allowed for a certain “customized” consumerism touting everyone’s unique individuality. Christopher Lasch likewise studied the mass psychology of the 1960s and 1970s as having grown dialectically out of older forms of neuroses like hysteria and obsessional neuroses, associated with older phases of capitalism, to the growing psychiatric concern with narcissism. 

In 2003, screenwriters Ravetch and Frank Jr. reflected back that something of this spirit was emerging during the making of Hud: “We felt the country was gradually moving into a kind of self-absorption, indulgence, and greed – which, of course, fully blossomed in the ’eighties and ’nineties’” (Baer 260). And narcissism itself indicates some psychological wounding at its heart contracted, as Marcuse argued in Eros and Civilization (1955), in a political economy experienced as “surplus repression.” The narcissist,” writes Christopher Lasch, “has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past”. It is as though the logical extension of Martin Ritt’s Old Left contempt for Haight-Ashbury was the Weather Underground, about which Lasch writes: “The atmosphere in which the weathermen lived – an atmosphere of violence, danger, drugs, sexual promiscuity, moral and psychic chaos – derived not so much from an older revolutionary tradition as from the turmoil and narcissistic anguish of contemporary America”.

As we have seen, Hud freely obeys his impulses, confident of simply improvising his way out of consequences. Homer argues not merely from neighborliness but from wider social responsibility: “And risk startin’ a’ epidemic in the entire country?”, which would be a severely negative economic externality. Hud argues from what he cynically regards as business norms: “Why, this whole country is run on epidemics, where you been?” In this sense, Hud, released on the eve of the JFK assassination, is not just a modern western but very much a film of the long 1950s at the “hard gate” of 1960s unrest, soon to be cynically embroiled in disappointed idealism-turned-mass-narcissistic indulgence. Interestingly, Larry McMurtry felt that sacrificing the herd, Homer’s life work, was the moral imperative. But though he admired the film, the author of Horseman assigned fault to the screenwriters for “following my novel too closely.” As Lasch maintains, “Many radicals still direct their indignation against the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order that have been weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself” (xvi). Hud’s “rebellion” was therefore understandable in the abstract, even if such was the pseudo-rebellion of the new culture of narcissism across the political spectrum. —“You Don’t Know the Story”: Horseman, Pass By and the Misprision of Hud (2021) by Randall Spinks. Source: https://brightlightsfilm.com

Paul Newman: "In those days theatrical agents took the train up from Grand Central Station to New Haven to scout the new talent at the drama school. There was apparently at least one in attendance for one of Yale’s four performances of Beethoven, a fellow from the Liebling-Wood Agency, Jim Merrick. He came backstage afterwards, gave me his card, and suggested I come see him in Manhattan. The Liebling-Wood Agency was a powerhouse on Broadway. It represented many of the era’s leading playwrights—such as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Yip Harburg—as well as some of the hottest stage talents, including Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. So I began making day trips to the city just to test the waters, on those days when I didn’t have classes. I read a theatrical trade paper called Actor’s Cues to find out about open casting calls, and went to many of them at CBS and NBC. They were airing a lot of live television dramas then being shot and broadcast from New York, but I never got any jobs from these open calls. Jim Merrick wanted to sign me to the Liebling-Wood Agency, but his bosses didn’t want to make a commitment to me. In the meantime, unbeknownst to Liebling-Wood, I’d also been seen by another talent agent, Maynard Morris, from the big MCA operation—but again with no commitment or obligation. One afternoon, Maynard sent me out to see a theater producer that the Liebling-Wood Agency had already had me visit. That’s when I decided to leave Liebling-Wood. That summer, I told Jackie I wanted to give New York a real try. For the time being, she would remain in New Haven with Scott, while I moved into a tiny apartment on the corner of Spring Street and Sixth Avenue, what’s now considered SoHo. It was incredibly tiny and I stayed there with two other people—a Yale young woman named Joan Szell and her boyfriend, who were summer housesitting for the actual tenants. Jackie had an aunt who lived on Staten Island and we moved there. Plus, someone we met suggested I might be able to get a job as a model. I was broke. I owned only one suit. And when I got offered a cover shoot for a detective magazine, I took it. I was posed with a cute girl in a brassiere, and I was supposed to be grabbing her arm. I was really embarrassed—but they paid me $150, which was quite a bit of money then. I walked out of that studio thinking, “Boy, I can go out now and buy me a new suit for $39.95!” 

"I became a member of the Actors Studio, the extraordinary acting study group headed by Lee Strasberg and famous for preaching the Method—the art of using your own memories and feelings to inhabit a role. How, I still wonder, did I ever pass that audition? They didn’t, and couldn’t, have responded to my acting. I’m sure the other actors there wondered, “How did this son of a bitch get in here?” But when I mixed my confidence and energy with my real emotions—terror and fright (which came out as rage)—something genuine was going on, even if just by accident. I felt the Actors Studio members were the real actors, the bohemians, and they saw this kid from Shaker Heights wearing his seersucker suit and, well, I was in their world but definitely I was not a part of it." —"Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man" (2022) by Paul Newman

Paul Newman: "Joanne Woodward looked like sixty or seventy million bucks"

Joanne Woodward knew that Newman was the right guy for her, but if he refused to divorce his wife, then she'd come to terms that he was definitely wrong for her. So Joanne threw herself into her work, ignoring Newman's pleas for keeping on waiting for his big decision. Joanne gave him a six-month ultimatum, and her absence during this probing time would prove to be the catalyst needed to Newman's divorce from Jackie Witte. If Somebody Up There Likes Me  had made Paul a star, Until They Sail  turned him into a matinee idol. His role as Larry Maddox in The Helen Morgan Story was somewhere between the two. Larry could love up the women as well as the army officer in Until They Sail, but he was an amoral heel. Newman and Ann Blyth play well together and have a particularly good scene when Larry confronts Helen when she comes home drunk. Newman must have felt certain frissons of recognition as the story played out, as Helen drank at first to deal with sorrow and disappointment, then became undeniably addicted to alcohol. Newman was not ready to admit to himself that there were times he relied on liquor for hope and happiness a little too much to be healthy. 

Despite its glossy, melodramatic surface, the picture works as a study of loneliness in the show-business of the 1940s against which even money and success are no barriers. Newman, who by now knew that often the worst kind of loneliness could afflict someone trapped in an unhappy marriage and separated from the one they truly loved, identified more with Helen's character than with Larry's. At least he knew Joanne was too controlled a person to turn to drink the way he and Helen Morgan did. Michael Curtiz was never a man to praise actors unduly; while getting the best out of them, he could give them a hard time in the process. He remembered Newman as thoroughly professional and attentive: “But he wouldn’t take any sass from me or anyone else.” Curtiz recalled Newman saying something along the lines of “if criticism is honest, I’m all for it. But if it’s done just out of meanness, I’ll walk away from it.” Although Larry has romantic feelings for Helen, at the film’s conclusion he seems to undergo a complete character change, picking Helen up at the nuthouse, taking her to her old nightclub where he’s assembled hundreds of her friends, and implying that he’ll never leave her again. Earlier it’s revealed that he even sent dozens of bouquets to her and signed other people’s names to the cards so that she wouldn’t feel forgotten.

Filming another Twentieth Century-Fox loan-out, From the Terrace, Newman had to battle to get Fox to cast Joanne as his wife, just as he’d had to battle to get her the spousal assignment in Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! but at least this was a more dramatic, juicier part. In fact, Woodward as the snobby wife made Newman's ex-wife Jackie at her worst seem sylphlike by comparison. Joanne told reporters that she and Paul could get out all their own frustrations with each other by screaming at each other in character on the set. Once that was done, they could go home and make like turtledoves. Myrna Loy was appearing in a supporting role as Newman’s mother. She recalled returning to Twentieth Century-Fox, where she had made some earlier films, and discovering that her dressing room was bare. “Noticing the tributes stacked in Paul Newman’s dressing room, I realized that I was yesterday news.” But when she walked out on the set, the crew all gave her a standing ovation. They then proceeded to subject Paul to merciless teasing, asking Myrna who that “kid” she was working with was and if she was giving acting lessons on the side now. Paul took all the teasing good-naturedly. Myrna Loy told her biographer, James Kotsilibas-Davis, that “Paul Newman was very sweet about it, displaying none of the cockiness of so many young stars. He gave me a lot to work from as his dissolute mother, a real departure for me. One scene—I’m sitting in front of a mirror telling him to go for his own good—is a stunner. Paul was already a pro.” 

After the artistically bankrupt experience of Exodus (Newman couldn't convince Otto Preminger to sign Joanne on board over Eva Marie Saint), Newman was ready for the stimulating challenge of The Hustler. Eddie Felson, the pool hustler, was maybe his most memorable role. The picture was filmed mostly on location in New York City, to good advantage. The director, Robert Rossen, had a terminal illness and knew that The Hustler  would be his one of his last films. “We had three weeks of rehearsals, using television technique,” Newman said, “where you lay out tape on the floor to mark the sets.” The Hustler emerged as a very suffocating and artistic film, though pool is not exactly the most cinematic of subjects. The atmospheric, moody photography of the film illuminates the bleak, depressing vistas of poolrooms, gin joints, crummy hotel rooms, and seedy bus terminals with startling clarity. Newman is completely convincing as Eddie Felson, a character nothing like Tony Lawrence of The Young Philadelphians. Newman was a winner in his role, and Eddie despite a major moral victory at the film’s conclusion, is pretty much a loser all of the way. In an early scene, after he beats the great Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), he’s so afraid people will think it was a fluke that he self-destructively plays Fats again and again until he’s sick from fatigue and has lost all of the $10,000 he’d won. 

Newman’s acting hides clues to Eddie’s character instead of laying it all out on the line as other actors might do. That’s why the picture is nearly over before we’re sure if Eddie Felson is a good guy or a bad guy or something in between; Newman keeps us guessing about him, never playing it heroically or like Eddie was nothing more than a sleaze. Paul is very convincing when he takes the girl (Piper Laurie) to a fancy restaurant for dinner and looks awkward as hell. Newman’s climactic speech after the girl’s suicide, when in disgust he parts company with Gordon, is also excellent. Actor Don Koll worked on The Hustler and recalled: “There’s a kind of caste system in Hollywood, where stars don’t mingle with bit players,” Koll said. “It just isn’t done. But when we were on location Newman told me that it was a relief to be free of the caste system, that he could mingle with everyone and be his friendly self, because basically he’s a very down-to-earth guy.” Newman received an Academy Award nomination for his work in The Hustler. When Maximilian Schell won for Judgment at Nuremburg, Joanne’s behavior backstage was for some shockingly childish. She refused to congratulate or even speak to Schell and, in her own words, “made a spectacle of myself,” cursing and rudely denouncing the Academy and the voters. When Joan Crawford heard about it, she thought the woman who had been named after her had more serious problems than just bad fashion sense. “The impression was that Paul was a basically nice guy who was run around by the nose by his wife,” Jack Garfein, a television director that Newman had met at the Actors Studio, commented. “Did Paul ever really ask or demand that she sublimate her career or needs in favor of his? Paul was just as disappointed, more so, when he lost the award to Schell, but he was gracious. I think Joanne embarrassed him terribly that night.” 

A. E. Hotchner, novelist and long-time friend of the Newmans, thinks Garfein was wrong. “Paul really was proud, if a bit startled, by her wife's support. Their marriage was one of the few authentic in Hollywood and that stirred envy and much tongue lashing. Paul laughed about Joan Crawford thinking she was more beautiful than Joanne. Geez, Joanne was a truly beautiful woman, she was gorgeous. Paul thought Crawford was a blabbermouth and not so beautiful even in her prime.” As Paul recounted to Stewart Stern: "Joanne gave birth to our first child together, Nell, in 1959, in California. The first time as an adult I remember crying—including when my father died—was when I saw Joanne in the hospital that day, ashen, with a dry mouth and lying on a gurney, headed into an elevator on her way to the delivery room. I was so staggered. Joanne came back from the hospital wearing this bellhop hat and a very stylish dress; she looked like sixty or seventy million bucks. When Lissy was born a couple of years later, I had my camera out and took billions of pictures of her. When I think of those pictures, it reminds me how Joanne handled our babies’ introduction into our home with such class and foresight." 

Newman’s next 1961 film project was Paris Blues, in which he was again teamed with his wife Joanne. Newman and Sidney Poitier played expatriate jazz musicians in Paris who become involved with tourists Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll. In Harold Flender’s novel, there was only the black couple, but Hollywood had to add a couple of whites or it was no sailing. The Newmans were attracted by the social consciousness of the piece, although the film is a bit dated about gender politics. Paris Blues was under the auspices of a production company, Pennebaker, set up by the one and only Marlon Brando, who was too occupied with other matters to push his—at that time, not too  considerable—weight around. Newman contemptuosly named him "Don Brando". Brando never took to other actors whom he considered professional rivals, like James Dean, Monty Clift or Paul Newman. 

Newman began filming the adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth a short while afterward Paris Blues. His involvement with the project had begun back in 1959 when he starred in the stage play at Tennessee Williams’s request. Richard Anderson, who’d appeared with Newman in Long Hot Summer, was appearing in The Highest Tree on Broadway at the same time and compared notes with Newman on occasion. “He revealed acting wasn’t his first choice,” Anderson said. “He was really an organization man. Explaining further, he wanted to be attached to the nuts and bolts of the game. It surprised me . . . most actors didn't have other plans.” Apparently even as early as 1959, Newman was thinking of branching out into directing and even other non-acting business pursuits, although it would be some time before any of his plans came to fruition. In the film, Newman comes off as too theatrical and self-aware and, at thirty-six, too old for the part. 

Although he does have his moments, Newman clung for dear life to the guidance Elia Kazan and Geraldine Page gave him and was too afraid to play Chance on the screen. Elia Kazan recounted to James Grissom: "Paul Newman was often unsure of his performance in the play. He never fully trusted himself as Chance Wayne. He gave some rocky performances, and I noticed that when he felt confident about his work, he ran from the theatre and hopped on his motorcycle and was gone. On the nights when he felt he hadn't done so well, he would linger at the stage door. Gerry noticed this and began to bolster him from the stage, through the performance." Tennessee Williams praised his favorite actress, saying to Grissom: "Geraldine Page is a great actress. It wasn't that she simply had talent, she had a genius, a maddening intellect that came with a supernatural vision of people. She pushed me. She made me a better writer and she made my plays better plays. Geraldine Page is all about getting it right, and just above that goal is getting it brilliant, which she does. She's a solitary genius."

The Newmans bought a house in Connecticut not far from A. E. Hotchner and his wife; Newman had become professional friends with Hotchner after he’d appeared on television in The Battler, for which Hotchner wrote the script. Hotchner did not waste time using the proximity to bring further ideas to his famous neighbor. The two men bought a boat and went fishing together, although they drank more beer than they caught fish. Ernest Lehman, who had written the fine scripts for Somebody Up There Likes Me and From the Terrace, had a new story he thought Paul would be interested in, a comedy-thriller entitled The Prize, with German bombshell Elke Sommer. 

Adapting from the novel The Prize by Irving Wallace, Lehman was hoping to create another North by Northwest, the brilliant thriller he had penned for Hitchcock. He even fashioned a scene that was to go one better than the sequence in North by Northwest in which Cary Grant evades pursuers by causing a scene at a fancy auction house. In the new scene, Newman, clad only in a towel, would heckle a speaker at a nudist colony. Edward G. Robinson plays a dual role as Dr. Max Stratman / Prof. Walter Stratman. Director Mark Robson, also of From the Terrace, gave Hitchcock's game a run for his money.

The first film Newman directed, Rachel, Rachel (1968) was inspired by a Margaret Laurence's novel entitled A Jest of God, which won the distinguished Canadian Governor-General’s Award. Joanne’s agent at the time, John Foreman, who had worked at MCA with Newman’s agent Myron McCormack, passed a copy of the book along to Joanne thinking she might be perfect for the role of the heroine, a woman in a small town who longs for love and excitement. Although this was not exactly typecasting, Woodward was often at her best playing characters with which she had nothing in common—something that was also true of Paul Newman. Paul wouldn’t read the novel at first—which was fine as far as Joanne was concerned, because she didn’t think he’d like it—but he agreed to go in with her and buy the film rights. Newman did his best to please Joanne when she got that certain look in her eye that meant she felt passionately about something. By now he often spoke of her “impeccable judgment.” To facilitate matters Newman started a new production company entitled Kayos Productions. Apparently Jodell Productions had met all its commitments, and Ritt’s and Newman’s film interests had gone in different directions. Considering the critical reaction to some of his movies, Newman figured he could probably direct as well as anyone. Besides, he’d gone to Yale to study stage direction, so at least he knew he’d be good with actors. 

The Newmans had been friends with the writer Stewart Stern since he’d written a teleplay Paul had starred in and particularly admired, Thundering Silence. Stern also did the screenplay for The Rack, as well as such notable films as Rebel without a Cause and The Ugly American. He was their first choice to turn A Jest of God into a screenplay. They got in touch with him, and he agreed to take on the project, although there were times when he nearly came to regret it. Stern would meet with Joanne and Paul at their home for story conferences by committee. Stern found that Joanne had her ideas and Paul had his, and what he had to say made little impact. Soon their story conferences metamorphosed into polite disagreements, then arguments, then finally screaming matches. One afternoon the three of them had a quarrel about whether the heroine would “pleasure” herself in bed in the prone position or face-up. Stern told them that, in essence, too many cooks were spoiling the broth and that he would work on the script with Paul or Joanne but not both of them. He stormed out of the house and went home. Now came the difficult part of finding a studio that would be willing to finance the picture. Newman was a megastar at this point, and he could probably have gotten financing for just about anything he starred in, but his wife just wasn’t as bankable. To his amazement and disillusionment, this major movie star found certain executives failing to return his phone calls. 

Newman was told by studio executives that the story was too downbeat, that it wasn’t commercial enough (which it wasn’t), that Joanne Woodward wasn’t a big enough name by then. “How about using another actress?” some inquired, gaining Newman's wrath. Newman knew that his wife’s heart was set on making this picture, and by now he wanted it for her as much as she did. She may have pressured him into getting interested initially, but he loved her and didn’t want her to be disappointed. As Stewart Stern put it with consummate insight born from years of friendship: “He is constantly trying to provide a setting where the world can see what he sees in her.” Also, Kayos Productions was going to wind up with egg on its face if it didn’t get the money to make the picture somewhere. Newman claimed that he decided to direct Rachel, Rachel because he couldn’t get anyone else to do it. Although Rachel, Rachel  is never as devastating as it could have been, it remains a picture of depth and meaning. The best line comes after surgery when the nurse tells her she’s out of danger. “How can I be out of danger if I’m not dead?” Rachel asks her.

Newman’s instincts were right in revising the screenplay and putting together so many rough cuts until it was perfect, for Rachel, Rachel is often poignant and never descends into soap opera as he was afraid it would. It was one portrait of alienation that would flourish in the next decade, with films like Five Easy Pieces or Taxi Driver. Estelle Parsons enjoyed working with Newman and was impressed by the self-effacing attention he gave to Joanne and the other actors. “He wanted to showcase his wife’s talent to maximum advantage, and he succeeded,” she said. Newman and Joanne won Golden Globes and the New York Film Critics’ Award as Best Actress and Best Director. Shortly after Rachel, Rachel was released, Newman got a strange phone call. A woman’s voice said, “You did it beautifully—what is  your name?” The woman was apparently struggling to remember who she had phoned, even though she had placed the call. When a bemused Newman told her his name, she said, “Yes, yes,” and told him it was Patricia Neal, his old co-star from Hud, calling to tell him how much she had loved Rachel, Rachel. Neal had suffered a massive stroke three years earlier and even then still had trouble remembering names of people she knew well. Newman was touched she had taken the trouble to phone him, even if he had as much difficulty expressing it as she did. 

Following the apocalyptical WUSA (1970) with low-brow fanfare like Pocket Money (1972) by Stuart Rosenberg, however, may not have been as screwy as it seemed. It may well have been a calculated attempt to win back those members of the audience—the Moral Majority and Heartland USA types who saw Newman as some kind of commie pinko. No matter how many times Newman was asked, he never gave a satisfactory answer about his reasons to make WUSA or exactly what message he was trying to get across. Robert Stone (the writer of WUSA) didn't get along with director Rosenberg. "My role was cut", explained actress Cloris Leachman, "a lot of stuff was left in the cutting room floor. The studio wasn't interested and Rosenberg gave in." —Sources: "Paul Newman: A Life" (2009) by Lawrence J. Quirk and "Paul Newman: Blue-Eyed Cool" (2022) by James Clarke